Andrew Meier
Spufford's odds of success were tall, for he has not only created a genre-bender—part novel, part history—he's taken as his subject what may be the most boring corner (central planning) of a very boring field (Soviet studies)…The result is a marvel—at once pure skazka, an old-style Russian fairy tale, and a deeply researched history populated with characters, episodes, even dialogue, snatched from history…Red Plenty is a literary/historical seesaw…a work, by turns learned and lyrical, that grows by degree, accreting into something lasting: a replica in miniature of a world of ideas never visible to most, and now gone.
—The New York Times Book Review
Dwight Garner
…Mr. Spufford is an amused and amusing observer of human beings, and it is a pleasure to be in his company. His descriptions of people pop off the page…Red Plenty is a strong and eccentric book about a beautiful mass delusion, a filigreed vision of a place Mr. Spufford likes to call "Story Russia"…His book, unlike the Soviet dream, delivers on every promise.
—The New York Times
From the Publisher
A hammer-and-sickle version of Altman's Nashville, with central committees replacing country music . . . [Spufford] has one of the most original minds in contemporary literature.” —Nick Hornby, The Believer
“A thrilling book that all enthusiasts of the Big State should read.” —Michael Burleigh, The Sunday Telegraph
From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY
"Clark's resonant baritone presents the author's vignettes of these years clearly and with great expression." —AudioFile
Kirkus Reviews
The strange, sad, hilarious story of the Soviet Union's blind pursuit of a Communist paradise, told through a mix of history and fiction, using both to get to the truth. Spufford (I May Be Some Time, 2003, etc.) traces the latter half of the history of the Soviet Union, starting in the late 1950s, when the Soviets were seeing an imaginary light over the horizon. After 40 years that included struggle, war, starvation and Stalin, the Marxist dream looked as if it might be taking off under Nikita Khrushchev. The Soviet Union's economic growth more than doubled that of the United States, and if it kept going at the same rate the "planned economy" would "overtake and surpass" capitalist America. Cars, food and houses would be better, and there would be more money and leisure all around, thanks to a top-down, start-to-finish management that "could be directed, as capitalism could not, to the fastest, most lavish fulfillment of human needs." Through a series of episodes involving economists, scientists, computer programmers, industrialists, artists and politicians--some real, some imagined, some drawn together from composites--Spufford tells the story of the life and death of a national illusion, as utopian dreams moldered into grim dystopian realities. The planned economy was a worker's nightmare, where production targets increased even as equipment became more and more outdated, and unforeseen, unplanned events--like the sudden loss of a spinning machine at a textile factory--set off a ripple effect of unproductiveness. Pay cuts and scarce commodities led to riots, such as one in Novocherkassk, where the dead bodies were hauled out and the bloody streets were repaved overnight. In his often-whimsical, somewhat Nabokovian notes, Spufford freely points out his own inventions, approximations and hedged bets on what might have happened. A highly creative, illuminating, genre-resisting history.
