Pandora's Box, subtitled A Fable From the Age of Science, is a BBC television documentary series by Adam Curtis looking at the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. It won a BAFTA for Best Factual Series in 1993. Curtis deals with, in order: Communism in the Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, the economy of the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah's leadership in Ghana in the 1950s, and the history of nuclear power. The documentary makes extensive use of clips from the short film Design for Dreaming, especially in the title sequence. Curtis's later series The Century of the Self and The Trap have similar themes to Pandora's Box.
Background Adam Curtis explained the background to the series: "I grew up in the late Fifties and Sixties. To me, the scientist was a heroic figure in a white coat, who stood proudly in a gleaming laboratory. Everyone was captivated by the idea that science could be used to build a better world ... since then, the image has been severely tainted, and for me, Pandora's Box will aim to find out why". Pandora's Box was the first work by Adam Curtis to showcase his subsequently distinctive visual style. He explained: "in Pandora’s Box I wanted to make a sort of funny film about economics. I was just starting out in TV and was almost in tears when editing because I could find nothing to illustrate it and I thought I was going to be sacked. Out of that desperation I started raiding the BBC archive, I remember I even had talking squirrels in it at one point. Stylistically, a lot was born out of that necessity to get things done to a deadline."
Episodes
Part 1. 'The Engineers' Plot' This episode, originally broadcast on 11 June 1992, details how the Bolshevik revolutionaries who came into power in 1917 attempted to industrialise and control the Soviet Union with rational scientific methods. The Bolsheviks wanted to turn the Soviet people into scientific beings. Aleksei Gastev used social engineering, including a social engineering machine, to make people more rational. But Bolshevik politicians and bourgeois engineers came into conflict. Lenin said, "The communists are not directing anything — they are being directed." Stalin arrested 2000 engineers in 1930, eight of whom were convicted in the Industrial Party show trial. Engineering schools gave those loyal to the party only limited training in engineering, to minimise their potential political influence. Industrialised America was used as a template to develop the Soviet Union. Magnitogorsk was built to closely replicate the steel mill city Gary, Indiana. A former worker describes how they went so far as to create metal trees since trees could not grow on the steppe. By the late 1930s, Stalin-faithful engineers like Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikita Khrushchev grew in influence, due to Stalin eliminating many earlier Bolshevik engineers. They aimed to use engineering in line with Stalin's policies to plan the entire country. At Gosplan, the head institution of central planning, engineers predicted future rational needs. Vitalii Semyonovich Lelchuk, from the USSR Academy of Sciences, describes the level of detail as absurd, "Even the KGB was told the quota of arrests to be made and the prisons to be used. The demand for coffins, novels and movies was all planned." The seemingly rational benchmarks began to have unexpected results. When the plan measured tonnes carried per kilometer, trains went on long journeys simply to meet the quota. Sofas and chandeliers increased in size to meet requirements of material usage. When Nikita Khrushchev took over after Stalin, he tried to make improvements, including considering prices in the plan. The head of the USSR State Committee for Organization and Methodology of Price Creation is shown with a tall stack of price logbooks declaring, "This shows quite clearly that the system is rational." Academician Victor Glushkov proposed the use of cybernetics to control people as a remedy for the problems of planning. In the 1960s, computers began to be used to process economic data. Consumer demand was calculated by computers from data gathered by surveys. But the time delay in the system meant that items were no longer in demand by the time they had been produced. When Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin took over in the mid-1960s, the economy of the Soviet Union was stagnating. By 1978, the country was in full economic crisis. Production had degenerated to a "pointless, elaborate ritual" and endeavours to improve the plan had been abandoned. The narrator says, "What had begun as a grand moral attempt to build a rational society ended by creating a bizarre, bewildering existence for millions of Soviet people."
Contributors Vitali Semyonovich Lelchuk, USSR Academy of Sciences Alexei A. Gastev Nikolai Vassilievich Chernobrovov, electrical engineer, 1920s Alexei Leontevich Shatilin, "Hero of the Soviet Union" Lev Emmanuilovich Razgon, former Bolshevik Michael J. Grisak, Gary steelworker, 1930s Rosa Dmitrievna Inkina, construction worker, Magnitogorsk Evgenii A. Ivanov, Senior Manager, USSR Gosplan Valerii Nikolaevich Blinov, managing director, Moscow Toothbrush and Plastic Comb Factory Aleksei Sergeevich Vassiliev, Deputy Managing Director in Charge of Quality, Moscow Toothbrush and Plastic Comb Factory Leonid Pavlovich Katovskii, taxi driver Sergei Mikhailovich Ulanov, Head of Organization and Methodology of Price Creation, USSR State Committee on Prices A. S. Fedorenko, Director, Central Economic-Mathematical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences Abel G. Aganbegyan, economist Dr Alexander Nikolaevich Voronov, Director, All Union Scientific Research Institute for the Study of the Population's Demand for Consumer Goods and the Conjuncture of the Market Dr Vyacheslav Konstantinovich Nefedov, economist Dr Natalya Antonovna Cherkasova, economist
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