Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams 333Notes
1 The best source for a discussion about Soviet high modernism is probably Richard Stites, Revolu-
tionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989). Its generous bibliography appears to cover most of the available sources.
2 This inference, we know, is not a distortion of the doctrines of liberalism. J. S. Mill, whose cre-
dentials as a liberal son of the Enlightenment are not in doubt, considered backwardness a sufficient
justification for placing authoritarian powers in the hands of a modernizer. See Ernest Gellner, ‘The
Struggle to Catch Up,’ Times Literary Supplement, 9 December 1994, p. 14. For a more detailed
argument along these lines, see also Jan P. Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh, eds., The Decolo-
nization of the Imagination: Culture, Knowledge, and Power (London: Zed Press, 1995).
3 Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, p19. Engels expressed his disdain for Communist Utopian schemes
like these by calling them ‘barracks Communism’.
4 One could say that Catherine the Great, being Prussian born and an avid correspondent with
several of the Encylopedists, including Voltaire, came by her mania for rational order honestly.
5 Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 119. The
term ‘gigantomania’ was, I believe, also in use in the Soviet Union. The ultimate failure of most
of the USSR’s great schemes is in itself an important story, the significance of which was captured
epigrammatically by Robert Conquest, who observed that ‘the end of the Cold War can be seen
as the defeat of Magnitogorsk by Silicon Valley’ (‘Party in the Dock,’ Times Literary Supplement,
6 November 1992, p. 7). For an industrial, cultural and social history of Magnitogorsk, see
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1995).
6 An interesting parallel can be seen in the French countryside following the Revolution, when
campaigns called for ‘de-Christianization’ and offered associated secular rituals.
7 Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, p. 119. See also Vera Sandomirsky Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Mid-
dle-Class Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), for how, under
Stalin, this austerity was transformed into opulence.
8 Stites, ‘Festivals of the People,’ chap. 4 of Revolutionary Dreams, pp. 79–97.
9 Ibid., p. 95. Through Sergey Eisenstein’s films, these public theatrical reenactments are the visual
images that remain embedded in the consciousness of many of those who were not participants in
the actual revolution.
10 Composers and filmmakers were also expected to be ‘engineers of the soul’.
11 Quoted in Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, p. 243.
12 Lenin, almost certainly influenced by another of his favourite books, Campanella’s City of the Sun,
wanted public sculptures of revolutionaries, complete with inspiring inscriptions, to be erected
throughout the city: a propaganda of monuments. See Anatoly Lunacharsky, ‘Lenin and Art,’
International Literature 5 (May 1935): 66–71.
13 Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, p. 242.
14 This entire section is based on chaps. 2, 4 and 6 of a remarkable forthcoming book by Deborah
Fitzgerald, Yeoman No More: The Industrialization of American Agriculture, to which I am greatly
indebted. The chapter and page numbers that follow refer to the draft manuscript.
15 Ibid., chap. 2, p. 21.
16 As many commentators have emphasized, this redesigning of work processes wrested the control
of production from skilled artisans and labourers and placed it in the hands of management,
whose ranks and prerogatives grew as the labour force was ‘de-skilled’.
17 Around 1920, much of the market for agricultural machinery made by US manufacturers was not
in the United States, where farm sizes were still relatively small, but outside the country, in such
places as Canada, Argentina, Australia and Russia, where farms were considerably larger. Fitzger-
ald, Yeoman No More, chap. 2, p. 31.