The capitalists looked surprisingly ordinary, for people who in their own individual persons were used to devouring stolen labour in phenomenal quantities. [p. 33]
A collection of linked short stories exploring the economics of the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s. I'm not sure whether this counts as fiction or creative non-fiction: while Spufford does invent characters, he explains their inspiration in the footnotes. (For example, geneticist Zoya Vaynshteyn, who speaks out against closed trials and suppression of research, is modelled on biologist Raissa Berg.) There are plenty of real people in here, too, from Kruschev himself to computing pioneer Lebedev and poet Sasha Galich. And there are real events -- the Novocherkassk massacre, the American Exhibition -- mixed in with the 'confabulations' about rural poverty, about death trains, about the value of industrial equipment being calculated by weight.
I'd absorbed, by osmosis, the notion that this was a science-fictional work: yes, if the science in question is economics. (See Adam Roberts' excellent review in Strange Horizons for more discussion of this argument.) Spufford himself introduces the book as 'not a novel. It has too much to explain, to be one of those. But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story...' [p. 3] And as he documents the rise and fall of the Soviet economic model, and the horrors perpetrated in its name, this blend of fact and fiction allows for exuberant prose and amusing exchanges. I'm wowed by Spufford's recent novels (especially Cahokia Jazz), but this has persuaded me to pursue his (alleged) non-fiction as well.
One of the many things I learnt from Red Plenty: 'Russian has no ‘h’, and renders the ‘h’ sound as ‘g’ rather than as (the other option) ‘kh’. The USSR was invaded in 1941 by a German dictator called Gitler.' [p. 401]. And due to the reading habits of some of the characters, I have been sparked by an urge to read one or more of the Strugatsky brothers' SF novels -- Roadside Picnic, Monday Begins on Saturday et cetera...
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