Homo Sovieticus

How Soviet scientists and pseudoscientists pursued telepathic research, cybernetic simulations, and mass hyptonism over television to control the minds of citizens. In October 1989, as the Cold War was ending and the Berlin Wall about to crumble, television viewers in the Soviet Union tuned in to the first of a series of unusual broadcasts. “Relax, let your thoughts wander free...” intoned the host, the physician and clinical psychotherapist Anatoly Mikhailovich Kashpirovsky. Moscow's Channel One was attempting mass hypnosis over television, a therapeutic session aimed at reassuring citizens panicked over the ongoing political upheaval—and aimed at taking control of their responses to it. Incredibly enough, this last-ditch effort to rally the citizenry was the culmination of decades of official telepathic research, cybernetic simulations, and coded messages undertaken to reinforce ideological conformity. In Homo Sovieticus, the art and media scholar Wladimir Velminski explores these scientific and pseudoscientific efforts at mind control. In a fascinating series of anecdotes, Velminski describes such phenomena as the conflation of mental energy and electromagnetism; the investigation of aura fields through the “Aurathron”; a laboratory that practiced mind control methods on dogs; and attempts to calibrate the thought processes of laborers. “Scientific” diagrams from the period accompany the text. In all of the experimental methods for implanting thoughts into a brain, Velminski finds political and metaphorical contaminations. These apparently technological experiments in telepathy and telekinesis were deployed for purely political purposes.

WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE TIMES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEWSWEEK, PASTE, and POP SUGAR The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.

Almost three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, today more often than ever, global media and intellectuals rely on the concept of homo sovieticus to explain Russia's authoritarian ills. Homo sovieticus - or the Soviet man - is understood to be a double-thinking, suspicious and fearful conformist with no morality, an innate obedience to authority and no public demands; they have been forged in the fires of the totalitarian conditions in which they find themselves. But where did this concept come from? What analytical and ideological pillars does it stand on? What is at stake in using this term today? The Afterlife of the 'Soviet Man' addresses all these questions and even explains why – at least in its contemporary usage – this concept should be abandoned altogether.

Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, this college professor illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shopping, landing a job, and other acts.

"Almost three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, today more often than ever, global media and intellectuals rely on the concept of homo sovieticus to explain Russia's authoritarian ills. Homo sovieticus - or the Soviet man - is understood to be a double-thinking, suspicious and fearful conformist with no morality, an innate obedience to authority and no public demands; they have been forged in the fires of the totalitarian conditions in which they find themselves. But where did this concept come from? What analytical and ideological pillars does it stand on? What is at stake in using this term today? The Afterlife of the 'Soviet Man' addresses all these questions and even explains why -- at least in its contemporary usage -- this concept should be abandoned altogether."--