Introductory description

This undergraduate final-year Advanced Option explores the history of the body in Soviet Russia from revolution to the collapse of the USSR, in light of revolutionary claims that socialism would bring about ‘a higher social-biologic type, or if you please, a superman’.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Term 1

1. Mind/Body/Social: Revolutionary Understandings of the Physical [Introduction to History of the Body as a field; exploration of early revolutionary theorising on the intersection between mind, body and society in socialism]
2. The Machine Man and the New Soviet Person [Utopian dreams of the body in the early Soviet period, impact of technology/psychology on unfolding state policy to ‘shape’ bodies through healthcare, training]
3. The New Soviet Woman [Gendered dimensions of Soviet vision of the body; understandings of the female body as an ‘obstacle’ to socialist transformation]
4. Disease and Deviance in the Early Soviet Period [Behaviours/identities/physical states defined by Soviet state as ‘parasites’ on the Soviet body politic]
5. Sensory Regimes of Socialism [Attempts by early Soviet cultural practitioners to shape new, revolutionary ways of hearing/seeing/smelling/tasting/touching the world]
6. Reading Week
7. Acculturating the Soviet Body [Stalinist attempts to foster ‘cultured’ bodies through hygiene, consumption, fashion]
8. Bodies of the Five-Year Plan [How planned economy under Stalin sought to shape bodies through physical culture and labour practices; consideration of how industrial labour damaged bodies]
9. Stalinist Fantasies of Embodiment [How Socialist Realist texts, films and art promoted ideal socialist bodies in the 1930s]
10. Nikolai Ostrovskii and the Crippled Hero [The case study of Nikolai Ostrovskii’s novel How the Steel was Tempered (1936), a Socialist Realist classic about a disabled man]

Term 2

1. Violence and the Body Politic during the Purges [The Purges as an embodied history: consideration of torture and violent death (or the anticipation of it) as a universal Soviet experience]
2. Bodies as Weapons in WWII [Soviet policy towards military preparedness; cultural depictions of military bodies; gendered experiences of the Eastern Front]
3. Marks of Trauma [Late Soviet attempts to come to terms with the twin traumas of the Purges and WWII; looking at bodily manifestations of these experiences (e.g. prison tattooing)]
4. Late Socialist Work, Rest and Play [Changing understandings of the ideal Soviet body under Khrushchev’s Thaw: from labour machine to object of leisure]
5. Technological Utopias of the Body [The impact of the Scientific-Technological Revolution on understandings of the body: from space habitats to prosthetics]
6. Reading Week
7. Pleasures in Socialism [The concept of pleasure (sensual/emotional) in late Soviet society; the impact of Cold War competition on understandings of luxury)
8. Afghanistan in the Popular Imagination [Soviet popular representations of Afghanistan veterans’ crippled bodies as a crisis of socialism; discussion of Svetlana Aleksievich’s Zinky Boys (1990)]
9. Ageing Soviet Bodies [The demographic crisis of the late Soviet period; popular responses to the ‘gerontocracy’ in the Kremlin (Brezhnev’s ageing body)]
10. Reclaiming the Body during Glasnost [Impact of Gorbachev’s reforms on Soviet view of the body; the ‘epidemics’ of drug use, prostitution and suicide as a rejection of Soviet socialism]

Term 3

1. Revision, long essay/dissertation meetings
2. Revision, long essay/dissertation meetings

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a systematic knowledge and understanding of the ways in which the Soviet Union envisaged the ideal socialist body, and the various policies it used to bring that body about
• Critically analyse and evaluate a broad range of primary sources (including literary, cinematic and visual texts) relating to the history of the Soviet body
• Effectively communicate ideas, and make informed, coherent and persuasive arguments, about the tensions between ‘ideal’ and ‘real’ bodies in the Soviet context
• Critically review and consolidate theoretical, methodological, and historiographical ideas relating to the history of the Soviet body.

Indicative reading list

Generic Reading lists can be found in Talis

Specific reading list for the module can be found on

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.