‘Now – let us try to understand. What are you saying, Doctor? Please be careful not to express groundless prejudice.’
‘I’m asking, can it be right for one comrade to take advantage of another’s gentleness of character?’ Dr Marina’s voice was shaking.
A long pause.
‘Are you talking about any comrades in particular?’ asked Fyodor. ‘Because if so I think we should know.’
‘Marina, darling, please don’t,’ said Vera. She was blushing hard and her eyes were a little watery.
Dr Marina’s face was flushed, her eyes glittering. ‘Yes, I am, as a matter of fact,’ she said. ‘I’m—’
‘She’s talking about me, of course,’ Volodya interrupted, clearing his throat. His voice was calm but he smiled a tight, angry smile. He went over to Vera and took her hand. ‘Verochka and I, we are very happy to announce to you all that we are occasionally sleeping together. Or rather not sleeping, having sexual intercourse. Seeing as you all seem to think it’s your business.’
‘Oh!’ Vera started to cough and the tears trickled out of her eyes.
Aghast, I glanced towards Slavkin. ‘But we’ve all promised Nikita to be celibate,’ I burst out. ‘You . . . you mustn’t, you know . . .’
Beside me, Fyodor’s face was turning scarlet. ‘You decadent! How dare you twist Revolutionary language for your own ends! You have betrayed a trust! You have debauched an innocent girl!’
‘Say that again,’ growled Volodya. ‘Repeat that, if you dare, you toad.’
Pasha stood up as well. ‘Wait, Fedya, can’t you see their point of view, too?’ he asked Fyodor. ‘They’ve decided to love each other openly – to have a “socially affirmed sexual life”, haven’t you heard Kollontai’s expression?’
‘Milaya Vera, sweet Vera, I never made you do anything you didn’t want to do, did I? It was your choice too, wasn’t it?’
Vera was shrinking into the corner of the divan. ‘Yes, Vova, it was my choice,’ she whispered.
Volodya sat next to her and put his arm round her. ‘You are treating us like children.’ He turned to Dr Marina, menace in his voice. ‘Every individual is free to make his or her own decisions now, even if you disapprove of them. What do you want, a priest to come along and marry us?’
‘She’s not free to make that decision!’ snapped Marina. ‘She’ll fall in love with you, you brute, and you’re just amusing yourself.’
Nikita sat back in his chair as though all the energy had flowed out of him. ‘Vova,’ he said quietly, ‘no one is denying that you are perfectly within your rights. But, my dear friend, aren’t we devoting all our strength, every minute of precious time, to achieving other goals?’ We are in the very first stages of the commune. If you have affairs, not only will you spread disharmony among your fellow commune members, you will be distracted from your Revolutionary work. And what about children? This is no time to bring children into the world. With children, you have a family unit, the basis of all bourgeois life—’
‘There are methods, you know, for not having children.’
‘Slavkin is right,’ snapped Fyodor. ‘We must make sacrifices, Volodya. Those methods are not reliable in any case. Only if we learn self-control can we become true Revolutionaries.’
I didn’t trust myself to speak; I couldn’t look at Slavkin.
‘Oh, you are a herd of nanny goats,’ interrupted Nina, who was lying voluptuously on the sofa. ‘What are you all making such a fuss about? It’s normal. Look around you, everyone’s doing it!’
There was a pause.
‘Camel, we don’t want to let you down,’ said Volodya at last, almost pleading. ‘Tell us what you want us to do.’
Nikita stirred. He looked painfully disappointed, with dark shadows under his eyes. ‘Pasha is right, you can make your own choices. But we are attempting to put the needs of the collective before our own, do you understand? We must not have the commune splintering into sub-groups. In our Manifesto, we wrote that we’d abolish the private and the domestic. How will you avoid that?’
‘We’re not married,’ said Vera timidly. ‘I mean, it’s not as if we’re in love or anything,’ she added, blushing.
Slowly, with purpose, Nikita spoke. ‘I want you to promise that you will cease these sexual relations.’
Volodya made an exasperated gesture. ‘Really, Camel?’
‘Yes. Or you must leave the IRT.’
‘For fuck’s sake . . .’
Nikita stood up. ‘I think you should talk privately and come to a decision. Will you stay and abide by the rules of the commune, or go? Why don’t you let us know tomorrow?’
We were silent as he left the room. Vera was crying quietly.
‘Verochka, darling,’ said Marina, throwing herself down beside her sister, ‘we promised Mother we’d stay together and look after each other. I beg you not to go with him—’
‘Oh, leave her alone,’ spat Volodya. ‘Stop bossing her, Marina, for once.’
I slipped out of the room and went to check on the old ladies in their bedroom. Mamzelle was not well – she had a chest infection – and as I settled her for the night I was aware of Anna Vladimirovna watching me. No detail ever passed her by.
‘You’re shaking, Miss Gerty,’ she said. ‘Are you feeling well?’
‘No, no, I’m a bit tired, that’s all. I shall go straight to bed now.’
As I left the room, I heard her say in a loud, hoarse whisper. ‘I’ve always said it doesn’t do to let peasants have too much of a say. Now he’s ruling over them all like a tsar.’
*
The following evening Volodya and Vera announced to the meeting that they wanted to stay in the commune.
‘She wants to stay, and I don’t want to go on my own,’ said Volodya, with bad grace.
Fyodor raised his eyebrows. ‘You can hardly participate with that attitude.’
‘No, no, you know how much I think of the Camel. I said already, didn’t I? He’s got a brain, he has, and I want to give him a chance to make things fairer.’ Volodya stood up straight and looked Nikita in the eye. ‘You have my word, Camel – I’ll give it my best shot. That’s all I can promise.’
Nikita smiled at him, his sweet, whole-faced beam. ‘I’m so glad, Vova. We’ll vote on it straight away. Shall we give them a chance? Any member can be expelled if the commune feels they are poisoning the atmosphere. Put your hands up those who want them to stay.’
Dr Marina, Pasha and Sonya put up their hands straight away; Nina and Ivan casually signalled yes. Slavkin joined them, and I did too. Only Fyodor remained firmly against.
‘Well, you are on trial, Vova, Verochka. Be aware that we will all be watching you to see if you are keeping your word. All right?’
‘All right,’ they said. Poor Vera bowed her head. ‘Thank you, everyone, for believing in us,’ she said.
‘And you, Fyodor, you need to drop your resistance now and assure us that you are cleansed of negative feeling.’
‘I think this is a mistake, you know. They broke a rule once, they are sure to break it again.’
‘The commune has voted. You must back down now, don’t be proud. Remember, pride is only the ego, not your essential being. I think you had better do an hour of the Model T.’
‘Really? Oh, no, I’m worn out, Nikita, please—’
‘One hour tonight, Fyodor, and remember to think cleansing thoughts as you do it.’
‘But—’
‘No pettiness.’ Slavkin was almost shouting. ‘We will get swamped in this pettiness!’
10
By the end of September Slavkin’s Propaganda Machine was finished, and we were spending several evenings a week administering anti-bourgeois vaccinations at a rate of twelve an hour. A couple of photographs have survived. In one, Volodya has his arms draped around Nikita and Pasha, three young men smiling into the evening sun. Behind them is just a glimpse of the Machine, obscured by the gaggle of children that have crowded in to stare at the camera. At t
he side you can just see Fyodor admonishing them, sun glinting off his spectacles. He looks so young too, with – I can hardly believe it – what looks like a stiff collar. In the other – the clearest image of the PropMash that we have – Nikita and Sonya stand together in front of the steps. Sonya is speaking, gesticulating with one hand and pushing her hair back with the other. Nikita is gazing at her, smiling a little. I feel I can remember this exact moment, that exact look.
Some evenings we managed to hire a horse to draw the PropMash to its location of the day; occasionally we all dragged it together – it wasn’t too heavy with eight or so of us pulling. Immediately a crowd of noisy, excited children would gather. We didn’t plan a venue, just stopped in whichever yard or park that Slavkin chose, but the lack of publicity made no difference. The street kids did that work for us, shouting into every house we passed, ‘The PropMash is coming!’ The queues soon stretched down the street.
‘Our medicine has an advantage over bacterial inoculation,’ Slavkin would announce benevolently to the crowd. He wore a doctor’s coat with a pair of pliers in the pocket and some nasty brownish stains here and there. ‘Ours is highly infectious. Each inoculation achieved here today should spread to a further forty or fifty. At this rate we’ll cover the entire Russian population in a hundred and seven and a half working days!’
We stacked up the gramophone records and filled the olfactory pumps with scents, loaded the films and rigged up a curtained cubicle around the Machine. We charged a rouble per vaccination, although we waived the fee for almost everyone except prosperous-looking people (and there were few enough of those).
‘Be aware,’ boomed Slavkin, drawing himself up to several inches above his full height by means of an inconspicuous cardboard box. ‘Once initiated, the process of vaccination cannot be interrupted under any circumstances. We cannot let you out, you must simply endure until the end. Otherwise it may have serious consequences. Do not attempt this if you have weak nerves or any other debilitating condition.’
The people in the queue shivered in pleasurable anticipation at these remarks and settled contentedly down to wait. They had no view of the Machine and could hear only muffled sound effects, including, occasionally, the screams and yells of the patient undergoing vaccination. These, too, seemed to increase their eagerness for their turn.
Each patient climbed up into the landau and squeezed in through the door. Once he or she was in the seat we fastened the straps and lowered the heavy metal helmet. Then the inoculation began. The temperature was slowly raised to that of a steam bath. The film began – a crude attempt at the technique Eisenstein would later develop – images inside a factory were cut with some unpleasant scenes at a slaughterhouse, and some of us dressed as high capitalists forcing our servants to grovel under the table. Volodya, as one of the servants, rather spoilt this part by grinning at the camera. More scenes from the factory, fainting workmen, emaciated children, cut with close-ups of babies crying, priests performing a burial and a piece of meat being fought over by stray dogs, and suddenly – the crisis of High Capitalism, a scene of hell given added shock value by us drumming the outside of the Machine and shouting down the ventilation tube. Then the olfactory pumps would switch from charred rubber, rotten meat, petrol and so on to the soothing scent of bread and grass, and a gentle breeze would dissipate the boiling heat of the factory that they had been trapped in. Abstract images of great beauty, simplicity and power were interspersed with images that dwelt on construction, brotherhood and harmony. The words of Lenin and Gorky could be heard at first in the distance, so one strained to catch what they were saying; then they slowly came closer, speaking in low, conversational tones; explaining simply and kindly what Socialism meant for all of us, for the individual. ‘Henceforth, no one need feel in the wrong’ is a phrase that stuck with me. ‘Guilt is not a Socialist emotion.’
The patients, reeling and dazed as they emerged from the Machine, were led to a small roped-off seating area known as No Man’s Land for at least ten minutes’ recovery time. Suitable reading materials were handed out. They were usually eager to talk the experience over with others, and ‘PropMash Friendships’ became a well-known after-effect. There were even some ‘PropMash Marriages’, apparently. Dozens had to be stopped from just walking straight back around to the end of the queue. ‘But I love it,’ I remember one wailing. ‘I want it!’
The most ardent supporters of the Machine were Slavkin’s friends in the avant-garde. Early on the artist Tatlin was inoculated, and raved about it to his friends, bringing a crowd the next day that included Popova, Stepanova and others. They dragged Slavkin out into the crowd and gave him three cheers. Nikita, typically, blushed and didn’t know what to say, especially when the poet Bryusov launched into criticism of the exterior of the Machine: ‘Where are the clean lines, where is the modern approach here, my dear friend? If it must be mammary, at least you might aim for a firm young bosom rather than this squashy old teat!’
Nikita, who hadn’t given much thought to the exterior of the Machine, muttered, ‘I suppose it’s a mother.’
Tatlin laughed, delighted. ‘Yes – a monument to the Mother who feeds us all! PropMasha, perhaps.’
Mayakovsky, who was filming in Petrograd at the time, came later and charmed everyone in the queue. He scribbled a chastushka, a little two-line rhyme:
Slavkin has found out what’s best –
To the future in a breast!
Thanks to all of this, Slavkin became quite well known, and at the IRT the trickle of curious visitors and fans grew to a stream. For a time we got no peace. Then Volodya fixed a lock on the gate and found an orphan, Kolenka, from the gaggle around the Machine one night. Kolenka’s job was to answer the doorbell and ask for a password before letting anyone in. If a guest did not know the password, he announced very fiercely, ‘The IRT are labouring in the red-hot forge of Revolution!’ and did not open. He turned away not only fans, but also inconvenient visitors like Prig, who returned several times with resettlement plans. Every now and again Kolenka wandered off to play somewhere and then we had to climb through the rotten plank at the end of the garden, but apart from that it worked well. He became a member of the commune, ate with us in the evenings and slept in the men’s dormitory, and seemed to grow several inches a month.
In short, the Propaganda Machine was a triumph – in all ways but one. Slavkin’s great wish was to win government support for it. He envisaged a future in which it was put into mass production and distributed across the country. But the Party leadership itself – unsurprisingly – was otherwise engaged. Each member of the Ispolkom was sent a personal invitation to the PropMash, which they ignored. Finally, at the behest of his artist friends, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Pasha’s boss at the Commissariat of Enlightenment, consented to a vaccination. He talked briefly with Slavkin; Nikita was nervous and distracted; he kept rubbing his hands together, blinking and laughing oddly. I could see that Lunacharsky thought him strange. There was a long, awkward pause and then he said, ‘Well, is it time?’
‘Yes, yes . . .’ Slavkin leapt forward to help him up, banging his head on the landau. Lunacharsky – who was quite tall – compressed himself into the space and we began the inoculation. When he finally emerged he was smiling in a restrained way. He put on his hat and shook Slavkin’s hand. ‘Let me congratulate you on a very fine piece of circus,’ he said. ‘Such things are still important.’
‘Circus? Not just . . . not only . . .’ stammered Nikita.
‘Really?’
‘We are administering a vaccination! A permanent immunity to bourgeois attitudes!’
‘I do congratulate you,’ murmured Lunacharsky, ‘and admire what you have done.’ He said it with the smiling charm for which he was famous, but the dismissal, nonetheless, was firm. ‘And I hear that your work on iridium alloys is remarkable,’ he added.
We packed up and trundled the Machine home with none of our usual exhilaration. Nikita was gloomy and irritable, and for the first ti
me in over a week, we did not take the Propaganda Machine out the following evening.
*
I sit here surrounded by my papers in my neat little modernist armchair, produced for the masses and sold inexpensively. On my walls are prints of paintings produced by the Russian avant-garde, now celebrated and sold for vast sums. If I look along my bookshelves, the lettering on every cover, every magazine – if it does not intend to look deliberately old-fashioned and folksy – is the plain sans serif of avant-garde pamphlets. From the new concrete towerblocks soaring up all over Hackney to my teacups, knives and forks, the stuff of our lives now echoes the drawings of students who worked at the Moscow design studios Vkhutemas in the cold, dark winters of the Civil War.
And I wonder about the Propaganda Machine and many of the designs of the Russian avant-garde. They were playful – the whims and self-dramatising jokes of clever children. They were also deadly serious, made in conditions of real suffering. They seemed insignificant among the clanging chaos of the Revolution, but they were levers to change lives, alter thoughts, create new ways of living; this we knew, straightforwardly, just as we knew that a teaspoonful of air resistance could make us fly, a wisp of steam could drive a locomotive. On their own merits they have survived: now, decades later, our houses, clothes, china, patterns, magazines, objects look and feel as they do at least partly because of the Soviet artists and poets who imagined them.
Yet, extraordinary as this achievement is in itself, it would not have satisfied their creators. The modern aesthetic was always a means to a far greater goal – a just society. And I can’t help thinking as I look around at my comfortable house and our well-designed modern city, how did we become so childishly easy to please, so unambitious? Why did we settle for so little?
*
Among the papers from the Institute that have survived is a scribbled account in my own hand entitled ‘The First Journey to the Future – 25 October 1918’. As I reread it, I suddenly feel the most extraordinary sensation, a sort of muffled, tingling wave of emotion, part agitation, part excitement. I laugh out loud, and the sound rackets alarmingly about my house.
The Vanishing Futurist Page 10