The image of totalitarianism is central to liberal ideology as the nefarious antithesis of free market exchange: the inevitable outcome of planned economies, which control their subjects’ lives down to the most intimate detail. Against this image of complete state control, the multispecies ethnography of early Soviet institutions gives us a fortuitous edge to ask how centrally planned economies structure the lives of those actors whose biosocial demands can be neither stamped out nor befuddled by propaganda. In this article we examine the institutions of the Stalinist state that could have created the totalitarian service dog: institutions that planned the distribution, raising, and breeding of family dogs for military service. Our narrative begins with a recently discovered genealogical document, issued to a German Shepherd bred by plan and born during the World War II Leningrad Blockade. Reading this document together with service-dog manuals, Soviet physiological studies, archival military documents, and autobiographical narratives, we unravel the history of Leningrad’s early Soviet military-service dog husbandry program. This program, we argue, relied on a particular distinction of public and private: at once stimulating affectionate interspecies bonds between dogs and their handlers and sequestering those relationships from the image of rational, scientifically objective interspecies communication. This reduction of human-dog relations to those criteria that could be scientifically studied and centrally planned yielded tangible results: it allowed the State’s dog husbandry program to create apparently unified groups of dogs and dog handlers and to successfully mobilize these groups for new military tasks, like mine detection, during World War II.

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种间关系和军事目标

极权主义的形象作为自由市场交换的邪恶对立面，是自由意识形态的核心：计划经济的必然结果，将其主体的生活控制在最紧密的细节上。与这种完全国家控制的形象相反，早期苏联机构的多种族民族志给我们提供了一个偶然的优势，即可以通过中央计划经济来构建那些生物社会需求既无法消除又不能被宣传迷惑的行为者的生活。在本文中，我们考察了可能会创建极权公犬的斯大林国家机构：那些计划分发，饲养和繁殖家庭犬以供兵役的机构。我们的叙述从最近发现的家谱文献开始，发行给计划养育的德国牧羊犬，并在第二次世界大战列宁格勒封锁期间出生。通过阅读这份文件以及现役军犬手册，苏联生理学研究，档案军事文件和自传叙事，我们可以了解列宁格勒早期的苏联现役军犬饲养计划的历史。我们认为，该程序依赖于公共和私人之间的特殊区别：立即刺激狗及其操作者之间深情的种间联系，并从理性的，科学的客观种间交流的形象中隔离这些关系。将人与狗之间的关系减少到可以进行科学研究和集中计划的标准，可以产生切实的结果：