The Manufacture of Deviance: The Case of the Soviet Purge, 1936-1938

This paper examines the Stalinist purges of 19.36-1938-as a modern case of a massive deviant-recruitment campaign. It tests, in general, the applicability of tentative generalizations made about the nature and the limits of such campaigns. These generalizations derive from investigations of American, English and Continental witch-crazes, and appear mainly in Erikson's Wayward Puritans (1966). Examination of the purge, its development and outcome, suggests that (1) under certain conditions, the amount of deviance a society can create, recognize, and process is not, as Er kson suggests, likely to remain fairly constant over time, but can be radically and swiftly increased: (2) the major characteristic enabling elasticity in the amount of deviance recognized is a control system of a special, repressive type; and (3) elasticity is amplified when the deployment pattern used by the society with respect to the deviants is one which, as in the Soviet case, at least appears to minimize the economic costs of isolating large numbers of persons from society.