14
Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams
J. C. Scott
The master builders of Soviet society were rather more like Niemeyer designing
Brasília than Baron Haussmann retrofitting Paris. A combination of defeat in war,
economic collapse and a revolution had provided the closest thing to a bulldozed site
that a state builder ever gets. The result was a kind of ultrahigh modernism that in
its audacity recalled the Utopian aspects of its precursor, the French Revolution.
This is not the place, nor am I the most knowledgeable guide, for an extensive
discussion of Soviet high modernism.^1 What I aim to do, instead, is to emphasize the
cultural and aesthetic elements in Soviet high modernism. This will in turn pave the
way for an examination of an illuminating point of direct contact between Soviet
and American high modernism: the belief in huge, mechanized, industrial farms.
In certain vital respects, Soviet high modernism is not a sharp break from Rus-
sian absolutism. Ernest Gellner has argued that of the two facets of the Enlighten-
ment – the one asserting the sovereignty of the individual and his interests, the other
commending the rational authority of experts – it was the second that spoke to rulers
who wanted their ‘backward’ states to catch up. The Enlightenment arrived in Cen-
tral Europe, he concludes, as a ‘centralizing rather than a liberating force’.^2
Strong historical echoes of Leninist high modernism can thus be found in
what Richard Stites calls the ‘administrative utopianism’ of the Russian czars and
their advisers in the 18th and 19th centuries. This administrative utopianism
found expression in a succession of schemes to organize the population (serfs, sol-
diers, workers, functionaries) into institutions ‘based upon hierarchy, discipline,
regimentation, strict order, rational planning, a geometrical environment, and a
form of welfarism’.^3 Peter the Great’s Saint Petersburg was the urban realization of
this vision. The city was laid out according to a strict rectilinear and radial plan on
completely new terrain. Its straight boulevards were, by design, twice as wide as the
tallest building, which was, naturally, at the geometric centre of the city. The build-
ings themselves reflected function and hierarchy, as the façade, height and material
of each corresponded to the social class of its inhabitants. The city’s physical layout
was in fact a legible map of its intended social structure.
Reprinted from Scott J C. 1998. Soviet collectivism, capitalist dreams, in Seeing Like a State. Yale
University Press, New Haven, pp193–222.