Flesh to Metal: Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution (review)

Rolf Hellebust's fine book explores the multifaceted meanings of metal in Soviet culture. Examining a wide array of literary sources, he argues that the creation of steel from iron represented two related goals: forging real steel to modernize Russia and re-forging flawed human nature. The person of Stalin embodied this dual mission. His revolutionary moniker was derived from the Russian word for steel. His infamous associate Molotov adopted his name from the Russian word for hammer, abandoning his original name of Scryabin, which he shared with a mystical prerevolutionary composer. Both Stalin and Molotov were exemplars of the flesh-to-metal transformation, and thus models for the ideal Soviet citizen. Ultimately, the transformation of human beings into something akin to steel was more like enslavement than emancipation. Enacting the flesh-to-metal metaphor thus betrayed the revolution's goal of human liberation.

Hellebust draws intriguing parallels between the Soviet obsession with re-forging human nature and similar Promethean ideas among medieval alchemists. Prometheus, like the Bolsheviks, defied the gods, as did the medieval alchemists. Alchemists embodied a revolutionary spirit that was expressed in the attempt to fashion a new human being. Among the Rosicrucians of the Reformation, alchemy became a "metaphor for human transformation," as it did for the Freemason movement (p. 25). When alchemists attempted to perfect nature, they considered this transformation a spiritual act which involved self-perfection, similar to Marx's linkage of labor with a self-transformation that would overcome "the opposition of worker and machine" (p. 28). Hellebust notes the expression of similar ideas in East Slavic folk culture. Intriguingly, he suggests a link between Russian Orthodoxy's idea of "the laboring, suffering body as the locus for spiritual transformation" and the Soviet "resacralization of labor via the flesh-to-metal myth" (p. 179). Drawing on such parallels, he suggests that the roots of the Soviet metal obsession went well beyond the modern era or Marxist ideology. In Hellebust's words, these roots prefigured "the goal of Bolshevik heroes in their symbolic ordeals of self-tempering" (p. 15).

This book complements similar studies of the West such as Anson Rabinbach's The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (1992) or Mark Seltzer's Bodies and Machines (1992). More comparisons with this literature might have helped to elaborate the uniqueness of the flesh-to-metal phenomenon in Soviet culture. At times, Hellebust makes claims that require further explanation. He suggests that the Socialist opponents of the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, had a "pastoral" conception wherein "history is nature," which distinguished them from Lenin and his group. But Hellebust does not cite evidence to illustrate this point, making it difficult to agree with his conclusion that, unlike the Mensheviks, "Bolshevik romantics like Lenin find more comfort in the prospect for action offered by the scene of the blacksmith and the proverbial chains" (pp. 18–19). He also makes claims regarding Marx's technological determinism which might have benefited from a reading of essays in Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx's edited volume, Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (1994).

Hellebust could have qualified his claims about the flesh-to-metal metaphor in Soviet politics by paying more attention to very different kinds of metaphors at work in Soviet society. As he himself notes in passing, Soviet artists and intellectuals complained about the dehumanizing quality of the flesh-to-metal metaphor. Aleksei Gastev, whom Hellebust uses as a primary example of Soviet flesh-to-metal thinking, was purged during Stalin's Great Terror. Does his execution suggest a fundamental shift in official thinking toward the kind of ideology Gastev preached? This question remains unanswered. One might also note the flowering of peasant folk culture under the Soviets. The peasant craftsmen of the 1920s and 1930s were widely celebrated as new kinds of Soviet men and women. Rather than metal, they worked in...