Alexei Kapitonowitsch Gastew

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Alexei Kapitonowitsch Gastew (between 1922 and 1924)

Aleksei Gastev ( Russian Алексей Капитонович Гастев ., Scientific transliteration Aleksej Kapitonovič Gastev ; born September 26 . Jul / 8. October  1882 greg. In Suzdal , Russian Empire ; † 15. April 1939 in Kommunarka ) was a Russian trade union activist and poet . He took part in the Russian Revolution of 1905 .

Life

Gastew was the son of a teacher and a seamstress. He enrolled at the Pedagogical Institute in Moscow, from which he was, however, excluded for attending meetings of the revolutionaries. In 1901 he became a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party . He led a combat group in the city of Kostroma and called the workers in the northern cities of Russia to strike. Gastew was associated with the Bolsheviks and corresponded with Lenin , from whom he received commissions in the period 1905-1907.

Due to his revolutionary activities Gastev was arrested several times and sent into exile in the north and east of Russia. Each time he managed to escape and live illegally in Russia and elsewhere in Europe.

Between 1901 and 1907 Gastew spent most of his time in exile, on the run or as a worker in Russian and Western European factories and sometimes lived under foreign names. Through his direct dealings with the proletariat, he developed a pragmatic understanding of Marxism. For Gastew, the revolution meant giving workers control over their everyday lives and all work processes. As early as 1906, Gastew was involved in the activities of the influential metalworkers union in St. Petersburg. Gastew distanced himself from 1907 from the activities of the Bolsheviks.

After his escape from exile, Gastew lived in Paris from 1910 to 1913 , where he worked in various factories. There he came into contact with the French syndicalism and took numerous perspectives and beliefs that form the Union - Socialism on. Gastew saw in the unions the most effective instrument against capitalism, as they could exert direct influence on the living and working conditions of the workers. In 1913 he returned to Russia. In 1914 he was captured again and exiled to Narym for four years, from which he fled. In 1917 he went to Petrograd. From 1917 to 1918 Gastew was the elected chairman of the Central Committee of the newly founded All-Russian Union of Metalworkers . In 1918 he took an active part in the union conference.

Inspired by the work of the American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor on the scientific management of work processes ( Scientific Management ), Gastew dealt extensively with questions of rationalization in the context of NOT (Russian Научной организации труда, Scientific work organization). NOT was a movement he initiated and which successfully established itself in the USSR in the early 1920s.

In 1920 Gastew founded the Central Labor Institute (CIT) in Moscow, which he himself considered a “total work of art”. The establishment of the institute was expressly welcomed by Lenin , who organized the necessary financial resources. The institute analyzed work processes in detail and made use of the then new media such as film and photography. The analyzes of repetitive processes, such as hammer blows and the operation of machines, were able to contribute to a rationalization of the work and to the improvement of the working conditions. To this end, numerous publications were published that made suggestions for organizing and setting up workplaces. One of the leading figures of the CIT was the movement scientist Nikolai Alexandrowitsch Bernstein , who headed the laboratory for biomechanics there from 1922 to 1925 .

To finance his ideas, Gastew founded the joint stock company Ustanowka (Aufbau) in 1928 , which checked the work processes of industrial companies and offered advice on rationalization. It was not until 1931 that he became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . In 1932 he was also elected chairman of the Soviet standardization office.

Gastew's lyric work

Gastev was also active as a poet and was referred to as the "proletarian bard of the machine age". He is considered an original and talented poet. In 1918 his volume Поэзия рабочего удара (Poėziâ rabočego udara / Poesie des Arbeitsschlag) was published, the last one in 1971. It is a collection of poems and prose texts written over the years, which artistically deal with the social situation of the workers and the Deal with the work process and the revolution. Most of the texts were written before 1914. Gastev's poetic work Ein Packen von Ordern from 1921 is his last and probably most important lyrical utterance. It appeared in German translation in 1999. For the future he was expecting the New Man who would combine the suppleness of animals with the precision of a machine. The power and formal language of the poems in this cycle are still impressive today, and they are sometimes given the title of a new lyrical genre. In addition, they give a striking picture of the mood of the Soviet construction after the October Revolution with all its breaks and excesses. In 1927 V. Percov also accused his poetry of "unprecedented industrial pathos" and "naive and bad taste".

Arrest and death

Gastew's death date is given in various publications as October 1, 1941. In addition to the false date of death, the authorities also told his relatives that he died of natural causes. More recent findings revise this statement. He was arrested on September 8, 1938 for "counter-revolutionary terrorist activities". He was imprisoned in a Moscow prison and sentenced to death by an express court on April 14, 1939. He had neither defense counsel nor the opportunity to appeal the verdict. Gastew was shot on April 15, 1939. It was only with the opening of the Russian presidential archives in the 1990s that a more precise reconstruction of the events was possible. His grandson Alexei Tkačenko-Gastev was granted access to the files, which enabled the circumstances and date of death to be determined. Tkačenko-Gastev published on 29 April 2005 a report on the Internet through access to the file (documents Identification: Центральный архив Федеральной Службы Безопасности Российской Федерации; Фонд уголовных дел Д. Р-4556: Следственное дело Гастева А.К..). The CIT was closed after Gastew's arrest. A number of family members were also arrested and sent to the gulag .

bibliography

  • Поэзия рабочего удара (Poėziâ rabočego udara / poetry of the work blow) . P. 1918, 1919, 1921 (reprint: Khudozhestvenaia literatura, Moscow 1964, 1971).
  • Индустриальный мир (Industrial´nyj mir / The industrialized world) . Kharkov 1919; Vremâ, Moscow 1923.
  • Как надо работать (Kak nado rabotat´ / How to work) . 1921 (reprint: Ekonomika, Leningrad 1966, Moscow 1972).
  • Плановые предпосылки (Planovye predpocylki / planning requirements) . Moscow 1926.
  • Трудовые установки (Trudowyje ustanowki / work facilities) . CIT, Moscow 1924 (reprint: Ekonomika, Moscow 1972, 1973).
  • Aleksey Gastev: A pack of orders . Text in German / Russian. Translation: Cornelia Köster. Verlag Peter Engstler, Ostheim / Rhön 1999, ISBN 3-929375-21-4 , (Original: Пачка ордеров. Riga 1921).

literature

  • Jay B. Sorenson: The Life and Death of Soviet Trade Unionism, 1917-1928 . 2nd Edition. Aldine Pub, New York 2009, ISBN 978-0202363509 .
  • Charles S. Maier: Between Taylorism and Technology: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920’s . In: Journal of Contemporary History. Vol. 5, No. April 2, 1970, pp. 27-61.
  • Kendall E. Bailes: Alexei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism, 1918-1924 . In: Soviet Studies . Vol. 29, No. 3, 1977, p. 373-394.
  • Robert C. Williams: Collective Immortality: The Syndicalist Origins of Proletarian Culture, 1905-1910 . In: Slavic Review. Vol. 5, Number 3, 1980, pp. 389-402.
  • Kurt Johansson: Aleksej Gastev, Proletarian Bard of the Machine Age. Almquist, Stockholm 1983, ISBN 978-9122006145 .
  • Rolf Hellebust: Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body. In: Slavic Review . Vol. 56, Number 3, 1997, pp. 500-518.
  • Siegfried Zielinski: Archeology of the media. At the depth of technical hearing and seeing. rororo, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 978-3499556494 .
  • Rolf Hellebust: Flesh to Metal. Soviet Literature & the Alchemy of Revolution. Cornell University Press, Ithaka (USA) 2003, ISBN 0-8014-4153-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Johansson, 1983
  2. ^ Johansson, 1983.
  3. ↑ cf. Johansson, 1983, pp. 73ff
  4. ↑ Irina Sirotkina: The Ubiquitous Reflex and Its Critics in Post-Revolutionary Russia. In: Reports on the history of science . Volume 32.WILEY-VCH Verlag, Weinheim 2009, ISBN, doi : 10.1002 / bewi.200901378 , p. 72.
  5. ↑ Cornelia Köster: Afterword . In: Gastew: A packing of orders.
  6. ↑ in Johansson, 1983, p. 103.
  7. ↑ Интернет-альманах современной русской поэзии и прозы (Internet Almanac of Modern Russian Poetry and Prose) ( Memento of March 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on July 2, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Gastew, Alexei Kapitonowitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Гастев, Алексей Капитонович (Russian spelling); Gastev, Aleksej Kapitonovič (scientific transliteration)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian union activist and poet
DATE OF BIRTH October 8, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Suzdal , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH April 15, 1939
Place of death Kommunarka