Aleksei Gastev, “Preface,” in Ustanovka proizvodstva metodom TsITa: Organicheskoe vnedrenie (Production installation by the TsIT method: Organic implementation) (Gosudarstvennoe izdatelʹstvo, 1927). Quoted in Gastev, Labor Attitudes (Ekonomika, 1973).
Evgenii Petrov, The Training Method of the Central Institute of Labor, emphasis in original. Excerpted below.
See Yuri Gastev, “From Social Engineering to Cybernetics: On the Methodological Concept of the Central Institute of Labor,” in Aleksei Gastev, Labor Attitudes (Ekonomika, 1973). Yuri Gastev, the son of Aleksei Gastev, was a mathematician and one of the founders of cybernetics in the USSR. He explicitly linked the concept of the social-engineering machine to cybernetics.
Lenin and Gastev were in active correspondence during the strikes of 1904–5; they met in Geneva in 1905 and again in 1906 at the Fourth Congress of the RSDLP in Stockholm. In 1907, Gastev left the party and turned to syndicalism, which, however, did not affect his relationship with Lenin.
Vladimir Lenin, note to the Deputy People’s Commissar of Finance Alsky, June 3, 1921: “I would like to help Comrade Gastev, head of the Institute of Labor. He needs to purchase about 0.5 million gold rubles. This, of course, we cannot do now. Is it possible to buy at least something in Germany using the Romanov money?” Quoted in Alexei Gastev, “Meeting with Lenin,” Organizatsiia truda, no. 1 (1924): 15.
“Figures on the TsIT Over Fifteen Years of Its Activity,” Organizatsiia truda, no. 3 (1936): 4.
Over fifteen years, by 1936, the TsIT published 269 books and journals totaling 3,238 printed sheets.
The most active institutions included the Kazan Institute of Scientific Organization of Labor, the Kharkiv Institute of Labor, and the Taganrog Institute for the Organization of Production, as well as a party group of administrators led by P. Kerzhentsev (the “Group of 17”). Specific aspects of the scientific organization of labor were also addressed by the Petrograd Laboratory of Labor at V. Bekhterev’s Institute for the Study of the Brain and Psychic Activity, the Institute of Management Technology, the Department of Standardization at the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, and the Laboratory of Industrial Psychotechnics at the People’s Commissariat of Labor headed by I. Shpilrein.
“The part of the body whose movement is being studied is fitted with one or several electric bulbs; if the shutter of a photographic camera is opened during work, the movement of the glowing bulbs produces white lines on a black background on the plate; these lines become dotted if a disk with sector-shaped openings, like a cinematographic shutter, rotates rapidly before the lens; by counting the dashes in the dotted line, their length, and the distances between them, one can draw a number of highly interesting conclusions about the speed, acceleration, and force of movement at any given moment, and from these data derive the most correct form of economical movement.” K. Kh. Kekcheev, How to Increase Labor Productivity: (A Psycho-Physiological Essay), Part 1: Lighting and Working Movements (Krasnaia nov’, 1923).
Aleksei Gastev, “Report on the Trip to the First International Congress on the Scientific Organization of Labor in Prague,” Organizatsiia truda, no. 6–7 (1924).
Aleksei Gastev, How to Work (Moscow, 1927), 196.
Aleksander Bogdanov, Tektology: Universal Organization Science, 1912–22.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 2, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (C.H. Kerr, 1912), 422–23.
Aleksei Gastev, “Preface to Poetry of the Worker’s Strike,” 6th ed. (1925), in Poetry of the Worker’s Strike (Sovetsky Pisatelʹ, 1964), 32.
From the preface to an article by B. V. Babin on the works of the American economist T. F. Willoughby, published in Economy and Management, no. 2 (1925). Not titled by the author.
Evgenii Petrov, Metod obucheniia TsITa (The Training Method of the Central Institute of Labor) (Gostrudizdat, 1930).
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London 1976), 456.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 460.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 460.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 495–96.
Originally published in Pravda, November 27, 1925. Reprinted in Aleksei Gastev, How to Work.—Trans.
TsIT’s early research included motion studies of the strike of a chisel (a sketch of which would become the institute’s logo) and the development of a biomechanical training regime for the worker.—Trans.
Gastev refers here to the widespread practices of workplace safety adopted after the revolution in the Codex of Labor Laws (KZOT), which would be comparable to OSHA in an American context.—Trans.
Ustanovka, one of Gastev’s central concepts, can be translated as either “installation,” “setup,” or “orientation.” I have selected one of these meanings in each instance depending on context. But in the Russian, Gastev often leaves its exact meaning rather ambiguous.—Trans.
Gastev adapted Frederick Taylor’s instructional cards for use in Soviet factories. In contradistinction to Taylor’s cards, which were individualized for particular operations within the division of labor, Gastev created generalized instructional cards, which were applicable to any operation in the production process.—Trans.
The theory of Darwin is the theory of the development of biological adaptations.
Our slogan will be understood by the serious production worker, by the technician, and by the shop engineer. But it may be incomprehensible to the humanist intellectuals and the engineers of administration, who are so common to our country.
Gastev here indicates the need to adapt the general training of the worker to the specific task at hand. He advocated for the introduction of adaptive devices to the workstation, designed for a specific operation, both to increase the efficiency of the process itself and to make the introduction of the worker to a new operation as frictionless as possible.—Trans.
Oh, you Oblomovian modernists! Dobrolyubov absolved you too quickly, Pisarev should have never stopped disparaging you, and Lenin let you off too easy!
A pedagogical space at TsIT designed to train the worker in a replica factory environment.—Trans.
Gastev uses the term “drill” to indicate a pedagogical process that demands rote repetition from the student. He distinguishes this from his own pedagogical method (ustanovka) and its cultivation of creativity and combinatorial capacities in the worker.—Trans.
