The Red Plenty Book Event — a round-table discussion of Francis Spufford’s novel, Red Plenty — ran on Crooked Timber from May 29 to June 14, 2012. online permalink: http://www.crookedtimber.org/categories/red_plenty_seminar The Book Event was organized by Henry Farrell. The book was edited by Henry Farrell and John Holbo, and designed by John Holbo. The Red Plenty Book Event is CC licensed: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. iii Contents Red Plenty is a Novel Kim Stanley Robinson 1 Red Plenty or Red Poverty? Reality versus ‘Psychoprophyilaxis’: Reflections on Spufford’s Vision of The Rise And The Decline of The Communist System Antoaneta Dimitrova 3 To market, to market … or not? George Scialabba 11 In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves Yo u Cosma Shalizi 21 On Narrating a System Carl Caldwell 47 Red Plenty – My Brush With Brezhnevism John Holbo 53 You Are Alone, In A Dark Wood. Now Cope. Henry Farrell 57 New Ideas From Dead Political Systems Daniel Davies 67 Worlds of Yesterday Felix Gilman 73 Good and Plenty Rich Yeselson 79 Will we ever know what otherwise is? Did we ever?Life, Fate and Irony Niamh Hardiman 85 Red Plenty:What WereThey Thinking? Maria Farrell 91 Red Plenty - or - Socialism Without Doctrines John Quiggin 97 Response Francis Spufford 101 Contributors 127 Red Plenty is a Novel Kim Stanley Robinson I loved Francis Spufford’sRed Plenty, which is a very beau- tiful novel. There seems to be some unnecessary confusion as to its form or genre. You can see that in the front matter of the American edition, in which it is described as “like no other history book,” “a collection of stories,” “faction,” “part detective story,” “a set of artfully interwoven genres,” “the least promis- ing fictional material of all time,” “reverse magical realism,” and “half novel/half history”. Of course it does not help that the first words of the novel are “This is not a novel. There is too much to explain...” All wrong. There is always too much to explain, and yet novels are still novels. They have an immense capacity to in- clude and shape all aspects of the real. Red Plenty is not even a particularly unusual novel, in terms of length, complexity, self-awareness, historical inclusions, bricolage technique, or any other matters of style or content. Shall we say Moby Dick is not a novel, or War and Peace? No we shall not. Red Plenty is a novel like they are, and should be discussed as one. All right. Getting past the first sentence: what I particularly liked in Red Plenty is the way it humanizes a mysterious and convulsive mass of recent history. It’s a tremendous demonstra- tion of what a great diagnostic power the novel can wield in the hands of a strong novelist. You could call it an outstanding example of socialist realism, in that its critique of the Soviet experiment also contains a deep sympathy for the experiment’s goals, and for the many people who continued to struggle for those goals to the end, despite the worsening circumstances. 1 It should be read together with F.V. Gladkov’s Cement to make that point clear. It should also be read in the context of science fiction, historical fiction, alternative history, Soviet modern- isms, and steampunk. This would be to put it in the context of other similar works, where it will always shine and illuminate. And it is so full of characters I cared about, described in a precise emotional language. A moment came for me, in the chapter called “Midsummer Night, 1962,” when the book took flight and soared into that space where we live other lives and hear other people’s thoughts, and feel their feelings. Now I too have been there! This is what novels do, and I insist Red Plenty is a novel because it strengthens our sense of the form to have this book included in it. 2 Red Plenty or Red Poverty? Reality versus ‘Psychoprophyilaxis’: Reflections on Spufford’s Vision of The Rise And The Decline of The Communist System Antoaneta Dimitrova Despite being modestly defined as a Russian fairytale by its author, Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty combines, in an original way, Russian style fiction and social science. Its originality lies in making the history of an idea into fiction and doing it in such a way that the combination of documentary and fiction does not come across as false history or as historical literature, but as a complex, engaging, exciting epic illuminating ques- tions of economics and politics that are normally too dry for art. By interweaving the stories of numerous characters with historical events and a grand narrative describing economic and social processes of several decades, Spufford fits into the best traditions of Russian fiction, but his focus on ideas rather than emotions makes his approach profoundly un-Russian. This is, to my mind, rather a plus than a weakness of the book, since the great Russian writers of the 19th and 20th century are unrivalled in portraying the great mysteries of the human soul in turbulent times. What they have not done, what hardly anyone has done, is to make a calm, objective, almost scien- 3 tific investigation of the ideas and relationships that made the success of the Soviet regime possible in the 1950s and 1960s, at the genuine and idealistic belief of citizens and elites at the time that, as Spufford’s Kantorovich character reasons, “if he could solve the problems people brought to the institute, it made the world a fraction better” (11). ThusRed Plenty is a book for social scientists in more ways than one. First because it draws on history and uses a great amount of documentary material, economic and social history of the Soviet Union to tell the story of the communist dream of abundance for all. And second, and perhaps more impor- tant, because its evidence driven narrative aims to answer several typical social science questions, especially for a social scientists interested in communism’s rise and fall. How could the Soviet planning economy be so successful in producing serious economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s, how could the Soviet system produce the science and innovation that led to space exploration and many other scientific achievements? And why did it then fail to continue doing so, to keep the pace of economic growth and scientific discovery? Among Spufford’s many achievements in this book is that he provides some direct and some indirect answers to these questions. Even though he leads us to the answers by telling the stories of characters that are convincing and fully capable of engaging the reader’s interest in their destiny, he manages somehow to explore mechanisms that are structural and not personal. Despite the attention for Khrushchev and other his- torical figures from the Soviet Union, the personal vignettes are embedded in a narrative in which science, even more so than the idea of plenty — is the hero. This is perhaps best rep- resented in by the prominent and fairly convincing character and the fate of the mathematician and economist Kantorovich. Other Red Plenty characters remain, as the planner Maksim Mokhov, “a confabulated embodiment of (the) institution” (395). 4 In contrast to many other books written about the Soviet period and especially about Stalinism, Spufford’s account is not emotional, grim and dramatic, does not aim to show the suffering of ordinary people or their disillusionment with the system as has already been done with unrivalled mastery by the classical works of Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak or Bulgakov, to name but a few. Instead, he shows the various characters influ- enced not so much by the cruel decisions, but by the dreams of the communist leaders. The leaders who, in accordance with Marxist dogma, pretended (Stalin) or hoped (Khrushchev) that they were social scientists and in Spufford’s interpretation harbored dreams of achieving abundance for all — Red Plenty. A dream that seemed to come true for a while by building on the idealism and enthusiasm of ordinary people and of talented scientists like the mathematician Kantorovich and his students and followers. Spufford’s approach to the period, in my view, is a success despite his self confessed lack of knowledge of Russian and the occasional unrealistic dialogue (for example, the dialogue between the ‘fixer’ Chekushkin and the factory director rep- resentative Stepovoi (234-245) rings somehow untrue pitched half way between the dry formal register of Soviet apparatchiks and the very informal everyday talk among drinking bud- dies). Even as his dialogue does not always achieve authentic- ity — and it seems that Spufford does not, rightly, aim to do so, (for example by using comrade instead of Mr. as a form of address) — the characters and their relationships are convinc- ing and reveal a kind of deeper truth about human behavior. As all good fiction, the book achieves a truthful representation of the social forces and personal relationships and in doing so, helps the reader to understand the Soviet system better. And as with all good fiction, Red Plenty provides, through the fate of its characters, the possibility of reaching for other conclusions than the author may have intended, of reflecting on other questions than the one defined as central by him. For 5 me, even more important than Spufford’s quest to understand the Soviet planning economy and its failure, is the question what mechanisms and relationships caused the moral failure of the communist system, the political decline which, arguably, preceded the economic failure by destroying the initiative and idealism which gave the communist regimes their energy and strength at the beginning.