Homo Sovieticus

<b>How Soviet scientists and pseudoscientists pursued telepathic research cybernetic simulations and mass hyptonism over television to control the minds of citizens.</b><p>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 <i>Homo Sovieticus</i> the art and media scholar Wladimir Velminski explores these scientific and pseudoscientific efforts at mind control.</p><p>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.</p>