Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  *

  Alexei and Sofia Gastev’s idyll in Kharkov came to an end towards the end of 1919, when they were forced to flee Denikin’s advancing White army. In early 1920 they came to Moscow, and Alexei found work as a technical supervisor at the engineering company Elektrosila. It was here that he first ‘plunged into an analysis of the work of the automaton as the most perfect machine’ – a truly We-ish formulation to describe his growing interest in the ergonomics of factory labour. Inspired by the work of Frank Taylor, Gastev wondered whether the workings of machines held lessons for how humans performed simple tasks.

  Gastev’s work at this time was both practical and poetic. His last poetic work, ‘A Packet of Orders’, was written deliberately so as to sound as if it is being fed into a machine. In his note to performers, Gastev explains that ‘A Packet of Orders’ is supposed to be read in an entirely flat manner: ‘No intonation, no pathos, not pseudo-classical elation and no stressed emotive places in the reading. Words and phrases follow one another with even speed.’

  Order 2

  Chronometer, report to duty.

  To the machines.

  Rise.

  Pause.

  Charge of attention.

  Supply.

  Switch on.

  Self feed.

  Stop.12

  Gastev found practical expression for these ideas in a pilot project conducted with five or six friends in two small rooms in the Hotel Elite in Central Moscow – now the site of the (rather good) Budapest Restaurant. Like everyone else, they spent most of their time scrabbling around for equipment. Pencils and paper were in short supply, and for a while they had to do without tables and chairs. In a letter dated 21 October 1920 Gastev complained, ‘I have one colleague, a man who has made extremely valuable contributions, whose shoes literally lack soles, and none of my fellow workers has a room.’13

  This did not stop Gastev giving his time-and-motion experiment a grand title. As director of the ‘Institute of Labour’, Gastev contacted Lenin in person and Lenin (who by now was sticking Taylorist charts on his walls and jotting ideas for his own book on scientific management) granted it funding. The Central Institute of Labour was born.

  If Gastev’s efforts to become a sort of Soviet Taylor seem ripe for parody (and Zamyatin certainly thought so), it is worth noting what Gastev himself said about the mechanisation of factories. For Gastev, who had actually worked in these places all his life, the point of mechanisation was to clear out the chaos, dirt and danger of the old sweatshops – places where, if you didn’t get your fingers ripped off, your labour still came to nothing. As far as Gastev was concerned, the modern factory actually dignified labour, and he had very little time for people who assumed that machines were there to replace people.

  People are waiting around like Oblomovs for a machine to come along like some sort of saviour – a machine that will eliminate the need for skills or so-called heavy labour … An enormous number of literary popularisers of Scientific Management look upon the machine as Chekhov’s characters gazed upon the ‘diamond sky’ in Three Sisters.14

  Lenin was never entirely convinced on this point. He eventually embraced Taylorism and its promise of enormous gains in productivity, but he worried that the new assembly-line practices his party was introducing would simply extract the last ounce of sweat from the worker. As early as 1912, he had neatly skewered Taylor’s supposed ‘advances’, when recounting the improvements visited upon one American factory:

  A mechanic’s operations were filmed in the course of a whole day. After studying the mechanic’s movements the efficiency experts provided him with a bench high enough to enable him to avoid losing time in bending down. He was given a boy to assist him … Within a few days the mechanic performed the work of assembling the given type of machine in one-fourth of the time it had taken before!

  What an enormous gain in labour productivity! … But the worker’s pay is not increased fourfold, but only half as much again, at the very most, and only for a short period at that. As soon as the workers get used to the new system their pay is cut to the former level. The capitalist obtains an enormous profit, but the workers toil four times as hard as before and wear down their nerves and muscles four times as fast as before.15

  These doubts never really vanished. When it came to running the country, however, scarce physical and human resources forced his hand. Practicality soon overrode every other consideration. His wife Nadya Krupskaya’s appraisal of Taylorism was brutally practical: ‘The division of functions and the introduction of written instructions allow for the placement of less qualified people in any given job.’16

  This goes a long way to explaining why Gastev’s frankly eccentric Central Institute of Labour received such enthusiastic official backing.

  Not that this backing made much difference – at least, not at first. The institute did not have stopwatches, training aids, fuel for heating, or, indeed, food. Its staff tried to simulate factory conditions in their experiments, but they had to mock up their machinery out of wood.

  Gastev proposed to study, measure and improve all the basic motions involved in physical labour. ‘We begin with the simplest, the most elementary movements,’ he explained, ‘and proceed to the mechanisation of man himself.’17 One of Gastev’s admirers – Tatyana Popova, a Moscow graduate from a textile-making family – wrote to her husband in 1924: ‘The Central Institute of Labor is a new Institute … Everything is done in a new manner, not in the way it was done by the bourgeoisie. The Institute is striving to introduce science into production. The interests of the director are those of a metalworker, therefore the Institute studies mostly the work of a metalworker and his two main procedures: chiseling and filing.’18

  A class at the Central Institute of Labour was a sort of drill practice. Pupils stood before their benches in set positions – places were marked out for their feet. They rehearsed separate elements of each task, then combined them in a finished performance. This was the regimentation of human beings taken into the realm of choreography, and Gastev, for all his modernist toothbrush moustache and crew-cut hair, wasn’t blind to the artistic potential of his creations. Take, for example, his Social Engineering Machine – a giant structure of pulleys, cogs and weights of no fathomable use whatsoever. It was, by Gastev’s own admission, his ‘last work of art’, a sort of mascot for the whole venture, and his aim was to install them all over the USSR.19

  As funding improved, the institute’s classrooms started to resemble modern muscle gyms. New-fangled machines trained workers in the movements they needed to operate their tools. On the walls, huge charts dealt with every detail of the work process: what and how much you had to eat to perform different work; how to swing a hammer; how to build a wall.

  Going by the sheer popularity of the classes, and the speed of the institute’s expansion, the classes must have been quite enjoyable. The problems started when, having completed your training, you went off to work in a real factory. The Central Institute’s classes, for all their memory training sessions and educational films, frequently left you with next to no understanding of why you were performing the actions the factory demanded of you. The institute’s well-ordered instruction shops taught you how to work, but they taught you nothing about factory life. If you were a peasant, arriving in the big city and looking for work and to better yourself, attending one of Gastev’s courses could indeed get you a job – but in truth you’d still be stumbling around in a rather lost fashion, and a factory floor, even a modern one, is an unforgiving place.

  In January 1921 Leon Trotsky, then at the height of his political influence, convened a conference to discuss these issues: the First All-Russian Initiating Conference on the Scientific Organisation of Labour. Gastev’s Central Institute of Labour was a fascinating experiment, but the conference revealed a need for change. By the time the institute completed its biometrical investigations of manual labour, Russian industry would be so changed by mechanisation that the institute’s
results would mean nothing, and Gastev had a fight on his hands to convince the authorities and his critics that his institute was still relevant to the development of the economy.20

  *

  In photographs, Gastev’s mean-looking pince-nez and his uncanny resemblance to his hero Frederick W. Taylor suggest an extremely reserved man. One contemporary described him as ‘a tightly wound steel spring’ and a hard taskmaster. But he was also quick-witted, never at a loss for words, and a good and considerate friend. An evening out with Alexei Gastev was likely to be an entertaining one: athletes and circus artists fascinated him, particularly jugglers, acrobats and magicians, whose feats of precision and agility made an art of physical training.

  Gastev had, by his own account, left his own artistic practice behind him. He once wrote that he had turned to poetry only when other avenues of expression were cut off, and when the ‘revolution broke out [it] presented an opportunity to work directly as an organiser and creator of something new’. Sure enough, his ‘practical’ writings weren’t much less surreal than his verses. He wrote in Pravda in July 1922: ‘In the human organism there is a motor, there are springs, the finest regulators, there are even manometers. All this we need to study and use. There should be a special science – biomechanics. This science does not have to be narrow, about “work” only; it should border on sports, where movements are powerful, precise, and at the same time as light as air and as artistic as mechanisms.’21

  He was not at all an isolated figure. For example, there were numerous attempts at this time to finds ways to record and categorise dance movements. Valentin Parnac, who introduced jazz bands and jazz dance to Russia, developed a system of dance notation. Nikolai Bernstein’s ‘chronophotographs’ used to hang alongside pictures of dance performances in exhibitions.

  Bernstein’s efforts are particularly interesting because the 26-year-old joined Gastev in 1922 and worked with him for three years, before moving biometrics out of the workshops of the Central Institute of Labour and into the physiological laboratories of Moscow, where he worked in collaboration with Tatyana Popova, his sister-in-law. Their experiments on the ‘biodynamics of piano touch’ were notoriously noisy: now and again a siren would howl, while a pianist, interrupted by shouted commands, hammered on the same two keys of a piano, all to tease out the ‘scientific organisation of musical labour’.22

  Nikolai Alexandrovich Bernstein, a lifelong Moscow-dweller, came from a family of celebrated intellectuals (his father was a psychiatrist, an uncle a mathematician) and he cultivated all manner of interests and hobbies. He played piano, drew, assembled radios, and constructed models of steam engines and bridges. Bernstein worked out ways of mechanically registering movements and analysing those records mathematically. It was quite an achievement: movement is usually too quick for the human eye to grasp with any accuracy, and wasn’t really accessible to science until the advent of film. Even then, a visual record of points in motion is extremely hard to interpret. It took Bernstein several years to come up with the necessary mathematics.23

  He developed a high-speed camera called the ‘kymocyclograph’. The shutter, a round plate with holes in it, rotated before the camera lens, so that the photographic plate would record multiple images, each exposed a fraction of a second after its neighbour. The shutter span so fast, Bernstein had to use a tuning fork, blowing air through the holes and comparing the pitch of the fork and the whistle, to work out the machine’s exact shutter speed.24

  Bernstein saw all manner of applications for his experimental equipment. He worked with musicologists and mathematicians, and collaborated for a while with psychologists Alexander Luria and Lev Vygotsky. To begin with, he was happy enough with Gastev’s machine metaphors. In his first scientific paper on the subject, ‘The Biomechanics of the Worker’s Stroke’, he wrote:

  The laws of mechanics are the same everywhere, no matter if they concern a steam locomotive, a lathe, or a human machine. Therefore, we do not have to derive some new, special mechanical laws. We must only compile a description and a characteristic of this living machine in the same way as we would do it for an automobile or a loom.25

  In the course of his work, however, Bernstein discovered something that undermined Gastev’s doctrine. He discovered that a physical movement – say, ‘the hand movement with the hammer’ – had to be treated and examined as one continuous action: ‘one could not alter a single detail without the entire construction changing in a quite regular way’.

  With practice you can hit the same sort of nail into the same sort of block of wood, at the same point, and with the same force, again and again and again. But film those actions with a kymocyclograph and study the results: no two strikes are alike! The result remains the same, but how you get the result varies each time.

  His conclusion that ‘the movement responds as a living being’ meant Gastev’s project – to break human movements down into mechanical components – simply didn’t make sense.

  By 1925 Bernstein and Popova found themselves increasingly out of sympathy with Gastev’s project, and left the Central Institute of Labour. Bernstein spent the next ten years jumping from post to post at a dizzying number of institutions: the Moscow Institute of Psychology, the State Institute of Labour Preservation, the State Institute of Musical Sciences, the Scientific Research Bureau of Prosthetic Appliances, the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine, the Central Institute of Physical Culture …

  The more he worked on his discovery, the more radical it turned out to be. It suggested that behind the simplest action lay a high-level command – a command that couldn’t possibly arise from simple reflexes.

  Put it this way: why is it that if you sign your name in sand with your foot, your signature bears a remarkable likeness to the signature you make with your hand, holding a pen, while sat at a desk? And if you think about it, how is it that a signature written while sitting at this chair and this desk is so similar to a signature written in that chair, at that desk? Conventional wisdom had it that handwriting style is a muscular habit. But if that were so ‘then every new posture of a subject would require the establishment of a whole new system of muscular regulations’ – an obvious nonsense.26

  So Bernstein began to assemble a wholly new and revolutionary model of physiology: one which compared the nervous system not to a telephone switchboard, as Ivan Pavlov did, but to something Bernstein frankly struggled to find a name for. A servomechanism? A feedback device?27

  And so, a full decade before the American mathematician Norbert Weiner coined the term, Nikolai Bernstein invented cybernetics – and embarked on a course that would set him and his colleagues at loggerheads with Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, the most revered scientist in all Russia.

  Notes

  1. ‘Narodnaia vypravka’ (1922), from Alexei Gastev, Poeziia rabochego udara [Poetry of the Factory Floor] (Moscow, 1971), p. 258.

  2. Kendall E. Bailes, ‘Alexei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism, 1918–24’, Soviet Studies 29, no. 3 (1 July 1977), pp. 373–94.

  3. ‘From a Tram-Driver’s Diary’ (1910), in Johansson & Gastev, Aleksej Gastev, p. 26.

  4. Williams, ‘Collective Immortality: The Syndicalist Origins of Proletarian Culture, 1905–1910’, p. 395.

  5. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, pp. 150–1.

  6. Patricia Carden, ‘Utopia and Anti-Utopia: Aleksei Gastev and Evgeny Zamyatin’, Russian Review 46, no. 1 (1987), p. 5.

  7. Ibid. p. 4.

  8. The Bolsheviks sent ‘agitprop’ trains, trucks and ships into Russia’s remotest corners. Public speakers, writers, books and pamphlets, even printing presses and movie projectors, were used in an effort to spread information about the new regime.

  9. Quotation adapted from Johansson & Gastev, Aleksej Gastev, p. 68.

  10. Evgenij I. Zamyatin, We, trans. Bernard Guilbert Guerney and Michael Glenny, p. 181. It is likely that Zamyatin came upon We’s other big literary influence here – ‘The New Utopia’, a remarkably creepy shor
t story by Jerome K. Jerome, better known as the author of Three Men in a Boat.

  11. Alexei Gastev, Poetry of the Factory Floor, p. 258.

  12. Johansson & Gastev, Aleksej Gastev, p. 105.

  13. Ibid. p. 110. Oblomov, the eponymous hero of a nineteenth-century novel by Ivan Goncharov, is a young but feckless nobleman who takes fifty pages to get from his bed to his chair. He is not ill. He is simply incapable of making the smallest decision.

  14. V. I. Lenin, ‘The Taylor System – Man’s Enslavement by the Machine’, Put Pravdy No. 35 (13 March 1914). In Lenin: Collected Works Vol. 20, pp. 152–154; available from Marxists Internet Archive at http://bit.ly/1OZnxrU.

  15. N. Krupskaya, ‘Sistema Teilora i organizatsiya raboty sovetskikh uchrezhdenii’ [‘The Taylor System and Soviet Labour Practices’], Krasnaya Nov’, Vol. 1 (1921), pp. 140–6.

  16. Quoted in R. S. Schultz, ‘Industrial Psychology in the Soviet Union’, Journal of Applied Psychology 19, no. 3 (1935), p. 269.

  17. Quoted in Vera L. Talis, ‘New Pages in the Biography of Nikolai Alexandrovich Bernstein’, Anticipation: Learning from the Past (Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study, 2014), p. 2.

  18. Gastev’s son talked about his father’s Social Engineering Machine in ‘The Engineers’ Plot’, the opening episode of Adam Curtis’s unmissable, so-concise-as-to-be-paranoid TV documentary Pandora’s Box (BBC, 1992).

  19. Bailes, ‘Alexei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism, 1918–24’, pp. 373–94; also Daniel A. Wren, and Arthur G. Bedeian, ‘The Taylorization of Lenin: Rhetoric or Reality?’, International Journal of Social Economics 31, no. 3 (1 March 2004), pp. 287–99. For a while, the Taylorist discipline of ‘psychotechnics’ promised to put the workplace under rational, enlightened management. For a contemporary account see Schultz, ‘Industrial Psychology in the Soviet Union’, pp. 265–308. Zenovia A. Sochor provides a more recent perspective in ‘Soviet Taylorism Revisited’, Soviet Studies 33, no. 2 (1981), pp. 246–64.