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Red Plenty Kindle Edition
"Spufford cunningly maps out a literary genre of his own . . . Freewheeling and fabulous." —The Times (London)
Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.
Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherGraywolf Press
- Publication dateFebruary 14, 2012
- File size1200 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"A marvel...a work, by turns learned and lyrical, that grows by degree...a replica in miniature of a world of ideas never visible to most, and now gone."
-- "New York Times Book Review""Spufford cunningly maps out a literary genre of his own...Freewheeling and fabulous."
-- " Times (London)"About the Author
Francis Spufford is the author of several highly praised books of nonfiction. His first book, I May Be Some Time, won the Writers Guild Award for Best Nonfiction Book of 1996, the Banff Mountain Book Prize, and a Somerset Maugham Award. In 2007 Spufford was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College and lives near Cambridge, England. Golden Hill is his first novel.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
RED PLENTY
By Francis SpuffordGraywolf Press
Copyright © 2010 Francis SpuffordAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-604-0
Contents
Cast List............................................ixIntroduction.........................................31 The Prodigy, 1938..................................82 Mr Chairman, 1959..................................183 Little Plastic Beakers, 1959.......................404 White dust, 1953...................................59Introduction.........................................811 Shadow Prices, 1960................................932 From the Photograph, 1961..........................1083 Stormy Applause, 1961..............................120Introduction.........................................1411 Midsummer night, 1962..............................1512 The Price of Meat, 1962............................187Introduction.........................................2051 The Method of Balances, 1963.......................2122 Prisoner's dilemma, 1963...........................2243 Favours, 1964......................................234Introduction.........................................2691 Trading down, 1964.................................2762 Ladies, Cover your Ears!, 1965.....................2833 Psychoprophylaxis, 1966............................302Introduction.........................................3231 The Unified System, 1970...........................3292 Police in the Forest, 1968.........................3413 The Pensioner, 1968................................357Acknowledgements.....................................363Notes................................................366Bibliography.........................................421Chapter One
The Prodigy, 1938A tram was coming, squealing metal against metal, throwing blue-white sparks into the winter dark. Without thinking about it, Leonid Vitalevich lent his increment of shove to the jostling crowd, and was lifted with the rest of the collectivity over the rear step and into the cram of human flesh behind the concertina door. 'C'mon citizens, push up!' said a short woman next to him, as if they had a choice about it, as if they could decide to move or not, when everyone inside a Leningrad tram was locked in the struggle to get from the entry door at the back to the exit at the front by the time their stop came around. Yet the social miracle took place: somewhere at the far end a small mob of passengers burped out onto the roadway, and a squeezing ripple travelled down the car, a tram-peristalsis propelled by shoulders and elbows, creating just enough space to press into before the door closed. The yellow bulbs overhead flickered, and the tram rocked away with a rising hum. Leonid Vitalevich was wedged against a metal post on one side, on the other against the short woman. She was wedged against a tall fellow with a big chin and blond hair standing on end. Beyond him was a clerk with a glazed eye, like a herring on ice, and three young soldiers who had already started their evening spree judging by their breath. But the smell of vodka merged with the sweaty sourness of the workers a little further forward, whose factory had plainly lodged them in a barracks without a bathroom, and the fierce rosewater scent the short woman had on, into one, hot, composite human smell, just as all the corners and pieces of sleeve and collar he could see fused into one tight kaleidoscope of darned hand-me-downs, and worn leather, and too-big khaki.
He was wearing what he thought of as his 'professor outfit', the old suit cobbled together by his mother and sister which had been supposed to make him look like a plausible Professor L. V. Kantorovich when he first started teaching at the university six years ago, aged twenty. He'd been standing at the blackboard in the lecture theatre, taking a deep breath, chalk in hand, about to launch into the basics of set theory, when a helpful voice from the front row said, 'I'd stop messing about if I was you. They take things seriously here. You'll only get in trouble when the professor arrives.' He'd had to learn to be sharp, to make his presence felt. Even now, when the world was filling up with surprisingly young scientists and army officers and plant managers – the older ones having taken to disappearing by night, leaving silence behind them, and gaps in every hierarchy to be plugged by anxious twentysomethings working all hours to learn their new jobs – even now, pinched and tired as he was, dull-skinned like everyone else on the tram, he still had the occasional difficulty with someone misled by his big adam's apple, and his big eyes, and his sticking-out ears. This was the problem with being what people called a prodigy. You always had to be saying something or doing something to persuade people that you weren't what they thought they saw. He couldn't remember it ever being any different, though he presumed that before he learned to talk, and then almost immediately to count, and to do algebra, and to play chess, there'd been a milky time when he was only Dr and Mrs Kantorovich's ordinary baby. But at seven, when he worked out from his big brother's radiology textbook that you ought to be able to tell how old a rock was from the amount of undecayed carbon in it, he'd had to get past Nikolai's indulgent medical-student smile before he would pay attention, and start talking about the idea seriously, the way he needed. 'you must have read this somewhere. You must have done. Or been talking to someone ...' At fourteen, he had to persuade the other students at the Physico-Mathematical Institute that he wasn't just an annoying shrimp who'd wandered in by mistake; that he belonged in their company, even though he was a head shorter than any of them, and had to bounce as he walked along the corridor with them to keep his face in the general domain of the conversation. At eighteen, presenting original work at the All-Union Mathematical Congress, he measured his success by his ability to get the yellow-fingered, chainsmoking geniuses to stop being kind. When they gave up being encouraging, when they made their first sarcastic remark, when they started to sneer and to try to shred his theorems, he knew they had ceased seeing a kid and started to see a mathematician.
Automatically, Leonid Vitalevich gripped his wallet tight in his trouser pocket, against pickpockets. Gangs worked the trams, and you couldn't tell which of these faces, these polite faces, aggressive faces, drunken faces, was really a pokerface, a front for a hand down below extracting surplus value. He couldn't see anything beneath chest level, so it was best to be careful; couldn't see his feet, though he could certainly feel them, now that the fuggy warmth of the tram had thawed the crust over the annoying hole that'd appeared today on the sole of his left shoe. He had a small wad of newspaper in there, and it was turning soggy. This was the third time this winter the shoes had sprung a leak. He would have to go back to the retired cobbler Denisov this Sunday, take him another present, listen to more self-contradictory reminiscences about the old man's adventures with women. Of course it would be much better to get a new pair of shoes altogether, or maybe boots. Who could he ask? Who would know somebody who knew somebody? He would have to think about it. He gazed through the sliver of window visible between heads, and fragments of city slid by: a patrol car parked on a corner, grand facades streaked with damage from leaking gutters, red neon flashing FIVE – In – FOUR, FIVE – In – FOUR, the word more on the bottom corner of a poster, which he knew at once would read in full Life has become better, more cheerful! Those posters were all over the place. The slogan advertised Soviet Champagne. Or the existence of Soviet Champagne advertised the slogan, he wasn't sure which. But now he was looking without seeing. His thoughts had dived into his satchel, clutched tight with his other hand. Halfway down a lefthand page in his notebook, the blue ink scribble of equations broke off, and now his mind was racing on from that point, seeing a possible next move, seeing the thread of an idea elongate. Today, something had happened.
He had been doing a bit of consultancy. It went with being attached to the Institute of Industrial Construction; you had to sing for your supper every so often. And he didn't really mind. It was a pleasure to put the lucid order in his head to use. More than a pleasure, a relief almost, because every time the pure pattern of mathematics turned out to have a purchase on the way the world worked, turned out to provide the secret thread controlling something loud and various and apparently arbitrary, it provided one more quantum of confirmation for what Leonid Vitalevich wanted to believe, needed to believe, did believe when he was happy: that all of this, this swirl of phenomena lurching on through time, this mess of interlocked systems, some filigree-fine, some huge and simple, this tram full of strangers and smoky air, this city of Peter built on human bones, all ultimately made sense, were all intricately generated by some intelligible principle or set of principles working themselves out on many levels at once, even if the expressions didn't exist yet which could capture much of the process.
No, he didn't mind. Besides, there was a duty involved. If he could solve the problems people brought to the institute, it made the world a fraction better. The world was lifting itself up out of darkness and beginning to shine, and mathematics was how he could help. It was his contribution. It was what he could give, according to his abilities. He was lucky enough to live in the only country on the planet where human beings had seized the power to shape events according to reason, instead of letting things happen as they happened to happen, or allowing the old forces of superstition and greed to push people around. Here, and nowhere else, reason was in charge. He might have been born in Germany, and then this tram ride tonight would have been full of fear. On his professor suit would have been a cotton star, and dark things would have looked out of people's faces at him, just because his grandfather had worn earlocks, had subscribed to a slightly different unverifiable fairytale about the world. He would have been hated there, for no reason at all. Or he might have been born in America, and then who could say if he would even have had the two kopecks for the tram at all? Would a twenty-six-year-old Jew be a professor there? He might be a beggar, he might be playing a violin on the street in the rain, the thoughts in his head of no concern to anyone because nobody could make money out of them. Cruelty, waste, fictions allowed to buffet real men and women to and fro: only here had people escaped this black nonsense, and made themselves reality's deliberate designers rather than its playthings. True, reason was a difficult tool. You laboured with it to see a little more, and at best you got glimpses, partial truths; but the glimpses were always worth having. True, the new consciously-chosen world still had rough edges and very obvious imperfections, but those things would change. This was only the beginning, the day after reason's reign began.
Anyway. Today he had had a request from the Plywood Trust of Leningrad. 'Would the comrade professor, etc. etc., grateful for any insight, etc. etc., assurance of cordial greetings, etc. etc.' It was a work-assignment problem. The Plywood Trust produced umpteen different types of plywood using umpteen different machines, and they wanted to know how to direct their limited stock of raw materials to the different machines so as to get the best use out of it. Leonid Vitalevich had never been to the plywood factory, but he could picture it. It would be like all the other enterprises which had sprung up around the city over the last few years, multiplying like mushrooms after rain, putting chimneys at the end of streets, filling the air with smuts and the river with eddies of chemical dye. All the investment that hadn't gone into new clothes and everyday comforts had gone into the factories: they were what the tired people on the tram had got instead. At the plywood factory, he supposed, there would be a raw brick barn, cold enough inside at this time of year to turn the workers' breaths to puffs of steam. He guessed that the machinery would be the usual wild mixture. Aged pre-revolutionary presses and stampers would be running alongside homegrown products of the Soviet machine-tool industry, with here and there a silky import, efficient but hard to maintain. Together, under the exposed girders of the roof, this mismatched orchestra of devices would be pouring out a discordant symphony of hisses, treadlings, clunks and saw-edged whines. The management wanted help tuning the orchestra up. To be honest, he couldn't quite see what the machines were doing. He had only a vague idea of how plywood was actually manufactured. It somehow involved glue and sawdust, that was all he knew. It didn't matter: for his purposes, he only needed to think of the machines as abstract propositions, each one effectively an equation in solid form, and immediately he read the letter he understood that the Plywood Trust, in its mathematical innocence, had sent him a classic example of a system of equations that was impossible to solve. There was a reason why factories around the world, capitalist or socialist, didn't have a handy formula for these situations. It wasn't just an oversight, something people hadn't got around to yet. The quick way to deal with the Plywood Trust's enquiry would have been to write a polite note explaining that the management had just requested the mathematical equivalent of a flying carpet or a genie in a bottle.
But he hadn't written that note. Instead, casually at first, and then with sudden excitement, with the certainty that the hard light of genesis was shining in his head, brief, inexplicable, not to be resisted or questioned while it lasted, he had started to think. He had thought about ways to distinguish between better answers and worse answers to questions which had no right answer. He had seen a method which could do what the detective work of conventional algebra could not, in situations like the one the Plywood Trust described, and would trick impossibility into disclosing useful knowledge. The method depended on measuring each machine's output of one plywood in terms of all the other plywoods it could have made. But again, he had no sense of plywood as a scratchy concrete stuff. That had faded into nothing, leaving only the pure pattern of the situation, of all situations in which you had to choose one action over another action. Time passed. The genesis light blinked off. It seemed to be night outside his office window. The grey blur of the winter daylight had vanished. The family would be worrying about him, starting to wonder if he had vanished too. He should go home. But he groped for his pen and began to write, fixing in extended, patient form – as patient as he could manage – what'd come to him first unseparated into stages, still fused into one intricate understanding, as if all its necessary component pieces were faces and angles of one complex polyhedron he'd been permitted to gaze at, while the light lasted; the amazing, ungentle light. He got down the basics, surprised to find as he drove the blue ink onward how rough and incomplete they seemed to be, spelt out, and what a lot of work remained.
And now, on the tram, he was following his thought into implications, into what he was suspecting might be a world of implications. Clearly, the world had got by quite well until now without this idea. In the era before half past two this afternoon, the people arranging the flow of work in factories had been able to do so with a fair degree of efficiency by using rules of thumb and educated intuition, or else the modern age would not be as industrialised as it was: would not have trams and neon, would not have airships and autogyros thronging the sky, would not have skyscrapers in Manhattan and the promise of more in Moscow. But a fair degree of efficiency was very far removed from a maximum degree of efficiency. If he was right – and he was sure he was, in essentials – then anyone applying the new method to any production situation in the huge family of situations resembling the one at the Plywood Trust should be able to count on a measurable percentage improvement in the quantity of product they got from a given amount of raw materials. Or you could put that the other way around: they would make a measurable percentage saving on the raw materials they needed to make a given amount of product.
He didn't know yet what sort of percentage he was talking about, but just suppose it was 3%. It might not sound like much, only a marginal gain, an abstemious eking out of a little bit more from the production process, at a time when all the newspapers showed miners ripping into fat mountains of solid metal, and the output of plants booming 50%, 75%, 150%. But it was predictable. You could count on the extra 3% year after year. Above all it was free. It would come merely by organising a little differently the tasks people were doing already. It was 3% of extra order snatched out of the grasp of entropy. In the face of the patched and mended cosmos, always crumbling of its own accord, always trying to fall down, it built; it gained 3% more of what humanity wanted, free and clear, just as a reward for thought. Moreover, he thought, its applications did not stop with individual factories, with getting 3% more plywood, or 3% more gun barrels, or 3% more wardrobes. If you could maximise, minimise, optimise the collection of machines at the Plywood Trust, why couldn't you optimise a collection of factories, treating each of them, one level further up, as an equation? you could tune a factory, then tune a group of factories, till they hummed, till they purred. And that meant –
'Watch what you're doing!' cried the short woman. 'Take your head out of your arse and watch what you're doing, why don't you?' The big man had seized the chance, the last time they all shuffled up the tram, to free his hand and light a cigarette. But as it hung at the corner of his mouth, cardboard holder pinched in two dimensions to act as a filter, a jolt from the track had knocked the whole burning load of tobacco out of the paper tube at the end, and it had fallen, smouldering, onto her shoulder. Her arms were pinned.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from RED PLENTYby Francis Spufford Copyright © 2010 by Francis Spufford. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : B0074HCLPE
- Publisher : Graywolf Press; Original edition (February 14, 2012)
- Publication date : February 14, 2012
- Language : English
- File size : 1200 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 453 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #228,214 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #35 in Historical Russian Fiction
- #101 in History of Russia eBooks
- #314 in Communism & Socialism (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Officially, I was a writer of non-fiction for the first half of my career, and I certainly enjoyed scraping up against the stubborn, resistant, endlessly interesting surface of the real world. I like awkwardness, things that don't fit, things that put up a struggle against being described. But when I was excited by what I was writing about, what I wanted to do with my excitement was always to tell a story. So every one of my non-fiction books borrowed techniques from the novel, and contained sections where I came close to behaving like a novelist. The chapter retelling the story of Captain Scott's last Antarctic expedition at the end of "I May Be Some Time", for example, or the thirty-page version of the gospel story in "Unapologetic". It wasn't a total surprise that in 2010 I published a book, "Red Plenty", which was a cross between fiction and documentary, or that afterwards I completed my crabwise crawl towards the novel with the honest-to-goodness entirely-made-up "Golden Hill". This was a historical novel about eighteenth century New York written like, well, an actual eighteenth century novel: hyperactive, stuffed with incident, and not very bothered about genre or good taste. It was elaborate, though. It was about exceptional events, and huge amounts of money, and good-looking people talking extravagantly in a special place. Nothing wrong with any of that: I'm an Aaron Sorkin fan and a Joss Whedon fan, keen on dialogue that whooshes around like a firework display. But those were the ingredients of romance, and there were other interesting things to tell stories about, so my next novel "Light Perpetual" in 2021 was deliberately plainer, about the lives that five London children might have had if they hadn't been killed in 1944 by a German rocket. Ordinary lives, in theory; except that there are no ordinary lives, if you look closely enough. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize. And now (2023) I am returning to strong forms of story, and to plotting more like "Golden Hill", with a noir crime novel called "Cahokia Jazz", set in the 1922 of a different timeline, where a metropolis full of Native Americans stands on the banks of the Mississippi. Gunfire! Clarinet solos! Wisecracking journalists! Men in hats! Femmes fatales! All remixed to, I hope, different effect. Unexpected effect, as the old pleasures do new imaginative work. The idea is to screen for you, on the page, something like the best black and white movie you never saw.
Biography: I was born in 1964, the child of two historians. I'm married to an Anglican priest, I have two daughters, and I teach writing at Goldsmiths College, London, just next door to the place where a V2 fell on a branch of Woolworths.
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Wow, as i got into it, the overall narrative blew my mind. The stories are actually connected in a powerful way. they take you from a grad student looking at a new life with a new wife, up to (middle of the book) riots caused by food prices and a subsequent massacre by the army. Each story involves a different person, but they reference either the job function described in previous stories, or the actual characters themselves.
So, i'm half way through the book, and i realize that the overall narrative is one that examines how a planned economy approach of a communist country works, implicitly comparing and contrasting to a market approach. The logical thinking is impeccable - after the first few chapters I was thinking that a planned approach has to work by default, there are too many advantages related to system optimizations. Towards the middle, it's all falling apart and you realize that the micro optimizations and redundancy created by a market economy are major strengths that have to be handled with such an administrative overhead in a planned economy that it is ridiculous. It's a very powerful way to explain how the system worked, how the good intentions eventually filter down into some crazy actions, some bizarre checks and balances.
Hats off to the author, the writing is superb. I have no idea if this is what the USSR was actually like, but this has given me much more of a human connection to the types of things i think people dealt with on a daily basis. I now intuitively "feel" the weight of the planned system, and have new respect for both the planned approach (good intentions, far too many limitations both human and academic) and the market approach (duplication, survival of the fittest). I'm currently working for one of the largest organizations in the world, and many of the details of the Gosplan planning process have analogs in my company.
I'd rate this as one of the best books I have ever read. It has expanded my mind in many ways, and I find myself just zoning out thinking about the implications.
Let's be clear, however, about what the book is *not.* First of all, it's not really non-fiction at all. It's fiction, through and through. As the 70 pages of notes and bibliography attest, it's *extensively researched* fiction, based on real situations and often real people...but all the best historical fiction generally is extensively researched, based on real situations and real people. If Patrick O'Brian had ever seen fit to provide the sources consulted for his Aubrey/Maturin series, I have little doubt but that it would run to hundreds of pages. The mere fact that there are six short explanatory essays in the book does not, in fact, make the book some kind of non-fiction / fiction hybrid.
Secondly, those looking for a comprehensive explanation of Soviet economic planning are barking up the wrong tree. Some of the interrelated stories in the book concern the thinking that spurred the failed Kosygin Reform of 1965, and others demonstrate the contradictions, corruption and compromises inherent in centrally planned economies. However, other chapters are only tangentially related to this theme. Some focus on the emergence of the USSR's elite science cities in the 60s, Soviet computer science, Komsomol propagandists, and Soviet maternity hospitals, among other things.
This scattershot approach will vex some readers, particularly those under the misimpression that the book is a "history" rather than historical fiction. Fiction readers are likely to be more tolerant...particularly readers who realize that Spufford's episodic style is mimicking the style the Russian greats Vasily Grossman and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Spufford is using the economic theories of Leonid Kantorovich as a launching pad for a broader exploration of what the experience of living in the Soviet Union during the short-lived optimism of the Khruschev Thaw might have been like, when for a brief time the idea a Communist utopia seemed plausible to many.
This is an ambitious agenda, and the extent to which Spufford succeeds is remarkable. There are a couple things, though, that keep Red Plenty from being truly outstanding. First, Spufford isn't a Russian speaker, so his characters strike the occasional false note. Second, the transition from irrational optimism to hopeless disillusionment is abrupt. For instance, we see the (fictional) economist Emil Shailludin at the very beginning of his career when he is filled with idealism and (somewhat improbably) shocked by conditions outside of Moscow, and then many years later when he is he thrown into despair by the illogical half-measures that constituted Soviet economic reform. The progression is from A immediately to Z, with no sense of what might have happened in the intervening years. It's not often that I lament that a book is too short, but I really do feel Spufford's thematic concerns demanded an even broader canvas than the one he's provided.
These are quibbles, however, and don't detract much from one what was one of the more original and enjoyable books I've read this year.
Top reviews from other countries
Se você gosta de matemática, esse é um livro perfeito para você. Nele as grandes criações matemáticas da programção linear são contadas e como supostamente isso ajudaria a URSS.
Se Você gosta de economia, nesse livro você vai entender o entusiasmo com a economia planificada e os problemas que eles enfrentaram.
Se você gosta de política ,também terá uma excelente história das dificuldades políticas do sistema soviético e como mesmo as melhores intenções podem resultar em desastres.
E, por fim, se você não gosta muito de nada disso, mas apenas de uma boa história, este livro tem muitas boas histórias. Aliás, a descrição de como ocorre o câncer em um dos personagens é uma das passagens mais bens escritas e perfeitas que já li.
Em suma, há muitos motivos para você gostar desse livro. Foi o melhor livro que li em 2011, sem sombra de dúvida. Recomendo a todos.
Although the USSR disappeared a long time ago, I continue to have a lot of curiosity about life under systems other than Capitalism. It's not that I harbour any nostalgia or empathy for Communism -- absolutely not. But I enjoy reading about these "alternative systems" because they illuminate the human psyche. There are significant lessons to be learned by reading about these countries, how they operated (for better or worse), and why ultimately they radically shifted course in the late 1980's and early 1990's.
Mr. Spufford has written a very engaging book. It's not quite fiction, nor does it pretend to be a truly historical account of life in the USSR. It's a compendium of short stories, each story told from a different character's perspective. The majority of the characters are based on real people, and Mr. Spufford goes to great lengths (in the introduction and the addendum) to explain how he "padded" the real lives of these people in order to create a narrative.
The book straddles numerous actual historical events, diverse subjects, and ties everything together into an "almost" true-to-life drama that evolves over many years, from the death of Stalin in the 1950's, to the ascendance of Brezhnev in the 1970's. Within those decades, Mr. Spufford creatively isolates characters within their worlds in order to explain what the USSR was like: we visit collectivized farms, a central planning office, a Soviet hospital, etc. ... as you read about how each character struggles with their lot in life, you really begin to empathize with them, and the difficulties and opportunities that Communism presented them.
Hard-line believers in Communism (of whatever flavour) will probably not like this book. They would probably find Mr. Spufford's perspective to be reductionist, biased, and/or flawed. The picture that Mr. Spufford paints is not a pretty one. 21st-century Communists would probably label him as "revisionist" and, if they could, set him up for a spectacular show-trial and death-by-firing squad. Fortunately, we've moved beyond that paradigm.
If you're an armchair history fanatic with a love of Cold War intrigue, or if you have interest in Socialism and life in the USSR, you'll really enjoy this book. Highly recommended!
Why Red Plenty? Because it describes an attempt to beat capitalism on its own terms and to make Soviet citizens the richest in the world. And for a time in the 1950's and early 60's it looked as though it was going to succeed. Certainly improvements in housing, nutrition, education and health surpassed any other country in the World at this time. Apparently the rise of Russia at this time was viewed like China's development is viewed today - with awe and trepidation.
An original method of referencing not so much facts but feelings or attitudes or speeches or occasions to published books or periodicals at the end of each chapter underlines the authenticity of the attitudes being expressed. For example one reference was to a description "she had added a green leather belt bought at the flea market". The reference at the end of the chapter goes on to describe in great detail the legal car boot sales allowed so long as you had made the item and were not reselling . It lays out details of Article 154 of the Criminal Code dealing with the intricacies of the Soviet rules governing personal property. And there are copious such references at the end of each chapter which you do not have to read but add authority to the book.
The depth into which a variety of subjects are investigated is impressive. For example how the economy was planned with a sophisticated discussion on linear programming and shadow pricing and the move from production targets to efficiency, or profit targets, in state manufacturing operations. Or how lung cancer develops at the cellular level and how the continuous exposure of the cells to chemicals leads to mutation and eventually the growth of tumours is described in fascinating detail.
Whilst tackling the big issues in Russia at the time with seriousness, the way in which the story is told, and Francis Spufford calls it a fairy story, makes for an immensely readable book.