ABSTRACT
Politically, mass celebrations aimed to raise the spirit of their participants, transforming them from a piece of "the mob" into an element of "the organized masses." Soviet effigies and theatrical objects organized the masses, trespassing the seeming boundary between the physical and the psychic. Supervised by Glan, socialist spectacles reflected the Soviet discourse that sought to transform Marx's vision of the commodity as a falsely independent, fetishized product of labor. Soviet theorists aspired not to dismantle objects' illusory animation in capitalism by demonstrating the socially-constructed character of this animation, but to create truly animated objects—objects that could resist the alienation of the worker rather than perpetuate it. Operative rather than critical, Soviet thinkers aspired to mobilize the modern condition, discovering a potential for positive change where others located the tragic predicament. Dozens of swimmers from the "Soviet" bank help them to overthrow the Pope.
