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

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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 volumes 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.

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This volume deepens and complicates our understanding of the Soviet project of transforming human nature to create a new man. ... [Technologies of Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc] will be of interest not only to scholars engaged with the history of psychology, medicine, and disability, but also to those focused more broadly on the cultural and social history of communism. * The Russian Review *

Author Bio

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.