Mikhail Helle "Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man."

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. This remarkable and unsettling book interprets criminal Soviet rule as a consistent effort towards "creation of the New Man," an obediently selfless cog. Heller's claim is supported by his incomparable knowledge of Soviet political and literary sources.

Enduring parallels emerge between Soviet policy and the work of Zamyatin and Orwell, and they emerge in most areas of Soviet lifethe apotheosis of the plan, a mystical belief in Marxism-Leninism, and language used as a semiological system. 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 criminal 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.

Publisher: Knopf. First American Edition, 1988.

Used book. Very minor shelf wear from rubbing. Book very nice and clean.

See also: Michael Sacks, Jerry G Pankhurst "Understanding Soviet Society."