Free The Vanishing Futurist by Charlotte Hobson Page A

Freely.’
    ‘Oh Miss Clegg, please don’t be offended. It was a joke, that’s all. Pasha, come and apologise, won’t you? She didn’t understand . . .’
    But she had gone, rushing out of the house, clutching her bag to her chest. I went back into the meeting, where we decided on the finer details of laundry and mending, and established the Commissariat, to start work with immediate effect, the first Underwear Commissar being Pasha himself, who promised to work hard and absolve himself of the crime of ruining my reputation for once and for all at St Andrew’s Hostel for Governesses.
    ‘I couldn’t let that nasty woman take you away, could I, Gerty?’ said Pasha, not particularly repentant.
    *
    However much I resisted her attempts to interfere, I was still full of gratitude to Miss Clegg for bringing me to Gagarinsky Lane, for unwittingly allowing me the chance to participate in the task of auto-transformation. Mankind, we believed at the IRT, was only a half-designed product that had taken shape by accident rather than through conscious choices. In many ways we were not so different from the millions who seek self-improvement today – the spiritual questers, and those in therapy, and the readers of self-help literature; like them, we were hopeful that with self-awareness human beings are capable of living together in harmony.
    ‘It may sound an insurmountable task,’ Slavkin said, ‘but the whole history of man is really a long, slow war against our base instincts. A couple of centuries ago it was acceptable to burn witches and to hang pigs for heresy. In this context you see a large part of the road has already been travelled . . .’
    Pasha, who was fascinated by Freud, argued for a psychological approach, and from the beginning all of us were expected to write accounts of our Revolutionary Development (a few of which I still have in my dusty cardboard boxes) – the steps that had led us towards the commune, that we read aloud to the other members. He also suggested episodes of ‘group criticism’, at which people were encouraged to express any emotional difficulties they might be experiencing as a result of our communal life. We attempted to solve disagreements in this way.
    Fyodor saw simple discipline as the key. The Revolution, as he perceived it, was chiefly a matter of efficient organisation and training. He and Nikita clashed over this view.
    ‘I can’t help it, Fedya,’ said Nikita. ‘Your picture of the future fills me with dread.’
    ‘You’re too emotional about it,’ snapped Fyodor. He was rather cherubic, with very red, full lips. ‘Behind all your talk of technology is a sentimentalist.’
    Nikita, in fact, was an unusual mixture of the pragmatic and the idealist. He understood better than any of us that from now on, in human history, man would be formed by machines as much as the other way around. Man would have extraordinary powers – the power to fly like a bird or swim in the deepest oceans, the power to throw up mountains, even blast out of the shell of the Earth’s atmosphere – thanks to the advance of technology. His focus, therefore, was on designing the machines that would reshape man’s psychology.
    Towards the end of 1917, he had begun work on his first psychotechnological device, the Propaganda Machine. This ‘audio-visual sensory chamber that aimed to convert an individual’s mindset from bourgeois to Revolutionary in a single, twenty-minute session’, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica later described it, was no more than a rusty upside-down grain hopper from the back stables bolted onto the Kobelevs’ open carriage. Nikita insulated the hopper with thick cotton wadding and covered it with canvas, all but the funnel, which peeked out at the top. We coated it in what should have been Revolutionary red paint, but dried a sickly salmon pink, so from the outside the whole thing resembled nothing so much as a colossal, plumply upholstered bosom on wheels.
    To enter,