Few houses of this sort were ever built, although they loomed large in the Utopian imagination and futuristic novels such as Zamyatin's We (1920). Most of the projects which did materialize, like the Narkomfin (Ministry of Finance) house, designed by the Constructivist Moisei Ginzburg and built in Moscow between 1928 and 1930, tended to stop short of the full communal form, with private living spaces and communalized blocks for laundries and bath houses, dining rooms and kitchens, nurseries and schools.26 But the aim remained to marshal architecture in a way that would induce the individual to move away from private ('bourgeois') forms of domesticity to a more collective way of life. Architects envisaged a Utopia where everybody lived in huge communal houses, stretching high into the sky, with large green open spaces surrounding them (much like those conceived by Le Cor-busier or the garden city movement in Europe at that time), and everything provided on a social basis, from entertainment to electricity. They conceived of the city as a vast laboratory for organizing the behaviour and the psyche of the masses, as a totally controlled environment where the egotistic impulses of individual people could be remoulded rationally to operate as one collective body or machine.27
It had always been the aim of the Bolsheviks to create a new type of human being. As Marxists, they believed that human nature was a product of historical development, and could thus be transformed by a revolution in the way that people lived. Lenin was deeply influenced by the ideas of the physiologist Ivan Sechenov, who maintained that the brain was an electromechanical device responding to external
stimuli. Sechenov's materialism was the starting point for I. P. Pavlov's research on the conditioned reflexes of the brain (dogs' brains in particular), which was heavily supported by the Soviet government despite Pavlov's well-known anti-Soviet views. This was where science and socialism met. Lenin spoke of Pavlov's work as 'hugely significant for our revolution'.28 Trotsky waxed lyrical on the 'real scientific possibility' of reconstructing man:
What is man? He is by no means a finished or harmonious being. No, he is still a highly awkward creature. Man, as an animal, has not evolved by plan but spontaneously, and has accumulated many contradictions. The question of how to educate and regulate, of how to improve and complete the physical and spiritual construction of man, is a colossal problem which can only be understood on the basis of socialism. We can construct a railway across the Sahara, we can build the Eiffel Tower and talk directly with New York, but surely we cannot improve on man. Yes we can! To produce a new, 'improved version' of man - that is the future task of communism. And for that we first have to find out everything about man, his anatomy, his physiology and that part of his physiology which is called his psychology. Man must look at himself and see himself as a raw material, or at best as a semi-manufactured product, and say: 'At last, my dear
The artist also had a central role to play in the construction of Soviet man. It was Stalin who first used the famous phrase, in 1932, about the artist as the 'engineer of the human soul'. But the concept of the artist as engineer was central to the whole of the Soviet avant-garde (not just those artists who toed the Party line), and it applied to many of the left-wing and experimental groups which dedicated their art to the building of a New World after 1917: the Constructivists, the Futurists, the artists aligned to Proletkult and the Left Front (LEF), Vsevolod Meyerhold in the theatre, or the Kinok group and Eisenstein in cinema all broadly shared the communist ideal. All these artists were involved in their own revolutions against 'bourgeois' art, and they were convinced that they could train the human mind to see the world in a more socialistic way through new art forms. They viewed the brain as a complex piece of machinery which they could recondition through reflexes provoked by their mechanistic art (cinematic montage, biomechanics
in the theatre, industrial art, etc.). Since they believed that consciousness was shaped by the environment, they focused on forms of art, like architecture and documentary film, photomontage and poster art, designs for clothes and fabrics, household objects and furniture, which had a direct impact on people's daily lives.
