Die Neue Menschheit. Biologische Utopien in Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts Herausgegeben von Boris Groys und Michael Hagemeister unter Mitarbeit von Annen von der Heijden

One aspect of the bio-political debate influenced by Foucault concentrates on the state control of sexual-reproduction and the physical well-being of the citizenry. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century Russian authors had devised a comparatively more radical project envisioning a total restructuring of life. That is, a quite wide-ranging bio-political project had existed long before the present discussion began. For example, in the second half of the nineteenth century Nikolai Fedorov outlined the "Projekt der gemeinsamen Tatâ?? (â??The Project of Concerted Actionâ??). His purpose simply was to utilize modern technology to raise the dead. In Fedorovâ??s wake the so-called bio-cosmologists later proclaimed communism as a means to achieve immortality. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of the Soviet rocket program, developed his concept originally with the notion of colonizing other planets with resurrected people. Simultaneously, Alexander Bogdanov was working on the creation of a system of blood transfusion that aimed at changing all of mankind into one collective body. In contrast to Foucaultâ??s analyses the Russian concepts are not limited by nationalistic requirements but are given life by their universal-globalistic appeal which can be expanded outwards into space, backwards into the past and forwards into the future. This anthology introduces bio-political and utopian concepts that are still unknown up to the present day, and it contributes as well to the understanding of ideological components of the communist world-picture which in their western perception have hardly been noted but are still relevant in the post-communist present.