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Homo Sovieticus: Brain Waves, Mind Control, and Telepathic Destiny
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.
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.
128 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 16, 2019
A cute little book with a kooky title. Despite the promise of the title the book is actually an academic paper on the history of soviet science projects and the revolutionary inventors who dreamed them up.
The first chapter is the most pro-mo dense since it is Velminski's summary of the projects he is going to cover. As he tries to establish a context for the outdated methods and abandoned magical inspiration of electricity and its potentialities, Velminski coherently lays out the revolutionary theory surrounding Communism's ideal. The scientists in the book sought to perfect, through technology, various aspects of the New Communist society and the citizen within it.
Aleksei Gastev, the subject of the longest and most involved discussion, was an early Soviet inventor. In fact, he was tight we Lenin and encouraged the Bolshevik to draft new rules concerning patents. All of Gastev's work centered on a rebuttal to Fredrick Taylor's Scientific Management. Where Taylorism sought to pit worker against worker for a management's reward, Gastev thought that the New Worker would want to use the same "science of motion and work" to perfect their own performance. Soviet workers competing with themselves for their own betterment was more humane than Capitalists' mechanization of the worker for greater profit.
Chapter Three delves into a bit of literary criticism by exploring the 1929 science fiction novel, Ruler of the World by Aleksandr Belyaev. The novel is the story of a German scientist, Stiner, who is able to perfect the use of radio waves to control the minds of others. Hijinks ensue. Of course, the point of the chapter is to illustrate how the discovery and control of radio waves inspired all sorts of possibilities and fantasies - among them telepathy, mind as electric circuits, etc. The most ominous focused on how humanity was endangered by the invisible waves that could magically transmit image and sound. So why NOT thought as well...
The threat and promise of Television is the focus of Chapter 5. Even though Soviet tv programming began in October 1931, Soviet factories had no produced a single tv set. So the only people who had tvs were hobbyists and other tinkering science guys. One such amateur was Hovannes Adamian, the father of Soviet television. Over the course of years, Adamian tinkered, patented, and garnered the attention of the authorities. These authorities granted him a staff and a lab which allowed him to perfect the first successful broadcast of the televisual image in Russia.
Chapter 6 concerns the more modern ideas of mental energy being the same as the wireless nature electomagentism. To that end, a great deal of experimentation was expended attempting to control and codify the use of electromagnetic waves to connect, communicate, and influence the human body (and by extension the physical world). The strangest thing in the entire book is contained in this chapter. As the Soviet Union was collapsing, the government ran a nightly hypnosis program with Anatoly Kashpirovsky. Each night, he would attempt to hypnotize the viewers into calming down and stop worrying about the news of protests and collapse. He even encouraged ionized water to be consumed, after he ionized it through the power of television. Of course, it didn't work.
Overall, I enjoyed this brief little stroll through the silliness of human invention and science.
The first chapter is the most pro-mo dense since it is Velminski's summary of the projects he is going to cover. As he tries to establish a context for the outdated methods and abandoned magical inspiration of electricity and its potentialities, Velminski coherently lays out the revolutionary theory surrounding Communism's ideal. The scientists in the book sought to perfect, through technology, various aspects of the New Communist society and the citizen within it.
Aleksei Gastev, the subject of the longest and most involved discussion, was an early Soviet inventor. In fact, he was tight we Lenin and encouraged the Bolshevik to draft new rules concerning patents. All of Gastev's work centered on a rebuttal to Fredrick Taylor's Scientific Management. Where Taylorism sought to pit worker against worker for a management's reward, Gastev thought that the New Worker would want to use the same "science of motion and work" to perfect their own performance. Soviet workers competing with themselves for their own betterment was more humane than Capitalists' mechanization of the worker for greater profit.
Chapter Three delves into a bit of literary criticism by exploring the 1929 science fiction novel, Ruler of the World by Aleksandr Belyaev. The novel is the story of a German scientist, Stiner, who is able to perfect the use of radio waves to control the minds of others. Hijinks ensue. Of course, the point of the chapter is to illustrate how the discovery and control of radio waves inspired all sorts of possibilities and fantasies - among them telepathy, mind as electric circuits, etc. The most ominous focused on how humanity was endangered by the invisible waves that could magically transmit image and sound. So why NOT thought as well...
The threat and promise of Television is the focus of Chapter 5. Even though Soviet tv programming began in October 1931, Soviet factories had no produced a single tv set. So the only people who had tvs were hobbyists and other tinkering science guys. One such amateur was Hovannes Adamian, the father of Soviet television. Over the course of years, Adamian tinkered, patented, and garnered the attention of the authorities. These authorities granted him a staff and a lab which allowed him to perfect the first successful broadcast of the televisual image in Russia.
Chapter 6 concerns the more modern ideas of mental energy being the same as the wireless nature electomagentism. To that end, a great deal of experimentation was expended attempting to control and codify the use of electromagnetic waves to connect, communicate, and influence the human body (and by extension the physical world). The strangest thing in the entire book is contained in this chapter. As the Soviet Union was collapsing, the government ran a nightly hypnosis program with Anatoly Kashpirovsky. Each night, he would attempt to hypnotize the viewers into calming down and stop worrying about the news of protests and collapse. He even encouraged ionized water to be consumed, after he ionized it through the power of television. Of course, it didn't work.
Overall, I enjoyed this brief little stroll through the silliness of human invention and science.
September 13, 2020
'What is revolution in general? It is liberation from all ... inhibitors. [...] It is complete absence of restraint. There were laws, customs, and so forth. All of this has now come to naught. The old is gone, the new still does not exist. Inhibition is eliminated, there remains only excitation. And this produces all possible excesses in the realms of desire, thought, and behavior.'
June 23, 2024
Books about Soviet scientific projects will always be a genre that I love. Reading historical accounts of how Soviet scientists and philosophers thought about science, from the pre-Bolshevik era to the post-Stalinist period, is always exciting and filled with an intense curiosity to reconfigure nature. In Homo Sovieticus, the effort to reconfigure nature is exposed through a period and trajectory of scientific research on the potential and limitations of the mind. Although the study of the mind's potential to change the material world was not only explored by Soviet scientists—during the Cold War, even a renowned anthropologist like Margaret Mead considered psi as a legitimate scientific endeavour—what makes the efforts of Soviet scientists intriguing is the primary question (or drive) that fueled this research: communist potentiality. In this context, communist potentiality is manifested through efforts to make telekinesis, telepathy, and mind control apparatuses for achieving a classless society and optimising automated labour. Although not discussed much and in detail, the development of cybernetics in the Soviet Union also had similar roots, although cybernetics in the Soviet context tried more to maximize labour potential. My favourite part of this book is imagining humans as radio transmitter entities, where neutron waves could theoretically be transmitted through the air without any intermediaries and looking at early cinematic technology to understand body movement by labour scientists. It was quite eye-opening and something I rarely thought about. Despite being brief, one of the best books I've read this year.
January 3, 2026
On the one hand, you have a really interesting look into the types of scientific experiments done on the human mind and psyche for revolutionary and/or propaganda purposes (from what I remember). On the other hand, you have a very brief and at times abjectly outlandish piece of literature on a subject that probably warranted a lot more pages and narration.
The brevity makes this a book you can slam in a single day if that interests you. On the other hand, it is hard to determine whether this is all there is to learn on the subject. It seems there is a lot more insight to gain, as decades of research was performed in this realm.
I will say that one of the most hilarious pages I have ever observed in my life has come from this book, which left me cracking up in the middle of a quiet college library for a solid 10 minutes. And no, I will not spoil it, but what I am referring to will be doubtlessly clear if you read the final couple chapters.
Quick and easy but nothing too in-depth. Not bad overall. 3 stars.
The brevity makes this a book you can slam in a single day if that interests you. On the other hand, it is hard to determine whether this is all there is to learn on the subject. It seems there is a lot more insight to gain, as decades of research was performed in this realm.
I will say that one of the most hilarious pages I have ever observed in my life has come from this book, which left me cracking up in the middle of a quiet college library for a solid 10 minutes. And no, I will not spoil it, but what I am referring to will be doubtlessly clear if you read the final couple chapters.
Quick and easy but nothing too in-depth. Not bad overall. 3 stars.
July 18, 2019
It's either a bad translation or the author is deliberately being confusing. The choice of complicated words, and ove reliance on anecdotes leaves the reader more confused about the topic. It feels the book has no direction/purpose.
August 1, 2019
Sure, this book is a bit dense. The jargon can be a bit hard to wade through at times, but it's not needlessly complicated for what it is. How Velminski writes about media control in the Soviet Union is so uncomfortably similar to the media maelstrom of today.
December 7, 2022
An throughly interesting and bizarre book. That takes a look at possibly the grandest and strangest project ever undertaken by the Soviet Union, the creation of new human to express the triumph of the communist cause.
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November 1, 2017Kind of like sci-fi but nonfiction. Soviet scientists were up to some out there stuff!
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April 18, 2019This cool and interesting
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews