Homo Sovieticus: Brain Waves, Mind Control, and Telepathic Destiny

The English translation is difficult to follow and the charts are in Russian.It was a disappointment.

About as fun to read as a technical instruction manual.I was never able to figure out if the author believed in this nonsense or not.Full of Soviet meaningless jargon.

What a weird book. It is short (97 pages) and written in an impenetrable “post-modern” academic style, originally in German, not rendered more lucid in the English translation.Example sentence: “For Gulyaev, creative-dynamic-energetic switching provided the foundation for bipolar control circuitry.”Um, okay.The best thing about it is the many illustrations and reproductions of esoteric Soviet research. It’s worth buying for the pictures alone.Despite the title, the book only touches briefly on ESP research. Most chapters are about Taylorism, cybernetics, the Soviet television industry, an analysis of a popular science fiction novel called “The Ruler of the World”, etc. But “mind control” is used as a sort of guiding metaphor for these technologies of social organization (television, novels, the design of work processes, etc.) So If you’re expecting it to be about Soviet ESP research, it’s (mostly) not about that.The content of this book is strange enough that despite the reputable university publisher, I half suspected that this was a Sokal-style hoax. It took a little Googling to confirm that, yes, Pavel Gulyaev, Aleksei Gastev, and Anatoly Kaspirovsky are all real people.If you like Soviet kitsch, or fringe science with a Nikolai Tesla flavor, or Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, you’ll probably also like this book.