“the one all-encompassing line”

The expression “the one all-encompassing line” transforms the familiar Soviet queue into a model of society itself: not a collection of separate waits, but a continuous system extending across Russia and through time. In this image, the line regulates access to necessities and public rituals while also shaping relationships, habits, and the ways people become visible to institutions.

The Queue as a Social World

In the scene at Lenin’s tomb, a queue of 150 citizens winds from the entrance into the square. Its members wait in an orderly sequence: Uzbeks in silk coats, girls from the east in embroidered caps, and Georgian peasants among them. The lone figure in a ragged coat regards their patience with a crooked smile. What might appear to a foreigner as ten thousand separate lines—for trams, groceries, jobs, education, and housing—is recast as one universal line, stretching across the country and back through time.

The metaphor gives waiting a social as well as administrative function. In the line, the narration says, friendships form and romances kindle; patience and civility are practiced, and even wisdom is acquired. The queue is therefore not only an obstacle between people and what they need. It is a shared setting in which people learn how to endure one another and the conditions governing them.

The comparison between waiting for bread and visiting Lenin’s remains makes the system’s scale concrete. Someone willing to wait eight hours to buy a loaf, the lone figure reflects, might reasonably accept another hour or two to see a national hero at no charge. Necessity and commemoration occupy different places in public life, yet both are organized through waiting.

A Line Through History

The account attributes the line’s creation to Vladimir Lenin, who established it by decree in 1917 and took the first place, with his comrades forming behind him. From that beginning, the queue grows until it acquires the attributes of life itself. The image connects a daily practice to a political origin story: the nation’s many acts of waiting become parts of a single historical sequence.

This expansive metaphor sits beside the book’s caution about how history identifies decisive moments. In “Arachne’s Art,” historical turning points are presented as dates selected in retrospect: the launch of the First Five-Year Plan, the removal of Nikolai Bukharin from the Politburo, and the drafting of Article 58. The line offers a different emphasis. Rather than concentrating history in a few dates, it figures time as an ongoing queue in which one person follows another and ordinary life continues within political change.

Planning, Quotas, and Administrative Order

The language of collective effort in the First Five-Year Plan provides one context for the line’s broad reach. Urban workers are assigned the work of building power stations, steel mills, and heavy-machinery plants; grain-producing regions are expected to supply the cities. The demand for agricultural production becomes a sequence of targets and requisitions, as the state responds to falling harvests with increased quotas enforced at gunpoint.

The costs of this system are described in specific terms. A million kulaks are exiled to clear the way for the plan, although they include some of the regions’ most capable farmers. The remaining peasants resist new agricultural methods, tractors are scarce, and adverse weather compounds the collapse in output. In 1932, these pressures bring widespread hardship and starvation deaths for millions of peasants in Ukraine. Read beside the queue metaphor, the account shows how a society organized around allocation and sequence can make people and regions answerable to demands that disregard the local conditions on which production depends.

Procedure and the Recording of People

The same drive to make activity orderly appears in the Boyarsky Restaurant, where the assistant manager introduces a new procedure for taking and fulfilling orders. A waiter writes each order on a pad and carries it to a bookkeeper, who enters it in a ledger and issues a cooking slip. The kitchen records the order in a cooking log; after preparing the food, it issues a confirmation slip, which the bookkeeper exchanges for a stamped receipt authorizing the waiter to collect the dish. The waiter then notes that the meal has finally reached the table. Each step makes the next one possible, while the paperwork records the passage from request to delivery.

The Count’s objection is not to writing itself but to what the new procedure does to service. As headwaiter, he has made a point of meeting customers’ eyes, answering questions, recommending dishes, and remembering their preferences without taking his hands from behind his back. The formal chain of pads, ledgers, slips, and receipts makes the transaction verifiable, but it also replaces a personal exchange with a documented sequence.

The hotel’s filing cabinets extend that logic from operations to individual lives. Their first three cabinets hold reports on revenue, occupancy, staffing, maintenance, inventories, and discrepancies; the remaining cabinets contain files on guests and staff members, including Arkady, Vasily, Andrey, Emile, and Marina. The files record specific failings—tardiness, impertinence, disaffection, drunkenness, sloth, and desire—while leaving their subjects’ virtues outside the frame. The line’s administrative order thus has a human counterpart: people, like orders and resources, can be sorted, recorded, and made legible through selective accounting.