Pandora's Box - Part 1: "The Engineer's Plot"

This episode, originally broadcast on 11 June 1992, details how the Bolshevik revolutionaries who came into power in 1917 attempted to industrialise and control the Soviet Union with rational scientific methods. The Bolsheviks wanted to turn the Soviet people into scientific beings. Aleksei Gastev used social engineering, including a social engineering machine, to make people more rational.

But Bolshevik politicians and bourgeois engineers came into conflict. Lenin said, "The communists are not directing anything, they are being directed." Stalin arrested 2000 engineers in 1930, eight of whom were convicted in the Industrial Party show trial. Engineering schools gave those loyal to the party only limited training in engineering, to minimise their potential political influence. Industrialised America was used as a template to develop the Soviet Union. Magnitogorsk was built to closely replicate the steel mill city Gary, Indiana. A former worker describes how they went so far as to create metal trees since trees could not grow on the steppe.

By the late 1930s, Stalin-faithful engineers like Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikita Khrushchev grew in influence, due to Stalin eliminating many earlier Bolshevik engineers. They aimed to use engineering in line with Stalin's policies to plan the entire country. At Gosplan, the head institution of central planning, engineers predicted future rational needs. Vitalii Semyonovich Lelchuk, from the USSR Academy of Sciences, describes the level of detail as absurd, "Even the KGB was told the quota of arrests to be made and the prisons to be used. The demand for coffins, novels and movies was all planned." The seemingly rational benchmarks began to have unexpected results. When the plan measured tonnes carried per kilometer, trains went on long journeys simply to meet the quota. Sofas and chandeliers increased in size to meet requirements of material usage.

When Nikita Khrushchev took over after Stalin, he tried to make improvements, including considering prices in the plan. The head of the USSR State Committee for Organization and Methodology of Price Creation is shown with a tall stack of price logbooks declaring, "This shows quite clearly that the system is rational." Academician Victor Glushkov proposed the use of cybernetics to control people as a remedy for the problems of planning. In the 1960s, computers began to be used to process economic data. Consumer demand was calculated by computers from data gathered by surveys. But the time delay in the system meant that items were no longer in demand by the time they had been produced.

When Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin took over in the mid-1960s, the economy of the Soviet Union was stagnating. By 1978, the country was in full economic crisis. Production had degenerated to a "pointless, elaborate ritual" and endeavours to improve the plan had been abandoned. The narrator says, "What had begun as a grand moral attempt to build a rational society ended by creating a bizarre, bewildering existence for millions of Soviet people."

(Wikipedia)