Cogs in the Soviet wheel: the formation of Soviet man - Hardcover

HELLER, Mikhail

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002725169 ISBN 13: 9780002725163

Publisher: Collins Harvill, 1988

Synopsis

An emigre Russian historian offers an in-depth critical analysis of Soviet life that discusses the ways in which the Soviet regime controls the Soviet people--in education, culture, the workplace, ideology, and language

About this title

Language Notes:

Text: English, Russian (translation)

From Publishers Weekly:

Unlike hardened anti-Communist cold warriors, Heller avoids ideological mudslinging. His portrayal of the Soviet Union as an unfree society, one where each individual becomes a small cell in a vast organism, is devastating and convincing. A Sorbonne instructor who coauthored Utopia in Power, Heller insists that the Soviet state's overriding goal is the same as it was under Lenin and Stalin: shaping "human raw material" into obedient, passive cogs in a machine. Today in the U.S.S.R., he notes, all references to the Bible and the Jewish people have been removed from school texts; women do the heaviest physical work and bear most of the family's burdens but have practically no voice; men act as capricious boys, working off their feelings of powerlessness by abusing their wives. Heller's surprising expose of Gorbachev's touched-up Stalinist vocabulary is brilliant. This is one of the best books ever written on the making of Homo sovieticus and the dilemmas of the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Collins Harvill
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0002725169
• ISBN 13: 9780002725163
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1