Aleksei Gastev

From Monoskop
Revision as of 00:06, 14 August 2015 by Dusan (talk | contribs) (→‎Works)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Portrait of Gastev by Z. Tolkachev. From Gastev, Revolt of Culture, 1923.
Born October 8, 1882(1882-10-08)
Suzdal, Russian Empire
Died April 15, 1939(1939-04-15) (aged 56)
Kommunarka, near Moscow, Soviet Union
Web Wikipedia, Wikipedia-RU

Aleksei Kapitonovich Gastev (Алексей Капитонович Гастев; 1882-1939) was an early proponent of the scientific management of labour and an avant-garde poet.

Life and work

This section is sourced from Andrey Smirnov, Sound in Z: Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th-century Russia, London, 2013, pp 105-6.

Gastev was one of the most popular and outstanding proletarian poets of early post-revolutionary Russia. Gastev's influence on contemporaries and culture as a whole was considerable. As poet Nikolay Aseev described him in 1922 in his poem "Gastev": "Ovid of miners and metalworkers".[1] Among his numerous followers were composer Arseny Avraamov, producer, director and actor Vsevolod Meyerhold, physiologist Nikolai Bernstein and many involved in the "scientific organization of labour" (nauchnaya organizacia truda, NOT).

Born to a teacher and a seamstress in Suzdal, Russia, Gastev enrolled in the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, but was expelled after participation in a revolutionary meeting. Shortly after that Gastev was arrested and exiled to northern Russia. As a result of his exile, followed by emigration, in 1910-13 he spent three years working in the industrial factories of Paris, including at the Renault automobile factory.

After the October Revolution, Gastev returned to Russia. In 1918 he established a network of trade unions according to the model of the French syndicalists. "Each turner is a director of the machine tool", he constantly emphasized. "We put a resolute end to division into the so-called executive personnel and the personnel of management."[2] From its inception he had been the main ideologist of Proletkult.

Gastev was allegedly a personal acquaintance of, and in correspondence with, Henry Ford. Fascinated by Taylorism and Fordism, he led a popular movement for the "scientific organization of labour" which considered increasing automatization and standardization of workers' movements, language, and even thoughts as means for improving the efficiency of labour. He was convinced that his main artistic creation was CIT — the Central Institute of Labour which was founded in 1920 and supported by Lenin. In 1928 after an inspection of CIT laboratories the famous proletarian poet Maxim Gorky embraced Gastev and, referring to his departure from poetry, commented: "Now I understand why you have discarded fiction: the one is at the expense of the other."[3]

Meanwhile in 1921 at the All-Russian Scientific Management Conference, organized by Leon Trotsky, and held in Moscow, Platon Kerzhentsev, a Left Communist and the leading critic of Gastev, proposed an alternative to Gastev's work. It was a 'black mark' for Gastev. In totalitarian Russia in the 1930s Kerzhentsev became a leading theorist and organizer of scientific management in the country, based on the principles of vertical authority. The totalitarian State of the 1930s was opposed to the creation of an anarchical network of socially engineered Cyborgs with liberated minds. In 1938 Aleksei Gastev was arrested on false charges of 'counter-revolutionary terrorist activity' and sentenced to death by a fast trial; his institute was closed. On 15 April 1939 he was shot to death in the suburbs of Moscow.

Chronology

Taken from Johansson 1983: 7-8.

  • 1882 Born in Suzdal.
  • 1898 or 1899 Enters the Moscow Teachers' College.
  • 1900 Joins the Social-Democratic Party.
  • 1902 Expelled from the college. Arrested.
  • 1903 Sentenced to three years exile.
  • 1904 Flees to Paris. Pubhshes short story "The Accursed Question" in Geneva.
  • 1905 Professional revolutionary, active in the cities of Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kostroma and Jaroslavl'.
  • 1906 Delegate to the RSDRP's fourth congress in Stockholm. Arrested in Moscow. Sentenced to three years exile. Escapes to Paris. Returns to Russia in the fall.
  • 1907 Work and family life in Petersburg under assumed names.
  • 1910 Contributor to Zhizn' dlya vsekh. Moves to Paris.
  • 1913 Returns to Russia. Contributes to Pravda.
  • 1914 Arrested. Exiled to Narym for four years.
  • 1915 Flight to Tomsk and then to Novo-Nikolaevsk.
  • 1916 The poem in prose "Ekspress". Contributor to the newspaper Golos Sibiri.
  • 1917 Returns to Petrograd. Writes for several journals and newspa­pers. Elected general secretary of the All-Russian Metal­-Workers' Union.
  • 1918 First edition of Poeziya rabochego udara. To the Ukraine in the fall.
  • 1919 Appointed Commissar of the All-Ukrainian Art Soviet in Kharkiv.
  • 1920 Moves to Moscow. The beginning of the Central Institute of Labour (CIT).
  • 1921 Publication of Pachka orderov in Riga.
  • 1923 Fifth edition of PRU.
  • 1926 Sixth edition of PRU.
  • 1931 Becomes member of Communist Party.
  • 1932 Appointed chairman of the Soviet Bureau of Standardiza­tion.
  • 1934 Takes part in international congress on standardization in Stockholm.
  • 1936 Organizes training of Stakhanovites.
  • 1938 Arrested.
  • 1941 Officially declared dead on 1 October.
  • 1956 Rehabilitated.
Kako nado rabotat?, 1921/1972, PDF.

Works

  • Poeziya rabochego udara [Поэзия рабочего удара], Petrograd, 1918; 2nd ed., 1919; 3rd ed., Petrograd, 1921, 59 pp, edition of 3,000; Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel, 1964; repr., Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1971. A collection of poems. (Russian)
  • Pachka orderov [Пачка ордеров], Riga, 1921. A collection of poems. (Russian)
    • Ein Packen von Ordern, trans. Cornelia Köster, Ostheim/Rhön: Peter Engstler, 1999. (German)/(Russian)
  • Industrial'nyy mir [Индустриальный мир], Kharkiv, 1919; Moscow: Vremya, 1923. (Russian)
  • Yunost' idi! [Юность иди!], Moscow: VTsSPS, 1923, 72 pp. Edition of 10,000. (Russian)
  • Snaryazheniye sovremennoy kul'tury [Снаряжение современной культуры], 1923.
  • Vosstanie kultury [Восстание культуры], Kharkiv: Molodoy rabochiy, 1923. (Russian)
  • Novaia kul'turnaia ustanovka [Новая культурная установка], 1923; 2nd ed., Moscow: VtsSPS-TsIT, 1924. (Russian)
  • Kak nado rabotat [Как надо работать?], Moscow: VDSPS, 1924; 1st ed., Moscow: Ekonomika, 1966; 2nd ed., Moscow, 1972, 478 pp, HTML, HTML. (Russian)
  • Trudovye ustanovki [Трудовые установки], Moscow: TsIT, 1924, 302 pp + illustr.album, edition of 3,000; 2nd ed., Moscow: Ekonomika, 1973. (Russian)
  • Professional'nyye soyuzy i organizatsiya truda [Профессиональные союзы и организация труда], Izd-vo Leningradskogo Gubernskogo Soveta professional'nykh soyuzov, 1924. (Russian)
  • Planovyye predposylki [Плановые предпосылки], Moscow: NKRKI SSSR, 1926. (Russian)
  • Ustanovka proizvodstva metodom TsIT [Установка производства методом ЦИТ], Moscow, 1927. (Russian)
  • Normirovaniye i organizatsiya truda (Obshcheye vvedeniye v problemu) [Нормирование и организация труда (Общее введение в проблему)], Moscow: VTsSPS, 1929, 118 pp, edition of 5,000. (Russian)
  • Leonardo da Vinchi [Леонардо да Винчи], Moscow, 1982, 136 pp.
Kurt Johansson, Aleksej Gastev: Proletarian Bard of the Machine Age, Log, PDF.

Literature

Notes

  1. ↑ N. Aseev, Stihotvorenia i poemi, Moscow: Sovetski pisatel, 1967.
  2. ↑ A. Karpichev, "Nestandartni Gastev" [Non-standard Gastev], Standarti i kachestvo 9, Moscow, 2004. Trans. Andrey Smirnov.
  3. ↑ Ibid.

See also

Retrieved from "https://monoskop.org/index.php?title=Aleksei_Gastev&oldid=61486"