Platon Mikhailovich Kerzhentsev

From 1918 Kerzhentsev was a leading theorist of the Proletkult movement, seeking to establish principles for a new proletarian art to replace bourgeois theatre. His major work Creative Theatre (1923, expanding his 1918 Revolution and Theatre) is considered an early classic of Marxist theatre studies. It critiqued the existing professional theatre system and championed the 'self-activity theatre' (samodeyatelny teatr), in which workers themselves would create and perform. Central to his thinking was the concept of 'collective creation' (kollektivnoye tvorchestvo): dissolving the hierarchy among author, director, and actor so that an entire studio could generate work through improvisation and collaborative adaptation. Moscow Proletkult studios put this into practice with collective adaptations such as their staging of Jack London's 'The Mexican.' Kerzhentsev also theorized Proletkult mass festivals and open-air performances, providing intellectual foundations for early 1920s Soviet street theatre and civic pageantry. In this period he argued for a wholesale reconstruction of culture, but from the mid-1920s he shifted toward building a system of state-directed cultural control and censorship. Tellingly, the second (Stalin-era) edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia deliberately erased his Proletkult activities from his biography: a symbolic episode that captures the tension between his early radical cultural theory and his later role as a bureaucratic enforcer of orthodoxy.

Kerzhentsev was a leading theorist and organizer of the Scientific Organization of Labour (NOT) movement that unfolded in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. In his 1923 books Principles of Organization and NOT: Scientific Organization of Labour and Party Tasks, he charted a distinctive course, rejecting both Aleksei Gastev's extreme technicism, which sought to import Taylorism wholesale, and the chaotic 'proletarian management' approach that lacked any organizational principles. Kerzhentsev argued that labour efficiency could not be achieved through mechanical motion analysis alone; the worker's psychology and the structural principles of organization had to be considered together. He opposed piece-work, warning that it would create a 'workers' aristocracy' and fracture working-class solidarity.

In July 1923, his front-page Pravda article 'Time Builds Airplanes' led him to found the 'Time' League (Liga Vremya), a mass organization dedicated to eliminating late arrivals to meetings, unnecessary verbiage, and the broader waste of time, promoting the idea that 'time is a resource of the revolution.' Lenin and Trotsky were named honorary chairmen; Gastev, Preobrazhensky, Meyerhold, and others served on its presidium. League members, called 'elvisty' (from the Russian abbreviation LV), went into factories, offices, and army units with stopwatches, conducted chronometric studies, drew up 'time maps,' and campaigned for simplified paperwork and shorter meetings. The League published a journal called Time and distributed 'Organizer's Handbooks.' By 1925 it had grown to roughly 800 cells nationwide with some 25,000 members, but it declined with the end of the NEP. Its cultural reach was such that it was later satirized in Ilf and Petrov's classic novel The Golden Calf.