Monday, April 12, 2021

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.  

“RED PLENTY” by Francis Spufford (first published in 2010)

            Two years ago, on this blog, I reviewed Francis Spufford’s 18th century romp Golden Hill. It was published in 2016, and I described it as Spufford’s first work of fiction. Spufford (born in 1964), son of two professors and himself educated at Cambridge, began his writing career with a series of well-received works of non-fiction. All the sources I looked up listed Golden Hill as his first novel. But now that I’ve read his earlier Red Plenty (first published in 2010), I’m not so sure.

            Consider first the format of this fascinating book. The text is preceded by a list of dramatis personae, with asterisks (many of them) against the names of characters who were real historical people. Elsewhere, the author explains that most of his fictional characters are amalgams of real people, representing different classes or professions in the society he is depicting. The text is followed by 53 pages of end-notes (which I found myself reading in tandem with the text – a rather discombobulating experience). They explain, and source, the factual events upon which the book is founded. After them come 14 closely-printed pages of bibliography, authenticating sources. So how much is Red Plenty fact and how much is it fiction? How much is it a novel and how much a documentary? I also have to note that it is very episodic – indeed separate chapters could almost be called self-contained short stories, although there are some characters who recur in a number of chapters. This rara avis is not exactly a novel but then it’s not exactly non–fiction either. It is sui generis. I would call it dramatised history. 


 

            So, at last, what’s it all about?

            Most of dismal 20th century history has rolled over Soviet Russia. The Revolution. The long civil war. The disaster of collectivisation, killing millions of people. The megalomaniacal dictatorship of Stalin and the years of terror, purges and engineered famine to wipe out the peasant classes, with even more millions of deaths. Then the Second World War once Stalin’s co-operative arrangement with Hitler broke down. More millions of deaths. And the “frozen” post-war years as paranoia gripped Stalin and he set about his anti-semitic campaign with the fabricated “doctors’ plot”. But at last, in 1953, Stalin died and his successors appropriately set about trying to reform things, beginning by killing Stalin’s hangman Beria.

            And this is a time upon which Red Plenty focuses. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, mainly in the years when Nikita Krushchev was Party boss, there was at least the possibility that the Soviet Union would be able to create the land of plenty it had so long claimed to be constructing. Soviet GDP grew faster in the late 1950s than the GDP of most Western countries, including the USA. Soviet economists even dreamed of outstripping the capitalists and producing more quality goods and consumer items for their deprived masses than the USA could, as well as at last feeding their whole population. The opening chapters have Krushchev on his much-publicised visit to the USA in 1959 and his certainty that the USSR will soon be the master of world technology and will create, on Communist terms, a stable consumer society. Sputnik has already astounded the world. Soon Yuri Gagarin will further astound the world. Red Plenty is about to flow.

Except that it doesn’t.

            What went wrong with the Soviet dream?

            A whole raft of things. There were a couple of years with disastrous harvests, forcing the USSR into the humiliating position of having to import food to feed its people. The dream of self-sufficiency faded. Oil was struck in Siberia and again there was the mirage of endless prosperity on the back of petro-chemicals. But oil profits were frittered away on both heavy military spending and industrial enterprises conceived on 1930s priorities. More than anything, however, the Soviet system was based on the idea of a planned economy, which in effect meant a command economy. Soviet economists really believed that application of a rational plan would bring perpetual prosperity. By the early 1960s, this delusion was enhanced by the advent of computers. Now the younger, reformist Soviet economists believed that the appropriate manipulation of numbers via computers would create the perfect plan. But a plan, rigidly adhered to, never takes account of contingencies, unforseen events and real human needs. After the brief Spring of promise, the Soviet economy began to unravel. Things were already on the downward slide when Krushchev was unseated by a bloodless coup in the Central Committee in 1964, and Kosygin and Brezhnev took over. There would be no Red Plenty – just the dour continuity of rationing, scarcity, and planning further and further detached from reality.

Francis Spufford does not follow this history through to the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-90. He signs off in 1969-70, when Brezhnev demoted and dismissed Kosygin and took over as sole boss. We know all that remains ahead are 20-odd years of censorship, repression, conformity, and growing dissidence that will eventually help push the whole system over.

Thus I have gracelessly charted the general direction of Red Plenty. But I have not noted the spirit of the book. Please understand that Spufford does not write in a spirit of triumphalism (“The Soviets were wrong. Capitalism Won! Yippee!” etc. etc.). Most of his Soviet characters are presented sympathetically and the younger Soviet economists are depicted as idealists who really believed they could create a better world.

But reality blocks them.

In the opening chapter set in 1938 (Part One, Chapter One) a young idealist thinks “The economy was a clean sheet of paper on which reason was writing”. Sheer reason, and planning, will solve everything. By 1962 (Part Three, Chapter One) a daring young economist, discussing how quality goods are being neither produced nor distrbuted properly, remarks “The point being that it was incredibly hard for the stores to send the bad stuff back to the knitting mills, because it all counted towards their output targets. What we need is a planning system that counts the value of production rather than the quantity. But that, in turn, requires prices which express the value of what is produced.” Knowingly or otherwise, the young Soviet man is promoting some of the virtues of an open market economy… but alas, this never was, and never could be, compatible with a command economy. Permit competition, appropriate pricing, and value as opposed to output targets, and you contradict the whole system.

How dry all this must sound, as if Red Plenty is a treatise on economy without a human focus. Not so. Chapter by chapter – or rather short-story by short-story – Spufford brings alive the realities of Soviet life in the lives of individuals.

Consider how he illustrates idealism in the form of the (historical figure) economist Leonid Vitalevich, trying (Part Two, Chapters I and 2) to coax the ideal economic plan out of mathematical calculations fed through a primitive computer system. Mere numbers, he thinks, will rationalise the distribution of potatoes. Consider the younger economic boffins who, sequestered in an isolated seminar-school for economists, slowly realise what privileged lives they are leading when they are given comforts that are not available to the general public. They are even allowed to speak their minds with relative freedom, including mild denunciations of the nonsense science that was imposed by Stalin’s favourite charlatan Lysenko. (Part 3, Chapter 1). So much for the Soviet State’s pretensions to social equality.  

The command economy means that factories have to keep up with set quotas. But in turn this means, when raw materials are delivered only intermittently, that there have to be, every month, bouts of “storming”, when factories work through the night, pushing workers to the limits of endurance, to produce what is demanded. Alternatively, some factory managers engage is deliberate sabotage of machinery in order to get “emergency help” with replacements and also providing a plausible excuse for not keeping up with the quota (Part 4, Chapter 2). The industrial situation also throws up individuals like Chekushin (depicted in Part 4, Chapter 3), a “tolkach” or “fixer” who operates like a salesman with promises and bribes and a web of “connections”, not to sell things but to buy things necessary to keep the system moving. He has to face extortion from street gangsters, and being beaten up by corrupt policemen who want favours, on his quest to get necessary machinery for a factory to fulfil its quota.

Spufford also notes the failures of Soviet science and medicine. Part 5, Chapter 3, titled “Psychoprophylaxis” gives the experience of a mother about to give birth. She has been told, as all Soviet women were, that her birth should be “natural” without the use of any painkillers, and that she should be able to master any possible pain by mind control. In the event – and showing how Party members had special privileges – she screams bloody murder as her contractions get stronger, says she has influence with the local party boss, and therefore gets given a painkiller. Why did most Soviet women have to go through this “natural”, un-anaesthetised process? Simply because the USSR did not have adequated supplies of epidurals etc. They made a virtue out of necessity by pretending their “natural” childbirth system was superior.

Similarly (Part 6, Chapter 1) the USSR lagged behind in the treatment of cancer, another legacy of taking charlatan biology as law. As for cybernetics and computing, the USSR ran far behind the West, and found that the only way they could produce credible machines was to reverse-engineer American IBM machines. And even then, they produced machines that were out-of-date in comparison with newer American models. These things multiply when there is a suppression of entrepreneurship.

On much darker ground, Spufford dramatises the nature of a society where there are mass censorship and severe penalties for reporting, or even talking about, the system’s failures. In a sequence set in 1953 (Part 1, Chapter 4), the economist Emil Shaidullin for the first time visits a desolate rural area and has a vague sense that some catastrophe has struck there but does not know what it could possibly have been. Spufford has to explain that even sophisticated city-dwellers had virtually no knowledge of the famines that swept Russia in the 1930s as such things were simply not reported. Spufford goes on to note that even a moderately-informed Westerner would have known more about such events than Russians were ever allowed to know. There were some tentative dissidents who tried to present a moderate and cautious form of protest. Spufford introduces (Part 2, Chapter 3) the (historical) character Sacha Galich, scriptwriter, songwriter, troubadour and Jewish (hence sometimes running up against ingrained Russian anti-semitism). He has managed to survive by writing acceptable sentimental and patriotic ballads. He is not exactly writing in bad faith – his priority is surviving, after all. But he understands the horrors of the regime that he is not allowed to mention, and very late in Red Plenty (Part 6, Chapter 2) he actually dares to sing a protest song. The interesting point is the fear some of his audience experience, with their knowledge that even listening to such things can mean punishment.

Of course all this points to the sheer brutality of a totalitarian regime. It is dramatised most fully by Spufford (Part 3, Chapter 2) in his account of a protest which took place in the town of Novocherkassk in 1962. The price of basic necessities (bread, meat, milk) had risen so much that local factory workers simply could not afford to feed their families. A large, peaceful protest occurred. The official response was to call in the secret police and the army. The protesters were told to disperse, or else. The protesters refused to disperse. In the massacre that followed, 28 people were killed. Protests weren’t allowed in the USSR. Naturally the event was not reported, but little by little rumours and samizdat managed to make the story known, and post-Soviet research has verified what happened.

This is the brutal sub-text of Red Plenty. No matter how idealistic some Soviet economists may have been; no matter how well-intentioned some plans were; no matter how sophisticated some Soviet intellectualls were; the system was not only built on an unworkable economic idea, but it was also in the service of a profoundly anti-democratic state – in effect, a terror state, even if the terror had modified and mutated somewhat since the days of Stalin.

I understand that Red Plenty has been translated into nine languages. I am pleased that one of them is Russian.

 

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