Description
Book SynopsisThe 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
Table of ContentsList 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
