A Review: Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
I am thinking of riddles. When is a fairy tale both fiction and history? How does a fiction become truth? What has the power to alter the past? The answer to all is Red Plenty, a book that spans 32 years of Soviet history, a book that is fairy tale, fiction, and history.
Spufford mingles several fictional narratives—albeit featuring some real, historical figures—with dryer chapters about the progression of the Soviet socialist state and the push to achieve “plenty.” Peppered in between are pieces of a seemingly instructive fairy tale, or perhaps many fairy tales, like “Straight away the archer was seized as if by an impetuous breeze, and carried into the air so fast his cap fell off,” and “The old man took the bag in his teeth, and began to climb to heaven.”
This varied narrative results in a quite dazzling overview of the USSR in, primarily, the 1960s. The trouble of this varied story is that, for one with little outside interest in Russian history (me), it grows wearying. I wanted the book, through its many-genred nature, to transcend the need for inherent interest, as a good historical fiction will. But since the fictional chapters alternate stories and characters—each arc receives two or three chapters—the reader cannot become quite invested in them. I certainly tried. In the historical chapters, I quickly became entangled in political and economic discourse, not quite sure how to extricate myself. For example:
The ‘Kosygin reforms’ of 1965 put a lot more money in factory managers’ pockets, but they did almost nothing to stop the slowing of the Soviet growth rate. Even according to the generous official figures, there was only a 0.5% upward blip in growth during the Five-Year Plan that ran from 1966 to 1970. CIA estimates put the effect at only 0.2%, and recalculations later suggest there may have been no improvement at all.
That said, I admire what Spufford set out to do and believe that, to some extent, he achieved his purpose. He captures the facts of the time with almost alarming depth; the book begins with a very helpful list of characters (there are 70) and ends with 53 pages of clarifying notes.
Simultaneously, the author illustrates how real people lived in the time. We get Zoya Vaynshteyn, a biologist who has an affair with a student at the same institution; we witness the rise and the plateau of Leonid Vitalevich Kantorich’s career, a man known colloquially as “the genius”; Khrushchev introduces readers to Eisenhower and ends the book as a doddering, elderly man with no purpose; readers will peek into the world of newspaper censorship, a maternity ward, the Novocherkassk massacre, the Sector of Chemical and Rubber Goods, and the innards of one of Russia’s first computers.
If you are a history buff, a Soviet enthusiast, a scholar of Communism, or simply curious, give the book a few months and savor these moments because another book like this is unlikely ever to arrive. I marvel at it and at Spufford’s undeniable talent, but Red Plenty just wasn’t for me.
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
Graywolf Press, February 2012
ISBN: 9781555976040. 448 pgs.
