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Kak Hado Rabotat

Joost Janmaat writes from Moskow: Last night my guide Inara Nevskaya made me promise not to make it too late in bar Duma, which paid of this morning, with us being sharp as a pair of scissors as we make it up the steps of the library again. I am really quit exited what results we have yielded with the insane number of requests we made yesterday.

Inside, 73 volumes are waiting for us. Beautiful books with marbled hardcovers and labels that were handwritten in a time that people still valued handwriting. We drag the piles to one of the 400 reading tables in the central reading hall, where we set to work under the benevolent gaze of Lenin, whose massive statue is perched on an elevated platform at the far end of the central axis. A hugh mural depicts scenes of space travel and engineering the great canals of the Soviet Union.

Central to our pile of paper are the quarterly magazines that the Central Institute of Labor published. I can’t believe all this stuff has been saved. In it – through endless drawing, graphs, instruction manuals and manifestos – is 18 years of Gastev’s quest for the New Man. Reading his editorials is like a sky dive through Interbellum European history. It starts with radical social daydreaming, with manifestos about the near future and a better life for all. It is time to stop being sentimental about human nature and replace sociology by social engineering. It is time to not to just study and analyse society, but (re)create it. To introduce new social norms, make a new choreography of movement and new sets of social behavior. Gastev the poet – who speaks about men as ‘living machines’ – makes a dramatic call for scientific working methods and a make over of the new Soviet economy by means of social engineering. The protocols of the new working methods are summarized in Gastev’s most famous book: ‘How we should work’ (Kak hado rabotat, 1922).

After having set the parameters, from 1922 to 1926 the Institute seems to have been busy organizing an insane amount of experiments on workers to make work more more effective: to eradicate old ways and introduce new methods. Experiments in reprogramming the body (by physical training in what looks like gym machines, workers where taught better ways to operate their tools), the mind (by memory training), the organization of the work station (exact plans detail how to place your body vis-a-vis your tools). Extensive charts deal with every detail of labour: from the desired calorie consumption per type of labour, to how to optimize to swing a hammer, what sub-movemnets can be divided in the process of building a wall (and of course, how to optimize those). The books are full of warnings to workers to leave their bad habits and ineffective practices behind them and put effort in learning the new methods and movements of the New Age.

These were days of radical social experimentation, but with an air of utopia, of romanticism, of working for a greater good. Also, these years seem very open, with references on how colleagues in Germany and the US where doing. Gradually, you see this shifting: Lenin dies, Stalin takes over, the first five year plan takes effect, and Gastevs Institute starts to focus less on people (training workers and inventing a new choreography of work) and more on machines (better and bigger contraptions), production planning and economic output. By now, the Institute issues manuals on how to start up entire factories (including architectural plans, machine engineering schemes, labour charts, production plans and management schedules). Slowly also, pictures and quotes of Stalin start appearing. The last magazines date from 1938, a year before Gastev was arrested and shot dead by a firing squad in a Moscow suburb.

All the time, Inara is silently laughing next to me because of the simple and clear language of Gastev’s outrages proposals. And how revealing they actually are about how WE work (and sport) these days.

We found many references to social engineering, to movement and behavior research, to new choreographs of work. Even some hints a social engineering machine, which made my heart skip a beat every time. And finally, in some magazine on inventors and their latest inventions, we find an article on the machine, with a super blurry picture of what seems to be a maquette of the machine.

This machine, a pivotal invention from what must be the most creatively and intellectually outrages decade in human history, remains shrouded in mystery.. But the last magazine did hint at a new avenue of exploration: tomorrow we will make our way to the equally vast and illustrious Museum of Polytechnics, a collection of inventions, machines and flukes of sciences.