The structure of this book reminds me of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, which she describes as a constellation novel: a sequence of interconnected stories. The story of the book is, as it proclaims in the first paragraph, the “story of an idea,” and as a consequence of that the characters here, as memorable as they are, are all bit players to the real protagonist, the central planning system of the Soviet Union. (Is it a novel? The very first sentence of the book says no, but I think it most clearly is. Clearly Spufford consciously worked in the liminal space between fiction and history, but you encounter the characters in the book as characters, not as people who lived a long time ago, however much that is true.) The book takes us from the upper echelons of the Politburo, to the eggheads at Gosplan, to the factory foremans, to the smooth-talking buyers, to the academics ensconced in a seeming intellectual paradise in Akademgorodok. And what drives this panoramic tour of mid-20th century USSR is the sense that the dream of the Khruschev era getting more and more deferred, the Party’s promise that the USSR will be the richest country on Earth by 1980 slowly being forgotten---to the point where someone dug up old government documents from a time capsule and got in trouble for them! The book is an elegy to this beautiful dream of a society where everyone will be provided for.
An interesting thing to think about is how Red Plenty would be different if the dream of fully automatic luxury communism is still alive today. Would the obsession with cybernetics be replaced with machine learning? Instead of reams and reams of folders in Gosplan, would we see humming datacenters crunching all sorts of economic information? Importantly, given that we have technology far more advanced than any of the Soviet economists and engineers have dreamt of, would the slow failure of central planning be instead replaced with its triumph? It would be a nice thought, that communism simply was an idea ahead of its time, ironically proving Marx’s historical materialism correct.
Some of my favorite scenes:
Kantorovich’s beatific vision of Red Plenty in the tram:
He gazed up the tram, and saw everything and everybody in it touched by the transformation to come, rippling into new and more generous forms, the number 34 rattlebox to Krestovsky Island becoming a sleek silent ellipse filled with golden light, the women’s clothes all turning to quilted silk, the military uniforms melting into tailored grey and silver: and faces, faces the length of the car, relaxing, losing the worry lines and the hungry looks and all the assorted toothmarks of necessity. He could help to do that.
Khruschev marveling at a hot dog stand in Manhattan and thinking about how America has the same idea to bring about prosperity as the USSR: make lots and lots of cheap stuff.
But the Americans got it. Of all the capitalist countries, it was America that hand-most nearly trying to do the same thing as the Soviet Union. They shared the Soviet insight. They understood that whittling and hand-stitching belonged to the past. They understood that if ordinary people were to live the way the kings and merchants of old had lived, what would be required was a new kind of luxury, an ordinary luxury built up from goods turned out by the million so that everybody could have one. And they were so good at it! The bulk fertility of their industry was only the start. They had a kind of genius for lining up the fruitfulness of mass production with people’s desires, so that the factories delivered desire to people in little everyday packages. They were magnificently good at producing things you wanted – either things you knew you wanted, or things you discovered you wanted the moment you knew that they existed. Somehow their managers and designers thought ahead of people’s wants.
Galina’s outburst at the Sokolniki Park exhibit:
She had never really had to think about the Americans before. They were the villains in the story. She would have supposed that they would seize this chance to tell a rival story, a counter-story, in which they were the heroes. Instead they seemed to have come with no story; no story beyond this untiring, universal brightness, this glow spreading from every object.
A poetic invocation of Marx’s vision of capitalism:
But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead.
Then later Mokhov from Gosplan explaining to Emil the apprehension of the Soviet bureaucrats in using machines to bring about Red Plenty:
We know the machine. We know how the parts connect – and they do all connect, you know, they are all of a piece, the prices and the supply system and the plan targets. They interlock. And we know that the thing that stops the machine from seizing up is our ability to be pragmatic; our discretion. What do you want to do? You want to take our discretion away. You want the plan targets for ten thousand enterprises to come straight out of the computer. And then there’d be no way of correcting errors. Whatever mistakes were built into your prices would stay there, locked in for ever, multiplying and multiplying until the machine shook itself to pieces. No, thank you.
A description of Khrushchev:
Stalin had been a gangster who really believed he was a social scientist. Khrushchev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the Soviet Union would be governed by gangsters who were only pretending to be social scientists.
Inna Olegovna’s opinion of psychoprophylaxis:
Oh, she knew this game. All her life it had been the cure-all. Pretend the world better. If you weep, pretend you’re smiling. If you’re puzzled, pretend you’re certain. If you’re hungry, pretend you’re full. If you see chaos, pretend there’s a plan. If today stinks, pretend it’s tomorrow. If it hurts – psychoprophylaxis.
Zoya breaking off her tryst with Kostya:
She had been married once and that was enough. She had liked smuggling him in and out of the apartment at times when Max would not have to meet him – snatching the two hours of Saturday afternoon when Max was at the Young Inventors’ Club, and then going to pick him up, secretly alive and awakened in her clothes, her lips a little puffy with kissing, the taste of Kostya still in her mouth. He was not a braggart or an oaf, and he had let her be gently educational. But they were at different stages in their lives. He had wanted more than her spare afternoons, he had wanted to be in love and to be loved back and for what was happening between them to be the thing that set the story of his life, or at least the story of that part of his life. It was understandable. He was in his mid-twenties. He expected things to be cumulative, to make sense. He expected events to cut an intelligible figure in the air as they went by. And so she brought things quietly to an end, so that he could go off and fall in love elsewhere; have, with someone else, a passion with a narrative to it.
Khrushchev reflects in his dacha:
So much blood, and only one justification for it. Only one reason it could have been all right to have done such things, and aided their doing: if it had been all prologue, all only the last spasms in the death of the old, cruel world, and the birth of the kind new one. But without the work it was so much harder to believe. Without the work the future had no heft to keep the past at bay. And the world went on the same, so it seemed, unchanged, unredeemed, untransfigured. The same things went on happening, the same old necessities bit just as hard.