♪ I dreamt last night the moon was so bright it melted the walls away
♪ and it wasn't alarming when I saw prince charming come into my bedroom and say,
♪ "let me persuade you to come to the place where tomorrow meets today!" Oh! ♪
'If you were a scientist, you were it.'
'Your excellent scientists, I am your faithful servant.'
'building a new world.'
To those who began the revolution in Russia 75 years ago, science was a grand liberating force.
They believed Karl Marx had found the scientific laws of society
with which they would create a new world with everyone equal and free.
But within 20 years, the revolution was taken over by technocrats, who thought of the crowd as atoms.
They were inspired by the laws of engineering.
They wanted to transform the Soviet union into a giant rational machine
which they would run for their political masters.
Translation:
Music: "Summertime blues" by Eddie Cochran
Bell tolls
this is a story of science and political power -
how the bolsheviks' vision of using science to change the world was itself transformed.
What resulted was a strange experiment, far removed from the original aims of the revolution.
'Greetings from Moscow, the capital of the Soviet union -
'the world's first socialist state.
'All belongs to the people, all is created by the people and all is done to benefit the people.'
modern technology was central to the bolsheviks' plans.
Above all, the new power of electricity.
In 1920, Lenin unveiled a huge map dotted with light bulbs to show the planned electrification of the ussr.
To illuminate the bulbs, all electricity in the rest of Moscow had to be shut off.
Communism, said Lenin, is Soviet power plus electrification.
The aim of the bolsheviks was to transform the people they ruled
into what they called "scientific beings",
people able to understand and control machines, not be enslaved.
In mass parades, machines "crushed" the irrational dogmas of the past.
Moscow became "a talking city" -
its walls adorned with geometric perspectives,
its statues surrounded by parallelograms and futuristic structures.
Even music was used to transform the way people understood the world.
Electrical machines made what was called "rational music".
The most extraordinary project of all was the central institute of labour.
It was run by alexei gastev, who studied workers as though they were parts in a machine.
It was far more than mere time and motion.
Gastev believed he could teach people to behave in a rational way.
To do this, he built the social engineering machine. How it worked is a mystery, even to his son.
"Such is the power of science," said trotsky,
"that the average human being will become an Aristotle, a Marx. And beyond this, new peaks will rise."
In fact, the power to shape the future of the Soviet union
was passing to those who could build the new industrial society.
They were known as the bourgeois specialists, engineers who had the skills to master modern technology.
By 1923 they made up over three quarter of the state planning committee.
Under the tsar, their plans for factories and power stations had not been realised.
Now they could build them and they became influential figures.
Lenin saw his dream of control over this new world slipping away.
"To tell the truth," he said, "the communists are not directing anything. They are being directed."
But in 1924, Lenin died.
After a bitter struggle, Stalin seized power.
He decided to send Russia on a crash course of industrialisation.
It would bring even more power to the bourgeois engineers.
They sing in Russian
Man's voice:
Song continues
in 1927, Stalin began the five year plan.
Hundreds of thousands of volunteers travelled to the remote and desolate parts of the Soviet union.
Millions more were forced to join them. They had five years to build a modern industrial state.
Magnitogorsk, built in the far-off ural mountains on the edge of Asia,
was to become one of the largest steel plants in the world.
At the centre of these gigantic projects
were the only engineers they had - the bourgeois specialists.
At the end of 1930, the engineers' dream suddenly became a nightmare.
Stalin ordered 2,000 of them to be arrested and eight of them were put on a public show trial.
The charges were fantastic.
It was alleged that the engineers had plotted to seize power
and impose a government of technical specialists and scientists.
Their "confessions" were carefully rehearsed.
But behind this public charade was a very real struggle.
A year before, a group of engineers had publicly challenged Stalin
to give them more control of the five year plan.
The future, they had announced, belongs to managing engineers.
Instead, they were condemned to death or to continue to work on their schemes in chains.
A week later, Stalin announced bolsheviks must master technology. They must become specialists.
In the reconstruction period, technology decides everything.
He ordered engineering schools to be set up across the country.
But in the process, the aim of the revolution was redefined.
Technology was to have been the means to liberate the people. Now it had become an end in itself -
large-scale industrial production.
The education the engineers received was of the narrowest kind.
The commissar of education pleaded with Stalin, "there is a certain minimum of scientific culture
"which an engineer must master.
"It is as if, discovering we can live with four fingers, we cut-off the fifth one."
But he was dismissed.
Accordion intro
they sing in Russian
the model for this new world was america, the most successful industrial state in the world.
Stalin was determined to overtake it.
Sings solo
the prototype was magnitogorsk,
which had been based on a particular American city.
"We invite you to a city which has the largest steelworks, the largest plant in the world.
"We invite you to a city of blazing furnaces, of handsome homes, of magnificent schools,
"of fraternal temples, of shining beaches,
"of restful dunes, of flashing water, of dazzling sands.
"This is the city that we invite you. It is the magic city.
"It is called the magic city for these reasons."
Like many cities in america's north east, Gary is now almost derelict.
But 70 years ago, it was a new kind of model city,
planned around a steel mill.
To its builders, it was a chance to break with the past.
We were building that city. We took pride in that. We started fresh. We didn't undo anything.
We picked out what was the best all over. Even the steel mills,
we didn't have to destroy something to put something better in.
We got the best out of the catalogues.
There was a magic in doing this thing.
You took pride in something like that. We were all building the new world.
Magnitogorsk was a copy of Gary. These plans for the works with the city radiating out
were drawn up by the same American designers who'd built Gary.
Some American engineers even came to magnitogorsk
to take part in the building of Russia's city of steel.
As in Gary, a planned city began to grow up around the plant.
But in a nearby valley, a very different city was constructed where the American engineers lived.
Designed by a young Russian architect,
these dozen houses were copied from American architectural catalogues.
It was very like mount Vernon, New York, or germantown, Pennsylvania.
In what everyone called the American city,
the atmosphere had the smugness of park Avenue,
yet less than two miles away, the wolves howled and the wind blew across the endless Russian steppe.
Rosa inkina:
Those living in the American city were the new elite - old bolshevik commissars, foreign technicians
and an increasing number of young red engineers.
Dance music on gramophone
by the mid-30s, the engineers had become the heroes of society.
Praised by Stalin, they flaunted their new status,
relaxing in the shadow of the industrial world they had built.
Soviet man, who was once to have surpassed Aristotle and Marx,
had been replaced by the zealous engineer,
taught to think of everything in technical terms, and completely loyal to Stalin.
In the 30s, thousands travelled to the Soviet union to marvel at this dream come true.
But what they saw was an orderly society administered by technocrats.
George Bernard Shaw made it clear that what he admired
was the benevolent despotism of these enlightened technicians.
"The leaders were scientifically educated for their job," he said.
Russia, her people employed to the last man and woman,
her scientific agriculture trebling her harvests,
her roaring and multiplying factories, her efficient rulers, her sense of such hope and security
as has never before been seen in a civilised country on earth.
'Hello. Good evening, everybody!
'This is Moscow calling.'
'the power of the counter- revolutionary group is over.'
no trotskyist reptiles and their foreign protectors can...'
in 1937, Stalin began another series of purges.
'Death to enemies of the people!'
this time his targets were the old bolsheviks.
Now they ran the country as commissars and plant directors. In a notorious wave of show trials,
Stalin destroyed them.
The purge struck magnitogorsk with great force. No group, nobody in the works was spared.
The American city emptied of old specialists.
After the purge, the administrative personnel was almost 100% young Soviet engineers.
They were in charge now.
The beneficiaries of these purges were Stalin's red engineers.
They were in charge of Soviet industry.
Among them were young men like leonid brezhnev,
alexei kosygin...
And nikita khrushchev.
Unlike the bourgeois engineers,
they were completely unquestioning of Stalin's political aims.
Their narrow specialist training meant they planned the Soviet union
as though it were a piece of engineering.
There would be technical solutions to everything.
The war seemed to prove the engineers right.
It was their organisation of the industrial plants that ultimately saved Russia from the Nazis.
Victory left large parts of the country utterly destroyed.
Those now in charge were convinced that to rebuild the Soviet union an all-embracing plan was needed,
one in which everything would be taken care of in a rational way.
It was a vision of a planned utopia.
Singing in Russian:
Everything in the new Russia was to be designed and controlled from the centre of Moscow.
As the women sing of the future, they march past the giant hq of this organised society -
gosplan - state plan.
Gosplan's managers built a world that was simple, like a machine.
Everything society needed, down to the smallest object, was constructed to their design.
Their instructions were called planned indicators -
rational predictions of what they knew society needed.
'One wants to get a view from all sides of this beautiful structure,
'which the Soviet people call the palace of science.'
by the early '50s, vast reconstruction projects had changed the face of Soviet cities.
Rationing ended six years earlier than in britain.
The Soviet union was now an advanced industrial society.
It was the golden age of the plan.
But in its grandeur, the sweep of its ambitions, lay the seeds of its downfall.
Lelchuk:
Manager:
Worker:
'As the song ends,
'everybody swings into a waltz.' dance music
'The world has been dominated by the malignant power of Stalin.
'Now Stalin is dead and he cannot bequeath to anyone his prestige. A new era begins.'
'how wonderful it is to be young, and to know all doors are wide open before you.
When Stalin died, the terror subsided.
The planned economy flourished, but strange things began to happen.
The planners discovered that what seemed rational to them could lead to the oddest behaviour.
Whole trainloads of output went thousands of miles for no reason,
simply to fulfil a plan based on tons carried per kilometre.
Folk tales about the plan began to circulate.
Nikita khrushchev, 1931 graduate from the Moscow industrial academy,
understood the problem. It was the growing complexity of society.
What had made it manageable was not scientific planning but Stalin's brutal terror.
He had to change the plan.
Piped muzak
phone rings
In 1957, khrushchev attacked the planning bureaucracy publicly.
He made a speech that laid bare the absurdities in Soviet life.
Why were sofas getting ever bigger?
Why were the metal chandeliers all over Russia
so heavy that they threatened to crash down?
The reason was the planners' method of assessing the plan.
The more metal, the more wood used,
the better the plan was working.
Khrushchev insisted the bureaucrats must take into account prices, too.
Phone rings
But khrushchev's attempts to reform the planning system failed.
Taking power away from gosplan, creating regional plans, only added to the complexity.
One senior scientist, gushkov, predicted that by 1980,
the entire Soviet nation would be employed in administering the plan.
He felt the solution was the science of rational control, cybernetics.
'Cybernetics is a young branch of science which has a tremendous future.
'The institute of cybernetics' director, Viktor gushkov, says,
'"cybernetics is central to the scientific revolution.
'"What I have in mind is the use of computers in planning the future,
'"in forecasting scientific and technological progress."'
Academic:
Into this computer, the planners fed all the information they could find about Soviet society.
It revitalised the hope that science could control society.
The attempt to use the computers on such a vast scale could not save the plan or khrushchev.
In 1964, he was replaced by brezhnev and kosygin.
They were convinced that there were rational, scientific solutions
that could still lead Russia to the promised land.
'First one... Then many more. Like tiny islands.
'Now looking as though it is strewn with stars, a city of light lies below.
'This is omsk.'
The country's new leaders realised that although the economy was still growing,
and living conditions improving, the plan was badly out of control.
'No, we're not back in Moscow. These people are all siberians, workers in an aircraft factory.
'Metal-workers, turners, designers and engineers.'
the problem was the complexity of modern life, the intricacy of people's demands.
The planners wanted to predict this scientifically.
'These young people are looking in a two-way mirror.
'They have no idea they're in our film.
Woman:
Aganbegyan:
'The urge to accomplish the tasks laid down by the plan
'stimulates people and encourages them to be creative.'
they all refer to "the plan"
'The workers' collectives take on increased obligations
'and counter the plan with one of their own.
'This is known accordingly as a counter-plan.
'"The main point about our brigade's counter-plan
'"is the planned over-fulfilment of our production assignment."'
by the mid '70s, the Soviet leaders gave up on reforming the plan.
Much of industry degenerated into pointless, elaborate ritual.
What had begun as a grand attempt to build a rational society
ended by creating a bizarre, bewildering existence for millions of Soviet people.
When the plan demanded a laundry must give a quota of scrap metal,
there was no way to question it.
'Somewhere at the end of the road there's the pacific, the quiet ocean
'the roar of which never dies down. Beyond the horizon lies the 1980s,
'new destinies and new songs.'
male singer croons in Russian
They continue their song
and then on January 1st, 1992, all this disappeared
to be replaced by another dream from america - the free market.