2024/133: Red Plenty — Francis Spufford

2024/133: Red Plenty — Francis Spufford

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.

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