Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams 309Saint Petersburg had many counterparts, urban and rural. Under Catherine
the Great, Prince Grigory Potemkin established a whole series of model cities (such
as Ekaterinoslav) and model rural settlements. The next two czars, Paul and Alex-
ander I, inherited Catherine’s passion for Prussian order and efficiency.^4 Their
adviser, Alexei Arakcheev, established a model estate on which peasants wore uni-
forms and followed elaborate instructions on upkeep and maintenance, to the
point of carrying ‘punishment books’ inscribed with records of their violations.
This estate was made the basis of a far bolder plan for a network of widely scat-
tered, self-sufficient military colonies, which by the late 1820s included 750,000
people. This attempt to create a new Russia, in contrast to the disorder, mobility
and flux of a frontier society, quickly succumbed to popular resistance, corruption
and inefficiency. Long before the Bolsheviks took power, in any case, the historical
landscape was littered with the wreckage of many miscarried experiments in
authoritarian social planning.
Lenin and his confederates could implement their high-modernist plans start-
ing from nearly zero. The war, the revolution and the subsequent famine had gone
a long way toward dissolving the prerevolutionary society, particularly in the cities.
A general collapse of industrial production had provoked a vast exodus from the
cities and a virtual regression to a barter economy. The ensuing four-year civil war
further dissolved existing social ties as well as schooling the hard-pressed Bolshe-
viks in the methods of ‘war Communism’ – requisitions, martial law, coercion.
Working on a levelled social terrain and harbouring high-modernist ambitions
in keeping with the distinction of being the pioneers of the first socialist revolu-
tion, the Bolsheviks thought big. Nearly everything they planned was on a monu-
mental scale, from cities and individual buildings (the Palace of Soviets) to
construction projects (the White Sea Canal) and, later, the great industrial projects
of the first Five-Year Plan (Magnitogorsk), not to mention collectivization. Sheila
Fitzpatrick has appropriately called this passion for sheer size ‘gigantomania’.^5 The
economy itself was conceived as a well-ordered machine, where everyone would
simply produce goods of the description and quantity specified by the central
state’s statistical bureau, as Lenin had foreseen.
A transformation of the physical world was not, however, the only item on the
Bolshevik agenda. It was a cultural revolution that they sought, the creation of a
new person. Members of the secular intelligentsia were the most devoted partisans
of this aspect of the revolution. Campaigns to promote atheism and to suppress
Christian rituals were pressed in the villages. New ‘revolutionary’ funeral and mar-
riage ceremonies were invented amidst much fanfare, and a ritual of ‘Octobering’
was encouraged as an alternative to baptism.^6 Cremation – rational, clean, eco-
nomical – was promoted. Along with this secularization came enormous and
widely popular campaigns to promote education and literacy. Architects and social
planners invented new communal living arrangements designed to supersede the
bourgeois family pattern. Communal food, laundry and child-care services prom-
ised to free women from the traditional division of labour. Housing arrangements
were explicitly intended to be ‘social condensers’.