Red Plenty

by Francis Spufford

  The chief of world socialism taking instruction fromAmerican moneymen? No.

  ‘Bring on your questions,’ he said shortly. ‘I’m not tired yet.’

  It was not questions, though, so much as little orations that the millionaires took turns to launch at him, one by one, glancing at each other as they did so. A Mr McCloy, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, tried to tell him that American finance had no influence on American politics.

  ‘You must understand,’ he said, ‘if Wall Street is seen as supporting a piece of legislation, it’s the kiss of death in Washington.’

  The chairman narrowed his eyes. It was the same bizarre tactic Lodge had used, the same bizarre effort, apparently, to persuade him that the earth was flat, the sky was green, the moon was made of cheese. Better to take it lightly.

  ‘Very well,’ he answered. ‘From now on we will remember to pity you.’

  The director of General Dynamics explained that, although his company manufactured atomic bombs, it had no stake in tension between the superpowers. Mr Sarnoff, the tycoon of the RCA radio empire, explained that he had left Minsk for the United States as a boy, and never regretted it, because of the virtues of American broadcasting, which he described for a long time.

  He left a pause before he replied. ‘Things have changed in Minsk,’ he said.

  No one seemed interested in putting pressure on the government to lift the trade embargo. ‘What do you have that you want to sell us?’ he was asked.

  ‘This is a detail,’ he said. ‘If the principle is agreed, then junior officials can talk about specific products.’

  ‘What do we have that you want to buy?’

  ‘We have everything we need,’ he said. ‘We are not asking for favours.’

  Outside, the late summer day had become one of those evenings where the sky has the pure, clear colour of darkening water, moving to black through deeper and deeper blues. Up the avenue, he saw, a dust of tiny golden lights was appearing, just as Ilf and Petrov had promised. A solitary strand of cloud crossed the blue between the buildings, thinning and tightening like a pulled string. Disappointment tightened in the Chairman too, as security men hustled him from Harriman’s doorstep into the waiting car. Unfamiliar cooking smells came to his nose, mixed with pungent exhaust. Journalists surged forward: the streets were still very loud.

  He was not quite sure what conversation he had imagined himself having, but that had not been it. In the guardedto-and-fro in there, the essential things had not been said. Nobody had seemed to regard economic competition as an alternative to the military variety, at least not in the sense that he had meant. Relax, he instructed himself. He was going to say it all himself anyway, in tonight’s speech, without any idiot interruptions.

  *

  Back at the Waldorf Astoria the ballroom was now crammed with two thousand other businessmen, of slightly less ultimate lustre. These were the mere captains of industry, rather than the captains of the captains; capital’s ordinary executives, instead of its innrmost cabal. Perhaps they would be more receptive. In his experience, more junior apparatchiks often responded better to new initiatives. Indeed, there were times when the only way to get an organisation to change course was to behead it, and promote new leadership out of the middle ranks. If he were in charge of American capitalism, he thought, that would be the tactic he would adopt. It had been a favourite of the Boss’s, and it worked; it had just been a mistake to think that the beheading had to be literal. Retiring people worked just as well.

  Faces in front of him. Faces to each side of him, and above him too, because on all sides this ballroom had tiers of balconies like boxes at the theatre. He put on his reading glasses and exchanged a look with young Troyanovsky. They had rehearsed this speech carefully, revised it carefully too in order to incorporate Ambassador Menshikov’s advice about which Soviet achievements had caused most soul-searching in the American press. But as always, now he no longer had to watch his tongue, he liked to think on his feet a little, he liked to feel that in front of an audience he was setting off on a journey not completely mapped out in advance.

  Now then.

  *

  You’ve probably never seen a communist, he said. I must look to you like the first camel that arrives in a town where nobody’s ever seen a camel before: everyone wants to pull its tail, and check it’s real. Well, I am real; and in fact I’m just a human being like everybody else. The only difference is my opinion about how the social system should be run. And the only problem we all face today is agreeing that round the world each people should make their own choice about which system to have. Aren’t there cases in your system, he said, where competing corporations agree not to attack each other? Why shouldn’t we, representing the communist corporation, agree on peaceful co-existence with you, the representatives of the capitalist corporation?

  It surprised him, he said, when Mr Lodge defended capitalism with such ardour earlier in the day. Why did he do it? Did he think he might convert Khrushchev? Or did he think, just maybe, that he had to stop Khrushchev converting the audience … No, don’t worry; I have no such intention. I know who I’m dealing with – although, by the way, if anyone here would like to join in with building communism, we could certainly find them a job. We know how to value people, and the greater the benefit of their work, the more we pay them. That’s the principle of socialism.

  Seriously, though, he was delighted to be in the United States, and delighted to be meeting American businessmen. He was sure that there was much he could learn. In the same spirit, he said, there was something they might learn from him, which would do them good, even if maybe they didn’t want to hear it. He was sure they wouldn’t mind him speaking without diplomatic niceties, since businessmen are used to being utterly frank with each other.

  They could learn, he said, that Russia wasn’t going to fail. Look at the historical record, he said. Since 1913, we have raised our output thirty-six-fold, while yours has only risen four-fold. Maybe they would disagree that the reason for this more rapid development was the socialist revolution; he didn’t want to impose his ideology on anyone. But in that case, what miracles had it been that brought about these amazing results? Why was it – he asked – that Soviet schools of higher learning trained three times as many engineers as US colleges did? It might interest them to know that, in the new Sen-Year Plan which had just commenced, the Soviet Union was proposing capital investments alone of more than $750 billion. Where did the funds for this come from? It could only be explained by the advantages of the socialist system, since miracles, as we all know, don’t happen. When the plan was completed, the Soviet economy would be almost level with the American economy. And the plan was already ahead of schedule. The plan for 1959 had called for a 7.7% rise in industrial output, but before he left Moscow, Comrade Kosygin, Chairman of the State Planning Committee, had reported to him that in the first eight months of the year alone, there had already been a 12% increase. Let no one be in any doubt, he said, let no one hide their head in the sand like an ostrich: more rapidly even than we projected in our plans, we shall soon be able to overtake the United States.

  Gentlemen, he said, these were only a few words about the potential of the Soviet Union. We have everything we need. Some people may have thought that I came to the United States to press for Soviet–American trade because without it the Seven-Year Plan cannot be fulfilled. They were making a big mistake. They would be making another if they believed that the trade embargo weakened the defensive might of the Soviet Union. Remember the Sputniks and the rockets, he said. Remember that we were ahead of you in developing intercontinental missiles, which you still do not have to this day – and an ICBM is a true, creative innovation, if you think about it. No, the embargo was simply obstinacy.

  The US and the USSR had to choose between living in peace as good neighbours, or drifting into another war. There was no third alternative. They couldn’t move to the moon. According to the information from the recent Soviet lun
ar probe, it was not very cosy there at the moment. So he reminded his audience that gigantic possibilities for good and evil were concentrated in their hands. They were influential people, and he urged them to use their influence in the right direction, and to come out for peaceful co-existence and peaceful competition.

  *

  That was supposed to be the speech’s last line. It was where his typescript ran out. The listeners had laughed in some of the right places, looked grave in some of the intended places as well; but as he looked round the ballroom now, he thought he saw smiles of an offensive kind, cynical smiles.

  ‘Some of you are smiling,’ he said. ‘It’ll be a bitter pill to swallow when you realise you’re wrong. Still, never mind, you’ll have new opportunities to apply your knowledge and abilities, when the American people go over to socialism.’

  Immediately catcalls and hooting burst out from troublemakers in the balcony.

  ‘I am an old sparrow and you cannot confuse me with your cries,’ cried the Chairman. ‘I did not come here to beg! I represent the great Soviet state!’

  Notes – I.2 Mr Chairman, 1959

  1 Along the aisle the lads from the Tupolev bureau: for the story of Tupolev junior’s non-hostage hostagehood, see William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W.W.Norton, 2003), p. 422. The situation was particularly delicate because Tupolev senior had indeed been arrested for an imaginary political crime in the middle of the Second World War – and then continued to work on aircraft design as a prisoner in the ‘first circle’ of the Gulag.

  2 Everyone was wearing fine new outfits: for the visible Soviet prosperity of the 1950s, see Abel Aganbegyan, Moving the Mountain: Inside the Perestroika Revolution, trans. Helen Szamuely (London: Bantam, 1989) and G.I.Khanin, ‘1950s: The Triumph of the Soviet Economy’, Europe– Asia Studies vol. 55 no. 8 (December 2003), pp. 1187–1212; for the way in which the 1950s and 1960s saw the successful fulfilment of promises made in the 1930s, see Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, pp. 67–114.

  3 The Soviet economy had grown at 6%, 7%, 8%: for the vexed question of Soviet growth rates, see below, introduction to part II. I have chosen here for Khrushchev, as seems likely, to believe the official Soviet figures, which naturally gave the highest rate.

  4 Let’s compete on the merits of our washing machines: this is the famous ‘kitchen debate’. See Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 417–18; and the coverage in the New York Times, vol. CVIII no. 37,072, 25 July 1959, pp. 1–4.

  5 Without me, they’ll drown you like kittens: for this prophecy of Stalin’s, see Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 331. For the pipe-emptying and forehead-tapping episodes, see pp. 167–8 and 230.

  6 For the time being, you are richer than us: see Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 427.

  7 If I’d known there would be pictures like these: see Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 426.

  8 Were you in the war, Mr Lodge?: see Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers (Little Brown, Boston 1970).

  9 He knew from reading Ilf and Petrov: Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, famous authors of The Twelve Chairs (a satire of Soviet life under the New Economic Policy of the 1920s), drove across the USA in 1936–7. Their Odenoetazhnaya Amerika (‘One-storey America’), complete with descriptions of the Ford production line and a striptease show, was the primary source for Khrushchev’s generation’s mental picture of the United States. Perhaps fortunately for them from the political point of view, both Ilf and Petrov died during the Second World War.

  10 What is that 000-000 sound: despite forty years in politics, Khrushchev had genuinely never heard booing till he encountered it abroad. But I have relocated his first encounter with ‘the 000-000 noise’ to New York in 1959 from London in 1956. See Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 357.

  11 We had this in Moscow and Leningrad before the war: for the 1930s Soviet experiment with fast food, see Gronow, Caviar with Champagne.

  12 Of course he admired the Americans: for an overview of the Soviet infatuation with American industry, see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (University of California Press, 1995) and Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1991); with American management techniques, see Mark R. Beissinger, Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline and Soviet Power (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); for American mass culture, and especially jazz, see Frederick S. Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917–1980 (New York: OUP, 1983). Before the Second World War, this was an enthusiasm for a capitalist culture perceived as being removed from, even neutral in, the USSR’s rivalry with the old imperial powers of Europe. After 1945, it became a much more problematic perception of a resemblance to an avowed enemy.

  13 Do you have a gadget that puts the food in your mouth: see New York Times, vol. CVIII no. 37,072, 25 July 1959, pp. 1–4.

  14 He opened his reply with a few jokes: the official texts of Khrushchev’s speeches in America, shorn of heckles and improvisations, but not of jokes, are in Khrushchev in America and Let Us Live in Peace and Friendship: The Visit of N S Khrushchov [sic] to the USA, Sept 15 –27, 1959 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959); for accounts of the speeches in their disorderly contexts, see Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 424–39, and Gary John Tocchet, ‘September Thaw: Khrushchev’s Visit to America, 1959’, PhD thesis, Stanford 1995, and Peter Carlson, K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America’s Most Unlikely Tourist (New York: Public Affairs, 2009).

  15 Painted by a donkey with a brush tied to its tail: not a judgement Khrushchev is on record of making of Picasso, but characteristic of his reactions to art that was in any way abstract or non-figurative. See Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 589–90.

  16 Their cheeks were not notably bloated: it was a source of amazed comment to Khrushchev, on his international visits, that the rich and powerful in the West did not resemble the Soviet caricatures of them. For capitalists’ lack of top hats and snouts, see Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 351 and 428; for the surprising failure of the King of Norway and the Queen of England to be sinister and degenerate, see pp. 612 and 357. It’s possible that one reason for his hostility to the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was that, in Macmillan, he had for once met someone who did look a little like a Soviet stereotype of an aristocrat. ‘I want him to rush here, so that I can see him with omelette all over his dinner jacket’: Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 467.

  17 He knew how it was to handle a workforce: Khrushchev found it relatively easy, though psychologically alarming, to identify with businessmen, whom he tended to interpret as direct Western counterparts to Soviet manager-politicians such as himself.

  18 Bring on your questions, I’m not tired yet: Khrushchev’s dialoglue">18Harper’s Magazine vol. 242 no. 1,449 (February 1971), pp. 72–5.

  19 I am an old sparrow: see Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 429.

  3.

  Little Plastic Beakers, 1959

  If there was a joke, she was usually last to get it. If there was a catchphrase running around her group of friends, she would stumble over it or say it wrong somehow. She was popular with the boys, because when she decided to do something, she plunged in and definitely did it. She decided that it was foolish to be nervous about sex, so she slept in quick succession with Evgeniy, Pavel and Oskar. Then she had to have an abortion, and Oskar’s girlfriend Marina made a horrible scene, which died down, but left behind a kind of nasty imprint in her dealings with her friends. From then on, there was something a little bit mean in the way the girls looked at her, something a little bit speculative in the glances of the boys. It was a relief when she met Volodya, who was not on the nutrition course with her but studied engineering. Volodya took things seriously too. She was sitting in a Komsomol meeting when she noticed him. It was an averagely boring meeting, but he was not tilting his head back and gazing at the ceiling, or making those little dismissive flicks here and there with his gaze which stood in, at meetings, for full-scale eyerolling. He was taking note
s on a pad in small, neat, round handwriting. ‘It’s important for the future,’ he said, when she asked him about it afterward. ‘If you want to get to where you’re going, it’s important to show you’re not just a passenger.’ Being with Volodya was restfully like being with herself. He didn’t tease. He didn’t do flights of fancy, though he did play silly tunes on the trumpet when he was drunk. He too had plans, and like her, he wasn’t embarrassed by the idea of carefully thinking through what would be necessary to achieve them. You made a picture of the life you wanted to have, and then you worked back from there to the present. Volodya even came from a family that resembled hers more than a little, though his hometown was down in the south, not in the Urals. Her father was deputy Party secretary in a small town, her mother was a biology teacher; his father was second acccountant at a manganese mill, his mother a chemistry teacher. ‘Snap,’ said Volodya. ‘Snap,’ she agreed. Lying nose to nose in his dormitory bed she felt part of an alliance. He was quite scrawny but his hands were warm and dry. They decided to merge their plans. Both had one more year to run before they graduated. They would marry next summer, they decided, with their degrees safely in their pockets. They talked with comfortable, unironic thoroughness about flats and jobs. Both agreed on the absolute importance of securing Moscow residency. They had come from the edges to the centre; they were not going back again, not returning to any more of those small-town evenings of reading the newspaper and trying to imagine the city. ‘We’ll have to make ourselves useful,’ Volodya said. ‘Make sure that our names get noticed.’