Cement was chosen as one of the top 100 books on totalitarianism because it is a classic texts of socialist realism. The text offers insight into the technical rigors, stylistic innovations, and propaganda value of totalitarian literature, while the author's biography reveals the background of one of the Soviet Union's earliest court poets.
Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov was born in 1883 to a family of Old Believers in a peasant village in the province of Saratov. When he was nine years old, he left the
village to live with his parents among the fisher folk of the Volga and the peasants of the Caucuses. While his parents worked, Gladkov devoured books,
including the Russian classics. Though he excelled on his examinations, he was not allowed to enter the High School and continue his education because he
was poor. So he stayed close to the written word by becoming an apprentice in a printing plant. When his parents became unemployed, Gladkov became very ill
and spent a few months in the hospital. By the time he had recovered, his father was in prison for printing counterfeit money. Gladkov followed his parents to
Siberia when his father was sent to penal servitude in Transbaikalia.
There, he became a primary school teacher and in 1902 moved to the Stretensk district of Siberia, east of Lake Baikal. In 1904 he began propaganda work for the Social Revolutionary Party in Chita, east of Irkutsk. In 1905 he enters a teachers' institue in Tiflis. In 1906 he begins propaganda work for Bolsheviks and returns to Stretensk. In November 1906 he is arrested and exiled for three years "on the banks of the Lena". After exile, he moves to Novorossiisk then to the Kuban where he is appointed head of a primary shool in Pavlovskaya, a large Cossock village. In spring of 1918, he returns to Novorossiisk to reorganize schools. The town is captured by the Whites in August 1918 and Gladkov takes refuge in the workers' settlement of a cement factory. After Whites were driven out in 1920, he is put in charge of adult education in the town. He was also head of the regional department of Popular Education. In 1921 he moves to Moscow, where he works as head of a factory school, then secretary of the journal Novy Mir. He joined the proletarian literary group "The Smithy". In 1941 he became special correspondent for Izvestiya, reporting from Svedlovsk, and specializing in war-time industrial topics. After the war, from 1945 to 1948 he was director of the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. In his autobiographical note to Cement, Gladkov submits that, "as a Communist", he "took part in the civil war from beginning to end". Gladkov died in 1958.
Fans of Ayn Rand, especially Anthem-aficianoados, will find Gladkov's literary style familiar. Work and productivity are the great inspirations of life, while the female protagonists seem to be constructed of perfect metal metaphors. Gladkov's Dasha, in fact, shares more than a few qualities with Rand's Dagny. The aesthetic paean to industralization is also reminscient of Rand's railroad-mania in Atlas Shrugged. The protagonist, a demobilized Red Army soldier named Gleb, returns home after the civil war to find the cement factory where he used to work is in shambles. Gleb's response when he first returns to the cement factory reveals the ideal man's response to the sharp and shiny perfections of the industrial process:
Gleb finds that his wife Dasha has joined the Communist party, symbolized by the red kerchief wound round her hair. She mocks his intimate advances and refers to Gleb as "comrade", thus putting the sterility of Communism between them. Dasha's femininity takes on the quality of background music to her ideological commitments. Their daughter, Nurka, has been moved to a children's home, where she eventually dies.
Although much happens to Gleb and Dasha-- the plot is by no means a thin or uninteresting one--the book's resolution only indirectly concerns them. In this socialist realist novel, a happy ending comes with a well-functioning factory.
Though their child dies, their relationship flounders, and their hearts are crowded by ghosts, Cement ends happily for Gleb and Dasha-- human sentiment is abandoned for the greater goals of high production output. Sentimentality, ultimately, proves to be another bourgeois disease.
Gladkov successfully conveys the almost-religious idealism and hope of early Russian Marxists. Those who embraced the communist experiment often viewed
themselves as pioneers in the development of mankind's greatest phase. Demonstrating his movement from capitalism's egoism to communism's embrace of communal happiness, Gladkov frequently shifts from "I" to "we" when relaying Gleb's thoughts.
Ultimately, Cement is a celebration of communism's coming to Russia. But the celebration of a new era requires the burial of the past eras and all feelings or affections involved. Gleb must come to terms with ugly events and moments leading to the revolution, including his wife's mistreatment by various officers during his absence. No one can afford to nurse old wounds or return to old battles, for the siren song of socialism beckons:
Gladkov encourages Russians to forget all the dirt, grime, terror, broken families, and graves created en route to the Bolshevik revolution and accept the big, beautiful future of the Workers State. To emphasize the importance of industralization, Gladkov refers to the task of reconstruction with military jargon. Russians must move from the battle front to the "labor front". To understand the hope and enthusiasm of early Russian communists in the postwar period, one must read and revel in the world of Cement. As Gladkov concluded, everything must be sacrificed for the sanctity of the revolution, including political debate, discussion, and individual freedom. I leave you with Gleb's final words to his comrades:
"Keep your heads firm on your shoulders and get the work well in hand. That's how you have to look at it! It's no merit when we struggle consciously at the construction of our proletarian economy--! All of us--! United and of one mind. If I am a hero, then you are all heroes, and if we don't work with all our guts towards that kind of heroism, then to hell with us all!... We've staked our blood on it, and with our blood we'll set fire to the whole world. And now, tempered in fire, we're staking everything on our labour. Our brains and our hands tremble-- not from strain but from the desire for our new labours. We are building up socialism, Comrades, and our proletarian culture. On to victory, Comrades!"
The Soviet Literature blog has interesting post on the book's "revolutionary romanticism" and the two women tempting Gleb. + Abstracts and excerpts from the text itself + "Voices of Struggle: Soviet Women in the 1920's" + A course I would love to have eaten
