RED PLENTY
Francis Spufford
For my mother
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
The Cast
PART I
Introduction
1.: The Prodigy, 1938
2.: Mr Chairman, 1959
3.: Little Plastic Beakers, 1959
4.: White Dust, 1953
PART II
Introduction
1.: Shadow Prices, 1960
2.: From the Photograph, 1961
3.: Stormy Applause, 1961
PART III
Introduction
1.: Midsummer Night, 1962
2.: The Price of Meat, 1962
PART IV
Introduction
1.: The Method of Balances, 1963
2.: Prisoner’s Dilemma, 1963
3.: Favours, 1964
PART V
Introduction
1.: Trading Down, 1964
2.: Ladies, Cover Your Ears! 1965
3.: Psychoprophylaxis, 1966
PART VI
Introduction
1.: The Unified System, 1970
2.: Police in the Forest, 1968
3.: The Pensioner, 1968
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
Copyright
The Cast
in order of first appearance
CAPITALS indicate the part of a name most often used in the book
* indicates a real person
(I.2, IV.1, etc) indicates the part and chapter numbers of further scenes in which the person appears
On the tram in Leningrad
* LEONID VITALEVICH Kantorovich, a genius (I.1, II.1, III.1, VI.2, VI.3)
Visiting the United States
* Nikita Sergeyevich KHRUSHCHEV, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Chairman of the Council of Ministers (I.2, III.2, V.1, VI.3)
* NINA PETROVNA Khrushcheva, his wife (I.2, VI.3)
* Andrei GROMYKO, Soviet Foreign Minister (I.2)
* Oleg TROYANOVSKY, Khrushchev’s interpreter (I.2)
* Dwight D. EISENHOWER, President of the United States (I.2)
* Henry Cabot LODGE, US Ambassador to the United Nations (I.2)
* Averell HARRIMAN, a millionaire acting as East–West liaison (I.2)
At the American Exhibition in Sokolniki Park
GALINA, a student at Moscow State University and Komsomol member (I.3, V.3)
VOLODYA, ditto, her fiancé (I.3, III.2)
KHRISTOLYUBOV, a minor apparatchik (I.3)
FYODOR, a Komsomol member from an electrical factory (I.3, V.2)
ROGER TAYLOR, an African-American guide at the exhibition (I.3)
Walking to the Village
EMIL Arslanovich Shaidullin, a well-connected young economist (I.4, II.1, III.1, V.2, VI.2)
MAGDA, his fiancée (I.4)
Her FATHER (I.4)
Her MOTHER (I.4)
Her GRANDFATHER (I.4)
SASHA, her brother (I.4)
PLETKIN, the collective farm manager (I.4)
At the conference in the Academy of Sciences
* Vasily Sergeyevich NEMCHINOV, a reforming economist and academic politician (II.1)
* BOYARSKII, a political economist of the old school (II.1)
In the basement of the Institute of Precise Mechanics
* Sergei Alexeievich LEBEDEV, a pioneering Soviet computer designer (II.2, VI.1)
In Moscow on the day of the Party Congress
* Sasha/Alexander GALICH, a writer of stage comedies, screenplays and ideologically acceptable song lyrics (II.3, VI.2)
MORIN, a Thaw-minded newspaper editor (II.3)
MARFA TIMOFEYEVNA, a newspaper censor (II.3)
GRIGORIY, a doorman at the Writers’ Union (II.3)
At Akademgorodok in 1963
ZOYA Vaynshteyn, a biologist (III.1, VI.2)
VALENTIN, a graduate student in mathematics (III.1, VI.2)
KOSTYA, a graduate student in economics (III.1, VI.2)
HAIRBAND GIRL, Valentin’s would-be girlfriend (III.1)
* Andrei Petrovich ERSHOV, a computer programmer (III.1)
MO, a sardonic intellectual (III.1, VI.2)
SOBCHAK, an exasperated intellectual (III.1)
In Novocherkassk
BASOV, regional Party Secretary (III.2)
* KUROCHKIN, director of the Budenny Electric Locomotive Works (III.2)
* Anastas MIKOYAN, long-serving Presidium (Politburo) member (III.2)
* Frol KOZLOV, Presidium member and heir apparent to Khrushchev (III.2)
The MONK-FACED MAN, a veteran operative of the organs of security (III.2)
At Gosplan
Maksim Maksimovich MOKHOV, Deputy Director of the Sector of Chemical and Rubber Goods (IV.1)
On the train from Solovets
ARKHIPOV, KOSOY and MITRENKO, the management of the Solkemfib viscose works (IV.2)
PONOMAREV, an engineer and former political prisoner (IV.2)
In Sverdlovsk
CHEKUSKIN, a tolkach or ‘pusher’; a buying agent (IV.3)
SEÑORA LOPEZ, a Spanish dancing teacher (IV.3)
RYSZARD, a junior manager in the chemical equipment division of Uralmash (IV.3)
STEPOVOI, an inexperienced executive (IV.3)
KOLYA, a king thief (IV.3)
The LIEUTENANT, a policeman (IV.3)
VASSILY, a truck driver and Spartak fan (IV.3)
At the leadership compound in Moscow
Khrushchev’s CHAUFFEUR (V.1)
* MELNIKOV, commandant of Khrushchev’s first security detail in his retirement (V.1)
Khrushchev’s COOK (V.1)
* Khrushcev’s SON, Sergei Khrushchev, a rocket designer (V.1)
At the government dacha
* Alexei Nikolaevich KOSYGIN, Chairman of the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) (V.2)
In Galina’s flat, and the labour ward
FYODOR’S MOTHER, an annoyingly slim woman in her forties (V.3)
IVANOV, her lover (V.3)
A tired DOCTOR (V.3)
INNA OLEGOVNA, a midwife (V.3)
In the Kremlin corridor
FRENCHIE, a secretary (VI.1)
At Akademgorodok in 1968
MAX, Zoya’s ten-year-old son (VI.2)
TYOMA (short for Artemy), a doorkeeper in the Institute of Cytology and Genetics (VI.2)
The DIRECTOR of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics (VI.2)
A note on the characters
Although the list above divides the people in this book into two categories, real and imaginary, there are a couple of characters who, while fictional, exist in a relationship to real historical individuals: they occupy similar historical positions, they play similar professional roles, they share to a limited degree in the life-histories and life-events of the real people who prompted their invention. Yet they are inventions. They are fictional people standing roughly where real people stood: Zoya Vaynshteyn displacing the real fruit-fly biologist Raissa Berg, and Emil Shaidullin rudely elbowing aside the eminent economist Abel Aganbegyan. It is important to understand that Zoya and Emil, as represented here, came straight out of my head. Their characterisations were not the result of any process of interview or research or investigation on my part, and are not intended to reflect any judgement of mine on the character of the real scientists whose places they have taken. No characteristic, trait, action, thought, intention, utterance or opinion of these characters should be taken as an indication of any corresponding characteristic, trait, action, thought, intention, utterance or opinion belonging to the real individuals.
PART I
This
is 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; only the story is the story of an idea, first of all, and only afterwards, glimpsed through the chinks of the idea’s fate, the story of the people involved. The idea is the hero. It is the idea that sets forth, into a world of hazards and illusions, monsters and transformations, helped by some of those it meets along the way and hindered by others. Best to call this a fairytale, then though it really happened, or something like it. And not just any fairytale, but specifically a Russian fairytale, to go alongside the stories of Baba Yaga and the Glass Mountain that Afanaseyev the folklorist collected when he rode out over the black earth of Russia, under its wide sky, in the nineteenth century.
Where Western tales begin by shifting us to another time – ‘Once upon a time’ they say, meaning elsewhen, meaning then rather than now – Russian skazki make an adjustment of place. ‘In a certain land’, they start; or, ‘In the three-times-ninth kingdom …’ Meaning elsewhere, meaning there rather than here. Yet these elsewheres are always recognisable as home. In the distance will always be a wood- walled town where the churches have onion domes. The ruler will always be a Tsar, Ivan or Vladimir. The earth is always black. The sky is always wide. It’s Russia, always Russia, the dear dreadful enormous territory at the edge of Europe which is as large as all Europe put together. And, also, it isn’t. It is story Russia, not real Russia; a place never quite in perfect overlap with the daylight country of the same name. It is as near to it as a wish is to reality, and as far away too. For the tales supplied what the real country lacked, when villagers were telling them, and Afanaseyev was writing them down.
Real Russia’s fields grew scraggy crops of buckwheat and rye. Story Russia had magic tablecloths serving feasts without end. Real Russia’s roads were mud and ruts. Story Russia abounded in tools of joyful velocity: flying carpets, genies of the rushing air, horses that scarcely bent the grass they galloped on. Real Russia fixed its people in sluggish social immobility. Story Russia sent its lively boys to seek the Firebird or to woo the Swan Maiden. The stories dreamed away reality’s defects. They made promises good enough to last for one evening of firelight; promises which the teller and the hearers knew could only be delivered in some Russian otherwhere. They could come true only in the version of home where the broke-backed trestle over the stream at the village’s end became ‘a bridge of white hazelwood with oaken planks, spread with purple cloths and nailed with copper nails’. Only in the wish country, the dream country. Only in the twenty-seventh kingdom.
In the twentieth century, Russians stopped telling skazki. And at the same time, they were told that the skazki were coming true. The stories’ name for a magic carpet, samolet, ‘self-flyer’, had already become the ordinary Russian word for an aeroplane. Now voices from the radio and the movie screen and television began to promise that the magic tablecloth samobranka, ‘self-victualler’, would soon follow after. ‘In our day,’ Nikita Khrushchev told a crowd in the Lenin Stadium of Moscow on 28 September 1959, ‘the dreams mankind cherished for ages, dreams expressed in fairytales which seemed sheer fantasy, are being translated into reality by man’s own hands.’ He meant, above all, the skazki’s dreams of abundance. Humanity’s ancient condition of scarcity was going to end, imminently. Everyone was going to climb the cabbage stalk, scramble through the hole in the sky, and arrive in the land where millstones revolved all by themselves. ‘Whenever they gave a turn, a cake and a slice of bread with butter and sour cream appeared, and on top of them, a pot of grue’ Now, instead of being the imagined compensation for an empty belly, the sour cream and the butter were truly going to flow.
And of course, Khrushchev was right. That is exactly what did happen in the twentieth century, for hundreds of millions of people. There is indeed more food, and more kinds of food, in one ordinary supermarket of the present day, than in any of the old hungry dreams, dreamed in Russia or elsewhere. But Khrushchev believed that the plenty of the stories was coming in Soviet Russia, and coming because of something that the Soviet Union possessed and the hungry lands of capitalism lacked: the planned economy. Because the whole system of production and distribution in the USSR was owned by the state, because all Russia was (in Lenin’s words) ‘one office, one factory’, it could be directed, as capitalism could not, to the fastest, most lavish fulfilment of human needs. Therefore it would easily out-produce the wasteful chaos of the marketplace. Planning would be the USSR’s own self-turning millstone, its own self-victualling tablecloth.
This Russian fairytale began to be told in the decade of famine before the Second World War, and it lasted officially until Communism fell. Hardly anyone believed it, by the end. In practice, from the late 1960s on all that the Soviet regime aspired to do was to provide a pacifiying minimum of consumer goods to the inhabitants of the vast shoddy apartment buildings ringing every Soviet city. But once upon a time the story of red plenty had been serious: an attempt to beat capitalism on its own terms, and to make Soviet citizens the richest people in the world. For a short while, it even looked – and not just to Nikita Khrushchev – as if the story might be coming true. Intelligence was invested in it, as well as foolishness: a generation’s hopes, and a generation’s intellectual gifts, and a tyranny’s guilty wish for a happy ending. This book is about that moment. It is about the cleverest version of the idea, the most subtle of the Soviet attempts to pull a working samobranka out of the dream country. It is about the adventures of the idea of red plenty as it came hopefully along the high road.
But it is not a history. It is not a novel. It is itself a fairytale; and like a fairytale it is wishful, irresponsible, not to be relied on. The notes at the back indicate where the story it tells depends on invention, where the explanation it gives depends on lies. Remember, as you read, that this story does not take place in the literal, historical Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but only in some nearby kingdom; as near to it as wishes are to reality, and also as far away.
Notes – Introduction
1 A bridge of white hazelwood: this, and every quotation from a fairytale, comes from Aleksandr Afanas’ev [Afanaseyev], Russian Fairy Tales, translated by Norbert Guterman (New York: Pantheon, 1945), in some cases slightly adapted. For formal and anthropological analysis, see Maria Kravchenko, The World of the Russian Fairy Tale (Berne, 1987).
2 Russians stopped telling skazki: for the deliberate attempt to manufacture a continuing Soviet ‘folk’ tradition, with Stalin cast as mythic champion or good tsar, see Frank J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudo-folklore of the Stalin Era (Armonk: M.E.Sharpe, Inc., 1990); and also John McClure and Michael Urban, ‘The Folklore of State Socialism’, Soviet Studies vol. 35 no. 4 (1983), pp. 471–86; Felix J. Oinas, ‘Folklore and Politics in the Soviet Union’, Slavic Review 32 (1973), pp. 45–58; and Rachel Goff, ‘The Role of Traditional Russian Folklore in Soviet Propaganda’, Perspectives: Student Journal of Germanic and Slavic Studies (Brigham Young University), vol. 12, Winter 2004, at: http://germslav.byu.edu/perspectives/w2004contents. html. For an exploitation in contemporary fantasy of Russian folklore and the Soviet/post-Soviet setting, see Liz Williams, Nine Layers of Sky (New York: Bantam Spectra, 2003).
3 The stories’ name for a magic carpet: see Kravchenko, The World of the Russian Fairy Tale.
4 ‘In our day,’ Nikita Khrushchev told a crowd: see Khrushchev in America: Full Texts of the Speeches Made by N.S.Khrushchev on His Tour of the United States, September 15–27, 1959 (New York: Crosscurrents Press, 1960), which includes this speech, made in Moscow on his return.
5 All Russia was (in Lenin’s words) ‘one office, one factory’: technically, in fact, a prediction by him about the working of post-revolutionary society, made just before the Bolshevik putsch, and published just after it, in The State and Revolution (1918), ch. 5. ‘The whole of society will have become one office and one factory with equal work and equal pay.’ There are many, many
editions, but see, for example, V.I.Lenin, Selected Works vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970).
In a certain kingdom, in a certain land, namely, the very land in which we live …
1.
The Prodigy, 1938
A tram was coming, squealing metal against metal, throwing blue-white sparks into the winter dark. Without thinking about it, Leonid Vitalevich lent his increment of shove to the jostling crowd, and was lifted with the rest of the collectivity over the rear step and into the cram of human flesh behind the concertina door. ‘C’mon citizens, push up!’ said a short woman next to him, as if they had a choice about it, as if they could decide to move or not, when everyone inside a Leningrad tram was locked in the struggle to get from the entry door at the back to the exit at the front by the time their stop came around. Yet the social miracle took place: somewhere at the far end a small mob of passengers burped out onto the roadway, and a squeezing ripple travelled down the car, a tram-peristalsis propelled by shoulders and elbows, creating just enough space to press into before the door closed. The yellow bulbs overhead flickered, and the tram rocked away with a rising hum. Leonid Vitalevich was wedged against a metal post on one side, on the other against the short woman. She was wedged against a tall fellow with a big chin and blond hair standing on end. Beyond him was a clerk with a glazed eye, like a herring on ice, and three young soldiers who had already started their evening spree judging by their breath. But the smell of vodka merged with the sweaty sourness of the workers a little further forward, whose factory had plainly lodged them in a barracks without a bathroom, and the fierce rosewater scent the short woman had on, into one, hot, composite human smell, just as all the corners and pieces of sleeve and collar he could see fused into one tight kaleidoscope of darned hand-me-downs, and worn leather, and too-big khaki.
He was wearing what he thought of as his ‘professor outfit’, the old suit cobbled together by his mother and sister which had been supposed to make him look like a plausible Professor L. V. Kantorovich when he first started teaching at the university six years ago, aged twenty. He’d been standing at the blackboard in the lecture theatre, taking a deep breath, chalk in hand, about to launch into the basics of set theory, when a helpful voice from the front row said, ‘I’d stop messing about if I was you. They take things seriously here. You’ll only get in trouble when the professor arrives.’ He’d had to learn to be sharp, to make his presence felt. Even now, when the world was filling up with surprisingly young scientists and army officers and plant managers – the older ones having taken to disappearing by night, leaving silence behind them, and gaps in every hierarchy to be plugged by anxious twentysomethings working all hours to learn their new jobs – even now, pinched and tired as he was, dull-skinned like everyone else on the tram, he still had the occasional difficulty with someone misled by his big adam’s apple, and his big eyes, and his sticking-out ears. This was the problem with being what people called a prodigy. You always had to be saying something or doing something to persuade people that you weren’t what they thought they saw. He couldn’t remember it ever being any different, though he presumed that before he learned to talk, and then almost immediately to count, and to do algebra, and to play chess, there’d been a milky time when he was only Dr and Mrs Kantorovich’s ordinary baby. But at seven, when he worked out from his big brother’s radiology textbook that you ought to be able to tell how old a rock was from the amount of undecayed carbon in it, he’d had to get past Nikolai’s indulgent medical-student smile before he would pay attention, and start talking about the idea seriously, the way he needed. ‘You must have read this somewhere. You must have done. Or been talking to someone …’ At fourteen, he had to persuade the other students at the Physico-Mathematical Institute that he wasn’t just an annoying shrimp who’d wandered in by mistake; that he belonged in their company, even though he was a head shorter than any of them, and had to bounce as he walked along the corridor with them to keep his face in the general domain of the conversation. At eighteen, presenting original work at the All-Union Mathematical Congress, he measured his success by his ability to get the yellow-fingered, chainsmoking geniuses to stop being kind. When they gave up being encouraging, when they made their first sarcastic remark, when they started to sneer and to try to shred his theorems, he knew they had ceased seeing a kid and started to see a mathematician.
Red Plenty Page 1