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Following the First World War, Berlin Dadaist Johannes Baader announced a new calendar system, in which 1919 was designated Year A: “the first year of world freedom.” The idea of a revolutionary calendar hearkened back to the short-lived French Revolutionary calendar of 1789. The Soviets reformed the Russian calendar on February 1, 1918, adopting the Western Gregorian calendar over the Julian. A more radical proposal to begin a new calendar with 1917—the year of the Bolshevik Revolution—was put forth in 1929, but never implemented. Benito Mussolini, similarly, proposed that his 1922 march on Rome be considered “year zero.” Less a calendar reform and more an attempt to divest the existing calendar of its inherent meaning by superimposing an alternative structure, was the “Soviet continuous work week calendar,” initiated across the Soviet Union in August 1929. Devised for maximal productivity, the system aimed to enable factories to operate daily throughout the year by dividing the workforce into rotating groups, each assigned a different rest day. Small calendars—such as that shown above—were distributed by employers to their workers. In 1931, the continuous work week experiment was deemed a failure and the effort was discontinued. For more information, click here.
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