Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford

This is an unordinary work of fiction. There are two aspects in particular that make this book unique among contemporary fiction.

A Constellation of Varied Experience

It is not a new device in literature to devote each chapter to a different character and tell the story from their point of view. What makes Red Plenty unique is the way Spufford interweaves historical figures and fictional characters. He carefully chooses the fictional characters he creates so that they represent a typical experience in 1950’s Soviet society.

The only “you-should-definitely-know-who-this-is” character is Nikita Khrushchev. Spufford details his trip to New York. Khrushchev waxes sentimental in his limousine tour about how he wishes to make Moscow shine as bright as New York City, and marvels at the wonders of a hamburger. His interactions with Henry Cabot Lodge are humorous and tense.

Though each fictional character is meant to represent a certain slice of Soviet life, they are not caricatures. Spufford gives these characters a life of their own by detailing their own complex thoughts and anxieties. Their stories are memorable because they feel real, but also tie into the novel’s greater vision. There is the Jewish academic, whose mathematical genius is able to outshine the fact that he is Jewish…for most people and most of the time. There is the ambitious student from the country, who parrots party-approved rhetoric in public so that she has the chance to move up the ladder in her political career.

In a memorable scene at the American expo in Moscow, she confronts an African-American and, in her desire to spout off party approved lines in front of her peers, treads into racial territory. The tension is high when she calls the man out for being a second citizen in his own country, and the description of his reaction—at first threatened and then calm—sticks with me.

This turns out to be the end of her career. She ends up falling into disgrace for her uncalculated outburst, and her career never rebounds. She appears again towards the end of the book, settled with a man who is not her original lover and who disrespect and beats her. Her experience captures the feeling in Soviet life that your life is always somewhat out of your control. You must say what others perceive as right, and at the right moment, to have a chance to advance yourself forward.

There is the entrepreneur, whose efforts are pushed underground but are no less pivotal in helping the Soviet economy patch together the missing links between industries. When equipment fails and the government hasn’t approved a replacement, the entrepreneur seizes the opportunity and uses his connections to fill the gap. It is the middleman that is scorned from the top down, but is vital to economic functionality from the bottom up.

A Primitive, Pre-Electronic Calculator

This alludes to the other rare feature about Red Plenty: its focus on economic themes. Economics is a rare subject for fiction, but is at the heart of Spufford’s novel. In Soviet life, economic decisions are front and center because the decisions of few impact the lives of many. The economy isn’t spread out among millions of small decisions made by individuals. It is top-down in the strictest sense, and individuals have to react to these decisions in order to continue their lives. Spufford describes this in many ways.

He details the myriad bureaucracy workers who receive output goals, and who calculate input requirements that they then send up to the powers that be for their approval. The process is a constant one of back-and-forth negotiation, and the result is an excel-sheet balanced abstract perfection that does not hold up in real life.

Spufford captures the imperfection of the economy, and details how minor disturbances turn into major economic disasters because of the inflexibility of an economy designed as a series of pre-determined inputs and outputs. He describes a factory that loses a machine because of an accident, and the hassle it takes to find a replacement. Instead of a list of suppliers to contact, the factory owners have to follow a long chain of informal business contacts to find someone who can help with the dearth of supply. The Jewish entrepreneur I mention above is a link in this chain of contacts.

Spufford expounds on the idea of running an economy mathematically. In the words of one of the characters:

The market’s clock speed is laughable. It computes at the rate of a babushka in a headscarf, laboriously breaking a two-ruble note for change and muttering the numbers under her breath…No wonder that Oskar Lange over in Warsaw gleefully calls the marketplace a ‘primitive pre-electronic calculator’.

Spufford references ideas by Soviet economists of the time, those like the Polish economist Oskar R. Lange, who sought to remedy the perceived inefficiencies of capitalist economics by finding efficient systems to replace market-based pricing. He describes how countless Soviet mathematicians theorized how to unite the individual toil of millions of people in a such as way so as to create a balanced system, free of waste or excess. In doing so, he also relates just how gargantuan a task like this is.

When some mathematicians realize just how Sisyphean such an effort is, their attempts to explain to higher-ups the necessity of a replacement for prices to assuage the crippling inefficacies of the Soviet economic system fall on deaf ears. These plotlines—in which Spufford describes the desire on the part of intellectuals to get the party cadre to listen to reason—are the most tragic in the novel.

By the end of the novel, it’s obvious why Spufford chose to set his novel in the time period right after Stalin’s death. It was a time when the future looked bright for the Soviet Union, and it seemed for a second that if only Party leaders could make the right decisions, the Soviets could set the stage for economic and social progress in the future. Of course, we know how this story ends. The folly of incompetent leaders and the disastrous economic decisions they made slowly unraveled all the promise that these “plentiful” years had. This work of fiction makes historical reality feel all the more tragic.