Red Plenty

THC stumbled across this book by accident while reading a post on EconLog.  Its author calls it neither fact nor fiction, but rather "faction".  Set in the Soviet Union during the mid-1950s to the late 1960s it is an account of how a country, supposedly poised to take over the economic leadership of the world from the United States, failed to do so.  A book about the failure of centralized economic planning by Francis Spufford, a non-economist from Britain. Sounds kind of dry, doesn't it?  Even I normally wouldn't read something like this and I have a pretty high tolerance for "dry".  Here are excerpts from some of the reviews that got my attention:

Nick Hornby (author of High Fidelity)

 ". . . turning possibly the least promising fictional material of all time into an incredibly smart, surprisingly involving and deeply eccentric book, a hammer-and-sickle version of Altman's Nashville, with central committees replacing country music . . "

The Economist

"Few will expect to pick up a longish book on the topic by a non-economist and devour it almost at a sitting  . . It is part detective story - who or what is killing the Soviet economy? - and part a brilliantly clear explanation of some very intricate history and economics".

The Sunday Times

"Like no other history book I have ever read . . . I finished it in awe, not merely at Spufford's Stakhanovite research, but at his skill as a novelist, his judgement as a historian and his sheer guts in attempting something simulataneously so weird and yet so wonderful."

I read Red Plenty in three days and it lived up to the reviews.  It's not a story of the murderous Stalinist Soviet Union.  Many of the characters are sympathetic, well-intentioned, well-educated and striving to help their country meet the goal set out by Premier Khruschev to exceed the economic output of the United States by 1970.  We get to see the reality of how a totally planned economy works, the disputes among the bureaucrats, industrial sabotage and worker insurrections along with guest appearances by real people like Nikita Khruschev and Alexei Kosygin.  Yet, despite all their efforts, they fail and Spufford makes you understand why it was a hopeless task from the start.  While the story and settings are fictionalized, there are 50 pages of footnotes at the end explaining every twist and turn of Spufford's tale.
(Spufford)
"So weird and yet so wonderful" does capture the spirit of this book.