This book is one of many recent and forthcoming publications which argue for a convergence of neoliberal and Soviet economic practices and traditions.1 Here, the metaphor of flow “as a mental state of optimal labor productivity” links neoliberalism and “its apparent antithesis – Stalinism” (p. 8). Vinokour focuses on what she calls the “Stalinist master text,” a symbiosis of predominant discourses in (post-) revolutionary Russia that shaped and reflected what came to be known as Stalinism. According to Vinokour, the Stalinist master text quite literally overflowed with liquid and fluid metaphors, channels and dams: “This book investigates the surprising ubiquity of the language of fluids […] at all levels of the Stalinist master text.” (p. 4) In other words, this is not a historiographical work but the work of a literary scholar. This review then distills what historians can take away from this book, which, while stemming from a different discipline, raises questions that are very much at the core of the current debate on how to write the history of the socialist east as intimately connected to that of the capitalist west.

Although Vinokour nods to neoliberal ideas about labor and flow as she introduces her topic, she does not compare neoliberalism and Stalinism nor the traditions in modern thinking since the eighteenth century from which they both draw. Throughout her book up until the coda, Vinokour focuses almost entirely on the Russian/Soviet discourse both before and after 1917. Vinokour has plowed through an admirable quantity of primary texts in her hunt for liquid metaphors. The turning point in her narrative about energy, flow and labor is situated at the end of the 1920s, when Stalin’s dominance had been fully established. She introduces us to the fates of those authors who propelled ideas about flow long before the triumph of Stalinism. This work discusses Socialist realist writers like Platonov, Ostrovsky, and Gorky, as well as the many pre-revolutionary authors that prepared the ground for an “organic conceptualization of the human being, the laboring body as […] assemblage of energy-laden flows” (p. 6).

Overall, this book is a bold attempt to explain Stalinist labor culture and its fetishization of labor by re-reading (among many others) Tolstoi, Bogdanov, and Fedorov. According to Vinokour, these authors and their prerevolutionary utopianism “set the stage for the crimes of Stalinism” (p. 13). Vinokour’s book is to some degree a political pamphlet, since in her view, imagining the human body as a liquid, as something which can be channeled, is tantamount to imagining this very same human being as one that can be “liquidated” (p. 58). This book, then, is meant to be a warning.

As in almost any history of Stalinism, those who supposedly shaped and informed the system did not survive it. A prime example in Vinokour’s book of somebody who both influenced the Stalinist “text” and was eventually killed by Stalinist perpetrators is Aleksei Gastev (1882–1939). Gastev’s work epitomizes scientific management (nauchnaia organizatsiia truda or NOT) in the Soviet Union, the adaptation of Taylorist methods, the utopian dream of man-machines and efficiency. His dream was “to energeticize [energetizirovat’] the human being” (p. 73) to such an extent that workers would no longer tire.

Vinokour traces Stalinist modes of thinking where one would expect them the least. Even Varlam Shalamov, who was a Gulag survivor, dissident, and hitherto believed to be an outspoken anti-Stalinist, shows a “Stalinist echo” in his “view of writing as materialist endeavor as labor.” (p. 2) Another example Vinokour gives of an avid anti-Stalinist falling prey to Stalinist modes of thinking is Daniil Kharms, who died of starvation while imprisoned in Leningrad in 1942. In Vinokour’s reading the Stalinist master text managed to infiltrate not only the thinking of those who experienced and suffered during Stalinism, but even modern discussions of the body. Today, ideas about channeling bodies’ energies towards a transformation of nature and self have become vibrant again in a language of liquids, when workflow is experienced as positive and “creative production requires steely self-discipline.” (p. 3)

The individual chapters proceed chronologically, starting with discussions of prerevolutionary Russian utopianism addressing a selection of the usual suspects like Nikolai Fedorov (1829–1903), Aleksandr Bogdanov and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), interspersed with Tolstoi, who receives a chapter of his own. What unites those thinkers is their preoccupation with the “pruning or channeling of unruly human material” (p. 16). However, this discourse could be easily attributed to almost any avant-garde thinker or writer of the Fin-de-Siècle – not only in Russia – which is why Vinokour links it to labor culture. All of her authors relied on labor as a means of perfecting humankind; each expressed their belief by relying on metaphors of energy and liquids more specifically; and almost all of them held the individual responsible for achieving the transformation of the self.

Chapters three and four detail the biocentric core of Stalinist labor culture, something Vinokour labels the “organic turn” (p. 55). This turn was a shift from a mechanical concept of the human body towards a biological one. Vinokour discusses Stalinism as favoring “the brute force of the physical body” (ibid.) rather than relying on rationalizing Taylorist/Fordist models. While this rather clear-cut vision of Stalinist labor culture certainly holds true where Gulag labor is concerned, where brute force was indeed inflicted upon the body, historians of labor could dispute such a claim, since the Soviet authorities endorsed and implemented effective and rational production methods at that very moment of the 1930s.2 In her fourth chapter, Vinokour discusses the White Sea Canal as the “first major manifestation of the organic turn” (p. 93) and the Stakhanov movement as something Stalin celebrated as the “liberation of elemental vital energies” (p. 107). Freed from the corset of technology, rationalization, and science, Stalinism is essentially framed as a belief in miracles. The human body was able to do any- and everything.

Chapters five and six discuss Maksim Gorky and Nikolai Ostrovsky, among others, as representatives of the emerging values of socialist realism and as writers who relied on the language of fluids in their depiction of human labor. Vinokour discusses the establishment of the Writers’ Union in 1932 as an institution in which poets and writers turned into workers, and she discusses the ideological dangers of Gorky’s lurking romanticism within socialist realism. With the Stalinist “master text” and its reliance on liquid metaphors firmly established, chapters seven and eight move on to demonstrate this kind of thinking in authors who do not fully represent socialist realism, namely Platonov and Kharms. The metaphors of liquids were everywhere for these writers, but in Platonov’s works they did not necessarily stand in for a “productive channeling of energy”; instead, he portrayed liquids as “agents of waste, rot, and decay” (p. 181).

In her coda, Vinokour addresses the afterlife of the language of liquids in post-Soviet novels by authors as diverse as Viktor Pelevin and Dmitry Bykov. Finally, she explicitly compares the celebrated workflow in neoliberal self-help books with its apparent predecessor: the Stalinist master text.

This book is certainly a tour de force. Vinokour masters an impressive range of texts, and she is certainly fluent (sic!) in the language of liquids. The book successfully places Stalinism firmly within a global and modern discourse on labor. It leaves no doubt that Bolshevism, Stalinism, late Socialism, neoliberalism, and even the European social democracy of the nineteenth century conceived of labor as a flow of energy and the moment of finding the perfect flow as a form of happiness and pleasure. This book raises awareness of the metaphor of flow as a truly ubiquitous symbol and image, which in combination with ideas about productivity and labor leads to micromanagement and authoritarianism (p. 251), as Vinokour claims. Therefore: beware of the workflow!

Notes:
1 James Nealy, Making Socialism Work! The Shchekino Method and the Drive to Modernize Soviet Industry, Dissertation, Duke University 2022, https://hdl.handle.net/10161/25175 (26.07.2024). See also Tobias Rupprecht’s ongoing project on “Peripheral Liberalism”. One paradigmatic text to discuss the appearance of the flow metaphor and globalisation was Stuart Rockefeller, “Flow,” in: Current Anthropology 52 (2011), pp. 557–578.
2 See Stefan Link, Forging Global Fordism. Nazi-Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest Over the Industrial Order, Princeton, NJ 2020.