His fame, however, bore little relation to his work. In November 1919 Lenin sealed his status as a Soviet icon by mentioning him in his speech on the Second Anniversary of the Revolution as ‘Nikita Slavkin . . . known as the Vanishing Futurist . . . To labour unstintingly, to seek knowledge, and to give one’s life for science – this is a true Revolutionary hero,’ Lenin declared. The following year the first, short book appeared about Slavkin’s life. In Moscow in 1924 one of the floats in the May Day procession was dedicated to his memory, consisting of a large silver pod in which an unconscious Slavkin lay in a tangle of wires attached to outsize clocks and a huge dial marked ‘To Communism!’ When the arrow reached its Communist zenith, a bell rang and Slavkin leapt to his feet and performed a series of acrobatics. As the arrow ticked around to the beginning, he flopped back down again.
From 1928 and through the 1930s, the depiction of Slavkin moved away from a prone body to a more dynamic image. ‘Nikita Slavkin Breaking the Boundaries of Human Knowledge’ appeared in several further Soviet anniversaries. It showed Slavkin as a beefy fellow in white overalls slamming his fist through the outstretched page of a huge book. Soviet boys took this image to heart and came in their thousands to dressing-up days at school as little musclemen. I could imagine the scenes in the playground as they gave the boundaries of human knowledge what they deserved. ‘Take that! Hurr!’
Further books and a feature-length film (The Vanishing Futurist, 1952) came out, and several physics departments were named in his honour. A street and a monument were dedicated to him in Sverdlovsk (formerly Ekaterinburg), where he went to school, and a plaque was put up on the house on Gagarinsky Lane. Yet no one has ever managed to replicate his experiment with the Socialisation Capsule, and fifty years of advances in quantum physics cannot explain how his machine could have resulted in his disappearance.
During Khrushchev’s time in power, when so many injustices came to light, Pasha told me he wanted to try to discover the truth about Nikita’s – about your father’s – death. I was still reluctant; we argued over it, and Pasha didn’t bring the subject up again. When you first brought these boxes of papers down from the attic, however, I opened them to find an envelope with a Russian postmark that I’d never seen before. Inside it was a printed slip in Russian: ‘In response to your request.’ Pasha obviously wrote for information despite my resistance, and then left the results for me. He knew that when I looked through the IRT papers again – when I was ready to tell you this story – I would find it. It was a last act of love for you, Sophy, as well as for his friend.
The printed slip had a header, blurrily stamped in the pale green favoured by Soviet bureaucracy, which announced it originated in the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR. Behind it was a photograph of some kind of form. My heart was racing horribly. Half of me wanted to put the envelope back in the box and pretend I had never seen it. It was hard to decipher; the photograph was not entirely clear, the Russian cursive script was typically fluid, one letter running on to the next with little attempt at legibility. Stamped in large red letters over the form were the words: ‘Restricted Information’.
Beneath them I read:
Certificate of Death
SLAVKIN, Nikolai Gavrilovich
Age: 25 years
Died: 15 February 1919
Place of death: Moscow, Kolomenskoye Barracks, Southern Region (formerly the Church of Ascension)
Cause of death: Shot to the head
This information is registered on 18 March 1919, at the Registration Bureau of the Emergency Commission (the Cheka)
*
Earlier on in this account, I suggested that the real cause for astonishment did not lie in the failures of the IRT, but in the extent of our success. Some may wonder which success I am referring to. It is true that in material terms one would be hard pressed to point to any evidence of transformation. Our commune was split apart by jealousy and self-interest, while all around us Russia’s experiment with social justice became a vast agar plate for the cultivation of corruption and cynicism.
In the years since, an abyss has opened up between the left and the right, millions of lives have vanished into it, and the ideals behind our Revolution have been swamped by tragedy. As the 1960s recede and the cynical 1970s wear on, the demands of the market are the only signposts through the modern desert. On the right wing they dismiss social justice as facile and dangerous, while on the left, loyal Socialists – like myself for many years – believe they support the cause by closing their eyes to the reality of the Soviet Union, by blaming Stalin, or Lenin’s illness, or ‘errors’. Yet the truth is that in January 1919 Nikita Slavkin died of a bullet to the head in the filthy backyard of a lunatic asylum.
And yet . . . and yet . . . don’t give up. History may not advance in the swift straight lines that the early Soviet artists envisaged. But surely the cynics who claim it moves in circles are just as foolish. If it does seem to repeat itself, if we do seem to arrive back at the same place again and again – the outbreak of war, the counter-Revolution – we are still in a slightly better position each time. We have the experience of our previous passes.
As I see it, the IRT’s achievement was to embody, just for a fleeting moment, Slavkin’s greatest insight. His concept of Atomic Communism describes the fundamental nature of reality in our universe, in which with every conscious thought, every action, each individual influences the world around him or her. If we give up on this future, in this intricately connected world, we stand to lose everything. Yet even the most powerless and insignificant among us can trigger vast transfomations. A poor boy from Galilee imagined a society in which outcasts and prostitutes were the equals of kings, and set in motion a social revolution that is still playing out today. The Constructivists in the dark winters of War Communism envisaged the design of the modern world. Now a defenceless scientist and his wife, Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner, are shaking the foundations of the Soviet Union with their simple demands for cooperation and freedom of thought.
‘Fortunately,’ as Andrei Sakharov has written, ‘the future is unpredictable and also – because of quantum effects – uncertain.’
Despite or, rather, because of the fact that the future is unknowable, each of us bears a responsibility towards it. If all that our imagination can summon up is some limp, apathetic, cynical vision of a world just like the one in which we now live, then frankly that’s all we deserve.
An image floats back to me: the first weeks of the IRT, and all of us are lying together on the lawn at Gagarinsky Lane, gazing at the first stars, and the smell of dry grass is in the air – the end of summer – and Nikita is speaking:
‘For better or worse, we are creating the future here, in our minds. Each time we allow ourselves to imagine a harmonious world, we bring it closer. Just share your thoughts with us . . . You know the answer, if only you can discover it within yourself. Inside your imagination lies the blueprint for the future. How, why, what you will into being – this is the choice that confronts you, and all of us.’
Acknowledgements
This book has taken me years to write and the patience of saints has been put to the test. Very many thanks and a deep bow to Neil Belton, Georgia Garrett, Hannah Griffiths, Sarah Savitt, Samantha Matthews, Alex Russell, Will Hobson, Emma O’Bryen, Jonathan Tetley, Roland Chambers, Clem Cecil, Emily Irwin, Victoria Millar, Anna Benn, Julian Reilly, Bojana Mojsova, Sophie Poklewski-Koziell, Wim Peers, Alexander Hoare, Jessica and Charles Thomas, Leslie Hewitt, Peter France, Anna Gunin, Alexander Gunin, and above all to my dearest Philip.
The Alchemy of Art
If Gerty’s family was anxious about her decision to work for the Kobelevs, she could at least reassure them that she would not be the only Miss in Moscow. A steady trickle of enterprising girls set off to Russia before the war, drawn by high wages and generous treatment from their Anglophile employers, as well as the promise of adventure. Russia was after all one of the fastest-growing economies in Europe at t
he time, as well as Britain’s ally in the Triple Entente – while the Tsar, the very twin of his cousin George V, had at last taken the first steps towards constitutional reform. A century on, we look back at 1914 and see a country on the brink of inevitable disintegration, yet many more experienced political commentators than Gerty missed the signs of the coming upheavals. Before the war, an alternative future did perhaps still exist for the Russian Empire.
It’s quite possible, however, that Gerty’s family would have been alarmed by reports of another Russian revolution, in the arts rather than in politics, which was already shocking audiences all over the world. Since the 1890s Russia had been experiencing a kind of Modernist Renaissance. As its industrial development drew it into the economy of Europe, so its cultural life became more and more closely linked with that of the West, both influenced by and increasingly influencing European culture. Artists of every discipline threw themselves into the modern experiment with form, coupled with an almost ecstatic belief in human creativity and the unity of all the arts. Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Vrubel, Bakst, Malevich, Kandinsky, Bely, Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Eisenstein, Stanislavsky, Meyerhold are just a few of the brilliant and wildly varied talents of this period, whose work – one thinks of Malevich’s Black Square (1915) or Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un faune (1912), the birth of modern dance, in which a faun masturbates over a scarf – still looks challenging today.
The Futurists crashed onto the literary stage in 1912, with a manifesto called ‘A Slap in the Face of Public Taste’, which joyfully abused and rejected all previous Russian literature. They were a group of art students turned rock-star poets – swaggering, glamorous, publicity-hungry, their every pose designed for maximum shock value. In their firmly materialist world view there was one attitude which amounted almost to a religion – a belief in the power of art not just to depict, but to transform. The avant-garde’s answer to the problems of Russia was Art itself, with its capacity to unite mankind and to transmute the base metals of our flawed world. Their creations were their contribution to the Revolution; by imagining the future they were performing the alchemy that would transform the present.
Vladimir Mayakovsky, probably the most famous of the Futurists, poured his poetic genius into the direct, funny, vulgar language of the streets. Cocky barrow boy crossed with tragic poet, he made himself the hero of his poetry and his life – a supersized ‘handsome twenty-two-year-old’ with ‘no senile tenderness’, who straddled the universe – chatted to the sun, man to man, walked a tiny Napoleon on a leash and marched up to heaven to threaten a mouldering old God (who, of course, was nowhere to be found). He was, his poetry suggested, a representative of a Promethean new breed of men, typical of the age, who with modern technology would crush nature and build Utopia.
If Mayakovsky was the pin-up of the group, the gentle, ascetic Velimir Khlebnikov was considered by his contemporaries to be the most brilliant. At a Futurist carnival in Petrograd in 1917 he was borne through the streets on a throne with the inscription ‘Chairman of the World’. His ‘transrational’ poetry is a kaleidoscope of neologisms, arcane words and esoteric references – his own attempt at ‘the language of the birds’, an ancient, ideal language that was capable of expressing the pure essence of meaning.
While a political Revolution was still remote, nihilism was the literary avant-garde’s default position. As Mayakovsky later summed up in his first long poem, the idea was: ‘Down with your Love! Down with your Art! Down with your system! Down with your religion!’ Yet before 1917, apart from the brawls that often concluded their readings, the Futurists’ idea of bringing down the system was entirely artistic and performative. They talked of fusing Art and Life, dragging the artist out of his garret and placing him in the midst of people’s ordinary working lives; but at this stage little more than token gestures were possible – dressing eccentrically, for example, in a yellow blouse instead of a jacket and tie, wearing spoons or radishes in their buttonholes, and painting on unframed panels rather than old-fashioned canvases.
And then came 1917. The Tsarist regime fell in March, but it was the Bolshevik coup in October that swept away the entire bourgeois system. The avant-garde was jubilant: its demands had been granted with incredible speed and thoroughness, and anti-Establishment artists and writers had all at once become the mouthpiece of the new state. One can only wonder at how extraordinary this must have felt, although with typical brass-nosery they affected no surprise. Anything, suddenly, was possible. In art as in politics, all the talk might have dwelt ad nauseam on rationality, utility and a scientific approach – but beneath all that lay a limitless utopia, released from pragmatism by the dreamlike chaos of the moment.
The Futurists had long since changed their name: in the visual arts, the ‘Last Futurist Exhibition’ had taken place back in January 1916, after which it was partially succeeded by Suprematism, and in 1917 by Constructivism, which rejected painting altogether for production art – art with a social meaning and a practical purpose. Nonetheless, under the banner of Constructivist ‘labour’, extraordinary works of utopian art were conceived, even if they were never built, nor the necessary technology ever developed. Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, designed in 1919–20, is perhaps its emblematic creation: a magical object conceived by a soaring, original imagination that aimed to enlighten and transform the world around it not by representation or depiction, but by the simple fact of its existence . . . even though it did not and could not exist, because the very essence of its transformative power (materials, technology, organisation) was unavailable or had not yet been invented. In this alchemical spirit, the students of Vkhutemas created their extraordinary designs for flying, floating and dangling buildings, and El Lissitzky produced his prounen, architectonic drawings that hovered somewhere between the second and third dimension. ‘This was one of those epochs,’ the writer Darko Suvin later commented, ‘when new Heavens touch the old Earth, when the future actively overpowers the present.’ The inspirations of the avant-garde were as much guidelines to future creators as designs in themselves.
The Party’s dream had many of the features of the hyper-controlled, draconian utopias otherwise confined to SF novels – although, fortunately enough, its political and administrative weakness prevented too thorough an implementation. War Communism, the system adopted by the Bolsheviks during the Civil War, was at least partially conceived as a prefigurative stage on the route to Communism. The most striking move was perhaps Trotsky’s unilateral declaration of peace, which was followed the next day by a German invasion along the entire defenceless Russian border from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Internal policy was equally radical. All private enterprise was banned, industries and banks were nationalised and rations were distributed according to class, with workers, the Red Army and Party members being awarded the best rations, while ‘former people’ were given, in Trotsky’s unpleasant phrase, ‘only just enough bread so that they don’t forget the smell of it’. Obligatory labour was introduced as well as conscription, in a ferocious version of the workers’ paradise, while the ‘old world’ of the villages was treated ruthlessly. Under this system, even Party members and their loyal supporters could barely keep body and materialist soul together. The artist Olga Rozanova died of diphtheria in 1918; Khlebnikov, weakened by malnourishment, in 1922.
Despite these hardships the avant-garde pushed ahead as far as they could with the task of remaking the world. The Old was ritually cleansed with new street names and new, hurriedly built monuments; the walls of the Moscow Manège, for example, were painted with a list of Great People of History – Spartacus, Marx, Rosa Luxembourg. Mass theatrical events were organised to celebrate Revolutionary anniversaries, including a vast re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace with a cast of more than eight thousand. Avant-garde agitprop posters were displayed throughout Bolshevik-held areas. Mayakovsky’s plan to paint the trees outside the Kremlin red was typical of their witty co
nceptual approach to uniting art and life in one almost destitute but Revolutionary reality.
By 1921 War Communism had more or less brought the Bolshevik state to a standstill. Industrial production was minimal, the cities were half empty, starvation and disease were widespread. Lenin had no alternative but to reintroduce a certain level of market economics, the New Economic Policy, into the system, upon which his endlessly resourceful compatriots immediately set to work rebuilding their country.
For the next eight years or so Russians enjoyed something of a respite from the depredations of the State, and the avant-garde were able to carry themes from the pre-Revolutionary period to their conclusions. Despite their victory over the old order, the nihilistic tendency still persisted. The monochrome replaced colour, silence replaced music, nudity replaced fashion (the ‘Evenings of the Denuded Body’ which Pasha anachronistically wished he could attend, took place in 1922, with marches and the occupation of trolley buses), and a universal monosyllabic language called ‘Ao’ was proposed. The nichevoki, Russian Dadaists, made a single vow: ‘to read nothing, write nothing, publish nothing’. There were even darker negations too, unsurprising perhaps after seven years of war: robotism, antiverbalism, suicidalism.
Yet at the same time a spirit of joyful optimism in Revolutionary man’s capabilities possessed the avant-garde. The quest for egalitarianism took them in multiple directions – in the theatre, in dance, in music. One of the most successful was the famous orchestra without a conductor, Persimfans, which survived for a decade and inspired orchestras in New York and Germany. The artists Stepanova and Tatlin turned their attention to clothing – genderless, practical uniforms for different professions – which was never produced, although it has inspired later fashion brands such as Miu Miu and Chanel; disposable paper clothes were another suggestion ahead of their time.
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