Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  Notes

  1. David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair, p. 27.

  2. No sooner had James P. Goodrich retired as Republican Governor of Indiana than President Herbert Hoover appointed him to run the Russian operations of the American Relief Administration. For more on his observations of Russia, and his lobbying for the Soviet Union, see Dane Starbuck’s The Goodriches: An American Family.

  3. Daniel P. Todes, ‘Pavlov and the Bolsheviks’, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 17, no. 3 (1995), p. 384.

  4. A microtome is a tool used to cut extremely thin slices of material, useful in preparing slides for microscopy. (A macrotome is a precision saw used to prepare bigger anatomical sections.)

  5. Josephson, Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia, p. 77.

  6. Nikolai L. Krementsov, Stalinist Science, p. 14.

  7. Quoted in Igor G. Loskutov, Vavilov and His Institute: A History of the World Collection of Plant Genetic Resources in Russia, p. 18.

  8. Quoted in Peter Pringle, The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin’s Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century, p. 92.

  9. Quoted in Loskutov, Vavilov and his Institute, p. 23.

  10. Leonid Rodin in the introduction to N. I. Vavilov, Five Continents, p. xxi.

  11. Barbara Walker, ‘Kruzhok Culture: The Meaning of Patronage in the Early Soviet Literary World’, Contemporary European History, 11 (2002), pp. 107–23.

  12. Viacheslav Ivanov, ‘Why Did Stalin Kill Gorky?’, Russian Social Science Review, 35, no. 6 (1 November 1994), pp. 52–3.

  13. Pringle, The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, p. 85.

  14. Speech in opening the Eleventh Congress of the Party, 27 March 1922. In V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 33, pp. 237–42.

  15. Loren R. Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History, p. 89.

  16. Ivanov, ‘Why Did Stalin Kill Gorky?’, p. 55.

  17. Lenin to Gorky, 15 September 1919; available from the US Library of Congress at http://1.usa.gov/1NBxNon.

  18. Stuart Finkel, ‘Purging the Public Intellectual: The 1922 Expulsions from Soviet Russia’, Russian Review, 62 (2003), p. 589.

  19. A. E. Fersman, ‘From a speech delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Geographical Institute’, Problems of scholarly organisation in the work of Soviet scientists, 1917–1930 [in Russian], p. 201.

  4: Workers

  Making the New Soviet Man one reflex at a time: innovative biometric studies at Alexei Gastev’s Central Institute of Labour.

  Why are there mountains of books written on thermal energy, furnaces, boilers, steam machines, electricity, anthracite, white coal, and electrification, but none on the energy of the worker? 1

  Alexei Gastev

  Alexei Kapitonovich Gastev was born on 26 September 1882 in Suzdal, a small town in the middle of Russia. The townsfolk were mostly craftspeople – cobblers, tailors, hatters and painters – and Alexei grew up playing in the large cherry orchards which lay a short distance from the centre of the town.

  The child in the cherry orchard would become the most popular, reprinted and influential workers’ poet of the early Soviet era, his works universally considered some of the finest and strangest blooms of the Russian futurism. A writer less like Chekhov it would be hard to imagine, and not everyone was impressed. One comrade, coming away from Gastev’s recitation of his poem ‘We Grow from Iron’, complained, ‘That worker doesn’t speak so much as he yells, like it’s coming out of a trumpet.’

  Gastev, like his literary peers, held Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel What Is to Be Done? of 1863 in high esteem. (Lenin called it ‘the greatest and most talented representation of socialism before Marx’.) Chernyshevsky conjured up a vision of the ideal twentieth-century person – rational, self-disciplined, loves work for its own sake, and is selflessly committed to society and the greater good – and enlivened this rather dull-sounding formula with a plot about free love and references to bodily mortification, as when one minor political activist in the novel, Rakhmetov, sleeps on nails to harden his political resolve.

  The other great influence on Gastev was Walt Whitman. The New York poet had been introduced to Russian readers through Kornei Chukovsky’s translations in the literary journal Vesy. In fact futurist poetry generally, in its freedom, roughness and chutzpah, owes a lot to Whitman. But it was Gastev, and Gastev alone, who really understood how to marry Whitman’s style with the poetry of machines, factories and urban life. And this hardly comes as a surprise, since Gastev was the only worthwhile poet to have spent years working on the shop floor.

  Gastev’s love of tools and machinery began early. Around 1898, while attending Moscow Teachers’ College, he devoted himself to metalwork and carpentry. Expelled just before his finals in early 1902 for arranging a student demonstration, Gastev devoted himself entirely to political agitation in Moscow. (He had joined the Social Democratic Workers’ Party in 1900, at the age of eighteen.) In December 1902 he was arrested, charged with disseminating illegal propaganda, and sentenced to three years’ exile in the province of Vologda, 500 kilometres to the north.

  It was not a severe sentence, and Gastev took it in his stride, becoming the leader of the exile colony. He even arranged a demonstration there against the police’s ill-treatment before skipping Russia entirely for France.

  In June 1904 Gastev contacted the Bolshevik apparatus in Paris and took a job as a fitter in the Citroën plant. He spent his evenings attending courses organised by Russian émigrés, and learned to speak fluent French. By the end of the year he was in Geneva, where he published at his own expense a short story in Russian entitled ‘The Accursed Question’.

  The main character, Vasily, is a man in his thirties who has renounced his personal life and dedicated himself to working for the good of society. But Vasily has a weakness, an ‘animal passion’ which fills him with self-loathing and becomes ‘the most accursed, the most tragic question of his life’. Spring comes, and his repressed instincts boil over. He visits a prostitute, regrets it, and vows that ‘this would never happen to him again, that he would never again be torn between his passion and his conscience’.

  Biology, in Gastev’s story, reduces man to an animal. The only way to ‘let the human being within him triumph’ is self-denial. Gastev soon found more elegant avenues of self-expression, and his poetry is full of vigour and excitement and a sort of horripilating enthusiasm for everything mechanical. It is noticeable, however, that he never again invented a single individual to write about. All terror and excitement in his poetry is collective: heightened, and at the same time sanitised. (The historian Kendall Bailes dubbed Gastev’s mentality ‘a kind of Puritan ethic in secular garb’ – a summary hard to better.2)

  Gastev returned to Russia in the early spring of 1905 and drifted from job to job: on an assembly line, as a lathe operator, and as the driver of a tram.

  … with the motors whirring mightily you cut through the crisp air saturated with the fragrance of fresh greenery. Slowly, quietly, as if on velvet, you drift onto the Stroganov Bridge and rein in the car on the slope. A stop. And after it, ignoring the protests of the overdressed passengers and disregarding safety precautions, I switch on both motors at once; with a terrible lurch and bursts of sparks, I take off as if I had been stung by a bee down the twisting lane of Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt.3

  A professional revolutionary his whole adult life, Gastev now began to drift away from the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. A practical man, what mattered to him most were improved working conditions, better wages, health insurance and the like, and these issues, it seemed to him, were better settled on the factory floor, by the workers themselves, than abstracted into policy and discussed by bureaucrats in a capital that might lie half a world away. Who better to realise the revolution than the workers in whose name the revolution was being fought?

  Gastev found himself more and more drawn to the Syndicalist movement (‘syndicat’ is French for
trade union), which was then reaching a high point of popularity and influence. Gastev’s dream was to put the entire economy into the hands of skilled trades unions, and across Europe many socialists were drawing the same conclusion: that it was the business of workers themselves to take over factories, using the weapon of a general strike. (Mass industrial actions in Holland, Russia and Italy had been making headlines since 1904. The socialists had no such victories to brag about. There had been a revolution in Russia, in 1905, but they had missed it.) The International Congress of Syndicalists, meeting in Paris in April 1907, bemoaned Marxism’s ‘decomposition’, while the Italian journalist Arturo Labriola put the syndicalist case succinctly: five minutes of ‘direct action’ in the streets were worth many years of parliamentary debate.4

  In 1910, Gastev returned to Paris. He wrote: ‘I want to try not only to observe, not only to learn, but actively to work there.’ He found the city flooded with fellow self-exiles. In the Seine department alone, one in twelve residents was Russian. He found jobs as a metal-worker and a taxi driver, waking at five in the morning, returning home for supper around eight. He spent his evenings at lectures or gatherings of the Metal-Workers’ Section, the Bureau of Labour and the Workers’ Club. The bohemian existence led by many other Russian residents – visits to second-hand bookstores, cafés and museums, premieres of plays by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the doyen of the Paris scene – passed Gastev by.

  In the spring of 1913 he returned to Petersburg and after six months he was arrested again. This time he was sent to Siberia: to Narym on the Ob River, 400 kilometres north-west of Tomsk. Again, he took exile in his stride, baking bread, teaching, repairing machinery and writing. ‘Express: a Siberian Fantasy’ was completed here: a visionary prose poem about the industrial future of Siberia.

  In a curious Russo-American pidgin all its own, ‘Express’ describes a journey on an enormous, futuristic express train, Panorama, through Siberia’s ‘ungreened land’ – now a dense network of factories, tunnels, roads, canals, stations and towns. Buildings tower into the sky and plunge kilometres deep under the earth. Most utopias are as ossified as statues. Gastev’s future Siberia is a contested place, as ‘Americanoid trusts’ struggle for dominance with Siberian peasant socialists.

  Panorama crosses Siberia, from the Urals to Irkutsk, and then on a new line up to the Bering Straits and America. The steppe and tundra have been made the breadbasket of the world. Monstrous machines work the land. Human workers live in rows of houses laid out in a straight line for hundreds of kilometres. One after another the man-made wonders pass. Kurgan, ‘Kitchen of the World’. The ‘City of Steel’, Novo-Nikolaevsk. Krasnojarsk, the city of research, has a seismograph that can accurately predict earthquakes.

  Irkutsk, city of commerce: moving sidewalks carry passengers from level to level. Energiya: all the volcanoes have been capped with steel and asbestos to collect geothermal energy. Bering: a palace has been built of amber harvested from the sea. There are plans to melt the North Pole, so the Arctic may be fit for gardening. In front of the Bering tunnel stands a giant lighthouse, the tallest building on earth, made of concrete, metal, paper and non-melting ice. ‘Onward! Through the dangerous swamps, to the end, to the farthest, farthest end!’

  Gastev’s fascination with machinery dominates – but already we can see what became his abiding obsession in later life, when he gave up poetry to train the Soviet worker for the modern factory. Through an alchemical wedding to the machine, men become Man. The train itself longs ‘To drown man in metal, melt all the souls and out of them create one great one’.5 There are even hints of a cybernetic future here, and a world run not by people, but by mainframes.

  *

  Alexei Gastev returned to Petrograd in April 1918. He was now thirty-four. He tried to make a go of a career in trade unionism; he was elected secretary of the All-Russian Metal-Workers’ Union on its foundation on 27 June. But he found that the Bolsheviks, having taken control, were less inclined than ever to give real political power to the workers. The Bolshevik trade union boss Solomon Lozovsky was dogmatic: ‘We must emphasise clearly and firmly that the workers … must not believe that the factories belong to them.’ The trade unions existed to organise the workers. What the factories actually did was the preserve of government, and was to be coordinated on a national scale. Gastev attempted to protest, which is probably why he was not re-elected.

  Gastev’s disappointment was tempered somewhat by meeting Sofia Abramovna Grinbald, a young secretary in Lenin’s office. They married, and in 1919 they travelled south to the Ukraine, where Gastev devoted his time to writing. It proved a profitable occupation. His literary reputation grew quickly: a genuine worker who wrote poetry that poets could admire, in language that embodied everyone’s idea of the technologically advanced future.6

  Whistles

  When the morning whistles resound over the workers’ suburbs, it is not at all a summons to slavery. It is the song of the future.

  There was a time when we worked in poor shops and started our work at different hours of the morning.

  And now, at eight in the morning, the whistles sound for a million men.

  A million workers seize the hammers at the same moment.

  Our first blows thunder in accord.

  What is it that the whistles sing?

  It is the morning hymn to unity.7

  Lunacharsky called Gastev ‘our most gifted proletarian writer’. The poet Nikolai Aseev dubbed him ‘the Ovid of miners and metalworkers’. Gastev’s young contemporary Mikhail Svetlov once remarked, ‘Alexei Gastev? That’s not just a poet, that’s a phenomenon.’ Gastev’s Poetry of the Factory Floor (1918) was the first literary work published by Proletkult, the Bolshevik cultural organisation. It was already in its sixth edition by 1926. His works were regularly read and staged in Proletkult theatres in Petrograd and Moscow, and agit-prop trains8 at the front during the Civil War had ‘The Tower’ and ‘We Have Usurped the World’ on their repertoire.

  Gastev affected to have little time for the Russian language, with all its endless circumlocutions. Whenever he could, he used foreign loan-words. This makes him surprisingly easy to read for non-Russian speakers, who can still get an idea of his poetry from all the numbers, musical terms, and industrial and military jargon. ‘I grant you that, so far, we lack an international language,’ he explained:

  Still, there are international gestures, and international psychological formulae which millions know how to use. It is this which imparts to proletarian psychology a striking anonymity – one that lets us classify a single proletarian unit as A, B, or C, or 325, 0.75, 0 and so on. This psychological flattening and streamlining is the secret behind the enormous spontaneity of proletarian thinking … In the future this process will make individual thought impossible. It will, by imperceptible stages, be transformed into an objective and universal class psychology: a system of on-switches and off-switches and short circuits.9

  Gastev’s Poetry of the Factory Floor was probably the inspiration – certainly a huge influence – upon one of the great works of satire to come out of the iconoclastic 1920s, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s funny and devastating novel We.

  A prominent Old Bolshevik, Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin was born in the Tambov region, 300-odd kilometres south of Moscow, in 1884. His father was a Russian Orthodox priest, his mother a musician. He had joined the Bolsheviks while studying naval engineering in St Petersburg. In 1916 he had been sent to Britain to oversee the construction of icebreakers, and lived for a while in Newcastle upon Tyne.10 The protagonists of We have numbers rather than names, and these were taken directly from the specifications of Zamyatin’s favourite ship, the Saint Alexander Nevsky.

  In We Zamyatin’s hero-inventor D-503 describes with lyrical enthusiasm how work is organised in the One State. He is, by the lights of his far-future society, a literary-minded fellow, and lets us know, by repeated literary references, how influential Gastevian poetry has been in the shaping of his utopia: ‘We all (an
d perhaps all of you also) have read as schoolchildren that greatest of all the monuments of ancient literature which have come down to us: Timetables of all the Railroads. But place even that classic side by side with The Tables of Hourly Commandments and you will see, side by side, graphite and diamond.’ But his humanity, though deeply buried, and regimented nearly out of all existence, plays him false in the end. At first his malfunctioning existence is revealed in moments of high comedy. But as his love for the delicious E-330 grows, farce turns to tragedy, and ultimately to horror, as the One State rolls out its final solution for these sorts of emotional breakdowns – wholesale mechanisation, inside and out.

  The door of the auditorium on the corner was gaping and out of it issued a slowly, ponderously trampling column of fifty men. However, men is not at all the word: they did not have legs but some sort of heavy forged wheels turned by an invisible drive; not men, these, but some sort of humanoid tractors.11

  Zamyatin composed We in the early years of the Bolshevik experiment, and this makes it a dangerous book to pontificate over. Is it a send-up of the production-line methodology espoused by that prophet of industrialisation, Frank Winslow Taylor? Of course it is. Is it a savage parody of the regimentation that awaited Soviet Russia under Stalin? Probably not, though it’s very hard for a modern reader not to read it that way. Is it an attack on technically narrow-minded trade unionists like Gastev, or patrician old specialists and their patrons – men like Felix Dzerzhinsky? He was probably tilting at both. Zamyatin’s delirious, scatter-gun determination to send up virtually every Bolshevik pretension is rather lost, because subsequent events made it prophetic. So too did the author’s fate. In 1921, We became the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board. In 1924 Zamyatin arranged for We to be smuggled to London for publication and in 1927, an unauthorised Russian edition (translated back into Russian from Polish!) made Zamaytin’s further career in Stalin’s Russia impossible. He was finally given permission to leave in the country in the autumn of 1931.