Revue des études slaves

Utopias of time, space, and life in the Russian Revolution

Monsieur Richard Stites

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Stites Richard. Utopias of time, space, and life in the Russian Revolution. In: Revue des études slaves, tome 56, fascicule 1,
1984. L'utopie dans le monde slave. pp. 141-154;

doi : 10.3406/slave.1984.5392

http://www.persee.fr/doc/slave_0080-2557_1984_num_56_1_5392

Document généré le 02/06/2016

 UTOPIAS OF TIME, SPACE, AND LIFE
IN THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION*

RICHARD STITES

Historians and literary scholars are much addicted to classifying utopias. The
problem of définition lies in the fact that utopia impinges upon literature, political
thought, religious fantasy and practice, revolutionary idealism, mystical visions,
legend and folk wisdom (some of these arguably combinable). Utopia and utopia-
nism may express itself in formš as diverse as poetry, graphie art, architecture,
planned societies, fantasy novels, poetic visions, and ail sorts of communitarian
and perfectionist behavior. The word « utopia » has been ušed in so many contexts
- use ful and silly, hopeful and hostile — that it would be unwise to insist upon a
rigid and exhaustive system of categorization of ail phenomena identifiable as
utopian as a prerequisite to beginning a discussion of it in a particular historical
framework such as the one I am about to deal with : the Russian Révolution.
Utopianism was a genuine and vibrant element in that révolution and, though my
catégories of Time, Space, and Iife may sound lyrical and contrived, the substance
of those catégories is quite real. Temporal utopias were those not realizable in the
foreseeable future, by their author's own admission. Spatial utopias were plans
for an imminent new environment. Living utopias were practical experiments
carried out in the context of the révolution.

UTOPIAS OF TIME

I shall pass quickly over the temporal utopias that háve become firmly fixed in
the literature on the Russian Révolution : Marxism and Futurism. The utopian
aspects of Marx and his disciples háve been inventoried and analyzed many times,
never more incisively and elegantly than in Frank and Fritzie Manueľs Utopian
thought in the Western Worldx . And many háve commented on Lenin's alleged
lapse into utopian fantasy in State and Révolution2 . But H. G. Wells, who actually
called him « the Dreamer in the Kremlin », was one of the first to recognize (on the

* Conférence donnée dans le cadre du séminaire de Jutta Scherrer à l'École des hautes
études en sciences sociales le 25 janvier 1984.
1. F. and F. Manuel, Utopian thought in the Western World, Oxford, 1979, p. 697-716.
2. A good récent discussion is N. Harding, Lenin's political thought, 2 v., London, 1977-
1981,11, p. 110-141.

Rev. Étud. slaves, Paris, LVI/1, 1984, p. 141-154.

142 R. STITES

basis of his own wide expérience with fantasy, science, and socialism) that Lenin
was a complex figure1 . Не operated at ali levels of utopia : of time (State and
Révolution), of space (electrification), and of life (war communism in its many practical
ramifications). These are well known and I will not discuss them further hère.
Lenin 's Marxist vision of the distant future — like that of Bukharin and Preobra-
zhensky, Trotsky, and most other leading Bolsheviks - was standard, having been
worked out by Marx and his followers on the four décades preceding the
révolution : a stateless society of abundance, happiness, and coopération, denuded of
capitalist économie relations and priváte property, where a new communist
humanity, globally united, would produce according to individual capacity and consume
according to need. Except for certain nuances, conditioned by Russian realities,
there was nothing more or less utopian in this perspective than one would in other
European Social Démocratie commentaries on the communist future2 .
Il would not do to classify the Futurists of the Russian avant garde neatly as
utopians of time — as people primarily concerned with outlining the distant future.
There was nothing neat about them at ail. They were artists, passionately engaged
in seeing into the future and organizing their creativity around those visions.
Concrète détails and clearcut pictures of the coming age were as répugnant to
them as would been portrayals of their own times in « realistic » terms. Maya-
kovsky's brilliant etchings in verse of world cities, global conglomérâtes, workers
ascending into heaven, time machines, and flying proletarians were replète with
flashes of illumination about the shape of things to corne. But they were also full
of irony, learned fulminations, delightful contradictions, and sweeping metaphors.
And the bold images, the literary excitement, the class hatred, and the high
technology never fused into the kind of literary spéculation that can rightly be called
utopian. On the other hand, the Futurists, along with others of the avant garde,
contributed mightily to the intellectual milieu of machine worship and technolo-
gizing that fed other utopian dreams and coincided by and large with the Bolshe-
vik blueprint for urbanization and superproductivity through mechanization.
The role of artists — in révolution or out of it — is to suggest and not to document.
But it should also be recalled that Mayakovsky and many of his Futurist comrades
felt themselves to be — and actually were - activists of the transformation of
everyday life through their work on posters, festival décoration, and the popula-
rization of art among the masses3 .
The mode of future spéculation that has until récent times been most neglected
is revolutionary science fiction — precisely the genre where one would expect to
find it. This has been so because literary scholars rarely treat materiał of Iow
literary quality, because historians seldom see fiction as relevant (except for the
nineteenth century), and because literary scholars and historians do not often
concern themselves with each other's works. Récent studies by Jeffrey Brooks,
Vera Dunham, and Geoffrey Hosking portend a change in this lamentable habit
of overspecialization4 . Some 200 works of science fiction — a genre that flourished
on a more modest scale in the génération before 1917 — appeared in the 1920s.

1 . H. G. Wells, Russian in the shadows, London, 1921.

2. For background, see D. Tarschys, Beyond the State, Stockholm, 1971 .
3. E. J. Brown, Mayakovsky, Princeton, 1973 ; B. Jangfeldt, Majakovskí] and Futurism,
Stockholm, 1977.
4. J. Brooks, When Russia learned to read (fortheoming) ; V. Dunham, In Stalin's time.
Cambridge, 1976 ; G. Hosking, Beyond socialist realism, London, 1980.
 UTOPIAS OF TIME, SPACE, AND LIFE 143

Some of them circulated in mammoth numbers, were serialized in popular

magazines, staged as play s , or madę into movies1 .
The prototype for early Soviet utopian science fiction was the novel, Red Star,
written by the Bolshevik leader Alexander Bogdan ov in 1908. It is a classic example
of the utopia of time, set in a communist society on Mars which is 300 years ahead
of Earth in ideological development, technology, and social system. It contrast the
heaven of a Marxian Mars with the hell of a capitalist Earth, with its militarism,
exploitation, and brutal counter-revolutionary violence. The Martian system of
production and distribution of wealth and the social relations are taken right out
of Marx. But the vision is embellished by Bogdanov's spécial views on technolo-
gical organization and on human relations under communism. Computer-like
machines and statistical Systems do the économie planning just as productive
machinery does most of the work in this early version of a cybernetic society.
Equality and collectivism are heavily emphasized through the story : différences
(including gender) in physical appearance hâve been reduced to a minimum ;
titles, honors, and déférence are nonexistent, and historical heroes and heroines
are unknown. The planet is unified by a single language and culture. The major
« problem » for Martians is the continuous struggle against Nature, and not the
struggle among human beings. Bogdanov supplemented Red Star in 1913 with
another science fiction romance, Engineer Menni, dealing with the historical ori-
gins of communism on Mars2 .
Soviet science fiction in the 1920s was largely the work of fellow travellers
and pro-Soviet popular writers - there was as yet no officiai voice or officiai Une
concerning this genre. But the works were remarkably similar in their dual stress
on technology and on social justice and equality. Among the most popular and
représentative of the genre were Yakov Okunev's The Corning World (1923) set
200 hundred years in the future, Innokenty Zhukov's Voyage of the « Red Star »
Detachment to the Land of Marvels (1924), set in 1957, and Viktor Nikolsky's
In a Thousand Years (1925). Their communist paradises featured, among other
things, an urbanized planet, prolonged life, computerized production, garden
cities and portable homes, worldpeace, brotherhood, a single language (Esperanto),
and communal life3 .
The most elaborate, and also the last, of the revolutionary science fiction uto-
pias of the period was Yan Larri's Land of the Happy (1931). Judging by the
argument of the introduction, it may hâve been written as an answer to Eugène
Zamyatin's dystopian novel, We (1920), widely known but never published in the
USSR. Larri's land is strikingly similar to Zamyatin's United State : its cities are
radial and symmetrical in design and uniform across the land, with towering
skyscrapers, ail sorts of personal aircraft, telescreens (teleèkrany) and televoxes,
pneumatic trains, and a schéme to reduce ail the world's books to shorthand for
the purpose of space and accessibility. And there is the familiar épisode about
channeling of available resources into space that is found in We and in Red Star.

1. A. F. Britikov, Русский советский научно-фантастический роман, L., 1970 ; D. Su-

vin, « The utopian tradition of Russian science fiction », Modem language review, 66 (1971 ).
p. 139-159.
2. Both novels, with interpretive essays, are available as A. Bogdanov, Red Star : the first
Bolshevik utopia, ed. L. Graham and R. Stites (Bloomington, 1984).
3. Ja. Okunev, Грядущий мир, L., 1923 ; I. Žukov, Путешествие звена «Красной
Звезды » в страну чудес, Xarkov, 1924 ; V. Nikoľskij, Через 1000 лет, М., 1925.
144 R. STITES

But the inhabitants of Larri's romance are not the mindless rationalized vegetables
of Zamyatin's nightmare. Since the economy is run by automation, people work
at « socially necessary labor » only fïve hours a week (wearing identical costumes)
and at « socially useful labor » (hobbies, arts, or professions) any time they want
(and wearing costumes of their choice). Young people, bursting with laughter and
joie de vivre and bearing such names as Neon, May, Nefelin, and Storm, fly off to
vacation hôtels and resorts such as Sun Valley, the Happy Fisherman, Calabria,
the Gay Pilot, the Land of Soviets, Evening Stars, Future, and Bronze Horseman to
enjoy color and light shows and to dine communally at lakeside to piped in music
and entertainments1 .
Communist utopias of time in the early revolutionary years contained massive
doses of high technology and rationality of production and environment, a
Cockaygne-like quality of appetites sated and pleasures provided, a cuit of youth
and of immediacy and spontaneity, and a formulaic, unexamined system of comra-
deship and equality. Although ail of these novels were written after Zamyatin's
We, it was precisely the rational and technological éléments exalted in them that
he so fiercely satirized, just as Dostoevsky had done in response to Chernyshevsky's
Míhat ís To Ве Done ?. But Zamyatin was not the only enemy of this kind of future
thinking. A sharp debate during the Cultural Révolution of 1928-1931 revealed
surly undertones of resentment at the glowing pictures of the future encased in
these utopias. Larri's book (which had dared to suggest, through the words of
one of the characters, that Stalin's writings be subjected to sténographie pulping
along with the rest of world literature), was the last of its genre — long rare utopias
of time — until the late 1950s. The science fiction of the Stalin era was limited to
the idiom of immédiate technologizing, short-term planning, and fantasies of
mili tary struggle and espionage.
In discussing the intellectual climate of the revolutionary period, one ought
not to ignore the anti-Bolshevik imagination which was at least as autenthically
Russian as were the Bolsheviks and their literary supporters. A comprehensive
history of Russian émigré thought in the 1920s and 1930s would considerably
deepen our understanding of the Soviet mentality in many ways. Three novels of
an alternate future written in this period illustrate my point very well. The first,
Zamyatin's We, is too well known to merit additional discussion hère. But, as a
product of « internai émigration », it represents on a very high literary level a deep
critique not only of Bolshevism itself but of mechanization, depersonalization,
mathematical rationalism, and urbanization in the world at larger. His poetically
configured alternative was the tantalizing and irregular world beyond the green wall
— Nature itself, which the Bolshevik utopians seemed bent on conquering.
Alexander Chayanov's Joumey of My Brother Alexei to the Peasant Utopia, actually
published inside the USSR in 1920, envisioned a rural socialist utopia in the year
1984 in which the Bolsheviks and the great cities háve been removed and where
technology has been harnessed for defence and to grace the lives of peasants toiling
on small plots throughout the land2 .
Much less well known is the futuristic and nostalgie novel of the cossack general,
Peter Krasnov : Beyond the Thistle, written in Russian in Berlin in 1921 3. It
1 . Jan Larri, Страна счастливых, L., 1931 .
2. E.Zamjatin, Мы, 1920 ; New York, 1967 (transi, as We, 1924 ; New York, 1952) ;
I. Kremnev [A. Cajanov] , Путешествие моего брата Алексея в страну крестьянской уто
пии, М„ 1920, transi, in R. Ľ. F. Smith, cd., The Russian peasant in 1920 and 1984. London.
1977.
3. P. N. Krasnov, За чертополохом : фантастический роман, Berlin, 1922.
 UTOPÍ AS OF TIME, SPACE, AND LIFE 145

describes the collapse of Bolshevism through famine and mismanagement and the
restoration of Tsar Michael II. Vsevolodovich who appears out of the Himalayas
with a retinue of 3000 loyal soldiers mounted on white Arabian stallions. By the
1960s — when the fictional visitors « discover » the lost Russia — Faith, Tsar, and
Fatherland háve become the national mottoes in an absolute monarchy run by the
tsar and his voevodas and chiliarchs as in days of yore. There are few officiais,
no political news in the press, and only one « party » : the Brothers and Sisters
of Christ. There is inequality of ownership but everyone works. Factories are
spread out into the land and networks of family shops are run by Good Russian
merchants with peasant faces. Parasitic bankers, financiers, and lawyers do not
exist. Peasant men wear beards and celebrate the ancient Orthodox rituals and
rule their families according to the Domostroi — women having been restored to
their traditional sector of labor : housekeeping. Poland and Finland háve been
rejoined to the Empire. There are Jews in this newold Russia, but « they do not
rule over us as they did before » . A military painter heads the Art Academy and the
hit play of the moment is In the Name of the Tsar and the Fatherland.
Krasnov's utopia is more than a warmed-over Slavophilism. It is in fact the
most striking example of a Russian fascist utopia - and perhaps the only one.
Krasnov is not content with reviving the trappings and institutions of Muscovy.
Iike the emerging fascists whom he admired in exile, he has tried to corne to
terms with the technology necessary for survival in the modern world while simulta-
neously clinging to the artifacts and values of the past. Advanced science is at the
ready, but is divinely inspired. Flying trains and airplanes are available for long
distance transportation, electricity for light, and rain machines in every province
to ward off the drought. But automobiles — recalling the arrogance of Commissars
and Chekists - are outlawed in the land « beyond the thistle » as are noise and
pollution. Local travel is conducted on horseback and on sleighs. Children and
youth are mobilized into patriotic formations of Christian Blue Shirts who march
around in black pants and high leather boots as soldiers of the Tsar. The utopia
of Krasnov, reflecting a pathos laděn désire for a miracle of restoration with a
conventional projection of new technology, may háve been unique among the
utopias of time in the revolutionary period, but it contains many deep impulses
of Russian intellectual history - some of which survive very strongly to this day.

UTOPIAS OF SPACE

Utopias of space are programs for a new environment, new institutions, and new
habits to fit the coming arrangement of things. They differ from temporal utopia
in that they are seen to be feasible in the very near future — and their prophets
are always ready to begin at once. They are utopian none the less in that they go
against the current reality in a far more drastic way than the political, économie,
and social programs that corne flowing out of any révolution. It might well be
argued that all of Bolshevism was such a utopia. But the Bolshevik Révolution
proclaimed and put into action very much that was concrète and limited in scope.
A utopia must hâve an overall vision of what society should be like. I shall limit
my discussion to those that seem most représentative and most comprehensive in
the sweep of their aspirations : Prussianism, Mechanization, Militarization, and
Urbanization.
146 R- STITES

The 1916 appeal, Against Civilization, subsequently revised and Bolshevized

in 1918, for the Prussianization of Russian society by the two intellectuals, Evgenii
Poletaev and Nikolai Punin, seems at first glance an isolated literary épisode
without much resonance1 . But in fact it resonated with ideas that were much in
the air during World War I and the Russian Civil War : the hopelessly flaccid and
degenerate condition of Western civilization and the beauty and utility of harshess.
Against Gvilization rhapsodized at lenght, in Nietzschean and Spenglerian tones,
about the décomposition of English and French civilization with their individual
egoism and their cults of the romantic and the sentimental. To this they opposed
Germanie Kultur : discipline, bravery, hardness, military prowess, solidarity, battle-
fíeld camaraderie, and organization. After the révolution they joined these notions
to what they saw as similar ones in Bolshevism : the organizational power of the
machine, proletarian solidarity, class violence, hierarchy, and obédience — first
for war and then for industrial survival. The first two Bolshevik Commissars of
War, Trotsky and Frunze, might not háve read Against Civilization, but they
certainly showed themselves at times in full sympathy with some of its ideas for
a militarized society.
The vision of Alexei Gastev to mechanize the Russian proletarian and raw
peasant recruits to the factory was both more concrète and more extravagant.
Gastev was an intellectual who had made himself a worker before the révolution,
then an industrial poet, and then a utopian prophet of human mechanization.
His utopian prose poem, Express (1916), traced the journey of a train through a
future superindustrialized Siberia. After the révolution he called for a new society
in the near future in which the world would be transformed into an urbanized
machine, its inhabitants mechanized and standardized down to appearance,
nomenclature, émotions, language, and even thought2 . It was undoubtedly these works
that moved Zamyatin to write We. In the 1920s, Gastev founded and ran the
Central Institute of Labor on Taylorist principles (though called Scientific
Organization of Labor in Soviet parlance). Its aim was to transform a disorganized and
undisciplined work force, with its rustic notions of time, space, order, and motion,
into smoothly functioning components of industrial civilization. Like Frederick
Winslow Taylor, who inspired him, Gastev clocked the workers' movements,
measured out normš for industrial tasks, and drilled his pupils in orderliness and
punctuality. But he went far beyond Taylorism (once dubbed « a normal
American madness ») and preached compulsively the virtues of awareness, submission
to the rhythm of the machine, and a geometrie and mechanical style of life and
work.
Punin, Poletaev, and Gastev sought to change the environment through
organization, technology, and mechanization of the individual psychology — to make
the leap into modernity and prosperity by varying degrees of outward
transformation of the « system » or environment and inwart reform of the psyche. A rather
différent, more primitive, design for remaking Soviet society — but almost solely
as a mode of defence of the State — was the now much-talked-about « militariza-

1. E. Poletaev and N. Punin, Против цивилизации, 1916; Pg., 1918. i am indebted to

Charles Rougle of Stockholm University for this work.
2. K. Johansson and Charles Rougle, « Express : the future according to Gastev », in
L. Kleberg and Stites, eds., Utopia in Russian history, culture, and thought, spécial issue of
Russian history , 1984 ; Johansson, Aleksej Gastev, Stockholm, 1983.
 UTOPIAS OF TIME, SPACE, AND LIFE 147

tion of society » enunciated by War Commissar Mikhail Frunze in the mid 1920s.
Struck by the prospect of a future war of immense destructive power, by the
enormous cost of conducting the next conflict, by the staggering backwardness
of Russia's infrastructure, and by the looming menace of death from the skies by
means of long distance bombing, Frunze concluded that the old différence between
front and rear in time of war would disappear and that the entire nation would be
living on a military front. The only way to prépare for this, he argued, was the
complète militarization of society (voennizacija obščestva), by which he meant
militarization of discipline, ranks, and organization in the government, a wartime
footing for the economy, and a permanent military posture for the entire
population — thus turning the Soviet Union into an armed camp in the most literał sense
of the term. It was in some ways reminiscent of the schemes of Tsar Alexander I.
and his War Minister Arakcheev to plant military colonies ail over the Empire and
militarize the life of the peasants. Frunze's plan was never realized in peacetime,
though there are a number of contemporary Western analysts of Soviet affairs who
believe that Soviet society is now moving exactly in that direction1 .
Surely the most important, interesting, and relevant of the utopias of space -
and the one most written about in the West2 — is the phenomenon of town
planning in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Opinions on the future of the city consti-
tute a very rich and multiformed spectrum, running from anti-urbanist desires to
blow up the towns and rusticate Russia, through various intersecting and overlap-
ping schools or « urbanizing » and « de-urbanizing » , to suggestions by lyrical
enthusiasts to eliminate nature altogether in favor of a single global city. Soviet
town planners and architects fell in the middle catégories and argued over issues
such as how large, how far apart, how dense, how high, and in what form the new
cities or non-cities should be laid out. Their plans were for the most part socially,
economically, and geographically very radical, and thus utopian, but as utopias
of space — environment for the immédiate future — they were solemnly conceived
and seriously discussed.
In what kind of homes and in what kind of cities should socialist people live ?
Home and town planners of the revolutionary period were not much indebted to
the traditions of Fourier and Chernyshevsky whose communal structures, though
aborned with technology, were meant to be located in rural milieux. Their direct
inspiration were the European Garden City movement and German Social
Démocratie urban utopianism, both from the tum of the century. The former was
geographically radical but socially conservative. The latter was the reverse. Writers such
as Kautsky, Atlanticus, Braun, Zetkin, and Bebel, impressed by rapid urbanization
and the possibilities of gaz, electricity, and rapid transit, saw the communal
apartment building as the residential model of the future socialist city. The combina-
tion of communal cooking and feeding, technology applied to tenant services, and

1. M. V. Frunze, Избранные произведения, M., 1934, p. 192-201. For current

interprétations, see W. Odom, « The 'militarization of Soviet society1 », Problems of Communism, XXV
(sept.-oct. 1976), p. 34-51.
2. Among the best récent works are : A. Kopp, Changer la vie - changer la ville, Paris,
1975 ; id., Town and révolution, New York, 1970 ; N. A. Miljutin, Sotsgorod, Cambridge,
Mass., 1974 ; S. F. Starr, Melnikov, Princeton, 1978 ; id., « Visionary town planning during
the cultural révolution », in S. Fitzpatrick, éd., Cultural révolution in Russia, 1928-1931,
Bloomington, 1975 ; M. Bliznakov, « Urban planning in the USSR », in M. Hamm, éd., The city
in Russian history (Lexington, Kentucky, 1976).
148 R. STITES

individual rooms combinable for families, would allow for the économie
émancipation of women from housework, a space and time for communal and convivial
encounters among the résidents, and space for privacy as well. This belief was
developed among the Bolsheviks before the révolution by those interested in the
position of women and in the future of the family : Kolontai, Krupskaya, Armand,
and Lenin1 . Soviet ideological architects of the 1920s saw the communal apartment
house (or House Commune) as a social incubator of the new society, endowing
the residential environment with an almost physically transformative power.
In the mid-1920s, the urban communal vision began to possess city planners.
Some of them advanced outlandish, fantastic, and often delightful dreams of a
new communal world. The architect Leonidov, for example, envisioned Russians
living in small House Communes of sixteen families each, united in their daily
life by an enclosed winter garden, and set in a huge network of linear cities covering
the vastness of Russia. A school of town planning known as the Urbanists projected
massive communites of 40-50,000 people in House Communes clustered around a
factory, with individual cells for every person, including married couples. Newly-
weds could move into adjoining rooms and those who divorced could simply
close the Connecting door. A variant Urbanist schéme, reminiscent of Zamyatin's
nightmare, provided for segregated, barracks-like dormitories with rigid schedules
of the day's routine and spécial days for sexual cohabitation. On the other hand,
a realistic Urbanist allowed for temporary kitchens in each living space which could
be removed once the communards had moved over to communal dining.
The De-Urbanists were fired by a wholly différent vision : to empty the cities
and spread families and individuals around the countryside in portable, mobile,
and prefabricated homes. Iike the Urbanists, they allowed for fluid family relations
in a society where divorce was extremely easy : the portable units, really room-sized
boxes on stilts, could be attached and detached in the event of marriage or divorce.
Workplace, domestic services, and communal facilities (meeting halls, clubs, thea-
ters) were to be within easy walking distance. In outward form, the schéme of the
De-urbanists was very much like American style suburbia of that era. Urbanists,
De-Urbanists, proponents of linear cities, garden cities, non-cities, and renovated
cities jostled their ideas and plans in the bustling market place of utopian dreams
in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
But the House Commune idea dissolved in an oceanie tide of urban in-migra-
tion from the rural areas which rusticated the cities, eroded the citified idealism,
and turned buildings designed as communes into collections of overcrowded «
communal apartments » (kommunalnye kvartiry). The kommunalka, as it has been
called since then, was a twisted parody of the communal idea, with whole families
stuffed into a room, with sometimes 30 people sharing hallway, bath, toilet, phone,
kitchen, and entryway. A British observer in Moscow noticed in the kitchen of an
eight-room, eight-family apartment (formerly occupied by one family), eight
separate cupboards and eight ranges on the « communal » stove for eight separate
préparations (by eight wives of course) of eight privately consumed meals2 . So
it has been in the inner-city « communal » apartment ever since.
New cities were certainly built in the 1930s, many of them enormous, parti-
cularly at the industrial sites. But the living schemes - the utopias of space — of

1. For the background, see Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia,
Princeton, 1978, p. 258-269, 409410.
2. E. D. Simon et ai, Mosco w in the making. London. 1937. p. 143-172.
 UTOPI AS OF TIME, SPACE, AND LIFE 149

the Urbanists and De-Urbanists almost never got off the ground — or onto the
ground. In the early 1930s, utopian town planners were repudiated by the régime
as dangerous dreamers : Urbanists were called « Mensheviks » and De-Urbanists
« social fascists » — expletives much in the air at the time and having no earthly
relationship to the ideas of these architects. Not only Stalin and his political hench-
men hated communes ; so did his enemies Trotsky, Bukharin, and others. No polls
were taken of the population, so we cannot know how it may háve taken to them.
Spontaneous communards were always a small minority of the population, even in
the 1920s — Anarchists, Tolstoyans, sectarians, and ahandful of urban communist
young people. From what we know the peasantry, who constituted the bulk of
the urban population in the mid 1930s, it is doubtful that it would hâve been much
interested in the elaborate fantasies of city planners and communal architects.
But it is also doubtful that even under the right démographie and political
conditions Soviet urban utopias would hâve worked very well. Their designers
did not address themselves much to problems of group psychology and human
personality. According to their approach, the environment and the reshaping of
productive relations would solve ail problems. Yet the associational frameworks
designed for communards might well hâve led to aliénation from the outside world
and to dessication and boredom within. Their devices for multiplying and enriching
human contacts today sound rather drab and mechanistic : big dining rooms, group
discussions and lectures, entertainment and educational events, and dynamie
interaction in the enclosed pathways and wintergardens between buildings. But ail such
plans suffered from insufficient attention to the « communal personality » and
ways of breeding it. Fourier and Chernyschevsky in the 19th century and kibbutz
theorists today are far beyond them in this essential matter.

UTOPIAS OF LIFE

Ail the utopias of space suffered in varying degress from one-dimensionality,

environmentalism, and a compulsive single-formula mentality. Though operating
in the arena of the feasible, they ail too seldom examined the materiał — human
beings — for whom they were planning and designing. They ušed terms such as
Equality, Communalism, New Morality, Collectivism and so on without exami-
ning what these terms might hâve meant to various segments of the population :
workers, peasants, women, students. In my brief survey of « utopias of life » —
that is social experiments in action — I shall try to show the diversity and
divergence of meanings that these terms had among the people who used them. My
principal aim is to sketch in some of the behavioral history which is often left out
the story of utopias. Frank and Fritzie Manuel, in their monumental study of
utopian thought, conceded at the outset that what they aptly call « applied uto-
pistics » — the utopian expérimental behavior of everyday life — had to be omitted
from their account because of the shear scope of their work. But in studying
utopia in a given révolution or historical epoch, it is essential to go beneath the
literary and social fantasy into the realm of émotions felt, words spoken, and deeds
performed — in other words into various patterns of behavior inspired by and res-
ponding to the révolution, but utopian in their relation to the current reality.
How did the people themselves react to dreams of the future, to attempts at mili-
tarization or mechanization of life, to equality, community, and morality.
150 R. STITES

On the question of organizing life as a whole, there existed two poles of thought
and behavior : those who wished to mobilize people from the center by means of
the Party, the military, or other organs, and those who wished to be left alone
by the center altogether. It was the old Russian dichotomy between
administrative utopia (symbolized by the Military Colonies of the early 19th century) and
popular utopia (symbolized by peasant flight and sectarian communities), i.e.
between State and People. Trotsky's famous experiment with the militarization of
labor during the Civil War was an example of the fírst pole. In action as well as in
intention, Trotsky, as Commissar of War, strove to turn soldiers into workers and
peasants, and civilian laborers into soldiers — in other words to militarize society
at least for the duration of the war, to subject virtually the entire population to
the rigors of discipline, military hierarchy, and martial law. For several months in
1920, his efforts in certain sectors of Soviet Russia actually went much further
than the vague défensive schéme of Frunze discussed above. By his opponents,
Trotsky was compared to Arakcheev, the master of Alexander's Military
Colonies, and condemned for creating a brutal military despotism. The experiment did
not work very well even for its limited purpose and won no adhérents as a suitable
mode for organizing socialist society in time of peace1 .
At the opposite pole from Trotsky's militarization of labor were the movements
to secede from under the shadow of centralized power and build smaller worlds of
freedom and community. Like the peasant rebels and sectarians of the 18th and
19th centuries, certain groups and communities bade farewell to the two capitals,
to their ne w « tsars » Lenin and Trotsky, to central authority, to utopian intellec-
tuals in the city who dreamed of urbanizing, electrifying, militarizing, and mecha-
nizing Russia. The numerous republics that were founded, the districts that with-
drew from the politics and battle of the révolution — such as the tiny « tsardom
of Ur » deep in the forests above Kazan — were not utopian communities by
design or purpose. But there was something of a primitive utopia in the way their
inhabitants hoped and endeavored to create or sustain an earlier way of life. Local
communal experiments on the ground were genuine attempts to realize utopias -
ideal communities — in the midst of révolution. The most famous of these was
Nestor Makhno's communal republic in the vicinity of Gulyai-Pole in the Southern
Ukraine where land was divided equally and worked communally, with the chief
of the Insurgent Army himself doing fieldwork once a week — ail of it detached
and in défiance of any central power, Red or White. Less independent but no less
expérimental was the commune of Kronstadt where workers, sailors, andintellec-
tuals toiled side by side in the vegetable gardens. Anarchiste formed dozens of
communes, but so did Bolsheviks and people unattached to any party : peasants,
workers, widows, vétérans, ethnie minorities, and even children. Withdrawal and
escape were certainly impelled by political, nationalist, and économie
considérations during the years of révolution and civil war ; but in some cases they arose
from a dream, the realization of which seemed to hâve been made possible by the
révolution, with its chaos, reversai, and centrifugation. For a number of years,
people lived out this dream in their utopian enclaves in the hope that God would
remain in heaven and the « tsar » would remain far away2 .

1. R. Pethybridge, The social prelude to Stalinism, London, 1972, chap. 3.

2. For documentation on this phenomenon, see Stites, « Utopias in the air and on the
ground », in Kleberg and Stites, Utopia..., op. cit.
 UTOPI AS OF TIME, SPACE, AND LIFE 151

The ultimate goal of all utopia is an ideal community — whether it encompasses

a small village of sectarian brethren or a mammoth communal apartment building
in a socialist city. But to live in a community, its members must share certain
values about human behavior. During the révolution and into the 1920s, three
issues captures the imagination of revolutionary remolders of personality :
morality, equality, and efficiency. The campaign to create a new proletarian morality
came for the most from groups that often overlapped in membership and
mentality : the Zhenotdel, the League of Militant Atheists, and the Komsomol, in the
other words the elite of middle-level activists in the building of a socialist society.
The Zhenotdel or women's section of the Party focused on relations between men
and women — a subject much discussed in récent historiography1 . The League of
Militant Atheists contained mostly ultraleftists who wanted to abolish belief in
God at once, destroy the church, and root out the superstitions and rituals of the
people. Some took to blasphemy and carnival, designed to shame and ridicule the
church and discrédit its authority ; others to the launching of new revolutionary
rituals, such as Octobering (the communist blessing of newborns with names such
as Barricade, Revolt, Electric, Guillotine, Vladlen, etc.), Red Weddings, and
Socialist funerals2 . Still others lived by a « communist code » as models for the young.
In the matter of communist moral codes, the Komsomol took the lead in endless
debates about smoking and drinking (manly or harmful ?), dancing (healthy
sublimation or Afričan depravity ?), dressing neatly (cultured or antiproletarian ?) -
and the debates were lived out, argued, and observed in the course of everyday
life. Out of the swirl of debate and practice came much confusion and acrimony
to be sure, but also a fresh look at the human condition and the possibilities of
building a new personal culture out of the revolutionary values3 .
Egalitarianism in the Russian Révolution sprung from many currents, including
the abstract ravenstvo of the intelligentsia and the folkish pravda of the peasantry.
It expressed itself in a rich variety of behavioral formš. Equal rights to goods.
services, and privilèges meant flattening of the wages scale for all (including com-
missars), blocks of theater tickets for workers ; a place in the queue according to
moment of arrivai at it ; first-come-first served for all railroad seats ; access to
trams for all (including men in the ranks) ; the confiscation of wealth and treasure,
and the invasion of mansions and large fiats by the lower classes. Equal liability
"îeant everyone should work, including those who had never worked before — and
sometimes collective responsability (kruglovaja poruka) and coerced collective
looting. The egalitarian suspicion of authority high culture, and intellect expressed
itself in things like worker's control, iconoclasm, specialist-baiting, and even an
orchestra without a conductor. And the egalitarian hostility to déférence appeared
in such formš as the revolt against military rank, salute, and courtesy to superiors,
in the abolition of terms like gospodin, in the egalitarian use of vy-ty and the
word comrade, and in overall opposition to socially differentiated dress. This
far from exhaustive list is drawn not from programmatic brochures, but from
actual examples of revolutionary behavior in the early years of Soviet power4 .

1. Stites, The Women's Liberation..., op. cit., B. Farnsworth, Aleksandra Kollontai,

Stanford, 1980 ; B. Cléments, Bolshevik feminist, Bloomington, 1979 ; G. Lapidus, Women in
Soviet society, Berkeley, 1978.
2. Stites, « Iconoclastic currents in the Russian révolution », in A. Gleason et ai., eds..
Bolshevik culture, Bloomington, 1984.
3. The sources on this are manifold, but see P. Gooderham, « The Komsomol and Worker
Youth », unpublished páper, University of Ľssex, 1981.
4. Stites, Utopias..., art. cit.
152 R. STITES

If in the utopianism of everyday life, morality was largely the realm of masš
communist organizations, and egalitarianism the masses at large, the efficiency-in-
life movement known as the League of Time was very limited indeed, including
only a few thousand active adhérents and lasting only two years (1923-1925).
Founded by Platon Kerzhentsev as an offbranch of Gastev's Taylorist movement,
it directly related to everyday life and not just training in an institute for the
workplace. The Timeists (èlvisty in Russian after L. V. - Liga « Vremja ») were
formed into Time Cells all over urban Russia with the intention of translating
Gastev's utopia of space into life. They wore badges with the letters L. V. on
tnem and big watches on their wrists. Timeists harassed managers of factories,
shops, cafétérias, schools, government organizations. Their arena of opération
was universal, though they possessed no coercive authority. Their weapons were
diagrams for relocating furniture, equipment, and personnel along rational Unes,
clocks to enforce punctuality, locked doors in the face of tardy students,
interruptions of long-winded speakers, timetables and schedules, yardsticks and meters,
and a strident and humorless détermination to turn functioning humans into parts
of a huge machine. The Timeist ideal was a self-disciplined army, marching in
précision step (šagistika) from one productive task to another according to a
prearranged schedule. Though they probably achieved little enough in transfor-
ming work and life habits, the League of Time was abolished after a few years in
the face of widespread opposition to it as a band of ubiquitous busybodies1 .
Urban and rural communalism in the 1920s was the laboratory where all the
separate movements of utopia in life coalesced and were put to the test. It was
also the phenomenon that most closely replicated the social pictures of the future
contained in the utopias of time and some of the utopias of space. The communal
experiments of the 1920s possessed an enormous variety in styles, structures,
milieux, and participants. There were several thousand Anarchist and Communist
rural communes whose members were motivated by a mixture of ideology, survival,
and curiosity. In them residence usually remained individual or by family ; work
was coopérative ; in the early years distribution was according to varying notions
of « equity » ; equipment and services were pooled ; and land was held in common.
Most rural communes were in later years only slightly « higher » in socialist form
than the kolxoz. Religious and Tolstoyan communes in the countryside were more
consistently communal — that is complète pooling and sharing of resources and
products, with residential community. In the cities, student communes dealt
with all aspects of life outside of the classroom, particularly common residence
and dining. Communes were formed along similar lines by groups of workers in
the same enterprise, thus adding workplace association to the living arrangements.
Tenants of the few hundred House Communes designed by the socialist architects
of the 1920s attempted to put utopias of space into practice by living in them.
During the five year plan there flourished for a time the rabočaja kommuna,
actually an updated arteľ where groups of young people migra ted to the new
construction sites, worked as teams, pooled their wages and possessions, and slept
in tents2.

1. The journal Время, 1923-1925 ; P. M. Keržencev, Борьба за время. M., 1965.

2. Rural communes : B. Kerblay, « les Utopies communautaires », this issue, with
documentation ; I. A. Konjukov, Коллективное земледелие, 3rd éd., Moscow, 1927. Urban
communes : K. Menhert, Youth in Soviet Russia, New York, 1933 ; M. Jankovskij, Коммуна 133,
L., 1929 ; N. Buxel, « О коллективах », Красная молодеж, 3-4 (mar.-apr. 1925), р. 132-134.
 UTOPI AS OF TIME, SPACE, AND LIFE 153

Given the wide variety of formš - all permitted and some even encouraged by
the régime — one сап imagine the variety of behavior patterns. In the realm of equa-
Hty, the spectrum on women's position ran from relegation of women to the
communal kitchen and laundry in rural communes to full rotation of all tasks among
men and women in the student and workers' communes ; on property from large
areas of priváte possessions in rural areas to full pooling of everything (including
underwear) in the urban communes ; from priváte life in rural communes to
complète association in every leisure moment in urban communes ; from privacy of
family space in the country, through priváte and public space in the House
Communes, to complète « nationalization » (as they quaintly called it) of sleeping,
studying, and visiting space in the student communes.
Within each type of commune, the variation was also considérable. An enthusiast
for rural communes suggested introducing the clock and the bell to induce punctua-
lity, but there is no evidence that this ever caught on. Yet in some of the student
communes, Timeists attempted to introduce what was called a « reign of terror
and time » by regimenting and tabulating every waking moment of the
communards. Few sources exist on moral issues in the rural communes, but the urban
ones were constantly beset by problems of outside income, sex, the use of leisure
time, mode of dress, comradeship, collective spirit, and many other aspects of
byt and moral behavior.
Although there is no place hère for more concrète détails about
expérimentation in the realm of everyday life, what I hâve outlined points to two striking
perspectives on the discussion of utopianism in the Russian Révolution. The first
is the immense différence between the values and behavior patterns just discussed
and the fiat, simplified, schematized, and naively optimistic formulations of those
who dealt in perfect societies of the distant and immédiate future. Granted, the
utopians of time assumed that the décades and the centuries would hâve brought
about the high technology, the super-abundance, and the long training of the Soviet
People that would enable such mechanisms to operáte in the way they were depic-
ted. But they said very little in their discussions, programs, or novels about the
transition from the « old » personality to the « new » or about ways in which
préjudices and vices were to be eliminated along the road to utopia. The utopians
of space were even more arrogant : they laid out environments for a communal
and comradely life in the near future, expecting their own génération or the next
on1 to occupy the utopian landscape without moral or psychological mapš and
compassés to guide them, to say nothing of sufficient time for preparing the jour-
ney. The ironie thing is that both kinds of utopian schemer were surrounded in
the first décade of the Révolution with thousands of workers, students, peasants,
women, Young Communists, Militant Atheists, Timeists, communards, and all
sorts of people who could hâve given them rewarding lessons in the problems of
creating a new society from below and from the inside.
The second and concluding point is this : that the utopians of life deserve far
more crédit and attention than they hâve been given by Soviet or Western historians
for exploring in peaceful and mostly noncoercive ways the methods by which
human relations сап be bettered. They were also naive, over-optimistic and some-
times even arrogant. But these vices were balanced at least by their willingness
to experiment upon themselves and take the conséquences — to live in communes
and not just design them, to practice « proletarian » morality and not just preach
it, to insinuate equality into everyday life and not just to proclaim it, to work
precisely, punctually, and conscientiously, and not just inscribe such behavior on
154 R. STITES

propaganda posters. The utopians of everyday life were clearly inspired by written
visions of the future, science fiction, and revolutionary utopias — by their own
admission. Far less often were the utopians of time and space aware of the experi-
ments and expériences that were going on under their very noses. The Stalinists
who came to power in the 193 Os were of course aggressively hostile to almost all
of these early utopias and experiments, and they imposed their own solution úpon
the révolution. But that is another story.