We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

In his cultural history of Russia, Natasha’s Dance, Orlando Figes describes Gastev’s research excellently: Hundreds of identically dressed trainees would be marched in columns to their benches, and orders would be given out by buzzes from machines. The workers were trained to hammer correctly, for instance by holding a hammer attached to and moved by a special machine, so that they internalized its mechanical rhythm. The same process was repeated for chiseling, filing and other basic skills. Gastev’s aim, by his own admission, was to turn the worker into a sort of ‘human robot’. . . Gastev envisaged a utopia where ‘people’ would be replaced by ‘proletarian units’ identified by ciphers such as ‘A,B,C, or 325, 075, 0, and so on.’ These automatons would be like machines, ‘incapable of individual thought’, and would simply obey their controller. A ‘mechanized collectivism’ would ‘take the place of the individual personality in the psychology of the proletariat’. There would no longer be a need for emotions, and the human soul would no longer be measured ‘by a shout or a smile but by a pressure gauge or a speedometer’.