The Electric Plough

1921 · The Revolutionaries · Work 960 of 1,871

Rich autumn colours, a flat trampled field on the northern edge of Moscow, early afternoon in late October, grey overcast sky, dark brown wet earth, birches with the last yellow leaves on the far horizon, in the foreground an eight-furrow balance plough seen from close behind at the height of its two large iron wheels, a vertical threaded spindle with a handwheel, the plough tilted askew in its furrow, its rear share sprung out of the ground, a taut steel cable running from the plough forward out of the frame toward a low boxy winch engine, small and grey in the far haze, a worker in a grey padded jacket on the plough seat, beyond the plough a dense crowd of about forty in long dark overcoats, black leather coats, one grey soldier's greatcoat, felt hats, peaked caps, military caps, fur hats, a child in a knitted cap, a girl in a headscarf, and one step in front of the front row, nearest the cable, the man, a man of fifty-one with a short reddish beard, in a dark peaked cap pulled low and a dark double-breasted overcoat with a curly astrakhan collar, face turned toward the camera, the same size as the people directly behind him.

Who
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, born Ulyanov (1870–1924), founded the Soviet state. Born on 22 April 1870 in Simbirsk, he led the Bolsheviks after the Russian Social Democrats split in 1903. When they seized power in October 1917, he became head of the Soviet government. His party ruled by force from the start: the Cheka, the secret police founded in December 1917, carried out the "Red Terror" against so-called class enemies and had grown to 143,000 men by the end of 1921. Lenin had the other socialist parties crushed. After war and civil war, some five million people starved in 1921–22, partly as a result of Bolshevik agrarian policy. In March 1921 his New Economic Policy allowed private trade again, but the party's monopoly on power remained. For him technology was a programme: "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country," he declared in December 1920. From May 1922 he suffered a series of strokes, and he died at Gorki on 21 January 1924. The roots of the later Stalinist terror reach back into his years.
The moment
On Saturday, 22 October 1921, at 2.15 p.m., Lenin left the Kremlin with his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya and his sister Maria Ulyanova for Butyrsky Khutor, the experimental farm of the Zootechnical Institute on Moscow's northern edge. On show was the first Soviet electric plough: two electric cable winches about 400 metres apart pulled an eight-share plough across the field on a steel cable, with a crew of five. It was a grey, cool day and the field had been trampled by many feet. On the hard-packed strips the plough lost its balance, its tail leapt out of the furrow, and Lenin asked irritably why it kept "wagging its tail". He was asked to keep his distance in case the cable snapped; he stayed close to the plough and asked the designers how to make it steadier and run it with fewer men. This is the moment in the picture. By 4.10 p.m. Lenin was back in the Kremlin.
The other side
Six days later the journal of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture reported that the first trials had gone "successfully". A member of the "Elektroplug" commission, writing 35 years afterwards, said Lenin left the field dissatisfied. Both can be true: the demonstration worked, the machine was flawed. The farm's workers had greeted Lenin with the wish that a "steel, unbreakable cable" might bind workers and peasants together and that electric light might show the peasants their way. At the same time the country was starving: the famine of 1921–22 cost some five million lives.

What the sources leave open: The remark about the tail, the warnings and Lenin's dissatisfaction come from the memoir of V. Z. Yesin, published in 1956; he knew the outcome only from talks with Krupskaya. Yesin also has Lenin arriving around 11 a.m., Lenin's Biographical Chronicle, citing an archive file, 2.15 p.m. What the winches and the power line looked like is not described; in the picture the winch stays a distant silhouette. Four photographs of the day served as a model.

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