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

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :
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.

Review :
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. Technologies of Mind and Body is a profound, theory-laden, and conceptually dense volume that will undoubtedly be of interest to scholars and students engaged in history, cultural studies, and STS. I would recommend this book as the go-to course adoption for teaching “the socialist body” in twentieth-century Europe.