The engineer’s plot
Historical Background
After the abdication of Tsar Nicholaas II by the Bolshevists in 1917, the communist regime attempted to develop Russia from a de facto agricultural society into a modern industrialised nation. With the implementation of a planned economy the leadership quickly gained total control over every aspect of society. The documentary highlights the degenerative development of Soviet technological determinism as it evolved from a moral attempt to build a rational society into a bizarre bewildering existence for millions of Soviet people.
Social interest
With the prospect of a utopian society, engineers became the new elite of an ideology which claimed to have no societal inequality. Contradictory to their initials ideals, the Communists eventually transformed Russia from a despotic autocracy into a panoptical society administrated by stringent technocrats. As the planning of every aspect of social and economic life became increasingly more uncontrollable the inevitable economic stagnation turned into economic crisis and finally resulted in the end of communism.
Pandora’s Box
Pandora’s Box is a six part BBC television documentary series written and produced by British television producer and documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. Each part of the series focuses on social, political or scientific aspects of reality and examines the increasing influence and danger of political and technological rationalism.
About the filmmaker
Adam Curtis is a renowned British television producer and documentary filmmaker noted for making programmes which often make far reaching claims on grand subjects. The scale of his subject matter and his claims to the undisputable truth of his opinion often give rise to controversy. However, his documentaries always expound clear views on the subject and are structurally well argued. Curtis is known for his extensive use of archival footage and the narration of his own documentaries.
Awards
Pandora’s Box won the 1993 BAFTA Award for Best Factual Series.
Scenes
- Introduction
- The engineers plot, part one of the television documentary series Pandora’s Box, illustrates how the vision of the Bolsheviks to use science to chance the world was itself transformed. The documentary highlights how soviet technological determinism developed from a moral attempt to build a rational society into a bizarre bewildering existence for millions of people.
- The aim of the Bolsheviks
- The aim of the Bolsheviks was to transform the people they ruled into scientific beings; people able to understand and control machines, rather than become enslaved by them. Their most extraordinary project of all was the Central Institute of Labour. It was run by a pioneer of scientific management in Russia, Alexei Gastev. The aim of the institute according to Gastev’s son, “Man would become a rational component of the machine.”
- Old Bourgeois engineers
- As modern technology become the determining factor in shaping the future of the Soviet Union, power shifted to those who could build this new industrial society. This clip illustrates how that power rested with the bourgeois specialists – engineers from before the Russian revolution. Although they soon became influence figures in the State Planning Committee (Gosplan), there power was challenges in the Industrial Party show trials where many were accused and convicted of plotting a coup against the Soviet government.
- New Soviet engineers
- After a bitter power struggle following Lenin’s death, Stalin ascended to power. He was determined to recapture the momentum of the revolution and send the Soviet Union on a crash course of industrialisation. After in the Industrial Party show trials, Stalin declared that Bolsheviks, and not the bourgeois specialists, should master modern technology. As a result, he ordered the establishment of engineering schools that would train the new generation of young faithful party members.
- Copying Gary, USA
- The prototype of Soviet industrial planning was the mining and industrial city Magnitogorsk. It was modelled after the US city Gary (Indiana) which was at the time the most prominent center of steel production in the United States. Planners aligned living and production sectors to minimize travel time; workers were allocated to a sector in the residential band closest to the sector of the industrial band in which they worked.
- The Great Purge
- This clip explains the effect of The Great Purge on the industrial development of the Soviet Union. The main beneficiaries of the purges were the newly trained soviet engineers who were unquestionably loyal to Stalin. The clip includes an excerpt from Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel by American writer John Scott, which accounts his experiences as a welder in Magnitogorsk.
- Gosplan, planning society
- The new soviet engineers were convinced that in order to rebuild the Soviet Union after the Second World War an all embracing plan would be needed, one in which everything would be taken care of in a rational way. This accumulated in the commanding influence of Gosplan – or State Planning Committee – which would soon determine the production and consumption of every imaginable product and service in the Soviet Union.
- Planning and Cybernetics
- By the early 1970s it had become evident that the planned economy model dictated by Gosplan had become unmanageable. According to leading scientist Victor Glushkov the solution lay in the science of rational control from the US, cybernetics. For more on cybernetics in the USSR, you can consult Slava Gerovitch’s book From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (2004).
- Consumer demands
- Despite the failure of cybernetics to master the increasing complexity of a planed economy, Khrushchev’s followers remained convinced that there were scientific solutions to control it. They established institutes that would scientifically determine people’s demands and allocate resources accordingly. In this clip employees of one such institute explain with which difficulties they were confronted.
- Years of stagnation
- The concluding part of the documentary illustrates how the Brezhnev Stagnation of the mid-70’s led to a period of economic standstill between 1979 and 1985. Complex demands of the modern economy and inflexible administration overwhelmed and constrained the central planners. Corruption and data fiddling became common practice among bureaucrats to report fulfilled targets and quotas, thus entrenching the crisis. This clip features comments by economist Abel Aganbegayan and historian Vitalii Lelchuk.
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