This strong belief in scientific positivism and technological development saw the alignment of the body with the machine as a precursor for the replacement of the body in the production process inevitably freeing up more time for leisure. With Russia relatively un-industrialized compared to Western Europe, the Bolsheviks envied industrial development, despite the horror stories about working and living conditions during the industrial revolution in Europe. Relatively few Bolsheviks even knew how to build factories, which resulted in hiring Americans to build factories modeled after those in Gary, Indiana. Construction was paid for through selling jewelry, paintings, silver, and rare books that were seized from the aristocracy during the revolution.5Half of the funding for the massive iron and steel factory at Magnitogorsk came from the sale of Raphael’s Alba Madonna to US robber-baron Andrew Mellon. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2000). The proposed solution to the industrial problems of Europe was a rationally planned socialist economy that embraced elements of capitalist production, such as Fordism and Taylorism. This resulted in fitzkul’tura not carrying the same anti-industrial sentiments of Western physical culture, but rather integrating industrial production into the ethos of the New Soviet Person.
The investment in physical culture after the October Revolution and civil war was both an ideological effort to make the body communist while also a pragmatic necessity to heal a social body ravaged by war. In response to the carnage of WWI, social hygienists slowly made their way into the public policy of liberal democracies. These theorists saw the origins of disease and epidemics as having less to do with individual choices or morality, and more to do with improper state management of the population. Since the late 19th century, doctors and scientists in Russia had been practicing social hygiene regionally through local governmental organizations known as zemstvos, without the support of the Tsarist regime. After the revolution, this organizational form scaffolded public health programs that embraced social hygiene. The approach to physical culture was similar in the sense that it was mostly organized locally with little state interest, but early success in sports on the international stage, such as wrestling and weightlifting, increasingly drew support from government officials.
The organizational form of the zemstvos and their political distance from the Tsarist state were both important precursors for the development of Soviet public health after the revolution. As with much of the social scientific thought of the era, there was a heavy reliance on gathering social statistics to understand and manage populations.6It was through scientists working in these zemstvos that western European thinkers, such as Adolf Quetelet, who invented the equation used to measure Body Mass Index, were first translated into Russian. David L Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 (Cornell University Press, 2011). Local zemstvos performed important public health research and statistical analysis about disease and epidemics outlining incredibly dire circumstances. When Lenin declared in 1919 that “either the lice will defeat socialism or socialism will defeat the lice,” he was speaking to the typhus epidemic, a disease carried by lice, that resulted in roughly 3 million deaths between 1918 and 1920.7Hoffmann. To have any idea about how many people were dying and from which diseases, the Bolsheviks relied on the expertise and organizational structures of the scientists working within the zemstvos who had been collecting population-level data for decades. After the revolution, the Soviets established the Supreme Council of Physical Culture and the Commissariat of Health (Narkomzdrav) which absorbed many of those previously working in the zemstvos.
The Fast and the Furious: Resistance and Repetition under Bolshevik Taylorism
Many forms of bodily calculation in western Europe at the turn of the 20th century appeared in the Soviet Union after the revolution but for different purposes. For example, Narkomzdrav attempted to calculate how many calories workers needed to survive, but instead of serving the purpose of forcing proletarians to labor as it did in England, it served a more dire pursuit of preventing mass starvation. Even before Stalin’s disastrous collectivization efforts, the food supply had been greatly damaged by WWI, the revolution, and the civil war. Fordism, as well as Fredrick Taylor’s Scientific Management, were hotly debated among party leaders but eventually embraced by Lenin under the banner of the Scientific Organization of Labor.8Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe. The importation of these ideas and practices existed in Russia before 1917, but their role in social life after the revolution was expressed through a number of organizations, one of which was Aleksei Gastev’s Central Institute of Labor.
Known for coining the term “social engineering,” Gastev, a life-long factory worker, poet, and revolutionary followed closely in the Taylorist tradition by forming cells and laboratories that would teach workers how to move in harmony with factory machines. He advanced visions of a world where human labor would be totally managed by machines, with the social aims of labor decided upon by workers councils. In the workshops held by the Central Institute of Labor, which lasted between 3-6 months, workers would all perform the same set of movements, such as a hammer strike, with their hand strapped to a machine to guide them through the perfect movement. The workshops would progress from simple to complex movements until the attendees could perform the movements correctly without guidance from the machine.
At the level of diet, or how these initiatives were experienced by those it impacted, the regime was not uniformly received. On the one hand, there was a popular criticism of this rationalization of work process as an extension of capitalist domination. The most notable protests came from the Kronstradt Commune who, in their bill of indictment against the Bolsheviks in 1921, criticized the party for embracing Taylorist work practices. On the other hand, there were very few meaningful incentives for workers to adopt any of these initiatives, making their existence in the lives of workers mainly a nuisance. Even though Gastev’s goal, as a factory worker himself, was to reduce the labor time of human tasks, this rarely translated into less work. Being more productive often did not lead to significantly better wages or living conditions, with workers left to run on the fumes of revolutionary willpower–which, although powerful, never last forever.