Book review: Red Plenty

Why the Soviet Union failed, as told by its citizens

He’s a man who can get out of his depth in a puddle.

In the footnotes of The Great Rupture Viktor Shvets claimed that of all the books he’s read, Red Plenty offers the most accurate depiction of the economic quagmires that ultimately made the Soviet Union a non-viable entity. I took Viktor’s endorsement seriously, clicked through Red Plenty in a week and what a week it was!

To summarize in a sentence: Red Plenty takes the reader through 50 years of Soviet history via personal stories, with a special focus on inefficiencies in the economic/governance model that led to the USSR’s ultimate implosion.

Red Plenty unravels itself through a series of short stories, many of which directly or indirectly wind together. It’s really quite clever how Spufford spins the web. Every year thousands of authors implement the interlocking story architecture but only a minority of them handle it this well.

Inefficiency is the core theme of the book. From the academic city in Siberia to the outskirts of Moscow, we learn how piss-poor the Soviet system was at managing an economy. While Spufford touches on the more brutal aspects of the Union - the most gruesome scene depicts a man fishing skull fragments and hair out of a clogged drain in the execution room’s floor - he doesn’t dwell on the violence unnecessarily. Thanks to Solzhenitsyn most people are already aware of the gulag, but less well-understood is how the Soviet system corrupted tasks as simple as the production of commodities. Here’s a touching example…

Three men manage a plant which produces the tough cord that lines the modern tire. Under a capitalist system the factory would produce as much tire cord as it profitably could, however, the Soviets believe in top-down control and production levels are determined by party leaders at Gosplan. The economist central planners study the data, attend smokey meetings and ultimately determine a “scientifically accurate” quota for tire cord, which they assign to the plant managers. Unfortunately, after six months of feverish activity the managers are forced to admit that it will be impossible to meet the deadline. No matter how many night shifts they work, the tire cord maker is incapable of producing the desired amount. The blasted machine is a dud! What can be done?

The managers believe that if they tell the party leaders about the discrepancy they’ll be labeled as saboteurs (a common accusation for anyone who fails to produce the expected amount). Instead, the managers execute an elaborate scheme which crescendos with a bulldozer rolling down a hill, smashing through the wall of the factory and colliding with the cord producing machine thus ruining it.

Thanks to the “accident” the men are no longer on the hook for that year’s quota and lo! Due to the critical nature of tire production they’ll soon receive a new machine, an updated model which will allow them to meet their quota in full. Under the constraints of the Soviet system you could argue that the managers handled the situation rationally (cleverly ruin the machine or risk getting sent to Siberia for 10 years), but from an objective view what they did is insane and among many other travesties; massively inefficient.

But the Soviet experiment had run into exactly the difficulty that Plato’s admirers encountered, back in the fifth century BC, when they attempted to mould philosophical monarchies for Syracuse and Macedonia. The recipe called for rule by heavily-armed virtue - or in the Leninist case, not exactly virtue, but a sort of intentionally post-ethical counterpart to it, self-righteously brutal. Wisdom was to be set where it could be ruthless. Once such a system existed, though, the qualities required to rise in it had much more to do with ruthlessness than with wisdom. - They were social scientists who thought principle required them to behave like gangsters.

The factory incident is one story out of many. A more nuts and bolts anecdote, if you will. As we read through Red Plenty we also find multiple examples of scholars attempting to make the Soviet system more productive than its capitalist counterpart. Many of these supposedly intelligent apparatchiks believe that central planning is the ideal solution to beat those damned Americans! Despite the contrary evidence, the scholars appear to earnestly think that they’ll centrally plan themselves into utopia, pulling brain matter from the bloody drain is a mere stepping stone towards the eventual paradise.

He saw the other figures too, the ones showing that year after year this last decade the soviet economy had grown at 6%, 7%, 8% every year, while the American one only grew 3% or so at best. He was not a man who was naturally excited by graphs, but he was excited by this one, when he understood that if the Soviet Union just kept growing at the same rate, propelled onward by the greater natural efficiency of central planning, the line of Soviet prosperity on the graph was due to cross the line representing American prosperity, and then to soar above it, in just under twenty years from now. he had seen victory on a sheet of cardboard. It was proven. It was going to happen

For me, one of the most striking details of the book was the sincere faith that many people had in a dystopian system that history has discredited. That quote above references a particular scholar who developed an elegant mathematical formula to increase production and improve factory management. The formula is viable and represents a genuine breakthrough, if you can apply it.

What the genius failed to understand, however, is that what functions on paper can fail in the real world. For the scholar’s model to work he must receive accurate data from the factory managers all across the USSR. He won’t get that. And then the managers, store owners, truck drivers, petty merchants, party officials and everyone else involved in the production process must agree to follow the formula’s dictates. They will never do that. It’s incredible myopia that an intelligent man could so completely fail to understand that an economy is a collection of flawed humans, not machines responding to directives.

He gazed greedily at faces. The capitalist looked surprisingly ordinary, for people who in their own individual persons were used to devouring stolen labour in phenomenal quantities.

So it is that we discover, yet again, what I believe to be the rotten core of an ideology that’s never going to work as promised. Communism is based on a hopelessly flawed understanding of human nature. The communist doctrine acts as if under the right circumstances people will outgrow several hundred-thousand years of evolution and gleefully work in harmony to create a promised utopia. Unfortunately, what almost always happens is that once a certain sub-set of humans decides that they’d rather not participate, well, force must be brought into play... Off to the gulag, comrade, but it’s for the greater good! A bullet will cure you of those unpatriotic thoughts, my brother. My dear sister, don’t you understand that your sacrifice brings us one step closer to Lenin’s promise land?

As should be obvious by now, “do as I command or die” is not a viable way to run an economy and generate growth, let alone human flourishing. Red Plenty provides numerous examples of that dictum, and does so in a highly entertaining and surprisingly well-written way. Even if you have no particular interest in the intricacies of Soviet absurdities, this book is just as engrossing as any good novel.

I’ll end this review with a quote from a man perched near the top of the Soviet hierarchy. A brilliant character who finds a unique way to solve the government debt problem, an approach that even Stephanie Kelton hasn’t considered (yet).

‘Do you know what my first job was, when I got back from the war?’ Mokhov asked cheerfully, when they had been walking for a minute or two and Emil had not spoken. ‘Burning bonds. You won’t have heard about this, because it was - still is - highly confidential. But there was a decision in ‘45 to simplify the finances by getting rid of all the bond certificates which had ended up in our hands, for one reason or other, during the war. - Every bond that had been donated to the war effort, every bond pledged to the savings bank as security for a loan, every bond held by a dead soldier, every bond that was ever confiscated. And into the flames they went.