Engineers of the human soul

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Engineers of the human soul (Russian: ) - a concept of culture promoted by Joseph Stalin.

The phrase was originally coined by Yury Olesha and then used by Joseph Stalin, firstly during his meeting with the Soviet writers in preparation for the first Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers:

The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks.... And therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul. (Joseph Stalin, Speech at home of Maxim Gorky, 26 October 1932)

Stalin undoubtedly saw it as something to be proud of. It was taken up by Andrei Zhdanov and developed into the idea of 'Socialist realism'

The phrase is nowadays mostly used in a negative sense, rejecting this and many other sorts of control. It gets applied also to the cultural controls of Nazis, and also to some US culture.

Mao Zedong used same concept, though perhaps not the phrase itself

"Works of literature and art, as ideological forms, are products of the reflection in the human brain of the life of a given society. Revolutionary literature and art are the products of the reflection of the life of the people in the brains of revolutionary writers and artists. (Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, 1942)

Deng Xiaoping spoke approvingly of 'engineers of the human soul' in the post-Mao era, while also condemning the 'Gang of Four'.

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