The Measures Taken

The adventures of the Bolsheviks in the land of the West


‘Why did I have to see it, this West. I loved it better without having seen it. Take its technology from it and it remains a rotten pile of manure, hopeless and decrepit’
Alexander Rodchenko, 1925

Reyner Banham once said that he’d learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original. In 1935, Pravda correspondents Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov drove an almost complete circuit round the United States, in search of the ‘real America’. That this meeting of future irreconcilables should seem unusual is somewhat anachronistic. Look for instance at the inception of the very term ‘Leninism’, not to mention its codification into a recognisable doctrine, in a series of lectures delivered by the Bolshevik General Secretary in 1924 to the young technocrats brought into the party in the posthumous ‘Lenin Levy’, and later published as Foundations of Leninism. In amongst the more expected deliquisitions on party practice and morality and appeals to the sainted leader is the enshrining of a curious and under-investigated element of the Leninist corpus, namely what was occasionally called Taylorism or Fordism, but by Stalin ‘American efficency’. This Amerikanizm wasn’t limited to the ruling clique of the USSR, some sort of statement of intent of the nomenklatura; in 1926’s Culture and Socialism Trotsky was claiming ‘The Soviet system shod with American technology will be socialism’ a conjunction that would define the new society: ‘it will transform our order, liberating it from the heritage of backwardness, primitiveness and barbarism’. It is with this conjunction in mind that we should appraise this republishing of a frequently rapturous travelogue, written from inside a Ford, photographs taken with a Leica. Indeed by 1935 it might have seemed like the USSR were the true harbingers of modernisation, with the USA languishing under the depression and the USSR ‘dizzy with success’ at its forced industrialisation.

A Stomach of Stone and Iron



The accepted view of Bolshevism and ‘Americanism’ as eternal enemies, coloured by the Red Scares and most obviously by the Cold War – the suicidal race where militarily and economically the USA is the adversary to be ‘overtaken and outstripped’ - is encapsulated by a little book published by Moscow’s Foreign Languages Publishing House in 1949. Inside a cover which depicts a poker-faced NYC cop, truncheon in hand, grimly defending an elevated railway and the looming Rockefeller Centre while disconsolate proletarians hang their heads in the background, Maxim Gorky’s In America is a reprint of a series of articles written in 1906 on a sojurn by the young Bolshevik playwright and novelist in New York. Gorky is not impressed by New York. The skyscrapers do not move him. In the most memorable of the essays, the apocalyptic maelstrom of 'The City of the Yellow Devil', Capital’s inhumanity is underlined by a furious fairytale anthropomorphism- high-tech industrial capitalism is personified as a dragon, a dinosaur, or as an exotic and terrifying beast, consuming and spitting out the worker for its own self-perpetuating jouissance. America here is irredeemable, a lesson only in abject mechanised brutality and the depths to which bourgeois society has sunk.

Before we move onto some rather more nuanced American travelogues it is worth immersing ourselves for a while in Gorky’s corrosive scorn. Here, the ‘icthyosaurs of capital’ preside over a landscape both prehistoric and futuristic. ‘Dark soundless skyscrapers, square, without any desire to be beautiful…’, here we have capital with its mask off, forcing into its maw every level of human life, much as in the personified Moloch of Lang’s Metropolis, inspired itself by a trip to New York. The proletariat is ‘nourishment for the city monster’, which farms it in an enormous mechanisation of the human body; ‘thrusts and pushes thousands of sounds into their ears, flings fine biting dust into their ears, blinds them, and deafens them with a long-drawn out, unceasing howl’…there is no emancipatory potential here in advanced technology, merely a mass mechanical slavery. Gorky notes that the American proletariat seem oddly unknowing of how horrible this fate is, that they go about their daily business unperturbed.



To go from this to prosleytising on behalf of ‘Leninist Taylorism’, we could consider how Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy suggests an assent between the machines and the workers, a co-operation in this remaking of the body that so terrifies Gorky. The Taylor system demonstrates a total and precise remaking, a rationalisation at the level of the smallest of bodily functions, rather than the excresences of Gorky’s yellow devil, becoming the ‘object of intelligence and decision making at the level of the labourer’s ‘body’’. In this sense the transition between Bolshevik Humanism and Futurism can be read in the terms of the jouissance of industry suggested by Lyotard of the English proletariat; ‘in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed the mad destruction of their inorganic body which was indeed imposed on them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their peasant identity’. When this is taken up by those in mainly rural countries facing a similar confrontation with the machine, the response is not so much resistance as infatuation.



Though Lenin had described Taylorism in 1914 as ‘Man’s Enslavement by the Machine’, post-revolution, we find him advocating ‘the study and teaching of the Taylor system and its systematic trial and adoption’. On the artistic front we have in 1921 the Manifesto of the Eccentric Actor, proclaiming not that Soviet Russia turn East, but turn yet further West; Europe was dead, and only a harnessing of the USA to the USSR held out any hope: ‘Yesterday: the culture of Europe, Today: the technology of America, industrialisation, production under the Stars & Stripes. Oh Americanisation! Oh undertaker!’. This Americanisation could be summed up in a few proper names- Chaplin, Ford, Griffith, Taylor - mass-produced forms of culture and mass produced goods, the democratic veshch of the new avant-gardes, attempting to create a socialist material culture, and of the new state itself, aware of the theoretical impossibility of an agrarian socialism. The Constructivists grouped round LEF were determined to confront all of this, to somehow force it into the frame of an egalitarian project.

Hence, you can find 20 years after Gorky the LEF co-editor and Bolshevik cheerleader Vladimir Mayakovsky, standing atop Brooklyn Bridge proclaiming:
this very mile of steel,
that’s where alive
my visions can arise-
a struggle
for constructions
over style,
severe reckonings
of screws
and steel.
His 1926 jaunts round the USA and Mexico (recently collected by Hesperus Press as My Discovery of America), while making reference to his predecessor, provoke a very different response to Gorky’s bitterness. Mayakovsky is unashamedly in love with the factories, the elevated railways, the production lines and all the trappings of ‘Americanisation’; though this is a tentative balancing act. The old Moscow export Progress Press editions used to define Taylorism in their glossary as a system that ‘under capitalism is used to oppress the worker’ (but is presumably emancipatory under socialism), and accordingly Mayakovsky’s appreciation of a Ford factory in Detroit has two sections. The first, where he watches, enraptured, the process, coming out of the factory ‘completely stunned’; the second where he reports the travails of its workers, limited to precisely measured 15 minute lunch breaks, and workers are spied upon to prevent them organising. For Mayakovsky, this does not make the machine itself into a spluttering satanic Moloch, but a potential liberator locked into an irrational economic system. He sees much that is absurd and mystificatory in the USA, from its personal morality to its dogged clinging onto religion, all ways in which this irrationalism is able to take hold at an everyday level.



What happens to this Americanism as the USSR, enlisting American technicians for its Five Year Plan, starts to industrialise itself, is interesting. In the first round of the 1932 Palace of Soviets competition for an Empire State-rivalling centre of Communist power, the entries by Melnikov or Moisei Ginzburg, or Mendelsohn or Gropius, were passed over in favour of a confection by Hector Hamilton, a New York architect otherwise lost to history, captioning his stone monolith with a pidgin Russian ‘Moskva - Niu Lork’, and it is actually this that provided the model for the winning design by Boris Iofan, and by association the subsequent Stalinist skyscrapers of the late 1940s. Moscow modernism was passed over in favour of the mystificatory moderne of the USA, of which Mayakovsky had already expressed his disapproval – ‘they preposterously decorate their fortieth storeys with some Renaissance piece or other, oblivious to the fact that these curlicues and statuettes are good enough at six storeys,but any higher they are completely unnoticeable. Of course, these high class baubles can’t be placed any lower, or they’ll interfere with advertisments.’ Stripped of these objets d’art, technology might be more sachlich, and more socialist- yet the Soviet state took it on, baubles and all.

Let’s Catch up to the American Chicken!
(Title of a Soviet children’s book of the 1920s)



All this is an America that one could have learned from Lev Kuleshov films and imported detective stories, from the skyscraper montages advertising Hollywood blockbusters in the posters of the Stenberg brothers. So the readers of ‘the Soviet Life’ Ogonek may have been somewhat alarmed by what Ilf and Petrov claimed was the photograph that really encapsulated their immersion in the USA in all its vast totality. This is a picture that would be wholly familiar to our current, wholly Americanised culture but still alien to a European of 1935: a desolate traffic intersection, a petrol station, wires criss-crossing overhead and advertising filling in the otherwise utterly blank landscape. ‘This’, write Ilf and Petrov, ‘right here, is America’. Not the ballet mechanique at Ford’s, not the increasingly modernist New York skyline, and not the teeming proletariat of Chicago, but a scene instead of emptiness and eerie calm, an electrification that seems to have produced a kind of kinetic stasis.



However much this is a repudiation of the avant-garde’s American dreams, Ilf and Petrov’s format here is totally informed by the precedent of LEF, particularly in its late 20s guise as Novyi LEF, a journal of ‘factography’, agitating at the reader to avoid becoming one of the illiterates of the future by documenting their own environment via the new reproductive technologies. So one of our correspondents- popular satirical novelists of the NEP period who had some success in the US with The Little Golden Calf- takes decidedly unprofessional photographs which provide the fulcrum of the text, which illustrates the documentation rather than vice versa. This provoked an ambiguous response. The photos were significantly altered when the travelogue was written up into the book One-Storied America, and they were accused, with great irony, by the partisan of LEF Alexander Rodchenko, fresh from proving his recantation by aestheticising forced labour on the White Sea Canal, of an inadvertent ‘Formalism’, their raw technique leaving the Empire State Building ‘desperately distorted’. It’s this residue of the disavowed avant-garde that makes much of Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue seem something of a remnant of this closed experiment.



What the Stalinised USSR hadn’t quite disavowed was Americanism – after all, the comedies of Alexandrov (some of which Ilf and Petrov had worked on), like Stalin’s favourite Volga-Volga were themselves adaptations of the new forms of the sound film and their organising the possibilities of the silents into fixed mechanical ballets. Nonetheless, the Socialist Realist cinema, with its literary adaptations and 19th century pretensions, could not be seen to be wholly consenting to some Busby Berkeley frivolity. These contradictions are rife as Ilf and Petrov confront California. In an anecdote that would seem rather prescient, they aren’t allowed to bring fruit into the state in case it carries bacteria- even then the state was unhealthily obsessed with its own health. And in a touch that Mayakovsky would have appreciated, they are utterly floored by the Golden Gate bridge, then being built- ‘engineers should cry get down on their knees and cry tears of joy at the sight of this brilliant construction’, with Ilf’s photo looking like a Chernikhov fantasy.

One of the most obviously ‘Formalist’ photographs in this volume depicts Hollywood Boulevard tilted at a heavy angle, the better to illustrate the wild irrationalism; a tram breaking out of the frame, with a plastic Christmas tree affixed to a telephone pole at the other end. However post-Productivism, the production-line approach to cinema had to be censured. In the silent film ‘there were some clumsy thoughts, but at least they were thoughts.’ The sound film meanwhile enables a product that is ‘slapped together as easily and quickly as standard little summer cottages – a little Fibrolite, a little plywood, some carpenter’s glue, and three forget-me-nots by the porch’. This mania for churning out product is solemnly contrasted by our correspondents with ‘the Soviet art of film’, then actually being replaced with a more Hollywood-esque conservatism. On both sides of the future divide, the barrier had been raised again between art and production.



Surveying the death agonies of Stalinism, Boris Groys claimed ‘the Stalinist ideologists were in fact more radical than the cultural revolutionaries, who were in fact Westernisers aspiring to make Russia a kind of better America’. Ilf and Petrov accordingly want to salvage American innovation from its unjust economic system. Mel Brooks, a director not known for his socially wholesome aspirations, would later adapt their novel of low level NEP criminality The Twelve Chairs. Their take on Hollywood was informed by more of a sense of its ridiculousness than moralising at its ‘nauseating’ industry. Under the ‘sickly aridity’ of its eternal sunshine, it stands as an absurd industry mass-producing idiocy, though Ilf and Petrov stop to offer brief praise to All Quiet on the Western Front, and peculiarly, the director of over-ripe Stanislavskian costume extravaganzas like Queen Christina and Song of Songs, Rouben Mamoulian. The other city portraits of Ilf and Petrov are tinged with a similar ambiguity. Their appreciation of the 24 hour noise of New York was like an amalgam of Gorky than of Mayakovsky- excoriating the ‘fearful din’ of the elevated railway and standing supine before the ‘cold, noble and clean’ geometry of the Empire State Building, ‘rising up like a beam of artificial ice’; which leads to their noting the strange pointlessness of these feats of technology. The building was half empty at the time.



Their digressions into urbanism shouldn’t obscure what is the essential originality and value of this as a document, which is in that by pinpointing the importance of sameness and sprawl, of advertising and the endless highway, they had discovered where the future would actually lie, rather than in a kinetic mechanisation. One particularly instructive photographic juxtaposition shows the Main Street of two ‘cities’, over a thousand miles apart. In both cases, we see a seemingly endless row of one-storied buildings, a café, a crowd of automobiles, and one or two people looking rather out of place amid the desolation, just enough ‘to contradict the impression that the entire population of the city has perished’. What life there is comes from advertising. Here there is completely inadvertent interest, in that distance has added curiosity to these images of identical towns, and there’s something intriguing about the figures that do walk through these depopulated townscapes. The fur-coated flapper in high heels turning towards Ilf’s camera with an unreadable expression that could be a sneer or surprise, the question of what she might be doing on this street corner; the hilariously upright citizen marching forwards, cowboy hat pulled right over the eyes. He looks somewhat piqued, as if perhaps he’s figured that his interlocutors aren’t from round here. But then somewhat unexpectedly considering what was to come around 15 years later, no-one seems remotely interested in whence Ilf and Petrov have come. Throughout their journey they pick up various hikers, all willing to talk about themselves at length, but never ask what language our correspondents are speaking to each other. At one point, questioning a Southerner as to why he wouldn’t marry a ‘negro’, the reply is ‘you’re from New York, I see’.



Much is pertinent in this peculiar travelogue. The discovery that in fact, the massive distances and mass transportation of an advanced technological superpower would create a population so sedentary, and so alike. That a country committed to democracy would rely on the subjugation of particular peoples - the shacks they photograph of black Southern workers look not unlike those recently turned inside out by Katrina - and by contributing to a dispelling of the myth that the USSR and the USA were some kind of ideological intractables, while in fact the latter was an inextricable part of the dream-life of the former. There is a documentation of and a dialogue with the strange thing-world of a truly advanced capitalism; what lingers of Ilf’s photographs are the odd, discrete objects- an artificial wigwam, a sign of art deco silos (like those reproduced in Moisei Ginzburg’s Constructivist tract Style and Epoch 10 years earlier) announcing entry into Texas, a fibreglass white horse at the front of a bar proclaiming that whiskey will be sold there. As such it is at its most pungent in its digressions on the subject of advertising, which suggest that the American colonising of the European unconscious noted by Wim Wenders in the 1970s could work with great swiftness, even among two writers as persistently on-message as Ilf and Petrov; most memorably in their struggle with what would at one point go under the slogan of ‘the real thing’.

‘We withstood it for a month. We avoided Coca-Cola. We even held out for another month. But then the advertising finally got to us. We experienced the drink. We can speak with clear consciences. Yes, Coca-Cola does refresh the throat, stimulate the nerves, and has a salutary effect on the constitution. How could we not say that, when for three months its been drilled into our skulls every day, every hour and every minute?’