Reconstruction Concept as Symbolic Marker of Radical Social Engineering

Abstract

The article presents a conceptual analysis of Reconstruction notion which became a conceptual foundation of Ukrainian history in Stalinism era. Through the methodological prism of social engineering, the author studies the lingual techniques of embedding the new era ideological messages into the mental structure of personality. An interesting feature of this research is a comparative analysis of two modernism projects – American reconstruction in 1863–1877 and socio-political breakup of the Stalinism era. The author draws on extensive factual material including J. Stalin’s speeches, Ukrainian scientific periodical publications of 1930s etc. to look into the public and methodological planes of interpreting the Reconstruction construct. The article demonstrates the process of verbal coding for specific fragments or ‘pieces’ of the conceptual system and argues that information manipulation arises at the stage of language-related cognition of the world, interpretation of certain words and their meaning. It is this specifics that leads to creating an informational picture of the world that cannot be constituted without a language and enables an individual to go beyond their direct experience. The article shows the dynamics of implanting the idea of Reconstruction into the concept sphere of Soviet people and its development from the first public presentation of the word in Stalin’s speeches to its entrenchment in scientific discourse. Scholars of the time strived to justify, rationalize and give ground to Stalin’s ideas in terms of building new utopian society systems. Since early 1930s, the Reconstruction concept has been associated with drastic transformations in agriculture, education system, culture and science, mass media and households. In the course of the research the author resorted to general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, systematization, comparison, as well as conceptual analysis.

Key words: discourse, concept, reconstruction, Soviet people, social engineering, communication technologies, propaganda.