Red plenty

Francis Spufford, 1964-

Book - 2012

The Soviet Union was built on 20th-century magic called 'the planned economy', which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. This book is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away.

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Subjects
Published
Minneapolis, Minn. : Graywolf Press [2012], c2010.
Language
English
Main Author
Francis Spufford, 1964- (-)
Item Description
First published 2010.
Physical Description
xiii, 434 p. ; 21 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (p. 421-434).
ISBN
9781555976040
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

WHILE many look back on the Soviet Union and fixate on the politics, purges and wars, the British writer Francis Spufford, in his latest high-wire act, has devoted Stakhanovite study and considerable literary muscle to another endeavor. He tells the story of "an idea," the dream that mobilized a generation, created one of history's largest industrial monsters and ultimately doomed it to failure. "Red Plenty," as its title suggests, is the story of the Bolshevik promise of abundance. Spufford's odds of success were tall, for he has not only created a genre-bender - part novel, part history - he's taken as his subject what may be the most boring corner (central planning) of a very boring field (Soviet studies). From the preamble: "This is not a novel. It has too much to explain, to be one of those. But it is not a history, either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story." Radical? Not really. At least, not on Russian turf. Think: "Darkness at Noon," "Doctor Zhivago," "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." "Storifying" history, for Solzhenitsyn, was old hat. "The Gulag Archipelago," though he did not deem it literature, bears the subtitle "An Experiment in Literary Investigation." Still, Spufford juggles well, and includes 53 pages of endnotes. The result is a marvel -at once pure skazka, an old-style Russian fairy tale, and a deeply researched history populated with characters, episodes, even dialogue, snatched from history. Spufford the fabulist conjures up the fluorescent dead-dull drone of Soviet life, the post-Stalin, pre-Brezhnev heyday, flowing with dread and promises, a realm where briefcases bang "hollow" on knees, clouds "unzipped their bellies and let down the snow," skin in banyas (bathhouses) looks "like willow-pattern china" and wheat fields "smell like bakery dust." We gain entrance, as well, to a realm normally roped off to trespassers: Soviet cybernetics - the science of control systems. Making Soviet theory sexy, Spufford describes flirtations at the "Cybernetics Kaffeeklatch" in Akademgorodok (the Siberian Mecca of Soviet science) and duels over "irrational pricing" at a Politburo dacha. Spufford tells us, in the notes, how often he has "cheated." And yet he has not only researched in the hinterlands but devoured shelffuls of abstruse tomes, everything from "Factory and Manager in the U.S.S.R." (Joseph S. Berliner, Harvard University Press, 1957) to the "Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia" (Steidl, 2004). Who else has parsed the "potatooptimizing program" of the Moscow Regional Planning Agency or delved into "Building the Svetlogorsk Artificial Fiber Plant" (Sovetskaya Belorussya, Dec. 2, 1962)? Pity the double vision: the novelist dreaming plotlines while scouring Gosplan statistics till the eyeballs turned red. But it was worth it. In one memorable scene, we meet the future Nobel Prize-winning economist Leonid Kantorovich in 1938, his mind set spinning by a request from the Plywood Trust of Leningrad to optimize production. What if, he daydreams, "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 percent more of what humanity wanted, free and clear, just as a reward for thought"? And here is Spufford's young believer, Volodya, late of Moscow State University, when a price hike on meat yielded the Soviet Union's most violent postwar strike, in Novocherkassk in 1962. Volodya watches in horror as his bright shining future begins to bleed: "These bullets were not disappearing into the blue, they were being drilled deliberately into the flesh of the crowd - which shook, which fissured, which fell apart and revealed that it was made only of the single bodies of men and women and children. A man of 60-something, gray beard, drinker's cheeks, was turning baffled on the spot just where Volodya was looking, everyone around him lurching into motion. Just where one of his neighbors with the guns was looking too, evidently: the near side of the old man's head caved in, the far side blew out in a geyser of red and gray. A woman holding a baby got the spray in her face and began to scream." The endnotes reveal the fault line between fact and fiction. "The gray-bearded drinker shot in the head is imaginary," Spufford writes, but "the nursing mother sprayed with blood and brains is not." The greater point, though, is hit: Who remembers, if they ever knew, about the massacre? Who understood it not as a rare uprising, but as a landmark in the devolution of the dream of plenty? Throughout, Spufford weaves a command of Soviet science, or pseudoscience, with an understanding of the grease within the machine. A chapter on the travails of an early-1960s tolkach - the Soviet fixer who, with flowers, perfumes and Black Sea holiday vouchers, matched suppliers and buyers to tally out quotas - may be his best. "I make what's supposed to happen, happen," Spufford's ace, Chekuskin, says. "You can call me a purchasing agent you can call me an expediter, you can be crude and call me a pusher. It's all the same thing. I help things along in the direction the Plan says they should be going. I don't steal. I don't give bribes or take bribes. I persuade the wheels to go round. That's all. Here, have a glass of wine, it's not bad, it's Azerbaijani." Beyond the pitch-perfect sales patter lies an unlovely truth that ruined the gleaming Soviet ideal. Even when it functioned - in the 1950s the U.S.S.R grew faster, Spufford reminds us, than any other nation in the world, except Japan - the empire survived on a simple rule: "Everything Is Personal." Chekuskin, who came up peddling pickled herring a century before Facebook, recites the gospel of the Social Network. The system, he says, works only "because friends look after friends; and when you're with me, you aren't just friends with the people you do business with direct, you're friends with everyone I'm friends with. And that's enough people, I promise you, to solve virtually any problem you may have." There are excesses. The dialogue at times sounds wooden, as if cranked through Google Translate. Fusty Sovietologists (yes, the dinosaurs stalk the ether) will doubtless deplore the rare slip. "Red Plenty," too, risks becoming a novel in which ideas are animated and people reduced to abstractions, as Marx would understand. But its author knows better. Emil Shaidullin, a stand-in for Abel Aganbegyan, the reforming economist who rose under Gorbachev, tells himself: "Just you remember that the world is really sweat and dirt." Spufford knows that humanity, even with "an average degree of duplicity and self-interest," will trump any idea, no matter how beautiful. That truth becomes most evident in the finale. Spufford gives us Khrushchev in retirement, alone at the dacha: "'Paradise,' he told the wheat field in baffled fury, 'is a place where people want to end up, not a place they run from. What kind of socialism is that? . . . when you have to keep people in chains?'" The febrile imaginings of a fantasist? No. The words, though excised from the first editions of his memoirs, of Khrushchev himself. Yes, "Red Plenty" is a literary/historical seesaw, a work sure to have even the most bilious Kindle-haters tapping for hyperlinks. But it is a work, by turns learned and lyrical, that grows by degree, accreting into something lasting: a replica in miniature of a world of ideas never visible to most, and now gone. Andrew Meier is the author of "Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 4, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review

After making a splash in England, Spufford's newest novel is likely to do the same in the U.S. If you think that a novel about the planned economy of the USSR from the 1950s through the 1970s would be boring, think again. Loosely based on real events, each of the book's interconnected vignettes gives insight into the bureaucrats, economists, and scientists who created the Soviet economy and all that it represented. From the voice of Khrushchev in the upper echelon of the Communist Party, to the story of Zoya, a young female biologist sent to study at a lab in Siberia, Spufford's narrative offers penetrating looks at an era rarely examined in this kind of human detail. Although the historical element can be daunting, Spufford's explanatory notes and references help readers navigate the more difficult sections. By teetering delicately between history and fiction, the novel leaves readers with a sense of the period that could not have been achieved with a straight, factual approach.--Paulson, Heather Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Though the intricacies of Soviet central planning may seem an unlikely topic for a work of historical fiction, Spufford succeeds at distilling the dismal science into a page-turner and using the unconventional vehicles of linear planning, cybernetics, communal agricultural policy, and exposition on the respective merits of Marx and Hayek (buttressed by extensive footnotes) to explore the entire range of human emotion. In his first work of fiction, Spufford (The Child That Books Built) mixes in a lot of fact, interspersing stories of functionaries in the Soviet economy-real, imagined and composites-with brief essays expanding on the topics raised by their plight. In the late 1950s, socialism seemed on the verge of triumph: the Soviet Union was growing faster than the United States, and its leaders expected to overtake the West in material production and provide its people with an unmatched standard of living ("Socialism would have to mimic capitalism's ability to run an industrial revolution, to marshal investment, to build modern life. Socialism would have to compete with capitalism at doing the same things as capitalism"). This is the story of that effort, and its inevitable failure, on a scale as large as a nation and as small as one factory worker. Extensively researched and both convincing and compelling in its idiosyncrasies (despite the author's admission that he speaks no Russian), this genre-bending book surprises in many ways. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Associates. (Feb. 14) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

An unusual work blending fiction with history, this is the story of a specific time and place: the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, when its planned economy promised more prosperity than American capitalism. Historical figures like Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Vitalevich Kantorovich, the only Soviet to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, mingle with fictional scientists and mathematicians to show the struggle among differing views of how best to steer the Soviet economy. The book vividly captures debates about progress and pricing that sometimes boggle the mind, such as when resources are used to make products no one wants, and it also shows how the political machine chews up those who dare to protest. While the large number of people represented can be a bit overwhelming and, individually, are so interesting that readers are left wanting to know more about their fates, Spufford (The Child That Books Built) presents an amazingly clear portrait of complex economic policies that ultimately did not work. -VERDICT Recommended for history and fiction readers with a taste for dystopian works like 1984 and for sweeping novels like those by Theodore Dreiser. [Notwithstanding the fictional aspects, this book is being presented as history by the publisher.-Ed.]-Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

I May Be Some Time, 2003, etc.) traces the latter half of the history of the Soviet Union, starting in the late 1950s, when the Soviets were seeing an imaginary light over the horizon. After 40 years that included struggle, war, starvation and Stalin, the Marxist dream looked as if it might be taking off under Nikita Khrushchev. The Soviet Union's economic growth more than doubled that of the United States, and if it kept going at the same rate the "planned economy" would "overtake and surpass" capitalist America. Cars, food and houses would be better, and there would be more money and leisure all around, thanks to a top-down, start-to-finish management that "could be directed, as capitalism could not, to the fastest, most lavish fulfillment of human needs." Through a series of episodes involving economists, scientists, computer programmers, industrialists, artists and politicians--some real, some imagined, some drawn together from composites--Spufford tells the story of the life and death of a national illusion, as utopian dreams moldered into grim dystopian realities. The planned economy was a worker's nightmare, where production targets increased even as equipment became more and more outdated, and unforeseen, unplanned events--like the sudden loss of a spinning machine at a textile factory--set off a ripple effect of unproductiveness. Pay cuts and scarce commodities led to riots, such as one in Novocherkassk, where the dead bodies were hauled out and the bloody streets were repaved overnight. In his often-whimsical, somewhat Nabokovian notes, Spufford freely points out his own inventions, approximations and hedged bets on what might have happened. A highly creative, illuminating, genre-resisting history.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.