Is this a novel? I've never read a novel though with 60 pages of footnotes. Is this a history book? History books don't usually mix a cast of entirely fictional characters with known figures from history. Spufford himself describes it as a 'half-way house on the borders of fiction'.

It's clever. Each section of the book is prefaced by the relevant section of mid-20th century Russian economic and political history. Each is then succeeeded by a few chapters of, well, vignettes really, in which we meet factory workers, lovers, members of the scientific elite, managers.... With one exception, we never revisit these characters, nor are their stories complete tales. What we are given is a slice from their lives, one which, when read with the others, and with the accompanying history provides a rich and illuminating picture of Russia's planned economy and its effect on day-to-day life.

You'll learn about economics, and politics, but most of all, you'll learn about people, and how by being unpredictable, tired and human they, together with ideologies that were sometimes shortsighted or perverse prevented the realisation of the Great Soviet Dream. ( )

Увлекательная книга повествующая жизнь людей разного ранга в СССР. Интересные короткие истории, о том как в такой огромной стране СССР пытались провести такой эксперимент как СССР. Книга написана очень хорошо: разные герои, разные жизненные ситуации, особенно понравились диалоги. ( )

Fictional account of the Soviet Union's attempt to use "scientific socialism" to outproduce the West in the Khruschev years, and how they eventually squandered the talents of some of the world's smartest people with their centralized, top-down bureaucracy. This was sort of a natural follow-up to many of the themes in Philip Mirowski's superb Machine Dreams and has gotten rave reviews about its innovative blending of well-paced fiction and hard economics. ( )

I saw this book recommended in a comment on Hacker News, and originally decided to pick it up because I wanted to get a more emotional telling of this era, primarily to give me context to the stories of parents' own experiences with communism in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s-1990s. I was surprised at how much I liked the book.

Primarily, I was surprised that I hadn't seen this format of storytelling before - obviously there are plenty of strict fiction / non-fiction books, and a solid amount of books that fall in the fuzzy middle of 'based on true events.' But I haven't seen any books in that last category that both try to tell an interesting story for the reader and also provide footnotes at the end that explain, in detail, what liberties the author has taken to make the narrative more interesting. This I think is the biggest factor in my enjoyment of the book.

The actual content was also handled in a pleasing way. Spufford creates a few parallel stories that he comes back to during different sections of the book. Some are only one-off. The way that the stories are organized, however, allows the author to leave the narrative of one setting and come back to it much further in the future, transporting the reader to when something interesting is happening. In a normal fiction book you wouldn't need to do this (since you can just arbitrarily have events happen in a way that is fortuitous to storytelling), but in this kind of book it's important for the reader that the dates match the chronology in real-life time. I thought this particular way of handling the necessary time discontinuity / event discontinuity was well done.

Overall, I'd recommend Red Plenty to anyone wanting to get a better feel of the Soviet promise. I came away from it largely succeeding in my goal. ( )

This book was really good.

It meanders through a diverse set of lives across class, era, age, and occupation. The author wrote the book not knowing russian, which is absolutely silly, but whatever. We hear from a woman having a baby, a planner figuring out how to plan the economy, a couple fighting hard to be prototypical soviets, a "reverse salesman" etc.
Some lessons I learned from the book:

I have had a hard time in my life really understanding what it's like to fear being candid with the people around you. In Russia, you could easily be sent to the gulag for a wayward sentence or note. It seems that in such a society, this fear tramples the innocence of innocence, leading to a layer of surliness over top of confidences, ecstasy, and dreams. Of course in many stories the anger and hopelessness shone through, and of course now that I have read it, the absolute complexity and inertia of the soviet machine maps very closely to the complexity I see inside of Amazon. This last bit was very interesting to read and see the parallels. An example of this is that although Kosygin had in his hands a better economic planning protocol, he chose a stable decline over it because he felt that if the algorithms broke the economy, this unknown would be unmanageable compared to top down bureaucratic decisions. This maps very neatly with neural networks inside of large scale machine learning systems. Although they are far more powerful, managers can be loathe to use them, because you can't make them do exactly what you want, or hold a single part accountable for a failure. With FST's and rules, you can easily add or subtract logic, but not so for an end to end system.

Another surprising fact was the underpinnings of hope which drove the early Soviet revolution, say in the 1950's. The people really believed that they could "win" and that the plenty that Stalin and Khrushchev promised would come, the utopia would arrive. This led to, according to the author, much of the pain in the early days which should have existed in people's hearts get punted towards the future, but when this pain landed in Kosygin's declining society, there was some hell to pay for sure.

Another self evident point that nevertheless was important to see in words, was the russian envy toward the West. The governments used the West as a sort of ruler to measure themselves on.

One issue I'm surprised the book didn't deal with was the nuclear terror. I read watchmen during reading this book, and Watchmen was all about the terror felt in America over being bombed, but this subject was just not breached in Red Plenty. I guess this makes sense, the book definitely chose its battles. ( )