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Red Plenty Paperback – July 7, 2011

by Francis Spufford (Author)

4.5 628 ratings

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The Soviet Union was founded on a fairytale. It was built on 20th-century magic called 'the planned economy', which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the penny-pinching 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 Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan, every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche and sputniks would lead the way to the stars. And it's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.

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"A hammer-and-sickle version of Altman's Nashville, with central committees replacing country music . . . [Spufford] has one of the most original minds in contemporary literature." --Nick Hornby, "The Believer"

"A thrilling book that all enthusiasts of the Big State should read." --Michael Burleigh, "The Sunday Telegraph"

About the Author

Francis Spufford, a former Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year (1997), has edited two acclaimed literary anthologies and a collection of essays about the history of technology. His first book, I May Be Some Time, won the Writers' Guild Award for Best Non-Fiction Book of 1996, the Banff Mountain Book Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award. His second, The Child That Books Built, gave Neil Gaiman 'the peculiar feeling that there was now a book I didn't need to write'. His third, Backroom Boys, was called 'as nearly perfect as makes no difference' by the Daily Telegraph and was shortlisted for the Aventis Prize. His fourth, Red Plenty was called 'odd, brilliant and crazily brave' in the Evening Standard, longlisted for the Orwell Prize and translated into eight languages. His latest book, Unapologetic, was described by Nick Hornby as 'an incredibly smart, challenging, and beautiful book'. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College and lives near Cambridge.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Faber & Faber; Main edition (July 7, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0571225241
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0571225248
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.3 x 1.1 x 7.9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,094,507 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,510 in Communism & Socialism (Books)
- #70,103 in Historical Fiction (Books)

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Francis Spufford

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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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Andrew McVeigh

astonishing writing, deep insights into a planned economy

Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2021

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I started reading this book, not really knowing what to expect. it's basically fictionalized accounts / snapshots of different lives in the communist USSR, set typically around 1960s. the stories seem initially a bit disconnected. the writing and phrasing was very elegant so i kept going.

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.

14 people found this helpful

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zashibis

To the Glorious Future, Comrades!

Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2012

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This is an unusual and very enjoyable book about the utopian fantasies that underpinned Soviet economic thinking in the 50s and 60s. Spufford writes with verve and an authentic sense of place, and has digested a small mountain of research material to give a vivid picture of aspects of life in the Soviet Union of the period.

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.

6 people found this helpful

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Abiola O. Lapite

A marvellous illustration of the absurd Soviet attempt at an unworkable dream

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 2, 2021

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Having first learned about the existence of this book through discussions between the sorts of people given to uttering fallacies like "True Communism has never been tried yet", I was expecting a work of science-fiction, one in which the incentives and innovation problems afflicting even market-socialism would simply be wished away through "better computers". Instead, what I found was something more akin to a cross between history, economics and sociology, a clear-eyed vivification of the aspirations of the Soviet leadership, how these were sold to the masses, how the reality increasingly fell short of these lofty goals, and how a few intellectuals thought they found a way to bring the dream back on track, before the personal incentives of party bosses and plant-managers laid waste to all the elegant mathematical dreams for surpassing the capitalists.

Spufford, though "merely" a writer, truly gets why the Soviet system was doomed to fail in a manner that many supposed experts have long proven incapable of grasping: given the unwillingness of Stalin's successors to replace personal incentives with the Gulag and the NKVD operative's truncheon (or bullet) as motivation, it was inevitable that the Soviet system would gradually come to a crawl as citizens pretended to work at jobs where they were given wages they couldn't use to actually buy much of value.

The arguments Spufford gives life to in this book are not new, and have been made over the decades by voices as varied as Ludwig von Mises and Joseph Stieglitz. What is genuinely innovative here is that said arguments aren't put across in the dry, technical language of economists addressing each other in peer-reviewed journals, nor even in the factual but jargon-free tone one might expect of an Economist survey article; instead Spufford uses the lives and frustrations of ordinary people to get the message across, showing how the perversities of the Soviet system manifested themselves in how one worked, how one interacted with colleagues, how one did business (or the Soviet Union's closest approximation to business) and how one dealt with officialdom, especially when what one might need to say was not what they wished to hear. The book succeeds in showing that the inhumanity and wastefulness of the Soviet economy wasn't some incidental aspect of the system but intrinsic to it, just as the perverse workarounds and sordid compromises it forced on the citizenry was an intrinsic flaw in the weave. Communism simply doesn't work on anything larger than the scale of a few hunter-gatherers, no matter the virtues of those who try to establish it as the basis of a state, or the amount of intellectual firepower they try to throw at it.

7 people found this helpful

Manoel Galdino

Uma história econômica na ficção

Reviewed in Brazil on May 11, 2014

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Embora hoje em dia pareça óbvio que uma economia planificada não poderia dar certo, no final dos anos 40 e começo dos anos 50, muitos economistas acreditavam que o sistema econômico soviético poderia de fato superar o capitalismo em termos de bem estar material. Red Plenty é a história de como isso deveria acontecer, a dificuldades encontradas e as soluções possíveis para essa dificuldade.

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.

8 people found this helpful

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robert thompson

An Insightful and Compelling Glimpse of Life Under Communism

Reviewed in Canada on July 5, 2013

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Having grown up during the Cold War (I was a teenager when Gorbachev was shaking things up in the USSR), I've always had a bit of a fascination with life behind the "Iron Curtain". The communist countries seemed so different than my own comfortable existence here in North America -- the USSR and its allies had deliberately chosen a radically different system than Capitalism. But how did that system work? Did it actually work at all? What was daily life like for people in those countries?

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!

3 people found this helpful

Jonas

Geschichte(n) der sowjetischen Planwirtschaft

Reviewed in Germany on June 6, 2012

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Anhand von historischen Erläuterungen und großteils fiktiven beispielhaften Geschichten wird die Entwicklung der Sowjetunion in der Nachkriegszeit bis Ende der sechziger Jahre dargestellt. Dabei werden die ökonomischen Hintergründe ebenso deutlich wie die ideologischen Annahmen und die Gründe für das letzliche Scheitern. Tragische und absurde Folgen der zentralen Planung werden anhand der kurzen Geschichten sichtbar, die ganz unterschiedliche Personen vorstellen und teilweise deren Entwicklung verfolgen. Ein lehrreiches Buch gerade für den Nichtwissenschaftler mit Interesse an Ökonomie.

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Len

A story of high ideals and noble ambitions turned to a bureaucratic quagmire.

Reviewed in Canada on January 10, 2014

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This is really a series of short stories recounting the dream of the communist party's attempt to create an economy of plenty. The book begins with Brezhnev travelling to New York to talk to the most powerful businessmen in the country. Ironically, he travels in a car designed after an American luxury vehicle. Brezhnev is wants to transfer the same dedication used by the Soviet Union to increase industrial production that was a focus of the Stalin to years to the production of consumer goods. As well as politicians, there are academics, economists and bureaucrats and criminals populating the rest of the book. The stories are well written and engaging however the transition between them can be jarring. I just became interested in one character and Mr. Spufford is moving onto the next. The book does however provide a terrific insight of how the Brezhnev’s dream of creating a consumer paradise based on communist principles turns into more of the same after Khrushchev comes to power. It’s a story of high ideals and noble ambitions turned to a bureaucratic quagmire.

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