The Aesthetic of Stalinist Planning and the World of the Special Villages

Pulling out his notation sheets and his class-stratification register, the activist began to make marks on the paper; his pencil was two-colored, and sometimes he would use the dark blue, sometimes the red...

&#8212 Andrei Platonov, The Foundation Pit

In 1930 and 1931, the state forcibly exiled almost two million peasants in an operation euphemistically labeled "special resettlement." In early 1930, in practice, this operation was primarily auxiliary to wholesale collectivization, exhibiting in the main "confiscative-repressive"features ¹ to remove and isolate state-defined enemies (the kulak), to expropriate kulak properties for use in the newly emerging collective farm system (as well as to prevent destruction of such properties), and to intimidate "wavering" peasants into joining collective farms. Later in 1930 and in the years to follow, the state would combine dekulakization with what had been in the 1920s still vague ideas about utilizing what were supposed to become self-sufficient penal populations in colonization, in agricultural expansion, and for the labor needs of the resource-rich but labor-sparse far north and east. The state created out of this amalgam what amounted to a parallel GULAG ² of special resettlement villages, housing first dekulakized peasants and, later, additional contingents of social and ethnic "enemies."

The world of the special villages constituted a dark underside to what Stephen Kotkin calls Stalinist civilization, an example of "progressive modernity" whereby the Soviet state sought to create an enlightenment utopia based on socialist desiderata. ³ The road to utopia in the Soviet context traversed treacherous political, social, and cultural terrains, populated by individuals and groups perceived to be alien or in some way obstructive to the Soviet project. The construction of socialism under Stalin entailed the purification of Soviet society. The "desire to excise and expunge" enemy elements became an imagined prerequisite to reordering and mastering Soviet society on the way to the new civilization. ⁴

The special settlements were vast laboratories of experimentation, replete with the most exquisitely detailed plans of control, regimentation, and order, designed to isolate noxious elements from healthy Soviet society, to keep them under constant observation and surveillance, and to reeducate through labor those who could be reeducated. On paper, the special villages exhibited all the traits of "scientific planning" from on high, ranging from centrally imposed schedules for everything from transport to village construction to reporting; to blueprints for homes, barns, and banias; to plans and interestingly precise schedules for the "liquidation" of epidemic diseases.

Yet the awful reality of the special villages was anything but planned. Epidemic illnesses swept through the villages; exhaustion from hunger, neglect, and overwork took a continuing toll; brutal, corrupt, and drunken commandants exercised unlimited power; and tens of thousands of people died. The story of the special villages, like so many of the grand utopian projects of those times, marked a radical, if predictable, disjuncture between "scientific" planning and reality, a seemingly unbridgeable gulf between discourse and practice. In the case of the special villages, Moscow planners had not only had to execute their plans with the bluntest of instruments &#8212 the Soviet Union's underdeveloped rural administration &#8212 but in the conditions of an emergency state (whether artificially designed or not) that grafted secrecy, excessive haste, and military procedure onto planning, all in a context of state terror. To make matters worse, the tempos of collectivization outpaced dekulakization and even the deportation operation, making planning "na khodu" (or "along the way," as one official put it) ⁵ &#8212 however "scientific" it may have appeared on paper &#8212 an essential feature of this process. The more the operation developed beyond the control of Moscow, the more Moscow responded with its endless plans, directives, orders, and threats, in an attempt to paper over reality, to assert control over provincial Oblomovs and Nagulnovs, ⁶ and to "ideologize" existing practice in order to bring it under the...