Book Review: Red Plenty

By Francis Spufford

Today it is hard for most people to imagine our economy being organized according to anything but a capitalist system. We take the miracle of the marketplace for granted, and millennials like myself don’t remember a time when America and the West competed against the Soviet Union to see who could produce the most prosperous society. During the famous “kitchen debate” in 1959, when the economies of both the United States and the USSR were growing at a rapid pace, Nikita Khrushchev debated Vice President Nixon in an exhibition hall that showcased the wide range of consumer goods available to the ordinary American worker. The challenge for Khrushchev, was to provide the average soviet citizen with the same abundance that the Americans enjoyed, but achieve this through the means of a planned economy instead of one based on supply and demand. Having suffered more than any other nation in a devastating war that nearly tore the world asunder, and having weathered brutal purges where untold millions died of starvation or in labor camps, the USSR now finally had a chance to leave hardship behind and become the worker’s paradise that it was always supposed to be. With every factory run by the government, centralized and efficient, Soviet citizens would soon be drinking the sweet nectar of mass produced consumer goods from the horn of plenty.  

Red Plenty has the unusual distinction of being a book that doesn’t fall into any particular genre. While this may seem a bit eccentric and weird, I assure you that whether it’s fiction, non-fiction or a bit of both, it’s one of my best reads this year. Where Western tales often transport us to a faraway place in another land, Russian folk tales, or skazki, always take place in a kingdom that any Russian peasant would vaguely recognize. The characters may be invented, but their names sound comfortingly Russian. There is an abundance of food on everyone’s table, which in itself would have seemed like science fiction to any medieval Russian, but the food is the kind that they would have recognized. A skazki takes place in a world that is similar to the Russia that they know, only a bit more photogenic and less full of coal dust and famine. Red Plenty can best be described as a modern day skazki, telling a tale of a kingdom that closely resembles the Soviet Union during the twentieth century, and portraying a moment in history when it seemed that a Communist planned economy would soon produce Ilyushin jet planes that flew truer than any Boeing, as well as vintage upon vintage of Romanian champagne more flavorful than Krug or Möet. 

The plot of Red Plenty is loosely centered around the ideas of an imaginary Soviet mathematician, who figures out a revolutionary way to increase the efficiency of state production, or at least that is what he thinks he is doing. These bold reforms then travel through a sluggish bureaucracy and impacts Soviet society on every level. The story is told through the eyes of a loosely collected cast of characters who inhabit every rung of the social ladder, from leading scientists and politicians to shady fixers and local part apparatchiks. These characters are themselves intriguing and colorful, but I get the sense that the story isn’t really about any of them. Just like the impersonal and monolithic Soviet Union, where individualism was strictly frowned upon, the main character is the society that they inhabit, its potential, ideals and aspirations as well as its cruelty and lack of respect for human lives. The Soviet Union was an inscrutable realm full of seemingly impossible contradictions, a place where logic reigned supreme and everything was about the common good, yet the liberty and happiness of the individual was of scant importance, and Red Plenty magnifies these contradictions to brilliant dramatic effect.

What a great shame then, that the continent sized country that promised to turn itself into a paradise on earth never lived up to its promise. At the beginning of the story the economy is humming along with record growth, and the Americans are wondering if they should be worried, yet by the late nineteen seventies Soviet production is caught in a spiral of diminishing returns, the red colossus unable to provide adequately for its citizens and at the same time maintain a military powerful enough to compete with the Western alliance. The worker’s paradise has turned into a nightmare, where perfectly fine raw materials are being ruined by being turned into a tractor that nobody wants, which will spend the rest of its days rusting away ignominiously on a field in Kazakhstan. The reign of terror and potato shortages that Khrushchev dreamed of supplanting with a contented land that enjoyed a surfeit of goods is gliding inevitably down a slippery slide, in the process of reverting to the place that a Russian peasant had to live in when the skazki had been told and the embers of the bonfire withered out.             

Most fairytales are about a prince rescuing a princess, not a mathematician with an idea about increasing industrial productivity by three percent, yet Red Plenty is easily one of the best fairytales I have ever read. The fact that Francis Spufford teaches writing at Goldsmiths College in England seems obvious when you delight in how well written the book is. He has a sure grasp of the writer’s art, and has done extensive research in order to write his eccentric almost-fairytale. Red Plenty is one of the best and most thought provoking books I have had the pleasure of reading in a long time. It may not belong in any recognizable genre, but trust me, it’s all the better for it.