40

Stalinism had a “constructivist” vision, as it were, of human beings, which implied an effort at self-improvement. This article analyses the specific practices devised to achieve this end (particularly self-reports, self-criticism and autobiography) beginning with the international schools for cadres in the 1930s. These institutions, which were supposed to produce “Bolshevik cadres”, offered an ideal opportunity to analyse the workings and finality of such self-improvement and institutional techniques which resorted as much to subjectivity and the interiorising of standards and values as to symbolic violence, discipline and ultimately repression.