Abstract
What happened in the process of making Soviet culture after 1917? Modernism and the Making of the New Soviet Man is a brilliant foray into a fascinating field of study, one that it also helps to constitute. It brings together design history and theory and critical theory and the everyday life practices, from the heroic to the comical and absurd, which made up the invention of communist culture in the aftermath of the October Revolution. It combines utopianism of differing kinds and levels with the practical modernism which set out to operationalize Bolshevik, and then Stalinist culture.
Tijana Vujošević sets out to address and explain the practical utopianism of this project and experiment. Utopia here is not just a matter of recipes for the cookshops of the future; it is floorplans and maps, designs for kitchens and bathhouses that seek to operationalize utopia. It brings together all the architects, planners and enthusiasts who set these fantasies into motion. In this Vujošević wants to work against the sense that utopianism just drifted away after War Communism and the NEP. Rather, there were different planning enthusiasts who were working on its application well into the 1930s, culminating in the opening of the Moscow Metro in 1935. In other words, the avant-garde was still at work well into the 30s, but they were doing different things and justifying them with different auras and ambitions. There were collective hopes here, but also plans for the individual – the New Soviet Man.
Vujošević follows the thinking of Dobrenko, for whom the 20s were essentially productivist and the 30s essentially representational. The Soviet New Man changed, in turn, from the figure of the worker to the aestheticized connoisseur of socialism as the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art created by the Communist Party. As is frequently observed, the core anomaly facing the Soviet Communist Party here was that in the beginning, after 1917, there was no significant proletariat to speak of, let alone to work with or upon. Just as the English working class first had to, so did the Soviets have to make their own proletariat. Whether this was to be called Proletkult or not, there needed to be a new Soviet Man, Woman, and a new Soviet culture. For what the Bolsheviks inherited was a torn culture and a society and an infrastructure in ruins.
Vujošević delivers a serious academic monograph that at the same time reads like an architect’s portfolio. There are six key chapters or case studies. First is the cosmic voyage, reaching back and into the stellar world of Marx and the Martians, in the first instance Bogdanov. The lightning rod for Soviet space fantasy was more immediate. It took the form of the new cult of the aeroplane and the aerodynamic. Here the hero figure is Tatlin, pictured in his Letatlin or ornithopter. Tatlin’s fantasy was that schoolchildren would with his device learn to fly as easily as they might learn to swim. The novelty of Vujošević’s interpretation is that she wants to add this layer of meaning. Letatlin is more than a folly, an exercise in irony, or: Tatlin is not just a crazy guy who thinks he might be able to fly in a device that is too heavy to achieve take-off. There is a surplus meaning here waiting to be deciphered. The design of self becomes the design of a flying proletariat. Giganticism and the fantasy of flight combined became part of the logic of the agit–plane, the aerial version of Trotsky’s revolutionary train. The next transmutation of this desire was Stalin’s Falcons, the daredevil crew of proletarian flyers, aerial Stakhanovites, these to be followed only by great hero Yuri Gagarin. Outer space was by this stage again utopia. Gagarin was the New Soviet Man of his own epoch. Outer space could be mastered after social space, the space of architecture and design.
The second chapter discusses Meyer’s chronotope, embodied in his play The Magnanimous Cuckold, the first biomechanical play of the Soviet era. New theatre also called out a new kind of theatre space. The key background actor here is Gastev, founder of the Central Institute of Labour, established in 1921 with the support of Lenin and Trotsky (of whom more later; for it seems to me that Trotsky in his futurist phase, round 1920, is the ghost in this machine). This is the world surveyed elsewhere by Andy Rabinbach, in The Human Motor. It is the world of Ford and Taylor, of cyclogram and photograph, only here it is taken into conception and production of proletarian theatre. Machines are taken to create an international proletariat who also take symbolically and specifically to the theatre stage, not only the world stage. This theatre was real, but it also represented a danse macabre given the events offstage: as per Comrade Trotsky, the militarization of labour. Again as in Trotsky, there needed at the same time on the ideological level to be a revolutionization of byt, or everyday life. For Gastev, byt needed to be aestheticized. As Vujošević observes, byt is semantically related to bytie, or transcendence. Everyday life and utopia were not so far apart; yet 1917 also introduced the permanent hinge connecting utopia and dystopia, utopia as state power or totalitarianism, engineering as social engineering.
Chapter 3 takes on the new model home. For if there is to be a New Soviet Man and Woman, then there must also be a New Soviet Home. The key figure here is Strumilin, who develops intricate time-budgets in order to establish time spent eating, dancing, working, hunting, strolling, etc., etc. (there seems to be no category for recreational sex). New Soviet Man should live efficiently, but also in such a manner as to develop skills and activities rather than wasting time in passive leisure. This domestic time and motion study is part of the universal attempt to rationalize the world, even though the proletariat in the Soviet Union as elsewhere likely seeks rather to sleep, or have sex, goof off or drink. This was, after all, also Ford’s challenge, and Gramsci’s. It was work pioneered by the Gilbreths in the pursuit of the efficient life of modernity. Every inch mattered; the material was fundamental. But as Gramsci understood, the ambition was primarily cultural. Folding beds were part of this new strategy, partly because they saved space, partly because they discouraged sex. A shadow here is Corbusier, as in his Stuttgart Home. But the pride and joy is Schütte-Lihotzky, and her design of the Frankfurt Kitchen. In the Soviet versions of these plans homes end up looking like cells, a visual parallel almost too troubling to contemplate. Some of the designs resemble watch huts.
In Chapter 4 we shift from the world of things to the world of liquids. The Soviet bathhouse becomes an artwork as well as a technology of hygiene. This involves the return of the Romans and the Dome of the Orthodox Church, and monumentalism as well as the mechanical cult of factory cleaning of bodies and clothing. In sympathy with Vujošević’s distinction, the proletarian operates the water environment into the 20s, but is its product into the 30s.
Chapter 5 brings the New Soviet Housewife, and her New Soviet Baby. Perhaps sexual activity is in the shadows here because Comrade Stalin becomes the symbolic father of the Republic: immaculate conception. The protagonists here are less women proletarians than Soviet houseworkers. Their work, into the 30s, involves less directly labour or design than ornamentation, a distinct shift from the functionalism of the first wave. Communist beauty involves hand and face cream, nutrition, the return not of robotnik but of Rubens. As Vujošević indicates, this becomes seriously weird, given the proximity of the Great Famine. Its fantasy world is one of surplus, where life has become more joyous. This was another version of the Great Lie: Soviet Cornucopia. Soviet housewives were charged with these bad utopian hopes while they were wearing gasmasks, if they were lucky. At this point, utopia does not drift away; it is dead, and its costs pummel the imagination of the living.
It all comes to fruition in Chapter 6, with the arrival of the Moscow Metro. Its ‘brother’ was the Volga-Moscow Canal, built with slave labour. In this context, the Metro was the Golden Calf. And this is the argument of the book: that there is always also an additional level of mythmaking involved which is at the same time constitutive of Soviet culture. As has been shown elsewhere, Soviet culture was saturated with the photograph, the image and the icon, as in Karasik, The Soviet Photobook, 1920–1941. Here it is beauty rather than function which rules. This was, indeed what the now exiled Trotsky hoped for as Bolshevism shod with American nails: a ‘delirious Niagara, which turns, day and night, the turbine of socialism’. For Kaganovich, the Metro was a kind of phantasmagoria, not Martian but marble. This was a triumph of the will via the CPSU, for the symbolic universe of collective wealth and grandeur. It was a technological antipode to Diego Rivera’s hymn to Detroit in Industry two years earlier. The New Soviet Culture was built on the body of the New Soviet Man. There is more to the story, of course. The importance of this book is that it compels us to confront all these dynamics together. It is sympathetic with its subject, and its subjects, but it also takes a distance from them. These are, both, so near and so far away. They represent the nightmares and fantasies that utopia are made of. Here, in this book, they are shown to be all too human, but also enacted, institutionalized, and material, real: in the world of actors and things, not only of the psyche. So does the Soviet experiment come to life, with all that follows.