Social Engineering Machine
The russian revolution of 1917 unleashed the biggest experiment in applied social utopia in human history. For more than a decade, the bolsheviks set off a barrage of extravagant visions for the total transformation of their world. They were in search for the Happy Man.
Picture from Stites, Revolutionary Dreams
One of the leading figures in this swirlingly creative dream was Alexei Gastev (1882-1939). He was a fighter and agitator in the Revolution, and in 1920 he became the founder and director of the Central Institute of Labor in Moscow. Richard Stites discusses Gastev's utopian ambitions in Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian vision and experimental life in the Russian Revolution (1991).
At the Institute, Gastev became one of the most active advocates of taylors scientific management. He set about to transform Russia into the Soviet Union - a rural society into an industrial society - by developing means to engineer mass behaviour. People that had worked with a shovel for generation had to be taught mechanical, repetitive motions. To promote an ultimate symbiosis between man and machine, worker and factory, he developed the Social Engineering Machine.
However, the exact plans to this contraption appear lost. They probably were destroyed when Gastev fell from grace and was executed during Stalins Reign of Terror. For a brilliant and beautiful introduction into Gastev, his machine and the social engineering of the early Boshevik, watch Adam Curtis' Pandoras Box, part 1: The Engineers plot.
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