Red Plenty

by Francis Spufford

  6 He had seen a method which could do what the detective work of conventional algebra could not: the Plywood Trust had in effect presented him with a group of equations to solve of the form 3a + 2b + 4c + 6d = 17, where the unknown variables a, b, c, d stood for the unknown assignments of work between different machines – only with many, many more variables than just these four. These are known as ‘linear’ equations, because if graphed they produce straight lines, and it is a property of linear equations that you can only solve them if you have as many equations to work with as there are variables. Otherwise, they are ‘undetermined’ – there are an infinite number of possible solutions, and no way to decide between them. The Plywood Trust’s equations were undetermined, since there were fewer of them than the immense number of variables they wanted to know. Kantorovich’s first step was to realise that he had a criterion for choosing between the infinite solutions, in the knowledge that a + b + c + d, the total amount of work done by the machines, was to be minimised for the production of the target output of plywood in the Plywood Trust’s plan. Or you could turn the problem around, and see yourself as maximising the output target. For a textbook explanation of linear programming, adapted to American business-school students, see Saul I. Gass, Linear Programming: Methods and Applications (NewYork: McGraw-Hill, 4th edn, 1975).

  7 Skyscrapers in Manhattan, and the promise of more in Moscow: for the promise of the Stalinist future, see Lev Kopelev, The Education of a True Believer (New York, 1980), quoted in Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, p. 18; for specifically architectural visions of the future, see the website Unrealised Moscow, www.muar.ru/ve/2003/moscow/index_e. htm, a gathering of the kind of images whose hypnagogic power, taken collectively, is horribly well realised in Jack Womack, Let’s Put tuture Behind Us (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996).

  8 An extra 3% year after year, compounded: in an economy that consumed all the goods it produced, the 3% of extra output Kantorovich anticipates here would only have contributed a simple boost to production, not a compounding addition to the growth rate. But in an economy that partially re-invested its productive output in further productive capacity, the 3% extra growth would indeed have compounded – and the Soviet economy of the 1930s was exceptional in the degree to which it reinvested, rather than consuming, its production.

  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 characteriic 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 dialogues with the billionaires at Harrima
n’s townhouse are as recorded by J.K.Galbraith’s amused ear, in ‘The Day Khrushchev Visited the Establishment’, Harper’s Magazine vol. 242 no. 1,449 (February 1971), pp. 72–5.

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

  I.3 Little Plastic Beakers, 1959

  1 ‘Now remember,’ Khristolyubov went on: this one-eared Party official is fictional, but the campaign to guide the reaction of Soviet visitors to the American exhibition by sending in pairs of Komsomol hecklers was quite real. See Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997).

  2 American girls in polkadotted knee-length dresses: for photographs of the American exhibition in Sokolniki Park, and of the Muscovite visitors to it, see Life Magazine, vol. 47 no. 6, 10 August 1959, pp. 28–35, with little plastic beakers on p. 31; for descriptions of the exhibits, see Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain; for a reading of the design politics of Buckminster Fuller’s dome, see Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, ‘Dome Days: Buckminster Fuller in the Cold War’ in Jenny Uglow and Francis Spufford, eds, Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), pp. 167–92; for press reaction in the US, see New York Times, vol. CVIII no. 37,072, 25 July 1959, pp. 1–4.

  3 She had added a green leather belt bought at the flea market: that is to say, at one of the legal bazaars or car-boot sales (without car boots) where Soviet citizens could sell their possessions second-hand. You could dispose of bric-a-brac and you could t your own handicrafts up for sale, like paintings or carved wooden spoons, but you couldn’t manufacture anything without falling foul of Article 162 of the Criminal Code, dealing with ‘the exercise of forbidden professions’, or resell things bought from state stores, because that contravened Article 154, forbidding ‘speculation’. For the intricacies of the Soviet rules governing personal property, see P. Charles Hachten, ‘Property Relations and the Economic Organization of Soviet Russia, 1941 to 1948: Volume One’, PhD thesis, University of Chicago 2005.

  4 On all seven screens, the night sky bloomed: for descriptions of Charles and Ray Eames’s deliberately overwhelming audio-visual presentation for the exhibition, and stills, see Beatriz Colomina, ‘Information obsession: the Eameses’ multiscreen architecture’, The Journal of Architecture vol. 6 (Autumn 2001), pp. 205–23, and Craig D’Ooge, ‘“Kazam!” Major Exhibition of the Work of American Designers Charles and Ray Eames Opens’, Library of Congress Information Bulletin, May 1999.

  5 The fact that Roger Taylor, unexpectedly, was a Negro: though Roger Taylor himself is an invention, there were a small number of African-Americans among the Russian-language students recruited to be exhibition guides, a controversial decision back in the US, and a source of exactly the kind of difficulty represented here to Komsomol hecklers equipped with talking-points about American racism. See Hixson, Parting the Curtain.

  6 Is this the national exhibition of a powerful and important country: Galina and Fyodor’s objections during the tour are modelled on contemporary Soviet press reaction, as recorded in Current Digest of the Soviet Press (Ann Arbor MI: Joint Committee on Slavic Studies), vol. XI no. 30, pp. 3–4, 7–12; vol. XI no. 31, pp. 10–13.

  7 The Soviet car-make which came closest in terms of lip-licking appeal: I’ve followed the male conversation at the beginning of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s Monday Begins on Saturday in nominating the Gaz Chaika. For further Soviet automobiliana, see www.autosoviet.com, and below, part V chapter 1.

  I.4 White Dust, 1953

  1 For him the beginning was the day he walked to the village: Emil Shaidullin’s walk to his in-laws in 1953 is a fictional embroidery on the similar journey taken by Abel Aganbegyan, and described in his Moving the Mountain. The events of Emil’s walk should not be read back to Professor Aganbegyan’s, any more than Emil’s character, throughout this book, should be taken as a portrait of Professor Aganbegyan.

  2 Stalin’s little book: J.V.Stalin, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, English edition (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952).

  3 And while Marx didn’t say much about economics after the revolution: for most of what he did say about it, see Robert Freedman, ed., Marx on Economics (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1961), pp. 229–41.

  4 Here and there, economists were starting to talk to biologists and mathematicians: for this first, semi-clandestine stage in the conversation of the disciplines which would produce Soviet cybernetics, which was not quite the same thing as Western cybernetics, see Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (Boston: MIT Press, 2002).

  5 For economics, after all, was a theory of everything: for a readable narrative history of the discipline’s history and universal ambitions, see Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, 4th edn (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971). For a much more intricate and specific (but still narrative) study of the ambitions that seemed to be enabled by economics’ encounter with information technology in the post-war twentieth century, see Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: CUP, 2002).

  6 Value shone in material things once labour had made them useful: the ‘labour theory of value’, as originated by Adam Smith and passed via David Ricardo to Marx. Soviet economists tended to be aware of pre-Marxian classical economics, at least in the form of citations and summaries, but not the post-Marxian development of it. The ‘marginalist revolution’ of the late nineteenth century was little known, and with it the characteristic mathematical formalisations of Western economics. Those who were well-enough informed to know about the ‘socialist calculation debate’ (see below, introduction to part II) were conscious that their proposals for optimal asset allocation presupposed a Walrasian model of general equilibrium, but Pareto was reputed only as a quasi-fascist, and Keynes as one more ‘bourgeois apologist’, whose fancy footwork could not disguise the unchanging operations of capital, as diagnosed once and for ever by Marx. For Marx’s formulation of the labour theory, see Freedman, ed., Marx on Economics, pp. 27–63; Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown, translated from the Polish by P.S.Falla, one-volume edition (New York: W.W.Norton, 2005), pp. 219–26. For the question of what Soviet economists knew, see Aganbegyan, Moving the Mountain; Joseph Berliner, ‘Economic Reform in the USSR’ in John W. Strong, ed., The Soviet Union under Brezhnev and Kosygin (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971), pp. 50–60; Aron Katsenelinboigen, Soviet Economic Thought and Political Power in the USSR (New York: Pergamon, 1980); Alex Simirenko, ed., Soviet Sociology (London: RKP, 1967). For a general exploration of what Soviet intellectuals under Khrushchev knew about the world, see Robert English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

  7 But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture: for Marx’s vision of the alienated dance of the commodities, and its philosophical roots and imaginative implications, see Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (New York, 1940), ch. 15, and Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, pp. 226–74.

  8 Machine-Tractor Station: the rural depots, with their own specialised workforce, where the equipment for mechanised farming was kept (until Khrushchev disastrously sold the machinery to the collective farms, which had no budget to maintain it). For the sorry history of Soviet agriculture, see Alec Nove, Economic History of the USSR, 1917–1991, final edition (London, 1992).

  9 It looked like the set for some Chekhov story: specifically, ‘Peasants’, in Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896– 1904, translated by Ronald Wilks (London: Penguin, 2004) – though Emil appears to be thinking of ‘Gooseberries’ in the same collection. See also Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (New York: Random House, 2001). A portrait of Soviet peasant life more contemporary with Emil’s walk (but no less depressing) is So
lzhenitsyn’s ‘Matryona’s House’, in Matryona’s House and Other Stories, translated by Michael Glenny (London: Penguin, 1975).

  10 A good Kazan Muslim: the implication here is that, at least on his father’s side, Emil Arslanovich is a Tatar. Though in Russian stereotype a Tatar has the facial features of Genghis Khan, the Mongol contribution to the Tatar gene pool was rather small, and blond Tatars are not at all unusual: as a group, they largely resemble Bulgarians, with whom they share an ancestry. Kazan had possessed a Muslim intelligentsia for centuries, but Tatars were not one of the minorities famous in the USSR for educational mobility, like Jews and Armenians, and they were not very strongly represented in twentieth-century Soviet intellectual life, with exceptions such as the computer designer Bashir Rameev. Presumably, Emil’s reasonably comfortable family experience under Stalin means that his parents (at least Party middle-rankers, judging by his own sharply upward career trajectory) successfully negotiated the sudden reversal of Soviet ‘nationalities’ policy during the later thirties. For this, see Terry Dean Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1929–1939 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). For a fabulously dismal description of post-Soviet Kazan, see Daniel Kalder, Lost Cosmonaut: Travels to the Republics That Tourism Forgot (London: Faber, 2006).