The Things of Life

Materiality in Late Soviet Russia

Alexey Golubev

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501752896
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

The Things of Life is a social and cultural history of material objects and spaces during the late socialist era. It traces the biographies of Soviet things, examining how the material world of the late Soviet period influenced Soviet people's gender roles, habitual choices, social trajectories, and imaginary aspirations. Instead of seeing political structures and discursive frameworks as the only mechanisms for shaping Soviet citizens, Alexey Golubev explores how Soviet people used objects and spaces to substantiate their individual and collective selves. In doing so, Golubev rediscovers what helped Soviet citizens make sense of their selves and the world around them, ranging from space rockets and model aircraft to heritage buildings, and from home gyms to the hallways and basements of post-Stalinist housing. Through these various materialist fascinations, The Things of Life considers the ways in which many Soviet people subverted the efforts of the Communist regime to transform them into a rationally organized, disciplined, and easily controllable community.

Golubev argues that late Soviet materiality had an immense impact on the organization of the Soviet historical and spatial imagination. His approach also makes clear the ways in which the Soviet self was an integral part of the global experience of modernity rather than simply an outcome of Communist propaganda. Through its focus on materiality and personhood, The Things of Life expands our understanding of what made Soviet people and society "Soviet."

Chapter 1

Techno-Utopian Visions of Soviet Intellectuals after Stalin

Our path leads through the poetry of machines, from the bungling citizen to the perfect electric man. In revealing the machine’s soul, in causing the worker to love his workbench, the peasant his tractor, the engineer his engine—we introduce creative joy into all mechanical labor, we bring people into closer kinship with machines, we foster new people.

—Dziga Vertov, “We: Variant of a Manifesto”

The émigré Soviet historian and philosopher Mikhail Heller titled his 1985 historical inquiry into “the formation of Soviet man” as Cogs in the Wheel.¹ This mechanistic metaphor underlined Heller’s main argument that the course of Soviet history was shaped by “a planned, concentrated and all-encompassing attack of unparalleled intensity” carried out by the Soviet state to “turn human beings into cogs.”² Heller argues that the entire communist leadership—from Vladimir Lenin to Konstantin Chernenko, the Soviet leader at the time he wrote Cogs in the Wheel—intentionally orchestrated this manufacturing process. It was from this perspective that Heller described “the formation of Soviet man” as a thoroughly designed project, which had been meticulously implemented since the earliest days of the Bolshevik regime. On one occasion, he referred to the communist leadership as “the creator” and Soviet state institutions as its “tools,” bringing demiurgic implications into his historical explanation.³

The historical imagination in Cogs in the Wheel is a good illustration of what Jacques Derrida called a secrecy effect; that is, a cultural tendency to explain political developments as the result of secret planning by the government and, consequently, to emplot and write history as the uncovering of this planning.⁴ It is not surprising that this book has produced a negligible influence on Soviet historiography, although it is still cited regularly in nonscholarly works. This conspiratorial form of historical imagination not only disregards historical transformation in Soviet Russia over seventy years but is also counterfactual. Heller manipulated some of his sources when, for example, he attributed to Joseph Stalin a statement that “Soviet man should consider himself a mere ‘cog’ in the gigantic wheel of the Soviet state,” or when he claimed that the term “cogs” was commonly used by another Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev.⁵ In fact, the metaphor of people as “cogs in the wheel” is almost impossible to find in official Soviet language. The official Soviet writing on the “new Soviet man”—those texts that became the foundations of Soviet pedagogy, cultural policies, or quotidian party work—emphasized that the socialist state “not only provided working masses with an unlimited access to spiritual wealth, but also made them immediate creators of culture.”⁶ Heller’s attempt to prove that Soviet leaders were engaged in an intentional and planned campaign of dehumanizing the Soviet population seems especially fallacious if one considers the theory and practice of Soviet education with its emphasis on the development of creative skills among students and the ultimate rejection of Anton Makarenko’s militarized approach to education.⁷ Although Soviet ideologists openly acknowledged that the making of the new Soviet person was a vital part of their political agenda, a “cog” is hardly a suitable term to describe the official understanding of an ideal communist personality.

The easiest way to deal with this contradiction would be to dismiss Heller’s account as a purely political statement aimed at discrediting the Soviet historical experience. Instead, I want to suggest that Cogs in the Wheel represents an interesting entry point to discuss Soviet cultural fantasies of control over the material world. Heller operates with two ostensibly different discursive regimes of Soviet culture, making use of one to criticize the other. His account of Soviet society is framed in concepts and arguments typical for a Marxist critique of capitalist societies in which the machine stood for the highest form of alienation and cogs for people alienated from humanity and which was a standard critique of capitalism in Soviet political philosophy.⁸ A graduate of the Faculty of History of Moscow State University, Heller was deeply immersed in this Marxist critique of capitalism. It is therefore hardly surprising that he employed its concepts and imagery to represent the Soviet state as a dehumanizing machine and Soviet people as cogs, thus turning the official Soviet language (with its critique of capitalism) against the source of its production.⁹

The other discursive regime that was targeted for criticism in Cogs in the Wheel is what I hereafter call the productivist language of Soviet culture. On many occasions, when Heller claimed to engage with the facts of the Soviet sociopolitical reality, he criticized facts of the language—that is, statements and documents that were produced as meaningful in this discursive regime but did not necessarily translate into social and economic practice. In one case, Heller quotes a slogan of Sergey Tretiakov, who advocated that literature and art should acquire a practical role in social transformation: “The worker in art must stand side by side with the scientist as a psycho-engineer and a psycho-constructor.” This, coupled with his quoting of Stalin’s famous reference to Soviet writers as “engineers of human souls,” gave Heller a rationale to claim that the entire Soviet history, from the moment the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, was an immense project of social engineering aimed at creating a society that would work like a machine and would be accordingly easily manageable.¹⁰ Heller’s was an analysis that extrapolated one particular discourse to the entirety of Soviet history. It is by disguising the productivist language of Soviet culture as the Soviet social reality that Heller produced a plausible—despite its ahistoricity and counterfactuality—genealogy of the Soviet man. Heller is undeniably biased and often inaccurate in his interpretations of Soviet history. Yet his account provides one important observation: a widespread tendency of Soviet officials and intelligentsia to define individual and collective selves through things.

This chapter examines the relationship between the productivist language of “the machine and the cogs” (the original Russian title of Heller’s book) and the technologies of the self that it invoked in late Soviet society. The focus here is on how this language provided Soviet society with a set of metaphors and concepts to understand the course of human history as the process of technological change as well as provoked and reinforced widely shared cultural fantasies of total control over the material world. This discussion is essential for the understanding of how human-matter interactions were conceptualized and reflected in the cultural logic of late socialism.

The ubiquitous character of the cultural language of productivism was noted by Serguei Oushakine, who suggested that the Soviet economy should be historically characterized as an economy of storage rather than of shortage. The overstocking of commodities—but also of the means of production—was not simply a sign of its ineffectiveness (an assessment that implies that surplus-oriented economic liberalism is taken as a universal economic model), but rather an indication of a different set of socioeconomic rules and principles that produced the Soviet economy as a specific historical phenomenon. These rules and principles can be traced back to early Soviet theorists of industrial production like Aleksei Gastev and Alexander Bogdanov as well as to the avant-gardist ideas of Soviet Productivists such as Boris Arvatov who sought to modernize Soviet everyday life through a new industrial design.¹¹ Dziga Vertov’s writings and documentaries reflected both the ideology and the aesthetics of Soviet Productivism, with machines acting as models for men and factories representing a superior form of the organization for social life. Whereas Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) or Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) represented machines as dehumanizing and alienating people from society and from themselves, for Vertov machines had to show the “path … through the poetry of machines, from the bungling citizen to the perfect electric man.”¹² In his Entuziazm: Simfoniia Donbassa (Enthusiasm: Symphony of Donbass [1930]), machines orchestrate and choreograph the movement of people, transforming them from scattered individuals into a powerful collective; the factory becomes an art object that creates new, perfectly socialist forms of social life.

The language and imagery of productivism with its tendency to imagine and organize society around machines was engaged in a complex relationship with economic processes and agents: it simultaneously described and constituted them. Despite its seemingly pragmatic and apolitical character, this language produced and was produced by the Soviet ideological order maintaining a specific “representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real condition of existence.”¹³ As such, it was an authoritative (and officially sanctioned) discursive regime, but unlike the official language of Pravda or similar Soviet publications, its production was deregulated and delegated to individuals for whom “speaking productivist” was not a ritualized and petrified activity, but rather provided the means of building and expressing their true ideals and visions of the future.¹⁴ In addition, the productivist language of Soviet culture had no particular centers of production. Examples of productivist speak can be found from Khrushchev’s memoir to popular Soviet magazines to specialized technical writing to grassroots pedagogic theories. Its seeming noninvolvement with the language of official Soviet ideology entailed the misrecognition of the fact that productivist language immersed its speakers in fantasies of subdued material reality, ranked Soviet people in accordance to their relationship to the production process and mastery over things, and created moral panic when certain Soviet people engaged in relationships with presumably mean and unworthy objects instead of sublime ones.

Machine as the Essence of Socialism

The mid- and late 1950s in the Soviet Union were a period of a revival of the techno-utopian ideas forged in the 1920s. Soon after Stalin’s death, in 1954, leading Soviet nuclear physicists wrote a collective essay to the Soviet government, warning that it was impossible to win a nuclear war and that such a conflict could potentially obliterate life on Earth.¹⁵ Their opinion informed the top-level decision-making process in the USSR: at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956, Khrushchev ruled out the inevitability of a military conflict between the socialist and capitalist blocs, and instead suggested that socialism would outcompete capitalism peacefully.¹⁶ This placed Soviet technological objects into a different plane of historicity in comparison to late Stalinism with its focus on the applied military use of technologies. For the officials and educational theorists of the post-Stalinist era, inspired by early Soviet techno-utopianism, the national mastery of technology was a way to secure the position of the USSR at the cutting edge of technological progress, a goal that inherently implied the possession of the present and future of human history.¹⁷ Prior to 1953, Stalin and the Communist Party were the key symbols of socialism. From the mid-1950s on, machines and technological development replaced them as the essence of socialist progress for many Soviet intellectuals and their audiences.

The Soviet space program that triumphantly burst into the Soviet public consciousness with the launch of Sputnik-1 in October 1957 made rockets and other space technologies the most prominent objects for encapsulating the long historical time of socialism. The first Soviet passenger hydrofoil boats launched in 1957 and notable for their ultra-modernist design were promptly named Raketa (Rocket), as was a premium watch brand introduced in 1961 at the Petrodvorets Watch Factory in Leningrad. The conquest of the outer space became a prominent theme for Soviet mass media, as well as for the writers, artists, and film directors working in the genres of popular science and science fiction, including Ivan Yefremov, Aleksander Deineka, and Pavel Klushantsev.¹⁸ Real and imaginary space technologies provided the Soviet public with a new understanding of the relationship between humans and technological objects. Shiny satellites and interplanetary probes, crewed spacecraft with intricate mechanisms, sophisticated computers, and cosmonauts in high-tech spacesuits suggested an intimacy of bodies and machines, their amalgamation as a necessary precondition of both technological and social development. During the following decades, Soviet space imagination acted as a testing ground for negotiating, probing, and defining the cultural boundary between the human and the technological.¹⁹

This renewed fascination with machines was not limited to space technologies. Beginning in the mid-1950s, the socialist realist canon in visual arts—with its focus on static compositions and “varnishing of reality,” a term that was widely used in the Khrushchev-era critique of this canon—became increasingly challenged by a partial and cautious revival of the politics and aesthetics of Soviet avant-garde. This revival was most prominent in photography, where a new generation of Soviet photographers turned to productivist motifs to catch a techno-utopian atmosphere that characterized post-Stalinist Soviet society. The nat...