Aleksei Gastev

In 1902, just before final examinations, he was expelled from the college for being among the leaders of a student demonstration to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the death of Nikolay Dobrolyubov.

As a result of his revolutionary activism, Gastev was arrested by the authorities and exiled to various parts of Northern and Eastern Russia in at least three separate incidents.

[3] At that time, he became familiar with French Syndicalism and adopted many of its views, seeing trade unions as a chief means of confronting capitalism by bringing concrete improvements into the lives of workers.

By 1913, Gastev had joined the Circle of Proletarian Culture, composed of revolutionary writers of Anatoly Lunacharsky, Fedor Kalinin, Pavel Bessalko and Mikhail Gerasimov.

[4] In 1917-1918, Gastev won election as the Chairman of the Central Committee of the newly created All-Russian Union of Metal Workers.

In 1920, Gastev became the founder and Director of the Central Institute of Labour (CIT) (Russian: ru:Центральный институт труда) in Moscow, which he referred to as his "last work of art".

The institution developed scientific approaches to work management, which in practical terms amounted to methods of training workers to perform mechanical operations in the most efficient way.

According to Figes (1996), Gastev "As the head of the Central Institute of Labor, established in 1920, he carried out experiments to train the workers so that they would end up acting like machines.

Gastev's aim, by his own admission, was to turn the worker into a sort of 'human robot' (a word, not coincidently, derived from the Slavic noun robota meaning work).

[7] However, unlike Frederick Taylor or Henry Ford, Alexei Gastev focused first of all on the human factor, making it the main idea of his seminal book “How to Work”.

[8] Platon Kerzhentsev criticized Gastev's Taylorist approach for adopting a "narrow base" by focusing on the worker rather than looking at the more general aspects of how production should be organized in a socialist society.

This led to the creation of the "setup method" (установочный метод), which viewed the conditioning of human faculties as a basis for reform of the educational system in its entirety.

Gastev's poetry energetically celebrates industrialization, announcing an era of a new type of human, trained by the overall mechanization of everyday life.

No reliable information about Gastev's fate after his arrest was available until the KGB archive, where the interrogation and trial documents were kept, became accessible to relatives in the early 1990s.

For the first time exhibits were presented that documented the different roles of Gastev as a theorist, writer, journalist, politician and founder of the CIL (Central Institute of Labor) (Manovich 2020).