In 1917 the Bolsheviks seize power promising to run the Soviet Union as a rational, scientific machine, and this episode of Adam Curtis's six-part series follows what that promise actually produced. Aleksei Gastev, founder of the Central Institute of Labour, builds a literal social-engineering machine meant to make workers think and move more efficiently. Archival footage tracks the industrial city of Magnitogorsk, built to copy Gary, Indiana, so closely that workers erect metal trees since nothing would grow on the steppe. Lenin admits the communists are being directed rather than directing, and Stalin answers the contradiction by arresting 2,000 engineers in 1930, eight of them convicted in the Industrial Party show trial. Later planners, including Brezhnev and Kosygin at Gosplan, chase rational quotas that backfire: trains run pointless long routes to hit distance targets, furniture grows oversized to meet material norms. An academic recalls the KGB even receiving arrest quotas alongside targets for coffins and novels. By the 1970s the system has hardened into what the narrator calls a bizarre, bewildering ritual.