Aside from casual references to Soviet biopolitics in the work of Foucault, Agamben, and Esposito, the theoretical literature on biopolitics has largely ignored the Soviet experience, while empirical research in Russian studies has rarely addressed biopolitics. The article examines the experience of Stalinism as an important case for the study of biopolitics that helps resolve a problem preoccupying scholars from Foucault onward: the proximity of biopolitics to its opposite, the thanatopolitics of the mass production of death. How is it that a mode of power presenting itself in terms of care, augmentation, and intensification of life so frequently end up negating life itself? The article addresses this question in the context of the confluence of two political rationalities in the project of Soviet socialism, the revolutionary transcendence of the old order and the biopolitical immanentism of the construction of new forms of life. Focusing on the catastrophic policies of the Great Break (1928–1932), it argues that this combination is ultimately aporetic, leading to the violent destruction of the very lives that were to be transformed. The conclusion considers the contemporary relevance of the lessons to be learnt from Stalinist biopolitics.

In the summer of 1925, a debutant writer, Aleksandr Beliaev, published a ‘scientific-fantastic story’, which depicted the travails of a severed human head living in a laboratory, supported by special machinery. Just a few months later, a young medical researcher, Sergei Briukhonenko, succeeded in reviving the severed head of a dog, using a special apparatus he had devised to keep the head alive. This paper examines the relationship between the literary and the scientific experiments with severed heads in post-revolutionary Russia, which reflected the anxieties about death, revival, and survival in the aftermath of the 1914–1923 ‘reign of death’ in that country. It contrasts the anguished ethical questions raised by the story with the public fascination for ‘science that conquers death’.

This paper includes the Biogoraphy, History, Philosphy, and ethics with Morallity of Vladimir Lenin.