Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man

By Michel Heller, Mikhail Geller, Mikhail Heller

Book Overview

Cogs In The Wheel: The Formation Of Soviet Man, by Heller, Mikhail This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394569261
• ISBN13: 9780394569260
• Release Date: May 1988
• Publisher: Knopf
• Length: 293 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Great book

Good historical facts

Enlightening book to understand what went wrong.

The Cogs is revealing many interesting operations that were going on in an experimentive society. Sometimes the style is extremely bitter, but sometime it is very funny: Obviously the historian is speaking not only about dry facts, but from an experience. Note the year of first publishing 1980:Geller was ahead of his time analyzing so sharply the mechanisms of subject technology- this book tells us about a totalitarian operation over personality. A Polish joke from the book :Poland, Soviet Union and USA were competing over who has the most modern computer: The test was done with a sentence "Why is there no meat?"After feeding the test sentence to all the computers, first of all the Polish computer noted that it could not solve the question, because its dictionary did not include word "meat".Secondly the USA made computer failed, because its dictionary did not include word "no".After some time the Soviet computer failed due to the fact, that the computer's dictionary did not include the word "Why". I do recommend this book.

The best book about the Soviet mindset that I have read!

Heller has written definitive book on what the Soviet regime was all about - an attempt to create a new human being. It goes into great detail of how the Soviet government attempted to reshape the human mind and society, with obvious disasterous results. It is a must read for students of Cold War history, and for anybody wanting to understand what the Soviet Union was all about. Reading this book confirms the fact the the Soviet Union was The Evil Empire.