Alexei Gastev and the soviet controversy over Taylorism, 1918–24

Abstract

SOVIET attitudes to work are as important for an understanding of Soviet culture as is, for example, the controversy over the so-called Protestant work ethic for an understanding of modern Western culture.1 While the Soviet Union may not yet have found its Max Weber or its R. H. Tawney to argue over the origins of Soviet attitudes to work, when it does a figure of critical importance for an understanding of this aspect of Soviet culture will be Alexei Gastev. Gastev was the founder of the Central Labour Institute and a major figure in the development and popularization of Soviet ideas concerning 'scientific management', or, as that term is rendered into Russian, nauchnaya organizatsiya truda (scientific organization of work), usually abbreviated as NOT. Gastev was originally known as the most popular of the 'worker-poets' in the early Soviet years-the 'Ovid of engineers, miners, and metal workers'.2 His prose-poems celebrated the life of a new, industrial Russia, and caught the imagination of a generation of Soviet young people, who bought six editions of his Poeziya rabochego udara in the first years of Soviet rule and flocked to hear dramatic readings of his work in the studios of the Proletarian Culture movement.3 These poems were written in prison and Siberian exile before I914, when Gastev was unable to continue his trade union and revolutionary activity. While these poems are far from the level of a Mayakovsky, their use of the strong imagery and language of the Petrograd working class won Mayakovsky's praise, and the Futurists excepted Gastev from their