Pandora's Box

'If you were a scientist, you were it.'

'Your excellent scientists, I am your faithful servant.'

'building a new world.'

To those who began the revolution in Russia 75 years ago, science was a grand liberating force.

They believed Karl Marx had found the scientific laws of society

with which they would create a new world with everyone equal and free.

But within 20 years, the revolution was taken over by technocrats, who thought of the crowd as atoms.

They were inspired by the laws of engineering.

They wanted to transform the Soviet union into a giant rational machine

which they would run for their political masters.

Translation:

Music: "Summertime blues" by Eddie Cochran

Bell tolls

this is a story of science and political power -

how the bolsheviks' vision of using science to change the world was itself transformed.

What resulted was a strange experiment, far removed from the original aims of the revolution.

'Greetings from Moscow, the capital of the Soviet union -

'the world's first socialist state.

'All belongs to the people, all is created by the people and all is done to benefit the people.'

modern technology was central to the bolsheviks' plans.

Above all, the new power of electricity.

In 1920, Lenin unveiled a huge map dotted with light bulbs to show the planned electrification of the ussr.

To illuminate the bulbs, all electricity in the rest of Moscow had to be shut off.

Communism, said Lenin, is Soviet power plus electrification.

The aim of the bolsheviks was to transform the people they ruled

into what they called "scientific beings",

people able to understand and control machines, not be enslaved.

In mass parades, machines "crushed" the irrational dogmas of the past.

Moscow became "a talking city" -

its walls adorned with geometric perspectives,

its statues surrounded by parallelograms and futuristic structures.

Even music was used to transform the way people understood the world.

Electrical machines made what was called "rational music".

The most extraordinary project of all was the central institute of labour.

It was run by alexei gastev, who studied workers as though they were parts in a machine.

It was far more than mere time and motion.

Gastev believed he could teach people to behave in a rational way.

To do this, he built the social engineering machine. How it worked is a mystery, even to his son.

"Such is the power of science," said trotsky,

"that the average human being will become an Aristotle, a Marx. And beyond this, new peaks will rise."

In fact, the power to shape the future of the Soviet union

was passing to those who could build the new industrial society.

They were known as the bourgeois specialists, engineers who had the skills to master modern technology.

By 1923 they made up over three quarter of the state planning committee.

Under the tsar, their plans for factories and power stations had not been realised.

Now they could build them and they became influential figures.

Lenin saw his dream of control over this new world slipping away.

"To tell the truth," he said, "the communists are not directing anything. They are being directed."

But in 1924, Lenin died.

After a bitter struggle, Stalin seized power.

He decided to send Russia on a crash course of industrialisation.

It would bring even more power to the bourgeois engineers.

They sing in Russian

Man's voice:

Song continues

in 1927, Stalin began the five year plan.

Hundreds of thousands of volunteers travelled to the remote and desolate parts of the Soviet union.

Millions more were forced to join them. They had five years to build a modern industrial state.

Magnitogorsk, built in the far-off ural mountains on the edge of Asia,

was to become one of the largest steel plants in the world.

At the centre of these gigantic projects

were the only engineers they had - the bourgeois specialists.

At the end of 1930, the engineers' dream suddenly became a nightmare.

Stalin ordered 2,000 of them to be arrested and eight of them were put on a public show trial.

The charges were fantastic.

It was alleged that the engineers had plotted to seize power

and impose a government of technical specialists and scientists.

Their "confessions" were carefully rehearsed.

But behind this public charade was a very real struggle.

A year before, a group of engineers had publicly challenged Stalin

to give them more control of the five year plan.

The future, they had announced, belongs to managing engineers.

Instead, they were condemned to death or to continue to work on their schemes in chains.

A week later, Stalin announced bolsheviks must master technology. They must become specialists.

In the reconstruction period, technology decides everything.

He ordered engineering schools to be set up across the country.

But in the process, the aim of the revolution was redefined.

Technology was to have been the means to liberate the people. Now it had become an end in itself -

large-scale industrial production.

The education the engineers received was of the narrowest kind.

The commissar of education pleaded with Stalin, "there is a certain minimum of scientific culture

"which an engineer must master.

"It is as if, discovering we can live with four fingers, we cut-off the fifth one."

But he was dismissed.

Accordion intro

they sing in Russian

the model for this new world was america, the most successful industrial state in the world.

Stalin was determined to overtake it.

Sings solo

the prototype was magnitogorsk,

which had been based on a particular American city.

"We invite you to a city which has the largest steelworks, the largest plant in the world.

"We invite you to a city of blazing furnaces, of handsome homes, of magnificent schools,

"of fraternal temples, of shining beaches,

"of restful dunes, of flashing water, of dazzling sands.

"This is the city that we invite you. It is the magic city.

"It is called the magic city for these reasons."

Like many cities in america's north east, Gary is now almost derelict.

But 70 years ago, it was a new kind of model city,

planned around a steel mill.

To its builders, it was a chance to break with the past.

We were building that city. We took pride in that. We started fresh. We didn't undo anything.

We picked out what was the best all over. Even the steel mills,

we didn't have to destroy something to put something better in.

We got the best out of the catalogues.

There was a magic in doing this thing.

You took pride in something like that. We were all building the new world.

Magnitogorsk was a copy of Gary. These plans for the works with the city radiating out

were drawn up by the same American designers who'd built Gary.

Some American engineers even came to magnitogorsk

to take part in the building of Russia's city of steel.

As in Gary, a planned city began to grow up around the plant.

But in a nearby valley, a very different city was constructed where the American engineers lived.

Designed by a young Russian architect,

these dozen houses were copied from American architectural catalogues.

It was very like mount Vernon, New York, or germantown, Pennsylvania.

In what everyone called the American city,

the atmosphere had the smugness of park Avenue,

yet less than two miles away, the wolves howled and the wind blew across the endless Russian steppe.

Rosa inkina:

Those living in the American city were the new elite - old bolshevik commissars, foreign technicians

and an increasing number of young red engineers.

Dance music on gramophone

by the mid-30s, the engineers had become the heroes of society.

Praised by Stalin, they flaunted their new status,

relaxing in the shadow of the industrial world they had built.

Soviet man, who was once to have surpassed Aristotle and Marx,

had been replaced by the zealous engineer,

taught to think of everything in technical terms, and completely loyal to Stalin.

In the 30s, thousands travelled to the Soviet union to marvel at this dream come true.

But what they saw was an orderly society administered by technocrats.

George Bernard Shaw made it clear that what he admired

was the benevolent despotism of these enlightened technicians.