Engineers of the Soul

Engineers of the Soul is the riveting story of how authors were forced to write in service of the Soviet Union's Communist ideology. Stalin first used the expression 'engineers of the soul' to refer to Soviet writers in 1932. It would become a well-known phrase and a feared concept. Together with the actual engineers, these engineers of the soul were supposed to contribute to the definitive establishment of the Communist paradise: by changing the appearance of the country with ambitious waterworks — Moscow Seaport — and by playing upon the souls of its inhabitants in books in such a way that the New Man would rise up. Combining investigative journalism with literary history, Westerman, himself once a student of hydraulic engineering, undertook two spectacular journeys: the first was to the Gulf of Kara Bogaz, now a muddy bay in the Caspian Sea but once described as a marvel of hydraulic engineering, and the second through the books — and the lives — of other Soviet writers including Maxim Gorki, Andrei Platonov and Isaak Babel.