Few houses of this sort were ever built, although they loomed large in the Utopian imagination and futuristic novels such as Zamyatin's We (1920). Most of the projects which did materialize, like the Narkomfin (Ministry of Finance) house, designed by the Constructivist Moisei Ginzburg and built in Moscow between 1928 and 1930, tended to stop short of the full communal form, with private living spaces and communalized blocks for laundries and bath houses, dining rooms and kitchens, nurseries and schools.26 But the aim remained to marshal architecture in a way that would induce the individual to move away from private ('bourgeois') forms of domesticity to a more collective way of life. Architects envisaged a Utopia where everybody lived in huge communal houses, stretching high into the sky, with large green open spaces surrounding them (much like those conceived by Le Cor-busier or the garden city movement in Europe at that time), and everything provided on a social basis, from entertainment to electricity. They conceived of the city as a vast laboratory for organizing the behaviour and the psyche of the masses, as a totally controlled environment where the egotistic impulses of individual people could be remoulded rationally to operate as one collective body or machine.27
It had always been the aim of the Bolsheviks to create a new type of human being. As Marxists, they believed that human nature was a product of historical development, and could thus be transformed by a revolution in the way that people lived. Lenin was deeply influenced by the ideas of the physiologist Ivan Sechenov, who maintained that the brain was an electromechanical device responding to external
stimuli. Sechenov's materialism was the starting point for I. P. Pavlov's research on the conditioned reflexes of the brain (dogs' brains in particular), which was heavily supported by the Soviet government despite Pavlov's well-known anti-Soviet views. This was where science and socialism met. Lenin spoke of Pavlov's work as 'hugely significant for our revolution'.28 Trotsky waxed lyrical on the 'real scientific possibility' of reconstructing man:
What is man? He is by no means a finished or harmonious being. No, he is still a highly awkward creature. Man, as an animal, has not evolved by plan but spontaneously, and has accumulated many contradictions. The question of how to educate and regulate, of how to improve and complete the physical and spiritual construction of man, is a colossal problem which can only be understood on the basis of socialism. We can construct a railway across the Sahara, we can build the Eiffel Tower and talk directly with New York, but surely we cannot improve on man. Yes we can! To produce a new, 'improved version' of man - that is the future task of communism. And for that we first have to find out everything about man, his anatomy, his physiology and that part of his physiology which is called his psychology. Man must look at himself and see himself as a raw material, or at best as a semi-manufactured product, and say: 'At last, my dear homo sapiens, I will work on you.'29
The artist also had a central role to play in the construction of Soviet man. It was Stalin who first used the famous phrase, in 1932, about the artist as the 'engineer of the human soul'. But the concept of the artist as engineer was central to the whole of the Soviet avant-garde (not just those artists who toed the Party line), and it applied to many of the left-wing and experimental groups which dedicated their art to the building of a New World after 1917: the Constructivists, the Futurists, the artists aligned to Proletkult and the Left Front (LEF), Vsevolod Meyerhold in the theatre, or the Kinok group and Eisenstein in cinema all broadly shared the communist ideal. All these artists were involved in their own revolutions against 'bourgeois' art, and they were convinced that they could train the human mind to see the world in a more socialistic way through new art forms. They viewed the brain as a complex piece of machinery which they could recondition through reflexes provoked by their mechanistic art (cinematic montage, biomechanics
in the theatre, industrial art, etc.). Since they believed that consciousness was shaped by the environment, they focused on forms of art, like architecture and documentary film, photomontage and poster art, designs for clothes and fabrics, household objects and furniture, which had a direct impact on people's daily lives.
The Constructivists were in the forefront of this movement to bring art into union with life. In their founding manifestos, written during 1921, they detached themselves from the history of art, rejecting easel painting and other such artistic modes as individualistic and irrelevant to the new society; as 'constructors' and 'technicians', they declared their commitment, by contrast, to the design and production of practical objects which they believed could transform social life.30 To this end, Varvara Stepanova and Vladimir Tatlin designed workers' clothes and uniforms. Stepanova's designs, which were strongly geometric and impersonal, broke down the divisions between male and female clothes. Tatlin's designs subordinated the artistic element to functionality. A man's spring coat, for example, was designed to be light yet retain heat, but it was made out of undyed material and lacked decorative design.31 Alexander Rodchenko and Gustav Klutsis used photomontage to smuggle agitation into commercial advertisements and even packaging. El Lissitzky (a late convert to the production art of the Constructivists) designed simple, lightweight furniture capable of being mass produced for standard use. It was versatile and movable, as necessitated by the ever-changing circumstances of the communal house. His folding bed was a good example of the Constructivist philosophy. It was highly practical, a real space-saver in the cramped Soviet apartments, and at the same time, insofar as it enabled the single person to change his sleeping place and sleeping partner, it was designed to be instrumental in the communistic movement to break down the conjugal relations of the bourgeois family.32
The Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) movement was equally committed to the idea of the artist fostering new forms of social life. 'A new science, art, literature, and morality', wrote one of its founders, Pavel Lebedev-Poliansky, in 1918, 'is preparing a new human being with a new system of emotions and beliefs.'33 The roots of the movement went back to the 1900s when the Forward (Vperedist) group of the Social Democrats (Gorky, Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky)
had set up schools in Italy for workers smuggled out of Russia. The object was to educate a tier of 'conscious proletarian socialists', a sort of working-class intelligentsia, who would then spread their knowledge to other workers and thereby ensure that the revolutionary movement created its own cultural revolution. In the Vperedists' view the organic development of a working-class culture was an essential prerequisite for the success of a socialist and democratic revolution, because knowledge was the key to power and, until the masses controlled it, they would be dependent on the bourgeoisie. The Vperedists clashed bitterly with Lenin, who was dismissive of the workers' potential as an independent cultural force, but after 1917, when the leading Bolsheviks were preoccupied with the more pressing matter of the civil war, cultural policy was left largely in their hands. Lunacharsky became the evocatively titled Commissar of Enlightenment, while Bogdanov assumed the leadership of the Proletkult movement. At its peak, in 1920, Proletkult claimed over 400,000 members in its factory clubs and theatres, artists' workshops and creative writing groups, brass bands and choirs, organized into some 300 branches spread across the Soviet territory. There was even a Proletarian University in Moscow and a Socialist Encyclopaedia, whose publication was seen by Bogdanov as a preparation for the future proletarian civilization, just as, in his view, Diderot's Encyclopedic had been an attempt by the rising bourgeoisie of eighteenth-century France to prepare its own cultural revolution.34 As one might expect in such a broad movement, there was a great diversity of views on the proper content of this revolutionary culture. The main ideological division concerned the relationship between the new and old, the Soviet and the Russian, in the proletarian civilization. On the extreme left wing of Proletkult there was a strong iconoclastic trend that revelled in the destruction of the old world. 'It's time for bullets to pepper museums', declared Mayakovsky, the founder of LEF, a loose association of Futurists and Constructivists which sought t
o link the avant-garde with Proletkult and the Soviet state. He dismissed the classics as 'old aesthetic junk' and punned that Rastrelli, the great palace-builder of St Petersburg, should be put against the wall (rasstreliat' in Russian means to execute). Much of this was intellectual swagger, like these lines from the poem 'We' by Vladimir Kirillov, the Proletkult poet:
In the name of our tomorrow we will burn Raphael, Destroy the museum, and trample over Art.35
Yet there was also the Utopian faith that a new culture would be built on the rubble of the old. The most committed members of the Proletkult were serious believers in the idea of a purely Soviet civilization that was entirely purged of historical and national elements. This 'Soviet culture' would be internationalist, collectivist and proletarian. There would be a proletarian philosophy, proletarian science and proletarian arts. Under the influence of such ideas, experimental forms of art appeared. There were films without professional actors (using 'types' selected from the streets), orchestras without conductors and 'concerts in the factory', with sirens, whistles, hooters, spoons and washboards as the instruments. Shostakovich (perhaps with tongue in cheek) introduced the sound of factory whistles in the climax of his Second Symphony ('To October') in 1927.
But was it possible to construct a new culture without learning from the old? How could one have a 'proletarian culture', or a 'proletarian intelligentsia', unless the proletariat was first educated in the arts and sciences of the old civilization? And if they were so educated, would they, or their culture, still be proletarian? The more moderate members of the Proletkult were forced to recognize that they could not expect to build their new culture entirely from scratch and that, however Utopian their plans, much of their work would consist of educating workers in the old culture. After 1921, once the Bolshevik victory in the civil war was assured, official policy encouraged something of a rapprochement with the 'petty-bourgeois' (that is, peasant and small-trading) sector and what remained of the intelligentsia, through the New Economic Policy (NEP).
Lenin, a conservative in artistic matters, had always been appalled by the cultural nihilism of the avant-garde. He once confessed to Klara Zetkin, the German communist, that he could not understand or derive any pleasure from works of modern art. His cultural politics were firmly based on the Enlightenment ideals of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia, and he took the view that the Revolution's task was to raise the working class to the level of the old elite culture. As he put it to Zetkin, 'We must preserve the beautiful, take it as a model, use it
as a starting point, even if it is "old". Why must we turn away from the truly beautiful just because it is "old"? Why must we bow low in front of the new, as if it were God, only because it is "new"?'36
But pressure on the Proletkult came from below as well as above. Most of the workers who visited its clubs wanted to learn French, or how to dance in pairs; they wanted to become, as they put it, more 'kul'turny' ('cultured'), by which they understood more 'refined'. In their habits and artistic taste, the Russian masses appeared to be resistant to the experiments of the avant-garde. There was little real enthusiasm for communal housing, which never escaped its associations with grim necessity. Even the inhabitants of commune houses rarely used their social space: they would take their meals from the canteen to their beds rather than eat them in the communal dining room.37 In the Moscow Soviet's model commune house, built in 1930, the residents put up icons and calendars of saints on the dormitory walls.38 The unlifelike images of the avant-garde were just as alien to a people whose limited acquaintance with the visual arts was based on the icon. Having decorated the streets of Vitebsk for the first anniversary of the October Revolution, Chagall was asked by local officials: 'Why is the cow green and why is the house flying through the sky, why? What's the connection with Marx and Engels?'39 Surveys of popular reading habits in the 192Os show that the workers continued to prefer the adventure stories of the sort they had read before 1917, and even the nineteenth-century classics, to the 'proletarian poetry' of the avant-garde.40 Just as unsuccessful was the new music. At one 'concert in the factory' there was such a cacophonous din from all the sirens and the hooters that even the workers failed to recognize the tune of what was meant to be the anthem of their proletarian civilization: it was the Internationale.41
3
'For us the most important of all the arts is cinema,' Lenin is reported to have said.42 He valued film above all for its propaganda role. In a country such as Russia, where in 1920 only two out of every five adults could read,43 the moving picture was a vital weapon in the battle to extend the Party's reach to the remote countryside, where makeshift
cinemas were established in requisitioned churches and village halls. Trotsky said the cinema would compete with the tavern and the church: it would appeal to a young society, whose character was formed, like a child's, through play.44 The fact that in the early 1920s nearly half the audience in Soviet cinemas was aged between ten and fifteen years (the age when political ideas start to form in a person's mind) was one of the medium's greatest virtues as far as its patrons in the Kremlin were concerned.45 Here was the art form of the new socialist society -it was technologically more advanced, more democratic, and more 'true to life' than any of the arts of the old world.
'The theatre is a game. The cinema is life', wrote one Soviet critic in 1927.46 It was the realism of the photographic image that made film the 'art of the future' in the Soviet Union.47 Other art forms represented life; but only cinema could capture life and reorganize it as a new reality. This was the premise of the Kinok group, formed in 1922 by the brilliant director Dziga Vertov, his wife, the cine newsreel editor Elizaveta Svilova, and his brother, Mikhail Kaufman, a daring cameraman who had been with the Red Army in the civil war. All three were involved in making propaganda films for Soviet agitprop. Travelling by special 'agit-trains' around the front-line regions in the civil war, they had noticed how the villagers to whom they showed their films were free from expectations of a narrative. Most of them had never seen a film or play before. 'I was the manager of the cinema carriage on one of the agit-trains', Vertov later wrote. 'The audience was made up of illiterate or semi-literate peasants. They could not even read the subtitles. These unspoiled viewers could not understand the theatrical conventions.'48 From this discovery, the Kinok group became convinced that the future of the cinema in Soviet Russia was to be found in non-fiction films. The basic idea of the group was signalled by its name. The word Kinok was an amalgam of kino (cinema) and oko (eye) - and the kinoki, or 'cine-eyes', were engaged in a battle over sight. The group declared war on the fiction films of the studios, the 'factory of dreams' which had enslaved the masses to the bourgeoisie, and took their camera out on to the streets to make films whose purpose was to 'catch life as it is' - or rather, insofar as their aim was 'to see and show the world in the name of the proletarian revolution', to catch life as it ought to be.49
This manipulative element was the fundamental difference between the kinoki and what would become known as cinema verite in the Western cinematic tradition: cinema verite aspired to a relatively objective naturalism, whereas (their claims to the contrary notwithstanding) the kinoki arranged their real-life images in a symbolic way. Perhaps it was because their visual approach was rooted in the iconic tradition of Russia. The Kinok group's most famous film, The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), is a sort of symphony of images from one day in the ideal Soviet metropolis, starting with early morning scenes of different types of work and moving through to evening sports and recreations. It ends with a visit to the cinema where The Man with a Movie Camera is on the screen. The film is full of such visual jokes and tricks, designed to debunk the fantasies of fiction film. Yet what emerges from this playful irony, even if it takes several viewings to decode, is a brilliant intellectual discourse about seeing and reality. What do we see when we look at a film? Life 'as it is' or as it is acted for the cameras? Is the camera a window on to life or does it make its own reality?
&nbs
p; Vertov, like all the Soviet avant-garde directors, wanted cinema to change the way its viewers saw the world. To engineer the Soviet consciousness, they hit upon a new technique - montage. By intercutting shots to create shocking contrasts and associations, montage aimed to manipulate the audience's reactions, directing them to the ideas the director wanted them to reach. Lev Kuleshov was the first director to use montage in the cinema - long before it was adopted in the West. He came to the technique by accident, when the chronic shortages of film stock in the civil war led him to experiment with making new movies by cutting up and rearranging bits of old ones. The scarcity of film compelled all the early Soviet directors to plan out scenes on paper first (storyboarding). This had the effect of reinforcing the intellectual composition of their films as a sequence of symbolic movements and gestures. Kuleshov believed that the visual meaning of the film was best communicated by the arrangement (montage) of the frames, and not by the content of the individual shots, as practised in the silent films and even in the early montage experiments of D. W. Griffith in America. According to Kuleshov, it was through the mon-tage of contrasting images that cinema could create meaning and
emotions in the audience. To demonstrate his theory he intercut a single neutral close-up of the actor Ivan Mozzukhin with three different visual sequences: a bowl of steaming soup, a women's body laid out in a coffin, and a child at play. It turned out that the audience interpreted the meaning of the close-up according to the context in which it was placed, seeing hunger in Mozzukhin's face in the first sequence, grief in the second, and joy in the third, although the three shots of him were identical.50 All the other great Soviet film directors of the 1920s used montage: Dziga Vertov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Boris Barnet and, in its most intellectualized form, Sergei Eisenstein. Montage was so central to the visual effect of Soviet experimental cinema that its exponents were afraid that their medium would be destroyed by the arrival of film sound. The essence of film art, as these directors saw it, lay in the orchestration of the visual images and the use of movement and of mimicry to suggest emotions and ideas. The introduction of a verbal element was bound to reduce film to a cheap surrogate for the theatre. With the advent of sound, Eisenstein and Pudovkin proposed to use it 'contrapuntally', contrasting sound with images as an added element of the montage.51
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