By the time of the Russian Revolution, the ground was well prepared for continuing accounts of Soviet Russia that obsessed about deciphering the Russian mind: The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia (Fülöp-Miller, Flint, and Tait 1929); New Minds, New Men? The Emergence of the Soviet Citizen (Woody 1932); Mind and Spirit in the Land of Soviets (Lyons 1947); The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism (Berlin and Hardy [1949] [2004]); The Country of the Blind: The Soviet System of Mind Control (Counts and Perlmutter 1949); The Mind of Modern Russia; Historical and Political Thought of Russia’s Great Age (Kohn 1955); The Revolt of the Mind: A Case History of Intellectual Resistance behind the Iron Curtain (Aczél and Méray 1959); The Russian Mind (Hingley 1978); and The Russian Mind since Stalin’s Death (Glazov 1985).
These titles do not describe brain activity so much as they signal a need to figure out the aims of the state, a need for intelligence, often by triangulating the words of intellectuals and artists for their relation to the state. The reference to the Russian mind signals worries about what might befall those who fail to read it. On October 1, 1939, Winston Churchill famously remarked over radio: “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Churchill’s words still ring like an incantation, even though he went on, in fact, to predict what the USSR would soon do (perceive German expansion as aggressive). The cliché that Russia poses special and inscrutable puzzles lives on.
During the Cold War American scholars approached the hermeneutic puzzle allegedly posed by Russians by projecting it inward, into Soviet and Russian national character. Right after World War II, the Rand Corporation commissioned anthropologist Margaret Mead and others to conduct a study that led to a collection of essays, Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority (1951). The authors interviewed Soviets who had immigrated during and just after the war and argued that Soviet social life was shaped by the ways Soviet people were uniquely paranoid about deceptive enemies within, paranoid that “every individual maintains the capacity for complete betrayal of all those values to which he has hitherto shown devoted allegiance” (197).3
Mead and her colleagues named fear of internal enemies as alien to “the Western mind” (an odd claim, given that they had just lived through McCarthy’s purges). While they acknowledged that the refugees entered interview situations conducted by officials and scholars representing the state that was granting asylum after a devastating war, they did not reflect on how such conditions primed identification of paranoia. Anthropological thinking about interview methods and contexts prompts me to consider how such research conditions resembled discursive genres such as interrogation, thus priming themes like betrayal.4 This is not to deny the existence of discourses of betrayal in the USSR; as discussed previously, historians have amply illuminated forms of Soviet unmasking and samokritika (“self-criticism”) in show trials, at work, in schools, and in diaries. What I do deny is the radical alterity of a “Soviet mind.” I mistrust claims of a specifically Soviet “culture of dissimulation” (Shlapentokh 1984; Sinyavsky 1991) and ask whether such claims are not themselves products of circuits for suspicion, channels charged by their functions and closures during imperial and then Cold War conflicts, because those functions and closures, their points of contact, extended beyond the borders of either state.
Paranoia and attention to others’ paranoia are both precipitates of conditions such as diplomacy and war (but see also Ngai 2005). Conditions shape demands for particular kinds of truth as useful intelligence; interview situations in service to aims of diplomacy or war strictly manage the channels for contact and structures for communicating.5 In 1998 the head of the Russian Academy for Theatrical Arts declared, in an official pamphlet describing the departments and admissions, that theater aims to make holes in the “defensive structures” of the audience (GITIS 1998); perhaps such aggressive metaphors for theatrical communication reverberate with previous painful encounters across political rifts.
GEOPOLITICAL PARANOIA AND INTUITION
During the years when Knebel’ ran telepathy drills for Soviet acting students, Americans were firing up related enchantments with intuition. The nineteenth-century movements of spiritualism and theosophy, the allied genres of gothic and science fiction, had moved into the mainstream by the 1960s. Themes of mind reading and mental control proliferated in American and British television series and films (The Prisoner, Doctor Who, Star Trek), as through New Age philosophy and popular publications on ESP experiments. Skeptics, too, redoubled public demonstrations to debunk ESP; belief in telepathy became a symptom of mental illness, as in the figure of the schizophrenic who receives FBI broadcasts by brain wave or claims psychic contact with aliens.6
In 1972 a report prepared for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency by the Army Medical Intelligence and Information Agency enumerated the practical military applications of extrasensory powers in ways that echoed Knebel’s words on developing sensitivity and attention within technologies for intuition: “In view of [animals’] perceptive processes, it has been difficult to differentiate between those sensory processes which are merely sharpened or highly honed, and those that are extra or super-normal. Certain military advantages would come from the application and control of these perceptive processes. For example, such application and control could be used in the detection and identification of animate objects or humans through brainwave interactions, mass hypnosis or mind control through long-distance telepathy, thermal receptors, and sensitivity to changes in magnetic electrical gravitational fields” (Army Medical Intelligence and Information Agency 1972, 26). Distant acting academies and military researchers converged to suggest that matters like intuition may not emerge naturally, that structures of governance or education can improve intuition, even to make contact in new ways via “thermal receptors.” In all their work about and on intuition, they could not but also effect changes across commonsense and theoretical models of communication.
American-style Cold War technologies for intuition engaged paranoia early on, later exemplified by anxiety about Madison Avenue subliminal barrages and musical messages embedded backward on vinyl, but originally over the wiles of foreign communists. The enemy seemed to spread propaganda through ever less detectable channels: How could we shut them out or even detect their invasive touch and influence? Looking back to 1962 from 2002, television critic Lee Siegel (2004) proposed “reading” the classic film The Manchurian Candidate (1962) as John Frankenheimer’s arch commentary on Cold War paranoia that linked media to mind control. In the opening scenes, North Korean communists inject American war prisoners with psychopharmaceuticals to program them with classically Freudian associations to mechanical cues: this playing card will remind you of your mother and trigger an urge to kill. Siegel, with an eye to the director’s other works critical of American-style propaganda, reads the film as subtly mocking those who during the McCarthy purges of the late 1940s rabidly accused Hollywood actors and directors of allowing ideological infiltration. They had demonized not only commie ideas—the semantic contents of mental influence—but also the diabolical means for making contact to implant ideas, techniques that were powerful because they came without words, seemingly hidden. A corrupted Hollywood would implant impulses in audiences through acting techniques, recruiting with a stage kiss:
In the original movie, there was something suspiciously familiar about the way the Commies manipulated American minds by playing on their buried emotions. Somewhere in the depths of Manchuria, we see Soviet and Chinese spymasters implanting new memories and associations into their [American] captives’ subconscious. The film’s central assassin is driven to murder by exposure to a queen-of-diamonds, which is intended to remind him of his powerful, threatening mother. The Communists in The Manchurian Candidate have developed a diabolical method of mind control based on memory’s emotional power. It is an ingenious method. It is a highly effective method. It is, in fact, the Method. The Method style of acting, that is. Developed in Moscow by Konstantin Stanislavsky in the early 20th century, the “System,” as it was first known, was composed of several principles. Chief among them was relying on “emotional memory” to play a role…. If the character is feeling shame, the actor might recall a humiliation in her own past that occurred in high school….