Aleksei Kapitonovich Gastev

Before he was the father of Soviet labour science, Gastev was Proletkult's first poet. The very first book published by Proletkult in 1918 was his collection Poetry of the Worker's Blow, which went through six editions by 1926, an explosive reception among workers of the era. Casting off traditional meter and rhyme, these prose poems translated the roar of factories and the rhythm of steel into language.

His poetry sang not of individual lyricism but the physicality of collective labour. Influenced by the Belgian symbolist Émile Verhaeren and the democratic odes of Walt Whitman, Gastev's poetic language can be called a 'poetics of the machine.' "Towers, square your shoulders / lift the iron beams / cranes, pierce the ceiling." In his verse, the factory is a living organism and the worker becomes part of its vast body. This vision mirrors exactly the ideal of the 'human-machine' he later trained at CIT.

In 1916, while in Siberian exile, he wrote the fantasy novella Express: A Siberian Fantasy, a journey aboard a train racing along the North Siberian Railway to the Bering Strait. It depicts the cities of the future: Yakutsk built of compressed paper, Okhotsk as a giant aquarium cultivating Pacific fish, Kamchatka harnessing volcanic heat, and 'Steel-City' (Novosibirsk), a fortress of Siberian industry with a thousand chimneys emitting only clean gases. This utopia was the imaginative blueprint for Soviet industrialization.

Mayakovsky name-checked him: "Where are you, Gastev and Kerzhentsev?" and Nikolai Aseyev dedicated a poem to him: "I want to hear your voice, Gastev, more than anyone else's." After 1920 Gastev abandoned literature entirely for labour science, yet he called CIT 'my last work of art.' Literature and social engineering are inseparable in him.

In 1921 Gastev became founder and permanent director of the Central Institute of Labour (CIT), which became the flagship of the Soviet scientific organization of labour (NOT) movement. English sources date the institute's founding to 1920 with Lenin's encouragement and funding, while Russian sources date his leadership to 1921, so the founding year is given differently. Gastev called the CIT "my last work of art." The institute studied simple repetitive operations, such as cutting material with a chisel, to devise more efficient methods, and trainees with arms strapped to hammering machines internalized mechanical rhythm in 30-minute drills; Gastev himself admitted the aim of turning the worker into a 'human robot.'

In his 1921 article 'Our Tasks' he set out a 'social engineering' program for the scientific organization of labour in a socialist economy. The decisive factor was the technology and logic of the technological process into which the new type of worker is incorporated; mass production turns every machine into a research laboratory; and work culture is determined by the methodology of machine work, with its analyticity, accounting of mass quantities and standardization. Social engineering had two branches: the scientific organization of the production process, based on physiology and psychology, and the scientific organization of management, based on social psychology. Unlike Frederick Taylor, who emphasized system and organization, and Henry Ford, who focused on production technique, Gastev emphasized the human factor, arguing that an organization's effectiveness begins with each person's effectiveness at the workplace, especially the efficient use of time. 'How to Work' pointed to the lack of labour culture among most Soviet citizens and the need to instil it. He corresponded regularly with Ford.

The CIT grew into a mass training apparatus. Russian figures for 1921–1938 credit it with training more than 500,000 skilled workers in roughly 200 trades at about 1,700 training points, including more than 8,000 for the Stalingrad tractor plant in early 1930, and with supplying over 400 enterprises and construction sites; over 20,000 instructors and managers were also trained, and its practical activity peaked in 1930–1934. In 1928 Gastev organized Ustanovka ('Setup') as a joint-stock company that audited industrial enterprises and sold recommendations on efficient work organization commercially, training qualified workers in intensive courses of 3–6 months. Because he opposed long-term vocational schooling such as the FZU factory schools, critics read this as opposing young people's social protection. His approach also faced internal controversy: Platon Kerzhentsev criticized his Taylorist 'narrow base' for focusing on the worker rather than the general organization of production in a socialist society. In 1921 the Central Council for the Scientific Organization of Labour (SOVNOT) was set up with both factions; at the 1924 All-Russian Scientific Management Conference in Moscow the conference sided with Gastev, though Kerzhentsev argued the CIT had wasted three years. As CIT director Gastev was permanent deputy chairman of SOVNOT and in 1926 its chairman, and for the CIT's fifth anniversary in 1926 he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. In 1931 he was admitted to the VKP(b) directly by the Central Committee without a candidate probationary period, in an effort to save the CIT from attacks by critics and party figures. From 1932 to 1936 he chaired the All-Union Committee for Standardization under the Council of Labour and Defence and edited the journal Bulletin of Standardization, and in 1935 he headed the Soviet delegation to the International Congress on Standardization in Stockholm.

In the second half of the 1930s the CIT came under criticism: applied labour sciences were accused of idealism and methodological neutrality and labelled 'bourgeois', industrial psychotechnics and labour psychophysiology laboratories were closed, and the work of the CIT and local labour institutes was largely curtailed. In September 1938 Gastev was arrested by the NKVD, with sources differing between 7 and 8 September. On 14 April 1939 the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court sentenced him to death on the charge of participation in a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization, and he was shot the next day at the Kommunarka range outside Moscow. Sources note there was no defence attorney and no possibility of appeal, as was common during the Great Purge. In March 1956 the same collegium rehabilitated him.

Repression extended to his family. Days after his execution his second wife, Sofya Abramovna Grinblat, a Warsaw-born Pravda editorial worker, was sentenced to 5 years as a family member of a traitor to the Motherland and served in the Potma camps. His sons Pyotr (1921–1943) was killed at Kursk and Yuri (1928–1993) was a political prisoner under Stalin and later a mathematician and dissident who emigrated to the USA. His legacy was long neglected in the USSR: only in the mid-1950s was he 'remembered' as a poet, and his significance as an organizer of production and pioneer of the scientific organization of labour was recognized only in the 1980s. His ideas, with those of O. A. Ermansky, underpinned what later became known as lean production, and from the 1930s a special institute in Japan studied Soviet industrialization experience and borrowed and reworked technologies developed at the CIT. A street in Suzdal is named after him, and since 2011 Russia has annually held a lean-production leaders' cup in his name. At the end of 1940 the CIT was transferred to the aviation industry commissariat, and its successor is the National Institute of Aviation Technologies (NIAT).