In short, the Propaganda Machine was a triumph – in all ways but one. Slavkin’s great wish was to win government support for it. He envisaged a future in which it was put into mass production and distributed across the country. But the Party leadership itself – unsurprisingly – was otherwise engaged. Each member of the Ispolkom was sent a personal invitation to the PropMash, which they ignored. Finally, at the behest of his artist friends, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Pasha’s boss at the Commissariat of Enlightenment, consented to a vaccination. He talked briefly with Slavkin; Nikita was nervous and distracted; he kept rubbing his hands together, blinking and laughing oddly. I could see that Lunacharsky thought him strange. There was a long, awkward pause and then he said, ‘Well, is it time?’
‘Yes, yes…’ Slavkin leapt forward to help him up, banging his head on the landau. Lunacharsky – who was quite tall – compressed himself into the space and we began the inoculation. When he finally emerged he was smiling in a restrained way. He put on his hat and shook Slavkin’s hand. ‘Let me congratulate you on a very fine piece of circus,’ he said. ‘Such things are still important.’
‘Circus? Not just… not only…’ stammered Nikita.
‘Really?’
‘We are administering a vaccination! A permanent immunity to bourgeois attitudes!’
‘I do congratulate you,’ murmured Lunacharsky, ‘and admire what you have done.’ He said it with the smiling charm for which he was famous, but the dismissal, nonetheless, was firm. ‘And I hear that your work on iridium alloys is remarkable,’ he added.
We packed up and trundled the Machine home with none of our usual exhilaration. Nikita was gloomy and irritable, and for the first time in over a week, we did not take the Propaganda Machine out the following evening.
I sit here surrounded by my papers in my neat little modernist armchair, produced for the masses and sold inexpensively. On my walls are prints of paintings produced by the Russian avant-garde, now celebrated and sold for vast sums. If I look along my bookshelves, the lettering on every cover, every magazine – if it does not intend to look deliberately old-fashioned and folksy – is the plain sans serif of avant-garde pamphlets. From the new concrete towerblocks soaring up all over Hackney to my teacups, knives and forks, the stuff of our lives now echoes the drawings of students who worked at the Moscow design studios Vkhutemas in the cold, dark winters of the Civil War.
And I wonder about the Propaganda Machine and many of the designs of the Russian avant-garde. They were playful – the whims and self-dramatising jokes of clever children. They were also deadly serious, made in conditions of real suffering. They seemed insignificant among the clanging chaos of the Revolution, but they were levers to change lives, alter thoughts, create new ways of living; this we knew, straightforwardly, just as we knew that a teaspoonful of air resistance could make us fly, a wisp of steam could drive a locomotive. On their own merits they have survived: now, decades later, our houses, clothes, china, patterns, magazines, objects look and feel as they do at least partly because of the Soviet artists and poets who imagined them.
Yet, extraordinary as this achievement is in itself, it would not have satisfied their creators. The modern aesthetic was always a means to a far greater goal – a just society. And I can’t help thinking as I look around at my comfortable house and our well-designed modern city, how did we become so childishly easy to please, so unambitious? Why did we settle for so little?
Among the papers from the Institute that have survived is a scribbled account in my own hand entitled ‘The First Journey to the Future – 25 October 1918’. As I reread it, I suddenly feel the most extraordinary sensation, a sort of muffled, tingling wave of emotion, part agitation, part excitement. I laugh out loud, and the sound rackets alarmingly about my house.
Slavkin was despondent for several weeks after Lunacharsky’s snub. Once the whiff of entertainment had tainted the PropMash, he lost all interest in it. It was true, also, that as time went on we became more aware of the arbitrary effect it had on people. Many felt benevolent and peaceful and reported greater faith in the future of the Revolution, but some made cynical remarks, such as, ‘Socialism don’t smell so good in real life, though, do it?’ And there were also cases when patients behaved erratically: several became amorous and forced themselves on to passers-by; one elderly man ran around making chicken noises. In another, very unfortunate case, a woman experienced some sort of mental crisis and emerged convinced that she was the Tsarina, a delusion that I believe persisted for some weeks. She caused chaos by insisting on inspecting the queue as if they were troops on parade and growing tearful when she saw the state of their buttons.
‘How can I have wasted my time on such nonsense?’ Slavkin groaned. ‘Superficial, pointless. I’m a fool. We need something that works at the level of atoms – of particles.’
He was already turning to the latest ideas on particle physics and to Einstein’s revelations.
On the evening of 25 October, Slavkin was exuberant. He sat on the floor in front of the lit stove and read from a pamphlet by the light of a couple of smoky, stinking nyedyshalki – no-breathers, wicks stuck in pots of oil.
‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘Time is our medium now. It’s by Khlebnikov. “Until now, the brain of the people has been hobbling about on three legs (the three axes of place). We, by cultivating the brain of mankind like farmers, will attach the fourth leg to this puppy, namely – the axis of time. Lame puppy! No longer will your miserable yelping grate on our ears!
‘“People of the past are no wiser when they assume that the sails of the State can be hoisted only on the axes of space. We, draped in our cloak of nothing but victories, build our young union by raising a sail on the axis of time, and warn you that our scale is greater than Cheops, and our task is bold, magnificent and stern… Black sails of time, now sound!”
‘You see?’ he went on triumphantly. ‘He’s talking about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. How many centuries will it take to build Communism at this rate? Our real task is to find an application for Einstein’s theory, to accelerate our passage to the future. We can’t dawdle around on the edges as we are now – taking a step forward, then running backwards, squabbling, concerning ourselves with superficialities…
‘We have put in place the basics of the commune. Now it is time for the real work to begin. We need to have a real understanding of Communism, what it will feel like in our bodies and our souls.
‘I have prepared a dose of a narcotic that is used by the Siberian animists. I recognised the mushrooms in the market – they used to grow near my village. There are mild physical symptoms such as contraction of the pupils, perspiration and increased heart rate, which will cause you no ill effects. The psychological effects are more extreme. You should experience a miraculous heightening of reality, lasting for some hours. They will lead you into another world – a world of joy, clarity and sensual delight. And this is where we use the Propaganda Machine. I have prepared new stimuli, all is fresh and ready. Each of you will undergo a vaccination. It will have an unimaginably powerful effect on a brain under the effect of the narcotic. I shall take some readings from your brains – the frequencies at which the particles vibrate – this will not take long. Then you will need to rest until the narcotic wears off.’
‘What on earth gave you this idea?’ asked Fyodor, frowning.