Red Plenty

by Francis Spufford

  2 When he handed out the traditional bouquets on Women’s Day: International Women’s Day was celebrated (and still is in present-day Russia) on 8 March, with this flower-giving tradition by men as a kind of courtly grave-marker for the early Soviet Union’s feminism.

  3 For chemicals were a vital sector at present: for the rapid build-up of the chemical industry, see Theodore Shabad, Basic Industrial Resources of the USSR (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969).

  4 ‘Suppressed inflation’ or a ‘permanent sellers’ market’: two linked phenomena, though the first chiefly affected the Soviet Union’s perpetually low-priority consumer sector, and the second was true of the cherished industrial sector too. The USSR had ‘suppressed inflation’ in the sense that it had the classic conditions for runaway inflation in a market economy, with far too much money chasing far too few goods to buy – but insisted on fixed prices for the scarce goods, thus pushing competition for them into non-money forms. The ‘permanent seller’s market’ was the situation in which both individual consumers, and more significantly whole enterprises, were so desperate to be able to buy that they would accept whatever the seller gave them, almost irrespective of quality or convenience.

  5 Across the herringbone parquet of the eighteenth floor: my visual sense of the Gosplan building comes from Curtis, ‘The Engineer’s Plot’, but I have no real information about its internal geography.

  6 He had brought it back himself, by train from Berlin: a little later he could, if he were very lucky, have bought it from a popular Moscow showroom for East German goods. Under communism, East Germany continued to manufacture office furniture to 1920s and 1930s designs, some of them rather stylish; and it was unusual too, for an Eastern Bloc country, in having a substantial industry producing plastic homewares, which were held up as a sign of socialist rationality. See Eli Rubin, Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). An equivalent to Galina in the GDR would not have been so impressed by the little beakers in Sokolniki Park.

  7 Chemical-industry input coefficients: a planner’s tool giving standardised proportions of the inputs required to produce a unit of a given output, the idea being that all enterprises could be kept up to a set level of efficiency by supplying them only with the appropriate level of materials. Also known as input norms. For the pitfalls of this system, and the tendency for the norms to proliferate into a mass of exceptions, and rules applying to one factory only, see Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR.

  8 ‘That’s how the steel was tempered,’ he said: Mokhov is alluding to the title of Nikolai Ostrovsky’s famous socialist-realist novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1936), which had become a common catchphrase. Computer programmers at Akademgorodok shouted it in August 1960 as they fought with the construction workers who kept turning off their power supply. See Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited.

  9 The balances were kept in a long, library-like room lined with filing cabinets: the individual balances looked as I describe them here, and as a paper system they worked in the way I describe, and they must certainly have been kept in filing cabinets in a room (or rooms) in Gosplan, but this particular room I have invented. The Soviet gorgon with hair the colour of dried blood is a generic gorgon, from Central Casting.

  10 A workspace where there was a convenient spare abacus: the most common calculating device throughout the history of Soviet Russia, and slightly different in construction from a Chinese abacus. See Wikipedia for description and photograph.

  11 373 folders, each holding work-in-progress on the balance for a commodity: the number of these most strategic commodities, also known as ‘funded commodities’, was diminishing in an attempt to make the system more manageable. There’d been 892 of them in 1957, and 2,390 in 1953 – but the deleted ones were presumably reappearing in the wider category of ‘planned commodities’, which didn’t need their balances signed off by the Council of Ministers but still had to be calculated by Gosplan. When these were included, Gosplan’s annual output of commodity allocations went up from c.4,000 typescript pages in twenty-two volumes to c.11,500 pages in seventy volumes. Figures all from Gertrude E. Schroeder, ‘The “Reform” of the Supply System in Soviet Industry’, Soviet Studies, vol. 24 no. 1, July 1972, pp. 97–119.

  12 A little problem with Solkemfib, the viscose plant at Solovets: Solkemfib is an invented addition to the genuine portfolio of new-generation chemical fibre plants that were opening in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. I’ve picked up details for Solkemfib from Ye. Zhukovskii, ‘Building the Svetlogorsk Artifical Fiber Plant’, Sovetskaya Belorussya, 2 December 1962; translated in USSR Economic Development, No. 58: Soviet Chemical Industry, US Dept of Commerce Joint Publications Research Service report 18,411, 28 March 1963, pp. 17–20. The town of Solovets, on the other hand, is allusive rather than just illusory. There was a real place of that name, an island in the White Sea where some of the nastiest atrocities in the early history of the Gulag took place. The name was borrowed by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky in the 1965 novel Monday Begins on Saturday, to give a little unacknowledgeable satirical edge to the town off in the northern forests somewhere where the institute for studying magic stands. And I’ve borrowed it in turn, to give my viscose factory a fantastical (and slightly sinister) frame.

  13 Really, it was only salt, sulp and coal in, viscose out: exhaustive descriptions of the viscose production process can be found on Wikipedia. Wood (pine/fir/larch/aspen) is boiled up with sodium bisulphite in digesters to give a special grade of cellulose called ‘dissolving pulp’, which is then steeped in sodium hydroxide (lye), squeezed out, crumbled, and aged in the oxygen of the air, before being churned with the industrial solvent carbon disulphide. This gives you cellulose xanthate, which is chemically viscose, but not yet in usable form; so you dissolve it again in more sodium hydroxide, and squirt it through spinnerets into a ‘spin bath’ of sulphuric acid, where the viscose liquid becomes filaments which can be stretched, wound, washed, bleached, rewashed and dried as viscose yarn. This is the form of viscose that can be woven as ‘rayon’ or ‘art silk’, as in Leonid Vitalevich’s necktie in part II chapter 1. Squirted through different spinnerets, however, the liquid can become viscose tyre cord or even cellophane. Solkemfib is not in the cellophane business. It clearly has one line set up for fabric and the other for cord. Of the three basic inputs Mokhov mentions, you need the salt to make the lye and the sodium bisulphite, the sulphur to make the sodium bisulphite, the carbon disulphide and the sulphuric acid, and the coal to make the carbon disulphide. Simple though these inputs are, they will still have put the Soviet viscose industry in competition for raw materials with soap-making, rubber-vulcanising, glue-manufacturing, ore-processing, petroleum-refining, steel-galvanising, brass-founding, metal-casting and fertiliser-producing. For an outline of the different industries’ interconnecting needs, see Shabad, Basic Industrial Resources of the USSR.

  14 The original shortfall leaping from commodity to commodity: for the classic analysis of the reasons for inevitable, permanent shortage in ‘unreformed’ planned economies, see Janos Kornai, Economics of Shortage, vol. A (Amsterdam/Oxford/New York, 1980). Kornai points out that, as well as the ‘vegetative process’ by which in such a system every actor sensibly overstates their needs, the system’s own insistence on perpetual growth ensures that any given supply of a material is going to be too little for what its users would want to do with it.

  15 In theory … you would need to revise all the balances a minimum of six times over, and a maximum of thirteen times: see the very clear exposition of the theory, and the pragmatic Soviet ways around it, in Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR.

  16 It was the basis for Emil Shaidullin’s entertaining prediction: really a prediction by Abel Aganbegyan, made in 1964.

  18 The PNSh-180-14s continuous-action engine for viscose: a real machine, referred to in ‘Results of the Work of the Chemical Fibres Industry for 1968�
��, Fibre Chemistry vol. 1 no. 2, March–April 1969, pp. 117–20; translation of Khimicheskie Volokna no. 2, March–April 1969, pp. 1–3. But I have no evidence that it was yet in production in 1963, and the technical upgrade, the figure of 17 for the annual output, the nomination of the Uralmash machine-building combine as its manufacturer, the description of it as a metal porcupine as big as a subway hall and the idea that it had its own balance at Gosplan all, all come straight out of the conjurer’s hat of invention.

  18 The page in front of him was simplicity itself: taken from the model of a balance-page illustrated in Levine, ‘The Centralised Planning of Supply in Soviet Industry’.

  19 He was supposed to get chemical-fibre production up to 400,000 tonnes per annum by 1965: target taken from Shabad, Basic Industrial Resources of the USSR.

  IV.2 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 1963

  1 They were off to the fleshpots together for the annual jamboree: the festive jaunt to Moscow to deliver the plan, and a lot of the rest of the behaviour of Solkemfib’s management, comes from Joseph Berliner, Factory and Manager in the USSR (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1957). See also, by the same author, ‘Informal Organization of the Soviet Firm’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 1952, pp. 342–65; The Innovation Decision in Soviet Industry (Boston: MIT Press, 1976); and Soviet Industry from Stalin to Gorbachev: Essays on Management and Innovation (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). An archetypal Soviet manager is among the semi-fictional ‘portraits’ in Raymond A. Bauer, Nine Soviet Portraits (Boston: MIT Press, 1965).

  2 The hotel Icebound Sea faced across the town square: from the hotel to the fisheries-trust teashop, all details faithfully reflect the Strugatskys’ version of the town of Solovets.

  3 They’d hit the gross target for the year 1962 dead on, 100% delivered of the 14,100 tonnes of viscose planned: a target figure for Solkemfib concocted by calculating the average planned output for a real Soviet viscose plant in 1962 from Shabad, Basic Industrial Resources of the USSR.

  4 All seeing the possibilities, all liking what they saw: I am probably anticipating the shamelessness of managerial behaviour in the later 1970s and 1980s by making Arkhipov, Mitrenko and Kosoy be willing to countenance an actual act of sabotage. It probably took longer than this for the fearful restraint of the Stalin time to come apart. But this was the direction in which things were going, so again, a real process has been foreshortened here. For an illuminating discussion of late-Soviet managerial gamesmanship, see Yevgeny Kuznetsov, ‘Learning in Networks: Enterprise Behaviour in the Former Soviet Union and Contemporary Russia’, in Joan M. Nelson, Charles Tilley and Lee Walker, eds, Transforming Post-Communist Political Economies (Washington DC: National Academy Press, 1997).

  5 Let alone to tolerate the signature stink of the viscose process: caused by the breakdown of dense quantities of carbon disulphide in the plants’ air, into even fouller-smelling carbonyl sulphide. Rotting cabbage was the usual comparison.

  6 He had been imprisoned, but was now released: for the situation of ex-political prisoners, see Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago vol. 3 part VI, ‘Exile’, pp. 335–468. Having the dree of exile lifted did not automatically restore one’s original residence rights. For a treatment in fiction of a prisoner’s unsettling reappearance among the comfortable and prosperous, see Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing, translated by Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

  IV.3 Favours, 1964

  1 Over the ridge where the floor heaved up they danced: I have no knowledge of any bulge in the dancefloor of the Sverdlovsk Palace of Culture. But the Novosibirsk Palace of Culture has one.

  2 A real Spaniard marooned here, in a crude cold steel town: and there were real Spaniards scattered around the Soviet Union, in just Senora Lopez’s position.

  3 It was his business to do so, he made his living snapping up these trifles: Chekuskin’s methods of operation in this chapter are elaborated from Joseph Berliner’s description of the work of the tolkach or ‘pusher’ in Factory and Manager in the USSR, with his capacity for instant friendship, and his memory for birthdays and children’s names, and his plausible entrée to every office in town. (The stereotypical traits of the successful salesman, in fact, here inverted for a situation in which buying rather than selling is the art that requires persuasion.) Berliner drew his information from post-war interviews with Displaced Persons, so the tolkach as he describes him is a creature of the 1930s: but the institutions of the Soviet economy that made the tolkach necessary remained essentially unchanged all the way from the Stalinist industrialisation to the fall of the state in 1991, and there were indignant newspaper reports and anti-tolkach cleanup campaigns every few years throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, which suggests a basic continuity. Given Chekuskin’s continual use of individual favour-trading to oil the wheels of his industrial negotiations, another important source was Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours. I’ve made Chekuskin extremely blatnoi, rich in connections, but he isn’t quite a blatmeister, a maestro of individual deal-making about flats and schools and telephones and doctors and Black Sea holidays, because – to use Ledeneva’s elegant analysis of the psychology of blat – a blatmeister co-ordinated the mutual backscratching of many overlapping circles of friends, and could only thrive if perceived as a real friend, whereas Chekuskin is fundamentally a commercial figure, who leans across the boundary into the world of blat, just as he also does into the world of the black market. Ledeneva is invaluable on the distinctions of feeling involved, the crucial one of which is the extent to which, in each of these three adjacent worlds of illicit behaviour, the actors let themselves see clearly what they were doing. Blat transactions were thoroughly mystified; they were conceptualised as part of the warmth of friendship, and could never be explicitly paid for by a return favour, though anyone who didn’t tend his or her end of a blat relationship would soon find the supply of friendly help drying up. The tolkach business knew it was a business; but it was one in which, as Chekuskin says below, Everything is Personal. The money was there, the price of a transaction had to be paid, but the object was to find non-money reasons for the transaction to take place. And at the other end of the scale, the black market was a market, of a rudimentary kind, where goods (for instance, stolen petrolere sold to relative strangers in order to obtain cash. It was the limited utility of cash that limited the size of the black market.

  4 A flying saucer swoops down over the earth and grabs a Russian, a German and a Frenchman: authentic joke, in the subgenre of comfortable self-insults to the Russian character, from Graham, ‘A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot ’. The aliens give all three abductees a pair of shining steel spheres and lock them in tiny compartments aboard the spaceship. They’ll release the one who can think of the most amazing thing to do with the spheres, they say. The German juggles with his spheres: not bad. But the Frenchman juggles with them while standing on his head and singing a beautiful love song. Surely he must be the winner – ‘but we’ll just check what the Russian can do,’ say the aliens. In a moment, they’re back. ‘Sorry, but the Russian wins.’ ‘In God’s name, how?’ says the Frenchman. ‘What else could he possibly have come up with?’ ‘Well,’ say the aliens in awe, ‘he broke one, and lost the other …’

  5 Over the intersection to the big portico of the Central Hotel: Sverdlovsk here has a generic Soviet geography, not the actual geographical detail of the actual city (now Ekaterinburg again).

  6 Feeling a certain wavering in his legs, as if they were anticipating a sudden need to flee: because Chekuskin’s activities are technically, of course, all illegal under Article 153 of the Soviet Criminal Code, prohibiting commercial middlemen.

  7 A gentleman named Gersh, who did pickled herrings in jars: or Hersch, as he would have been in other countries. Russian has no ‘h’, and renders the ‘h’ sound as ‘g’ rather than as (the other option) ‘kh’. The USSR was invaded in 1941 by a German dictator called Gitler. Mr Gersh’s pickled herring business, on the othe
r hand, clearly operated during the New Economic Policy of the mid-1920s.

  8 A brown hundred on the outside: for contemporary banknotes, see http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category: Banknotes_of_the_ Soviet_Union,_1961.

  9 No one would have printed on a cup or a bowl what these citizens had imprinted on themselves: all of the tattoo designs here are authentic, and can be found in Danzig Baldaev et al., Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia (Gottingen: Steidl, 2004).

  10 He had heard about the thieves’ marathon card sessions: for thieves and their card games in the Gulag, see Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 2, 1918–1956, Parts III–IV, translated by Thomas P. Whitney (London: Collins/Harvill, 1975), pp. 410–30. For a fictional representation, drawing on the Siberian experience of the imprisoned Yugoslav Karlo Stajner, see Danilo Kis, ‘The Magic Card Dealing’ (story), in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, translated anonymously from the Serbian (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978).

  11 Couple of stlyagi. Really stomped me, the little bastards: quiffed, music-loving members of the Soviet Union’s first distinctive teenage tribe. Associated with delinquency, and therefore conveniently blamable for all ills, and not just by Russians; Anthony Burgess claimed that it was a violent encounter with stilyagi outside a Leningrad nightclub that inspired him to create Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange.