Red Plenty

Red Plenty is organized almost as a series of linked short stories. Some stories clearly link to others; some stories could stand completely alone. While RP has the kind of sprawling cast appropriate to a good Russian novel, Leonid Kantorovich is the central character in more ways than one. First, he reappears over decades in multiple stories. His position of influence led a lot of characters to rotate about him, interacting with each other as their lives develop. Second, economics sets the boundary conditions of everyone's lives (and the book does a great of job of explaining exactly why this is true), so the Party's economic decisions had palpable effects all through that huge country. Whether those decisions were driven by Marxist-Leninist Thought or Kantorovich's linear programming made a big difference. Spufford does an excellent job of explaining how these seemingly abstruse conceptual difference was converted step-by-step into dramatic concrete changes in human lives. He shows, step by step, how it is almost like physics, where subtle distinctions, when embodied in millions of interacting parts, produce dramatically different emergent behavior.Kantorovich deserves far more fame than he ever got (even though he got a Nobel Prize): his idea of linear programming is routinely cited as one of the very few algorithms that shape the modern world. Laying out integrated circuits in cell phones, routing airplanes around the world, scheduling project tasks, converting crude oil to fuel efficiently, centralized economic planning -- these and a million more problems can be solved with LP. I hope this book inspires at least some people to learn more about Kantorovich's amazing life, and even a bit about linear programming (and its successors, such as convex programming or variational inequalities). Amazon has many good books on LP or convex optimization!Many reviewers comment that it was very unusual, different from anything you expected, and so on. I did not find anything unusual about it at all except that it got the math right from top to bottom, from abstract concepts to concrete daily life. As a very mathematically minded person, I did not find anything odd about that at all. I've pointed out to people for years that shadow prices (aka Lagrange multipliers, which Kantorovich carefully designated "objectively derived values") were a very touchy subject in the Soviet Union and could easily get a one-way trip to Siberia because they gave a way of determining value that was based on potential future uses rather than past labor inputs. And Marx's Labor Theory of Value categorically stated that only past labor inputs counted as "value". One can still get in passionate arguments about this exact topic today, as so many people have absorbed Marxist-Leninist Thought without knowing its name; as Keynes said "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”Kantorovich's struggles (and the tragic consequences of his failure) are a case study in the clash between people motivated by passionate, appealing but inaccurate theories and equally passionate people driven by a scientific understanding of what really will help The People. Because that clash continues today, albeit in different forms, Red Plenty has many subtle lessons for today's political struggles.

This is an unusual and very enjoyable book about the utopian fantasies that underpinned Soviet economic thinking in the 50s and 60s. Spufford writes with verve and an authentic sense of place, and has digested a small mountain of research material to give a vivid picture of aspects of life in the Soviet Union of the period.Let's be clear, however, about what the book is *not.* First of all, it's not really non-fiction at all. It's fiction, through and through. As the 70 pages of notes and bibliography attest, it's *extensively researched* fiction, based on real situations and often real people...but all the best historical fiction generally is extensively researched, based on real situations and real people. If Patrick O'Brian had ever seen fit to provide the sources consulted for his Aubrey/Maturin series, I have little doubt but that it would run to hundreds of pages. The mere fact that there are six short explanatory essays in the book does not, in fact, make the book some kind of non-fiction / fiction hybrid.Secondly, those looking for a comprehensive explanation of Soviet economic planning are barking up the wrong tree. Some of the interrelated stories in the book concern the thinking that spurred the failed Kosygin Reform of 1965, and others demonstrate the contradictions, corruption and compromises inherent in centrally planned economies. However, other chapters are only tangentially related to this theme. Some focus on the emergence of the USSR's elite science cities in the 60s, Soviet computer science, Komsomol propagandists, and Soviet maternity hospitals, among other things.This scattershot approach will vex some readers, particularly those under the misimpression that the book is a "history" rather than historical fiction. Fiction readers are likely to be more tolerant...particularly readers who realize that Spufford's episodic style is mimicking the style the Russian greats Vasily Grossman and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Spufford is using the economic theories of Leonid Kantorovich as a launching pad for a broader exploration of what the experience of living in the Soviet Union during the short-lived optimism of the Khruschev Thaw might have been like, when for a brief time the idea a Communist utopia seemed plausible to many.This is an ambitious agenda, and the extent to which Spufford succeeds is remarkable. There are a couple things, though, that keep Red Plenty from being truly outstanding. First, Spufford isn't a Russian speaker, so his characters strike the occasional false note. Second, the transition from irrational optimism to hopeless disillusionment is abrupt. For instance, we see the (fictional) economist Emil Shailludin at the very beginning of his career when he is filled with idealism and (somewhat improbably) shocked by conditions outside of Moscow, and then many years later when he is he thrown into despair by the illogical half-measures that constituted Soviet economic reform. The progression is from A immediately to Z, with no sense of what might have happened in the intervening years. It's not often that I lament that a book is too short, but I really do feel Spufford's thematic concerns demanded an even broader canvas than the one he's provided.These are quibbles, however, and don't detract much from one what was one of the more original and enjoyable books I've read this year.