Red Plenty

Red Plenty is not a work of fiction according to its author Francis Spufford. His very first words make that abundantly clear. The book charts the progress of the Soviet Union from the late 50s to the late 60s during a period of huge economic, political, ideological, sociological and technical change. Spufford has, like many of his contemporaries since it is the vogue thing to do, woven historically accurate figures from this period with figures invented from scratch, and some who are a synthesis of prominent contemporaneous individuals.

The book cannot be considered user-friendly. At the front is a lengthy Cast List containing the players of the story, asterisked denoting those characters that are real. Then we have the main narrative split into six parts each further split into short chapters. Prefacing each part is an italicised essay providing background on Marxism, the Communist machine, and events pertaining to the chronology of the book. At the rear of the book there is a lengthy footnote section referencing the main part of the book, but annoyingly these are not numbered for easy cross-reference.

The narrative itself isn't a narrative in the purest sense of the word. The chapters tend to stand alone - these are disparate chunks of story with no clear link to the preceding or succeeding. Indeed the book in total leaves many questions unanswered, characters introduced for no apparent reason, their motives unexplained, their connection to Soviet progression elusive and ephemeral.

The characters vary in depth; by and large those plucked from Spufford's imagination fair much better than those from reality. Fictional Zoya Vaynshteyn, a free-thinking university Biologist, is a spirited sexually attractive and sexually active militant. She commits crimes against the state whilst flirting with the intelligentsia and upper echelons of faculty management, and her chapters fly past. Chekuskin, a black-marketeer and oiler of wheels provides insight into the 'real' Soviet - a state bedeviled with corruption where achievement is possible only with middle-man facilitators.

These were the bright spots. Most of the book gets bogged down in the state's quest for economic growth through the implementation of linear programming techniques; the committee being seduced by the invention of complex mathematical equations and the belief that the manipulation of the variables could control supply and demand for the whole of the nation. If this sounds dull, then you'd be right. The book frequently reads as one of my Operation Research Linear Programming undergraduate lectures. It is often as dull and po-faced as the Soviet was perceived as being during the period it covers.

Dull, dull, dull.