Adam Curtis, 1992
1. The Engineers' Plot
PANDORA'S BOX
To those who began the
revolution in Russia, seventy-five years ago, science was a grand liberating
force. They believed Karl Marx had discovered the scientific laws of society,
which they would now use to unlock the gates to
a new world, where everyone
would be equal and free.
But within twenty years, the
revolution was taken over by technocrats, who looked down on the crowd below as
though they were atoms. They were inspired not by Marx, but by the laws of
engineering. They believed they could transform the Soviet Union into a giant
rational machine, which they would run for their political masters.
[Evgenii A. Ivanov (subtitled)]
[Overlooking a street] Each of those people down there is unique,
yet each is part of some
cluster or group in society. And each group is
governed by a set of iron laws, as unchanging as
the laws of nature, physics and the mechanical
sciences.
We wanted so desperately to make our people happy. To
give them, if not affluence, at least a
decent standard of living.
THE ENGINEERS' PLOT
A fable from the age of
science
This is a story of science
and political power; [of] how the Bolsheviks'
vision of using science to change the world was itself transformed. What
resulted was a strange experiment, far removed from the original aims of the
revolution.
From the beginning of the
revolution, modern technology was central to the Bolsheviks' plans – above all,
the new power of electricity. In 1920, Lenin unveiled in the Kremlin a huge map
studded with lightbulbs to show the planned electrification of the country. To
illuminate the bulbs, all electricity in the rest of Moscow had to be shut off.
Vitalii Semyonovich Lelchuk, USSR Academy of Sciences [subtitled]
The electrification plan was unlike any before in
history. It wasn't just about building power
stations. Its aim was to construct a new type of
human being.
"Communism", said
Lenin, "is Soviet power plus electrification." The aim of the Bolsheviks was to transform
the people they ruled into what they called "scientific beings":
people able to understand and control the machines of the modern world, rather
than become enslaved by them. They organised mass parades, where the machines
symbolically crushed the irrational dogmas of the past. Moscow became what
Lenin called a "talking city", its walls adorned with geometric
perspectives, giving glimpses of a new, rational world; its statues surrounded
by parallelograms and futuristic structures. Even music was used to transform
the way people understood the
world. Electrical machines
made what was called "rational music".
The most extraordinary
project of all was the Central Institute of Labour, set up on Lenin's orders.
It was run by Alexei Gastev, who photographed and studied workers as though
they were parts in a machine. It was far more than mere time-and-motion; Gastev
believed he could teach people to think and behave in a rational way. To do
this, he built the "social engineering machine", a giant structure of
pulleys, cogs and weights. How it worked is, today, a mystery, even to his son.
Alexei A. Gastev [subtitled]
A social engineering machine was built at the
Central Labour Institute. The aim of social
engineering was to make society rational and train
the state for maximum efficiency in the
same way as my father trained workers. He believed
society could be controlled like a machine.
The aim was to install these social engineering
machines all over the USSR. These machines
would make society function totally rationally. Man
would become a rational component of the
machine.
"Such is the power of
science", said Trotsky, "that the average human being will become an
Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx; and, beyond this, new peaks will rise." In
fact, the power to shape the Soviet Union was passing to those who could build
the new industrial society that the Bolsheviks wanted so much. They were known
as the "bourgeois specialists"; engineers from before the revolution
who had the skills needed to master the modern technology. Many had actually
opposed the revolution, but, by 1923, they made up over three-quarters of the
powerful state planning committee. Under the Tsar, their plans for factories
and power stations had remained on the drawing board – now, they were being
given the chance to build them; and they became influential figures.
Nikolai Vassilievich Chernobrovov, electrical engineer, 1920s
[subtitled]
We all admired these pre-revolutionary specialists,
whose engineering skills built our power
stations. The ordinary people didn't really
comprehend electricity, but their instinct told them
it was the way to a better world.
Lenin saw how his dream of
control over this new technical world was slipping away. "To tell the
truth", he said,
"the Communists are not
directing anything; they are being directed."
But, in 1924, Lenin died.
After a bitter struggle, Stalin seized power. He was determined to recapture the
momentum of the revolution. To do so, he decided to send Russia on a crash
course of industrialisation. It would bring even more power to the bourgeois
engineers.
Alexei Leontevich Shatilin, Hero of the Soviet Union [subtitled]
The train took seven days to reach Magnitogorsk from
Moscow. People came in their thousands.
In 1927, Stalin began the
"Five Year Plan". Hundreds of thousands of volunteers travelled to
the remote and desolate parts of the Soviet Union. Millions more were forced
off the land at gunpoint to join them. They had five years, Stalin told them,
to build a modern, industrial state.
[Alexei Leontevich Shatilin (subtitled)]
On arrival, we went straight to the site manager's
office. We were told to get to work immediately.
Bucket-loads of alarm clocks were issued so we
wouldn't oversleep. "Stick at it, lads", we were
told, "this place will soon be a great
industrial centre with every facility."
Back then, it was just
empty steppe.
Magnitogorsk, built in the
far-off Ural Mountains on the edge of Asia, was to become one of the largest
steel plants in the world. At the centre of these gigantic projects were the
only engineers the Soviet Union possessed: the bourgeois specialists.
Lev Emmanuilovich Razgon, former Bolshevik [subtitled]
The bourgeois engineers were eager to run these grand
projects, but, in the process, they
bartered their own freedom. The engineers didn't see
the trap. They saw only limitless horizons
of opportunity and creative freedom. None of them
imagined, even in their wildest dreams,
that they, the men who had striven to rebuild our
shattered economy, would be put on trial for
treason and sabotage.
At the end of 1930, the
engineers' dreams suddenly became a nightmare. Stalin ordered two thousand of
them
[] arrested and eight
of the most senior were put on a public show trial.
The charges were fantastic.
The prosecutor alleged that the bourgeois engineers were leaders of a political
organisation – the "Industrial Party" – and had plotted to seize
power. Their government would've been
composed solely of technical
specialists and scientists. Their confessions were carefully rehearsed.
But behind this public
charade was a very real struggle. Stalin, like Lenin before him, had come to
realise that with technology came power. A year before, a group of these
engineers had publicly challenged him to give them more control of the Five
Year Plan. The future, they had announced, belongs to managing engineers.
Instead,
they were led away from the
cameras, condemned to death or to continue to work on their schemes in chains.
A week later, Stalin
announed: "Bolsheviks must master technology. It is time for the
Bolsheviks themselves to become specialists. In the reconstruction period,
technology decides everything." He
ordered engineering schools to be set up across the country to train thousands
of the young Party faithful. But, in the process, the aim of the revolution was
redefined. Ten years before, technology was to've been a radiant means of
liberating millions of people. Now, it had become an end in itself. For these
young Red experts, it was simply large-scale industrial production.
[Vitalii Semyonovich Lelchuk (subtitled)]
Hundreds of thousands of engineers had been trained.
To them, society was a machine. Stalin
once referred to human beings as tiny cogs and the
engineers adopted this terminology. Deep
down, they believed that this machine-like society
could be made to grow by purely technical
means. More and more factories were built, requiring
more and more engineers. In the process,
a strange thing happened. Engineers bred engineers.
We became a nation of engineers. We had
more than any other country.
The education the engineers
received was of the narrowest kind. Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Education,
pleaded with Stalin. "There is a certain minimum of general scientific
culture", he said, "which an engineer must master and which we cannot
dispense with. It is as if discovering that it is possible to live with four
fingers, we
have decided to cut off the
fifth one." But he was dismissed.
The model for this new,
simplified world was America, the most successful industrial state in the
world. Stalin was determined to overtake it. The prototype was Magnitogorsk,
which had been based on a particular American city.
Gary, Indiana, USA
Michael J. Grisak, Gary steelworker, 1930s
[Reading from an old pamphlet about Gary, Indiana] "We invite you to a
city which has the largest
steel works, the largest tin plant in the world. We invite
you to a city of blazing furnaces, of
handsome homes, of magnificent schools, of splendid
churches, of towering hotels and fraternal
temples, of shining beaches, of restful mews, of
winding drives of flashing water and dazzling
sands" – this is the sea – "...that we
invite you..." – and, truthfully, it is called "The Magic
City"...
it is called "The Magic City" for these
reasons...
Like many cities in
America's northeast, Gary, Indiana is now almost derelict. But, seventy years
ago, it was a new kind of model city, planned in an ordered way around a giant
steel mill. To its builders, it was a chance to break with the complexities of the
past.
[Michael J. Grisak]
We were building that city and we took pride in
that. We started fresh; we didn't have to undo
anything... see – and we picked up what was the best all over.
Even the steel mills – we didn't
have to destroy something to put something better in;
we started with something better right
along. We got the best out of the catalogues that
were available. Those were some of the things
that was [sic] a "magic city" – there was a magic in
doing this thing; you took pride in something
like that.
They were all building the new world.
Magnitogorsk was a copy of
Gary. These plans for the works [shown onscreen], with the city radiating out from beyond, were
drawn up by the same American designers that built Gary. Inspired by one of the
most ambitious construction projects in the world, some American engineers even
came to Magnitogorsk to take part in the building of Russia's "city of
steel".
Rosa Dmitrievna Inkina, construction worker,
Magnitogorsk [subtitled]
They inspired our dreams. We imagined a magnificent
city, just like America. We dreamed of
palaces, houses and parks.
The workers made a lovely park. The first trees in
the park were all of metal, because there wasn't
a single tree growing on the steppe.
The dream gave hope to our working lives. We believed
in it passionately. I hope we weren't wrong.
As in Gary, a planned city
began to grow up around the plant. But in a quiet valley nearby, a very
different city was constructed, where the American engineers lived.
From "Behind the Urals" by John Scott;
memoirs of an American engineer in Stalin's Russia
[Voiceover:] "Designed by a young Russian architect named
Saprykin, these dozen large houses were
copied almost
exactly from American architectural catalogs. The result was something very
much
approaching
Mount Vernon, New York, or Germantown, Pennsylvania. And in what everyone
called
"the American city", the atmosphere of a summer evening held the
suspicion of the smugness
of Park
Avenue; yet, less than two miles away, the wolves howled and the wind blew
across the
endless
Russian steppe..."
[Rosa Dmitrievna Inkina (subtitled)]
When we visited the American city, we heard lovely
music and singing. It was like setting foot in
another world.
Those who lived in "the
American city" were the new elite: a mixture of old Bolshevik commissars,
foreign technicians and an ever-increasing number of young Red engineers. By
the mid-thirties, the engineers had become the heroes in Soviet society.
Praised by Stalin, they flaunted their new status, relaxing in the shadow of
the modern industrial world they had built for him. Soviet man – who was once
to have surpassed Aristotle, Goethe and Marx – had been replaced by the image
of a zealous engineer taught to think of everything in
technical terms; and
completely loyal to Stalin.
In the thirties, thousands
travelled to the Soviet Union to marvel at this dream come true. But what they
saw was not communism. Instead, it was an orderly society administered by
technocrats. George Bernard Shaw, like many other fellow travellers, made it
clear that what he admired was the benevolent despotism of these enlightened
technicians. "In
Russia", he said, "the leaders have been scientifically educated for
their job."
In 1937, Stalin began
another series of purges. This time, his targets were the tens of thousands of
old Bolsheviks. Once he had fought the revolution with them; now, they ran the
country as commissars and plant directors. In a notorious wave of show trials,
Stalin destroyed them.
[presumably from Scott's Behind the Urals, as above]
[Voiceover, as before:] "The purge struck Magnitogorsk with great
force. No group, nobody in the
works, was
spared."
[Alexei Leontevich Shatilin (subtitled)]
Word came through that all experts were to be
arrested. Zavenyagin, who was the head of the
steelworks, received a telephone call. It was Korobov
at the blast furnace, saying: "The specialist
engineers are being taken away." Zavenyagin asked him: "If the experts
all leave, who's going
to run the plant?" – "The young cadres", Korobov
replied – "Let them go, then", said Zavenyagin.
And then they were gone.
[Alexei A. Gastev (subtitled)]
They arrested my father in 1938. A year later, he
was tried and shot.
I feel the social engineering machine would have
forseen the impending cataclysm. It was as
if a warehouse manager suddenly decided to liquidate
whole sections of his stock. The social
engineering machine would have grown frantic as it
sensed the approaching doom. But nothing
was done. History rolled on.
The beneficiaries of these
purges were Stalin's Red engineers. As the thirties drew to a close, they were
in charge throughout Soviet industry. Among them were young men like Leonid
Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikita Khrushchev. Unlike their predecessors, the
bourgeois engineers, they were completely unquestioning of Stalin's political
aims. Their narrow specialist training now led them to approach the task of
planning the Soviet Union as
though it were a piece of
engineering. There would be technical solutions to everything.
The [Second World W]ar seemed to prove the
engineers right. It was their organisation of the industrial plants that
ultimately saved Russia from the Nazis. Victory left large parts of the country
utterly destroyed. Those now in charge were convinced that to rebuild the
Soviet Union, an all-embracing plan would be needed – one in which everything
would be taken care of in a rational way. It was a vision of a planned utopia.
[A clip from a post-WWII Soviet propaganda film starts, featuring ranks of
women marching and singing (subtitled)]
"Comrades, comrades, to work, as in war; All that we dream of,
all we wish and crave for,
we will have!
We'll prove ourselves at work just as we did at war ..."
Everything in the new Russia
was to be designed and controlled from the centre of Moscow. As the women [in the propaganda
clip] sing of the future,
they march past the giant headquarters of this organised society: Gosplan
("State Plan").
Evgenii A. Ivanov, Senior Manager, USSR Gosplan [subtitled]
We receive information here on all facets of life in
the Soviet Union. It is channelled to this very
floor from the remotest corners of our vast country.
Behind these doors are the offices of our
department. I'll open one so you can see inside. [He opens a door and
the camera looks in] The
comrades are busy. Our presence has gone unnoticed.
As the flow of information migrates through the
building, it becomes more and more
concentrated. This subsection receives the most
distilled data; the definitive numbers, the
ultimate information. Then, once the plan has been
decided, it turns into a vast surge of
information which falls like rain on every worker,
controlling all the industries in the Soviet
Union.
Gosplan's managers built a world
that was simple, like a machine. Everything society needed, down to the
smallest object, was constructed to their design. Their instructions were
called "plan indicators"; rational predictions of what they knew
society needed.
Valerii Nikolaievich Blinov, Managing Director, Moscow
Toothbrush and Plastic Comb Factory [subtitled]
We manufacture 70 million toothbrushes a year; enough
for the entire population of the Soviet
Union. Until recently, we had a huge number of plan
indicators imposed on us. Every toothbrush
was planned, like all the products we made.
Alexei Sergeevich Vassiliev, Deputy Managing Director
in Charge of Quality [subtitled]
The tiniest details of our range are controlled by
government agencies. This includes the planning
of quantities for each toothbrush.
By the early fifties, vast
reconstruction projects had changed the face of Soviet cities. Rationing ended
six years earlier than in Britain. The Soviet Union was now an advanced
industrial society. It was the golden age of the plan. But in its grandeur, the
sweep of its ambitions, lay the seeds of its downfall.
Vitalii Semyonovich Lelchuk, USSR Academy of Sciences [subtitled]
In itself, the idea of planning is not in the least
absurd. But when it's undertaken by the state on
a vast scale and it rules all aspects of life, then
it's absurd. Even the KGB was told the quota of
of arrests to be made and the prisons to be used.
The demand for coffins, novels and movies was all
planned. Things became increasingly absurd.
When Stalin died, much of
the machinery of terror disappeared. The planned economy flourished. But, as it
did so, strange things began to happen. The planners discovered that what
seemed rational to them could lead to the oddest behaviour. Whole train-loads
of output travelled thousands of miles for no reason, simply to fulfil a plan
that measured success in tons carried per kilometre. Folk-tales about the plan
began to circulate.
Leonid Pavlovich Katovskii, taxi driver [subtitled]
[While driving through Moscow] The plan is the plan.
It's a pain in the arse. If you drive more miles
a month than the plan allows, you're penalized. So,
if you want to stay within the permitted
mileage, you've to jack up the car, and wind back the
clock till it shows the right figure.
Nikita Khruschev, 1931
graduate from the Moscow Industrial Academy, understood the problem. It was the
growing complexity of Soviet society. What had made it manageable was not
scientific planning, but Stalin's brutal terror. Khruschev's dilemma was how to
change the plan and the thinking of those who made it.
[Leonid Pavlovich Katovskii (subtitled)]
There's Gosplan over there. They have endless meetings, but where they get their
plan from –
God only knows. They should switch places with us.
Then they'd think twice.
[Evgenii A. Ivanov (subtitled)]
[Back inside the Gosplan building] Here's another office. [He opens a door] Oh, they're out. In a
meeting, I expect.
In 1957, Khruschev attacked
the planning bureaucracy publicly. He made a speech that laid bare the growing
absurdities in Soviet life. Why, he asked, were sofas getting bigger and
bigger? Why were the metal chandeliers
that hung from the Kremlin's ceilings – and everywhere else in Russia – so
heavy that they threatened to come crashing down? The reason, he said, was the planners' method
of assessing the plan. The more metal, the more wood the factories used, the
better the plan was working. As part of a whole series of reforms, Khruschev
insisted that the bureaucrats must begin to take into account the price of
things.
Sergei Mikhailovich Ulanov, Head of Organization and
Methodology of Price Creation, USSR State Committee on
Prices [subtitled]
Here at the Prices Committee, we fix the price of
everything. A total of 25 million items comes
under our scrutiny. We employ four-hundred highly
qualified experts. Their job is to calculate the
prices, which are then logged in these handbooks [He indicates the
tall pile of books on the desk behind
which he is standing]. These are just a few.
There are many more. You could make a stack twice as
big as this one.
This shows quite clearly that the system is rational.
The system is cumbersome, I admit. However,
with the aid of modern technology, all these price
handbooks [the phone on the desk starts ringing]
will be reduced to just a few floppy disks which
the staff can keep in their desk drawers... Excuse me
a second. [He answers the phone] Yes... Right away. [He replaces the
handset] I'm awfully sorry, but I'm
required by the Minister on urgent business.
Despite his optimism,
Khruschev's attempts to reform the planning system failed. Taking power away
from Gosplan, creating regional plans, only added to the complexity. One
senior scientist, Academician Glushkov, predicted that by 1980, the entire
Soviet population would be employed in administering the plan. The solution, he
said, was the new science of rational control from America: cybernetics.
[From an unidentified black-and-white film]
[Voiceover:] "Cybernetics is a young branch of science
which has a tremendous future. Here is what
Director of
the Institute of Cybernetics, Academician Victor Glushkov, says:
"Cybernetics occupies
a central
place in the developing scientific and technological revolution. What I have in
mind is the
use of computers
in planning the future, in forecasting scientific and technological
progress.""
Academician A. S. Fedorenko, Director, Central
Economico-Mathematical Institute of the USSR Academy of
Sciences [subtitled]
Research was telling us our economy was in deep
trouble. We racked our brains to design a
model that would help industry become more efficient.
People would then work harder and
this would create a better life for everyone.
We did all in our power to apply real economic
science to these problems. Not pseudo-science,
but real economic science.
Into this computer [presumably the one
being shown onscreen], the planners fed all the information they could find about Soviet
society. For a brief moment in the mid-sixties, it revitalised the hope that science
could control society in a rational way.
Abel G. Aganbegyan, economist [subtitled]
Some of these people really believed that with
computers, you could plan and predict
everything. It was a utopia, an illusion.
[A. S. Fedorenko (subtitled)]
I can't claim that it has worked yet. But we're
getting there. The problem is that they didn't
take our scientific advice. [The Russian interviewer, off-camera, asks:] Why not? [Fedorenko replies:]
Because the people in charge didn't have a proper
understanding of science... and its basic
principles.
The attempt to use computers
on such a vast scale could not save the plan, or Nikita Khruschev. In 1964, he
was replaced by Brezhnev and Kosygin. They were convinced that there were
rational scientific solutions that could
still lead Russia to the
promised land.
The country's new leaders
realised that although the economy was still growing and living conditions
still improving, the plan was badly out of control. The problem was the
complexity of modern life; the intricacy of people's demands. The solution, the
planners believed, was to find a scientific way of predicting what their people
wanted.
All-Union Scientific
Research Institute for the Study of the Population's Demand for Consumer Goods
and the
Conjuncture of the Market
Dr. Alexander Nikolaievich Voronov, Director [subtitled]
Our task is easy and, at the same
time, difficult.
Dr. Vyacheslav Konstantinovich Nefedov,
Economist [subtitled]
Take the demand for pantyhose. A rise
in demand is determined by certain
well-known factors: the number of
women wearers, the duration of pantyhose
wear and the number of pantyhose worn.
From that, we make a rough estimate
of demand. One of our chief sources of
information is a nationwide network of
consumer correspondents, whose job is
to observe and study what people want.
Each city has two observers. Each
month they file a report. [He gets up and walks
off-camera] We process this data in
a computer and it comes out like this [He returns
with a lengthy
computer printout and unfurls it in front of the camera]. This tells us what
people are buying in all the basic
categories. [He sits back down and Voronov begins
to help him fold
the printout's pages back together] Other sources of data are special
consumer panels and nationwide...
surveys.
Dr. Natalya Antonovna Cherkasova, Economist [subtitled]
The problem is that industry reacts
very slowly to our scientific forecasts. For
instance, we decided people wanted
platform shoes. By the time industry got
round to increasing production, they
were out of fashion.
Nowadays, the Soviet consumer knows
that if there is enough of a particular
item in the shops, it's a sure sign
it's out of fashion.
[Abel G. Aganbegyan (subtitled)]
The late 1960s saw the most terrible period in our
post-war history. We called it the "years of
stagnation". In 1978, stagnation turned into
economic crisis. Food shortages began, factories
stood idle, standards of living slumped. They were
grim years. Our industrial base began to
function purely in its own interest. All the progress
we'd made in the 1960s was wasted.
By the mid-seventies, the
Soviet leadership gave up attempting to reform the plan. As the economy finally
began to slow down, much of industry degenerated into pointless elaborate
ritual. What had begun as a grand moral attempt to build a rational society
ended by creating a bizarre, bewildering existence for millions of Soviet
people.
[Vitalii Semyonovich Lelchuk (subtitled)]
Why weren't we able to transform our dreams into
reality? Why didn't we succeed in
creating a society where everyone could be free and
fulfilled? Who is to blame? Not
science itself, but the men who mistook what science
was [...glitch...]
