310 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
The ‘new man’ – the Bolshevik specialist, engineer or functionary – came to
represent a new code of social ethics, which was sometimes simply called kultura.
In keeping with the cult of technology and science, kultura emphasized punctual-
ity, cleanliness, businesslike directness, polite modesty, and good, but never showy,
manners.^7 It was this understanding of kultura and the party’s passion for the
League of Time, with its promotion of time consciousness, efficient work habits
and clock-driven routine, that were so brilliantly caricatured in Eugene Zamiatin’s
novel We and that later became the inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984.
What strikes an outside observer of this revolution in culture and architecture
is its emphasis on public form – on getting the visual and aesthetic dimensions of
the new world straight. One can perhaps see this best in what Stites calls the ‘festi-
vals of mustering’ organized by the cultural impresario of the early Soviet state,
Anatoly Lunacharsky.^8 In the outdoor dramas he produced, the revolution was
reenacted on a scale that must have seemed as large as the original, with cannons,
bands, searchlights, ships on the river, 4000 actors and 35,000 spectators.^9 Whereas
the actual revolution had all the usual messiness of reality, the reenactment called
for military precision, and the various actors were organized by platoon and mobi-
lized with semaphore and field telephones. Like mass exercises, the public spectacle
gave a retroactive order, purpose and central direction to the events, which were
designed to impress the spectator, not to reflect the historical facts.^10 If one can see
in Arakcheev’s military colonies an attempt to prefigure, to represent, a wished-for
order, then perhaps Lunacharsky’s staged revolution can be seen as a representation
of the wished-for relationship between the Bolsheviks and the proletarian crowd.
Little effort was spared to see that the ceremony turned out right. When Lunach-
arsky himself complained that churches were being demolished for the May Day
celebrations, Lazar Kaganivich, the city boss of Moscow, replied, ‘And my aesthet-
ics demand that the demonstration processions from the six districts of Moscow
should all pour into Red Square at the same time.’^11 In architecture, public manners,
urban design and public ritual, the emphasis on a visible, rational, disciplined social
facade seemed to prevail.^12 Stites suggests that there is some inverse relation between
this public face of order and purpose and the near anarchy that reigned in society at
large: ‘As in the case of all such Utopias, its organizers described it in rational, sym-
metrical terms, in the mathematical language of planning, control figures, statistics,
projections and precise commands. As in the vision of military colonies, which the
Utopian plan faintly resembled, its rational facade barely obscured the oceans of
misery, disorder, chaos, corruption and whimsicality that went with it.’^13
One possible implication of Stites’s assertion is that, in some circumstances,
what I call the miniaturization of order may be substituted for the real thing. A
facade or a small, easily managed zone of order and conformity may come to be an
end in itself; the representation may usurp the reality. Miniatures and small exper-
iments have, of course, an important role in studying larger phenomena. Model
aircraft built to scale and wind tunnels are essential steps in the design of new air-
planes. But when the two are confused – when, say, the general mistakes the parade
ground for the battlefield itself – the consequences are potentially disastrous.