In this ambitious, wide-ranging study, Maya Vinokour follows the metaphors of “flow” and “liquidity” across a vast array of literary and political-philosophical texts published in Russia between the 1870s and early 2000s. Focusing primarily on the Soviet period, Vinokour’s project of tracing a “liquid discourse” offers a witty, poignant exposé of Stalinist labor culture. Indeed, this period was replete with violent slogans, such as the liquidation of kulaks, the rechanneling of rivers, and the ad hoc relocation (perebroska) of workers’ brigades onto gigantic construction sites popping up across the Soviet Union. Concentrating on metaphors of liquidity and circulation allows Vinokour to highlight the ideological justifications for mechanisms of exploitation and coercive management, which squeezed out blood, sweat, and tears, and even the very living energy from the workers, all the while treating them not as individuals but rather as labor resources destined for uprooting, rerouting, and ultimately wasteful expenditure. Vinokour’s attention to these metaphors is inspired by Zygmunt Bauman’s famous discussion of “liquid modernity,” whose origins he detected, in part, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ exhortation to “melt the solids” of the capitalist socio-economic regime and its ossified social hierarchies.Footnote ¹ Bauman extended his analysis of modernity’s perpetual striving for restructuring and optimization to post-modern times—the times of gig jobs, deregulated markets, and global corporations, increasingly free of responsibilities to ensure safe working conditions, fair pay, and social security for their employees. In her study, Vinokour embraces Bauman’s social critique of extractivism, as she sets out to offer a stimulating, if not always systematic, parallel between the treatment of workers in totalitarian regimes and in the neoliberal economy of “the contemporary Anglo-American West” (9).

Similarly to Bauman, Vinokour’s spectrum of concepts that fall under the category of “liquid discourse” is broad. The core examples—where Vinokour’s analysis is at its finest—concern Iosif Stalin’s own speeches, demanding to lock in the “labor turnover (literally, fluidity [tekuchestʹ])” onto specific industrial sites and insisting on the shock-worker ethos so as to “squeeze out [vyzhatʹ] everything possible from technology” and nature (Vinokour 66–67). Stalin’s and other Party leaders’ speeches corroborate Vinokour’s definition of this “liquid discourse” as statements urging total control over the “bare life of the human body and its flows” (Vinokour 10) and exhorting the USSR’s citizens to self-police themselves and their neighbors lest the grand plan of building communism be sabotaged. Vinokour convincingly demonstrates the spread of these disciplinary ideas in the socialist realist novels of the 1930s: Marietta Shaginyan’s Hydrocentral, Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel was Tempered, Leonid Leonov’s Sotʹ and Road to the Ocean, and the multi-author publication The I.V. Stalin White Sea—Baltic Sea Canal. These texts placed the birth of the revolutionary consciousness at the climax of their narrative arcs and played up the “liquid” terminology of the era, such as perekovka (reforging), to dramatize the heroes’ ideological transformation and nature’s subjugation. In addition to these literary examples, Vinokour detects Stalinist clichés in the declarations of the odious agriculture reformer, Trofim Lysenko, which is unsurprising, because, as scholars of science have shown, Stalin personally edited Lysenko’s speeches.Footnote ² In the concluding chapter, Vinokour ingeniously connects her reflections on Stalinism to Viktor Pelevin’s postmodern critique of neoliberalism, as she highlights his “liquid” neologism of the “humanoil” in “Macedonian Criticism of French Thought.” In this novella, post-Soviet magnates profit from decades of authoritarian oppression and immiseration in Siberia as they export oil and pump out their capital, contaminated with the infernal “sulphur” of human rights abuses, into European banks.

Vinokour’s objective in her study, however, is not simply to decry the duplicity and violence of Stalinism and neoliberal globalism. As a scholar of Russian literature, her ambition is to identify the precursors of Stalinist metaphors and to trace the insidious infiltration of this discourse into the works of authors who have long enjoyed the reputation of being the voices of conscience—outsiders and martyrs of Russian and Soviet imperialism. By and large, in Vinokour’s study, all Russian literary, scientific, and political endeavors, from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, flow—inexorably, precipitously—into the quagmire of Stalinism. On this slippery slope we find not only communist ideologues and socialist realist icons, but also the nineteenth-century novelists Lev Tolstoi and Fedor Dostoyevskii, utopian dreamers Nikolai Fedorov and Aleksei Gastev, and, perhaps most shockingly, the non-conformists Varlam Shalamov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Platonov, and Daniil Kharms. In a disorienting way, the argumentative thread in these sections of the book first accuses an author of complicity, then retracts the accusation by showing that the author defied Stalinism’s tenets, and then reiterates this verdict of complicity despite the caveat just offered. Thus Vinokour acknowledges that Shalamov and Platonov decried the violence of forced labor and War Communism by depicting the toll of these catastrophes on human bodies and minds. She nevertheless concludes that Shalamov was “ironically affirming the Stalinist mission” (5) and Platonov “remained enmeshed in the basic ideological underpinnings of Stalinist utopianism” (198). Solzhenitsyn is even less fortunate: his entire oeuvre is dismissed as the morally suspect writings of a man “who made a career out of touting the useful aspects of his internment” (248). There is a certain sleight of hand that happens when Tolstoi is first likened to protofascist supporters of eugenics, then shown to be a critic of degeneration theory, but then again found to be a proponent of “the Western criminologists and sexologists whose theories he disdained” (Vinokour 18). Further, the chapter asserts, teleologically, that Tolstoi’s Resurrection “proleptically articulated” (36) the foundation for Stalinist practices of confessional diary writing and self-policing in preparation for show trials (28). That Tolstoi exposed widespread sexual predation on vulnerable women and urged the Russian elites to reflect on their callous dehumanization of victims is an accomplishment that Vinokour dismisses in favor of her Foucauldian interpretation of Dmitry Nekhliudov’s confessional diaries as disciplinarian and devastating for individual freedom, just like the Stalinist show trials. There is also a problematic assumption that Stalinist diary writing actually worked as intended by the Soviet police state. A famous objection to Michel Foucault by Michel de Certeau was that an all-permeating, total reach of disciplinary power was a fiction, which would crumble if historians considered citizens’ private acts—always a form of translation, renegotiation, and misappropriation of the official discourse.Footnote ³

The lack of veneration for private acts of defiance in Vinokour’s study may be a generational feature. Prior cohorts of Slavicists who came of age before the fall of the Berlin Wall tend to be more attuned to stories of martyrdom, resistance, inner exile, and dissidence. For example, Svetlana Boym wrote of Viktor Shklovskii as a writer who managed to preserve his inner freedom.Footnote ⁴ For Vinokour (97), the famed formalist is one of the sell-outs praising the building of the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal, while the tragic circumstances of Shklovskii’s efforts to find his philologist brother, Vladimir, imprisoned on this construction site, are completely overlooked. Starkly different from Vinokour is Gary Saul Morson’s recent treatment of Russian literature in Wonder Confronts Certainty, which takes seriously the fact that Russian authors were writing under conditions of state terror. It is thus not coincidental, Morson contends, that Russian literature produced terrorist novels and also thought through the consequences of radical revolutionary violence.Footnote ⁵

Leaving aside the question of moral authority (or its lack) of the Russian literati, a bigger issue in Vinokour’s Work Flows is its narrow methodology: “this volume tak[es] as a given … the existence of a Stalinist master text that is at once relatively consistent in ideology and highly varied in medium” (11). This position results in a limited selection of sources, which ultimately robs the book’s argument of nuance. For example, in her takedown of Aleksandr Bogdanov’s energeticsm and his utopian experiments in The Institute of Blood Transfusion, Vinokour is laser-focused on proving her thesis that Bogdanov’s ideas paved the way for the Stalinist view of labor as energy flows in need of top-down management. To make this point convincing, it would be important to address the fact that Vladimir Lenin expelled Bogdanov from the Party’s Central Committee due to Bogdanov’s critique of vozhdizm (the cult of the leader’s personality) and that Bogdanov’s goals for the Proletkulʹt were based on egalitarianism—without the domination of elite trend-setters.Footnote ⁶ Bogdanov’s energeticism was not a uniquely Soviet philosophical invention, but rather a response to the major breakthroughs in nineteenth-century thermodynamics. Bogdanov’s potential as a precursor of systems theory, theories of embodied cognition, ideas on the cyborgian symbiosis between organisms and their material tools, as well as altruistic allegiances between individual creators have been explored in recent scholarship, which escapes Vinokour’s radar.Footnote ⁷

Perhaps, it is in her notes on Soviet science that Vinokour is most uncharitable, condensing entire disciplines to exotic elements—those that seem outlandish for today’s reader: “In the Soviet medical literature, rejuvenation as treatment for neurasthenia was presented as a compromise between conditioning existing bodies and forcing them to evolve more rapidly into Soviet New People. In practice, these therapies involved treatments like implantation of monkey glands and endocrine injections” (Vinokour 63). What this passage neglects to mention is that “the implantation of monkey glands and endocrine injections” was not a Soviet innovation, but rather a fashionable and profitable practice by the French doctor Serge Voronoff and Austrian Eugen Steinach. The Soviets tried to catch up, but their experimental capacities were very limited in scale compared to Europe. As Nikolai Krementsov points out, in the early 1920s there was a robust debate among Russian physicians about the efficacy of these treatments.Footnote ⁸ Thus the usage of monkey glands was not as ubiquitous or universally accepted as Vinokour’s passage implies. In a similar vein, Vinokour writes that “even before the programmatic adoption of Lysenkoism in the 1930s, Soviet thinkers gravitated towards Lamarckian evolutionary theory” (63). Yet, while many Soviet researchers followed Bolshevik ideologues in their endorsement of Lamarckism and Lysenkoism, there was also a strong opposition, with critics risking their careers and livelihoods to defend what they perceived to be scientific truth. With these debates swept under the rug, those who perished in their fight for their convictions and research integrity receive no attention. And thus, in ways that are both intentional and not, the Stalinist master narrative reigns supreme.