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.

Stalin, to borrow Churchill's phrase, is "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma". There are still heated arguments about how precisely we should judge the Georgian student priest who grew up to be one of the 20th century's most notorious mass-murderers. This owes much to the enormity of the crimes, as Claire Shaw says in this short but chilling book about the man and the political system that developed under his rule: Stalinism. (Very few political regimes have been personalised in such a way Nazism does not bear the name of Hitler, for example). What visions underpinned his actions? What mechanisms enabled him to commit his crimes? Why did nobody stop him? Within Stalin's lifetime, Russia and her neighbours endured a series of violent revolutions, two world wars, the forced collectivisation of agriculture, a major industrialisation drive, and the violent cataclysms of the Purges. A vast social experiment was launched radically to remake the nature of human society on the basis of equality and the redistribution of wealth; its implementation resulted in a violent and coercive regime that had little respect for human life or the natural world. But it is too easy to dismiss Stalin simply as a monster. Too easy and wrong. What is most chilling about Stalin, as this book shows, is that he was all too human.