Technologies of Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc

The project to create a 'New Man' and 'New Woman' initiated in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc constituted one of the most extensive efforts to remake human psychophysiology in modern history. Playing on the different meanings of the word 'technology' - as practice, knowledge and artefact - this edited volume brings together scholarship from across a range of fields to shed light on the ways in which socialist regimes in the Soviet bloc and Eastern Europe sought to transform and revolutionise human capacities. From external, state-driven techniques of social control and bodily management, through institutional practices of transformation, to strategies of self-fashioning, Technologies of Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc probes how individuals and collectives engaged with - or resisted - the transformative imperatives of the Soviet experiment. The volume's broad scope covers topics including the theory and practice of revolutionary embodiment; the practice of expert knowledge and disciplinary power in psychotherapy and criminology; the representation and transformation of ideal bodies through mass media and culture; and the place of disabled bodies in the context of socialist transformational experiments. The book brings the history of human 're-making' and the history of Soviet and Eastern Bloc socialism into conversation in a way that will have broad and lasting resonance.

Anna Toropova is Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, UK. She is the author of Feeling Revolution: Cinema, Genre and the Politics of Affect under Stalin (2020). Her articles on Soviet cinema, biopolitics, medicine and spectatorship have been published in Slavic Review, The Russian Review, and JCH.
Claire Shaw is Associate Professor in the History of Modern Russia at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991 (2017). Her articles on deafness, disability and urban space have been published in Slavic Review, SEER, and Urban History.

List of illustrations
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Note on Transliteration
Introduction Anna Toropova and Claire Shaw
Part 1 Knowledges
1 'Rest for the brain' or 'technology of the unconscious?': Hypnosis in early Soviet medicine and culture Anna Toropova, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
2 From psychosis to psychopathy: Psychiatry and crime in communist Czechoslovakia (1948-70) Jakub Strelec, Institute of International Studies, Charles University, Czech Republic
3 Broadcasting communist morality: Sex education in Soviet Latvia Siobhán Hearne, University of Manchester, UK
4 Health and heroism: Shifting patterns in late socialist Central Europe Jan Arend, University of Tübingen, Germany
Part 2 Practices
5 Work and therapy: Two visions of the Bulgarian New Man Julian Chehirian, Princeton University, USA
6 'Human capabilities are limitless': Will and self-improvement in postwar Soviet psychotherapy Aleksandra Brokman
7 Soviet pioneers in smoking cessation: From group therapy in the 1920s to Cytisine in the 1970s Tricia Starks, University of Arkansas, USA
Part 3 Artefacts
8 Illuminating microbes: Preventing infectious diseases with bactericidal lamps in Soviet medicine, 1917-53 Johanna Conterio, University of Oslo, Norway
9 Embodied technologies: Lilya Brik's The Glass Eye (1929) and Esfir Shub's Today (1930) Lilya Kaganovsky, UCLA, USA
10 Arm race: The Cold War story of a bionic arm Frances Bernstein, Drew University, USA
11 Dreams of a synaesthetic future: Technologies of deafness in late Soviet socialism Claire Shaw, University of Warwick, UK
Index