Today we're moving ahead to the 1920s, the decade that immediately followed the 1917 Russian Revolution, one of the most significant events of the 20th century, and not just for Russia. We will talk about the widespread interest of Russian revolutionaries in American modernity. Especially the American methods of industrial production developed by Frederick Taylor And Henry Ford. The main goal of the Russian Revolution was to defeat capitalism, to structure the country's economy in such a way as to guarantee equality among all citizens. It would be fair to assume then, that American capitalism, it's belief in private property and individual freedom could be nothing but anathema to post-revolutionary Soviet politicians, economists and cultural figures who privileged communal property and communal spirit. But as we will discuss today, Russians, during the post-revolutionary decade, demonstrated an enormous interest in the American way of life. And the fascination, you should really say obsession, with the foundations of modern American capitalism. We will discuss the reasons this rather ironic development and look at how the American innovations of Taylorism and Fordism were adapted for Soviet revolutionary aspirations. Before I elaborate on the specific dimensions of this fascination, I should mention a few historically important facts. According to the philosopher Karl Marx, who argued for the eventual arrival of socialism and communism across the world, and whose writings provided the theoretical foundation for the Russian Revolution. A socialist revolution could be successful only in an industrially highly developed country, like the United States or Germany was at the time. But the first socialist revolution took place in Russia. A country that was significantly more backwards in its economic development, still rooted in agriculture, rather then the large scale industry. In addition, after two years of the bloody, brutal civil war that followed the 1917 revolution, the proletarian government found itself in 1920 in midst of utter economic ruin, which threatened progress towards the socialist cause. Vladimir Lenin, the political mastermind of the Russian revolution, wrote that without machines, without discipline, it is impossible to live in a modern society. It is necessary to master the highest technology or be crushed. To master the highest technology, Soviet Russia turned to the knowledge and experience of the United States, to the Taylorist, and especially Fordist system of industrial production. The system became the very image of modernity, of efficiency, energy, order, and hygiene that Soviet Russia hope to achieve. Leon Trotsky, for instance, a central player in Lenin's government in the early 1920s went so far as to argue that the integration of such Americanism will compliment the first stage of every young socialist society. Indeed in Soviet Russia, this process of integration became known as amerikanizatsia, or Americanization. As you might have seen in the chapter on American capitalism through French eyes, the Fordist system is best imaged through a factory assembly line. Along which a number of workers perform repetitive and precise movements that complement the work of the machine, aiding the mass production of a commercial object. Strikingly, the implementation of this system in revolutionary Russia took two paths. The first was very practical, the second assumed a utopian and imaginary proportions. Regarding the practical side, the system was gradually implemented in both old and newly-built factories, helping without doubt to industrialize the entire country over the 1920s and 30s. Because the industrial transformation was very fast, visible and tangible, Henry Ford himself achieved a cult status. His books were translated into Russian and accompanied by passionate introductions. And as the historian Richard Stein wrote, Henry Ford was perceived among the rural population as a man of magic who could by means of his American technique, release forces, otherwise little understood by the peasant. Fordism thus took hold of the Russian imagination, it intensified further Utopian visions already prevalent in Soviet culture at the time. It was perceived as a cure-all for many Russian ills, as a system that could transform not just industrial labor, but the organization of everyday life, producing ultimately a better humankind. Aleksei Gastev, a famous revolutionary worker and a poet, provides a particularly telling example of the implementation of American labor science into the Soviet context. In 1920 he founded the Central Institute of Labor. The specific goal of the Institute was to train the human body to perfectly execute the tasks associated with industrial production. The training was designed so as to habituate the worker into a set of efficient reflective machine-like movements. The Institute did this successfully, graduating about half a million workers by the end of the 1920s. But the broader goal of Gastev's Institute was to engineer an agile and disciplined Soviet body that moved with precision to accomplish any kind of task. Gastev's philosophy, known in Russia as machinism, imagined a perfect unbreakable union between human consciousness and the machine. Gastev's ideas were taking a step further still by another revolutionary, Platon Kerzhentsev, who founded the League of Time in 1923. An organization that sought to fight the waste of time in all aspects of life. For example, the league introduced the so called chrono cards to its members. The participant was required to notate her or his every activity by the half hour. Such notations were thought to be the first step towards self-discipline. They were an exercise in training the body to feel time in making the mechanical clock an integral, inseparable part of the human organism. As you can sense from these examples, the American technique found very rich ground for further experimentation and development in post revolutionary Russia. But the question is, how could the use of such foundational techniques of modern capitalism be justified for communist purposes? To answer this question, I want us to look at short fragments from two films dealing with issues of labor, productivity, and bodily efficiency. The first is from Charlie Chaplin's 1936 masterpiece Modern Times. The second is from Dziga Vertov's groundbreaking experimental 1929 Soviet documentary Man With a Movie Camera. Here we have two radically different views of Taylorism and Fordism, off within just within a few years of one another. [MUSIC] Chaplin is openly critical of the American production system, showing the assembly line oppressing the human body, violating it's independence and it's natural mobility. The accelerating speed of production overwhelms the laborer. In the Soviet film, by contrast, the labor appears to liberate the working woman. We see her in a state of focused excitement as she puts together cigarette packages, a task that her hands perform with agile perfection. And there if, the speed of the film accelerates to emphasize the machine-like proficiency of her motion. At the same time, her mind engages as well, as she continues to communicate with someone outside the film's frame. Such unity of body, mind, and the machine is achieved because the Soviet worker produces goods not for the factory owner. But for the community of which she is an equal part, allowing her to be invested in the mechanized labor physically and psychologically. Soviet culture does reconcile the American capitalist foundations with communist ideology by demonstrating that American tools could be used towards building a socialist community of equals. Rather than contributing to the profit of a select few. In the Soviet imagination, America had invented the most advanced system of production. But it was now up to the Soviet Union to advance the system for the good of all humankind.
