The idea of eliminating undesirable traits from human temperament to create a new man has been part of moral and political thinking worldwide for millennia. During the Enlightenment, European philosophers sought to construct an ideological framework for reshaping human nature. But it was only among the communist regimes of the twentieth century that such ideas were actually put into practice on a nationwide scale. In this book Yinghong Cheng examines three culturally diverse sociopolitical experiments--the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, China under Mao, and Cuba under Castro--in an...