Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams

The master builders of Soviet society were rather more like Niemeyer designing Brasilia 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. 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. 

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 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This administrative utopianism found expression in a succession of schemes to organize the population (serfs, soldiers, workers, 

Plan (Magnitogorsk), not to mention collectivization. Sheila Fitzpatrick has appropriately called this passion for sheer size giganto-mania. 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. 

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 experiments 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 airplanes. But when the two are confused—when, say, the general mistakes the parade ground for the battlefield itself—the consequences are potentially disastrous. 

---