Red Plenty  (2010) by Francis Spofford

 

Part One (3-76)

Introduction (3-8)

1.       The Prodigy 1938 (8-18)

2.       Mr. Chairman 1959 (18-40)

3.       Little Plastic  Beakers 1959 (40-58)

4.       White Dust 1953 (59-76)

 

Disclaimer on xiii.

 

Introduction (3-8)

 

  • Red Plenty is a fairy tale like Baba Yaga and the Glass Mountain and others collected by the 19th c. folklorist Afansayev. Russian fairytales are not ‘once upon a time’ but skazki: ‘once upon a place’. (Illustrated essay on Russian tales, by Helen Pilinovsky: Part One, Part Two) They take place in the 27th Kingdom, but everywhere is recognized as home: the town still has wooden walls and the church an onion dome, the sky is wide, the earth black and the Tsar is on the throne. Afansayev’s tales give what real Russia could not: food, speed and adventure…
  • Soviet Russia promised that the fairytales were coming true: the samolet (airplane); the samobranka (self-victualer) would provide abundance
  • The capitalist West made the dream of plenty come true with the creation  of a middle class capable of paying for the goods offered in a supermarket.
  • Khrushchev declared that a planned economy would make this abundance come true in Russia. He argued that a planned economy would out produce the wasteful marketplace (speech 28 Sept. 1959)
  • Red Plenty was tyranny’s wishful dream of a happy ending to the terrible violence of Stalin’s rule
  • Until the late 1960’s the government and the party actually believed its own rhetoric. After that, the state would only provide a pacifying minimum of consumer goods to the public until the system finally collapsed in 1989.

 

1.       The Prodigy, 1938 (8-18)

 

  • Leonid Vitalevich Kantorovich (1912-1986) the mathematician and economist; in 1975 the only Soviet winner of the Nobel Prize for economics.  He was Jewish.
  • Teaching at the Academy in since 1932, he is now 26. He is riding a tram, watching out for the gangs of pickpockets and looking through the windows at posters with champagne bottles claiming “Life is getting more cheerful!” (Stalin speech Dec 1935)
  • Leonid Vitalevich has an idea which issues from the Enlightenment belief that there is a direct correspondence between mathematics and the way the world works. The Bolsheviks had given the state the power to shape events according to reason rather than just letting them happen (freedom). The invisible hand creates cruelty, waste and friction in society; whereas, the Soviets can now consciously choose a different reality.
  • Leonid Vitlaevich’s idea is this: the mathematics of optimization (1939) Is there a solution to this business school problem: A Plywood company has a work assignment problem. It owns several different types of machines which all produce the same product. How do you optimize production? If you set up a system of equations to solve the problem, you could not find precise answers because you would need an equation for each of the multiple variables. However, Leonid Vitalevich realizes that it is possible to distinguish between better and worse answers to questions that have no answer. You can ‘trick impossibility into disclosing useful information.’ Leonid Vitalevich becomes excited because the idea implies that a measurable % improvement in quantity of production is possible, and this improvement is applicable on the macro scale of factories throughout the Soviet Union. Unlike the wasteful marketplace, an extra 3% per year increase of production is possible if the productive output is reinvested in the business.
  • This ‘mathematical method of production management’ was re-invented in the West by Air Force mathematicians Koopmans and Danzig. They called it linear programming.
  • See Cosma Shalizi on the computational feasibility of optimal planning  here; his follow-up is here.
  • The mathematical legacy: S S Kutateladze, ‘The Path and Space of Kantorovich’ (English)

 

2.   Mr. Chairman 1959 (18-40)

 

  • The visit of Premier Nikita Khrushchev to America Sept. 15-27 1959
  • We are listening to v’s stream of consciousness once he awakens form a nap aboard the turbo-prop airplane taking him across the Atlantic. He is seated next to Nina Petrovna and can see the airplane designer’s son who is not-a-hostage, just along for the ride.
  • Khrushchev version of Soviet History from the Civil War through collectivization and the cultural revolution to the purges and then the invasion of the fascists: ‘catching saboteurs drove us mad for a while’. He believes, “We did the dirty work so that the next generation could inherit a clean world.” (20-21) If communism could not give the people a better life than capitalism, then what is the point?
  • The Horn of Plenty is alive in his imagination. Plenty would be delivered by science. (21-22)
  • The hard stuff had already been accomplished: steel, electricity , coal. Now we need to focus on the small stuff: old clothes are vanishing, we are moving people from the horrible communal flats to pristine new apartments. Spending power is increasing although it is still only at 25% of the typical American’s. But Khrushchev believes that the USSR’s economy would overtake and surpass the American economy in 20 years.(22-23)
  • Khrushchev welcomes the test of comparison: the American Exhibition in Sokolniki Park. Why not compete economically with the Americans instead of in weapons of war?
  • Nixon Kitchen Debate in Moscow 25 July 1959 “Why not compete on the merits of our washing machines not the strength of our rockets?” (24)
  • The Boss? “Without me they’ll drown you like kittens.” He remembers the pipe ash knocked on his head. Well, you’re dead now.
  • Arrival in America (26) and the train ride to NYC. (26-27) Khrushchev compares his view to Ilf and Petrov’s One Storey America.(authors of The Twelve Chairs satire of NEP)  He scoffs at Penn Station: he himself had done a better job with the Moscow Metro.
  • He marvels at a kiosk for hamburgers (31) and admires America’s good idea: creating a new kind of luxury for the masses: an ordinary luxury built up from goods turned out  by the millions. Americans have a genius for lining up mass production with people’s desires: things you wanted or discovered you wanted: a torrent of clever anticipations. The Soviets too would have to become experts at interpreting everyday desire.
  • Henry Cabot Lodge’s speech (32): America is no longer simply capitalistic: it is a welfare state. Khrushchev declares that ‘a new social system, the socialist system is treading at your heels’.
  • Cocktail party at Averell Harriman’s city house (32-36) with thirty of the richest men in America. Khrushchev marvels that he, a worker, had been admitted to the sanctum of power. They had to deal with him now. But no one seemed interested in lifting trade barriers and letting the economies compete. He looked forward instead to dealing directly with the junior apparatchiks: there were times when moving forward required beheading the organization.
  • Khrushchev Speech at the UN (37): peaceful coexistence among competitors. We have much to learn from you. You should learn too: Russia wasn’t going to fail. Since 1913 36X growth vs. US 4X. USSR: 3X as many engineers. We shall overtake the US. Sputnik, rockets, intercontinental missiles

 

3.       Little Plastic  Beakers, 1959 (40-58)

 

  • The American Exhibition in Sokolniki Park:
  • The narrator, Galina, serves the Komsomol as a heckler who harasses the tour guides at the American Exhibition in Moscow. She and her finacee are serious, organized and ambitious people who hope to rise in the Komsomol so that they can secure Moscow residencies on a permanent basis. So you make yourself useful, you volunteer, you get noiced. You elect yourself into the ranks of the energetic and the reliable. The hecklers are directed to not miss any opportunities to put out the Russian point of view but they should not be rude.
  • The show begins inside the geodisical dome (Buckminster Fuller) where American girls in polka dotted knee length dresses introduce an overwhelming slide show with multiple screens about a day in the life of America. (Charles and Ray Eames) (44-46)  By the end of the show Galina’s picture of her future life with Volodya has been displaced. She begins to panic.
  • Roger Taylor, the black guide from Howard University, takes his group of Muscovites on the rest of the tour extolling the American Way of Life. The little plastic beakers are blocks of color made from panels of translucent plastic made into a framework of thin rods to make cubic displays of consumer commodities. (48-49) These displays reflect a world view in the same way that Faberge’s eggs reflected the world view of the tsars.
  • Roger and Fyodor debate the actual spending power of average American workers who with some discipline and planning can afford to purchase food, a car, even a house. (50-51) Galina believes her guide. People in America, some of them, can have a life as pretty and convenient as the little plastic beakers.
  • The tour moves on to the supermarket and then to the car show, which captivates all the men. At the fashion show, Galina finally finds her voice and starts to do her job. (54-57) She plays the race card and asks Roger how he can support a system which still discriminates against blacks. “You can’t even drink from the same water fountain as they do.” Roger defends America, but Galina offends the tour group by pushing the issue to the point where Roger loses his composure.

 

 

 

4.       White Dust 1953 (59-76)

 

  • Economist Emil Shaidullin is describing the day he walked to Sobinka, the little mill town outside of Moscow where his fiancé Magda grew up. Stalin died earlier in the year, and the consequence is as if ‘a shift in the earth’s crust’ has taken place, a ‘loosening in the fabric of things’. (59)
  • En route, Emil learns that there is no road to this town; he will have to walk along a dyke for ten kilometers (even though Moscow is only ten kilometers away).
  • At first, the walk is nice, but the day grows hot and increasingly dusty. As he passes the wheat crop turns a sickly bright green and then the landscape gives way to sick green pools. Then the mosquitos find him. (62-63)
  • Emil imagines himself as a human speck inching across the vast flat floor of Russia. He muses about the shift coming to the party intelligentsia: previously economists had merely justified political decisions. Now the time of the economist had arrived. To Stalin, all that had mattered was chain of command. Now, Marx’s ‘consciously arranged society' can be achieved. No more scabbling for survival; now a more efficient wealth producing apparatus could be achieved. (64-65)
  • Economics saw one substance that mattered: not money, not labor either, but value in material goods made useful. In capitalism Marx argued that labor had become commodified (66-67) Humans were mere mechanisms for chunking out man-hours. The alternative could now be considered: a truly human dance to the music of use: real need satisfied with the result of tangible good. (66-67)
  • After getting tired, dusty and sweaty, Emil is met by a tractor with her fiancée on it being driven by her father. He arrives at the village and sees wooden houses with low shingle roofs scattered at the marsh’s edge. They are not dachas. Emil imagines that he has stumbled on to the set for a Chekhov story like Peasants. This is a place where men in suits like him have always meant trouble. Emil wonders, “Did something bad happen here?” He has no conception of his history.(68-69)
  • He looks into the village store where instead of wares the shelves provide a graveyard for flies. This is not a supply problem, his fiancée explains: “We are just at the back of the queue.” (70-71)
  • Emil is the grandson of Tatars who successfully resisted and reversed Stalin’s plan of forced migration for his people in the late 1930’s.  
  • He is greeted by Magda’s mother and Pletkin the collective's manager who is embarrassed by the laudatory speech he has prepared because “Magda’s boy is covered in shit.”
  • Magda’s mother invites him into the family home and says, “Won’t you take a little drink?” The house is cluttered and smells of body odor. There is an icon in the corner. The local home brew arrives. It is a social necessity. It is also nearly pure alcohol, stronger than bottled vodka. (71-72)
  • After a few shots, Emil explains that he hopes that he will be able to do some good now that he is in the family. It is at this point that the others realize that he is working now for the Central Committee at the Kremlin. He cannot understand why the shop is bare. It should be the village’s connection to the larger economy—where the value they have created flows back to them in the fomr of goods. But the truth is that the prices at which the state pays for the wheat grown by the villagers who labor six days a week leaves nothing left for wages. Cash comes only from produce sold out of the villager’s vegetable gardens.(74-76)
  • In Emil’s drunken state, he imagines the way the socialist economy should function: workers from around the country might never meet, but they act on each other through long chains of value. Emil maintains faith that this economy’s particular laws will someday become plain. (76)

 

 

Red Plenty, Part Two (81-140)

Introduction (81-92)

1.       Shadow Prices 1960 (93-107)

2.       From the Photograph 1961 (108-119)

3.       Stormy Applause 1961 (120-140)

 

IIntroduction (81-92)

  • Spofford’s Version of Soviet History:
  • Marx had argued that capitalism created progress, but also misery. The socialist revolution would only take place after the industrial base had been established, in a ‘world of wonderful machines and ragged humans’. But paradise would then lie within the workers’ grasps. They need merely pick up the wonderful machines and carry them forward, still humming, into a new society. A brief period of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ would be necessary ala the dictatorships of Rome for emergency situations, but capitalism had already created the economy’s productive capacity.
  • But Marx had not predicted that Social Democrats in the great industrial nations would vote to achieve social improvements like old age pensions, unemployment insurance, free medical clinics and child care.
  • And Marx had not predicted that the revolution would take place in Russia, the country least prepared for a Marxist revolution. There society had been turned upside down after WWI when the Bolsheviks seized power. This country was truly 3rd world:  fewer railroad lines laid, worse roads, and less electricity than in the West, a country where the peasants were 90% illiterate and only one generation removed from slavery.  During the civil war which followed the revolution, the Bolshevik planned economy led to mass starvation.
  • In Russia socialism had to do what Marx had never expected: carry out the task of development. It had to compete with capitalism at doing what Marx had believed markets were necessary to achieve. Instead of a brief ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, Russia got permanent rule by the Bolshevik party, then the mixed economy of the NEP, then collectivization when the govt. set prices and all but a fraction of the surplus was taken for industry: coal, steel, concrete, machine goods. Economies grow fastest when they produce to expand the production base itself, so Stalin set dizzyingly increasing targets of output. To implement this crash industrialization, Stalin created an utterly hierarchical society: slave labor in the Gulag/ collectivized farms monitored with internal passports, and a swelling army of factory workers. This society existed in a high rate of mobility. It required whole categories of trained engineers, managers, new bureaucracies, and white collar specialists. The purges offered every job to the most ambitious: Kosygin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev all came from the working class and achieved salaries 20-30x those on the shop floor.  The planned economy was designed to ratchet up production each year. They measured growth in Net Material Production (total output of stuff) not Gross National Product (total income). 
  • By 1957, the year Sputnik was launched, the Soviet economy was growing faster (more than 5% a year) than any other country in the world, except Japan. Even in the West economists believed that the Soviets had achieved ‘technological lift-off’. Stalin’s successors could now set about civilizing their savage growth machine: the gulag was emptied, farmers were paid, workers’ wages were raised, apartments were built, but a new wave of industrial development was required if the economy were to keep pace with the West. Even so the Soviets remained confident that they could feed their populace, reinvest in their industrial machine, and also pay a super-power’s military bill.
  • However, disturbing trends were becoming apparent in the economy: growth was slowing, and the Soviets depended on a huge reinvestment to achieve its growth numbers. Growth was ‘extensive’ not ‘intensive’ via higher worker productivity. The Soviets were getting less productivity from re-investment than capitalist economies.


1.       Shadow Prices 1960 (93-107)

  • Nemchinov’s Conference in Moscow: Twenty-two years after his mathematical breakthrough, Leonid Vitalevich is now an apparatchik with special privileges and a Stalin Prize for mathematics, but he is still not being listened to. He insists that the application of his theories will save the Soviet economy hundreds of billions of dollar a year. He has written a book Best Use, aimed at managers, so its mathematics is relatively simple, but it addresses an intensely political question in technical terms. (103) With the same outlay of labor, materials and factory time, a simple reorganization of production can result in more production: “Out of nothing”. He also believes that allowing his formulae to set prices (shadow prices) will make the economy more productive. “objectively derived valuations”
  • Academician Nemchinov wonders if change is at hand. He has put himself out by publicly citing Kantorovich's work. (Of course, he had to criticize it.) and so creating the opportunity for this conference. He is excited because the new cyber-technicians are entranced by the possibility that computers might give the state the ability to manage large and complex economic problems.
  • Boyarskii the statistician objects. He argues that economics is not a science of quantity but of quality, and it is based on rigorous application of Marxist-Leninist partiinost. Political considerations trump all. Kantorovich is making the mistake of ascribing to mathematical discoveries a universal significance. The party determines that ‘all value is created by labor’ while shadow prices are determined by supply and demand.
  • Kantorovich responds by arguing that shadow prices are ‘the mathematical consequences of the situation’. We must manage the economy, not simply criticize the capitalist economy. He uses his tie as an example: are there tables somewhere that record standardized quantities of labor for each of the actions that go into making it? The rayon threads are processed from cellulose, spun, dyed, woven, cut and sown, transported…. Do we actually handle labor-value quantitatively? No. We currently track value through a variety of indicators: production norms (expectations that a plant employing such and such a number of workers should be expected to produce such and such a number of ties) or more imperfectly through prices. So our system frequently produces perverse results: a plan may benefit an individual enterprise but not the national economy as a whole. (99-100) While market prices are formed spontaneously, objective valuations can be computed on the basis of an optimal plan. Such ‘linear programming’ can only be used in an individual business in the West, but capitalism cannot calculate an optimum for a whole economy at once. “Electronic computers will immeasurably strengthen our ability to handle large and complex problems. And they have, moreover, the great virtue of requiring clarity from us.” (i.e. good data) (101)
  • Description of a pod of frozen whales swimming up Krasikov Street. (102)
  • Algorithms to manage the national economy? His friends wonder, “Why isn’t he dead?” for addressing such an intensely political question with such forthright gall? Well, Kantorovich did much of the mathematical heavy lifting to build the bomb. He even wrote to Stalin and his book made the official rounds, but it remains unpublished.
  • Kantorovich is now headed east to the Novosibirsk where the Academy’s new science city is being constructed. There, away from the hustle and bustle of the capital, Khrushchev believes that practical answers to Soviet production problems will be solved.


2.       From the Photograph 1961 (108-119)

  • A vacuum tube has been turned into an arithmetical processor: the BESM-2. Electrons move one way through an anode into a vacuum tube and then are ordered by electrical grids: it is on-off, false-true, zero-one. From this yes-no choice, the computer can build up information of the most complex structures “AND” “OR” “NOT” and do it all in ten thousandths of seconds.
  • Sergei Alexeivich Lebedev is the scientist who built the first Soviet computer in 1951 for use as the brain of the Soviet’s missile defense system calculating courses for counter missiles. The problem with working with the military is that everything must be classified Tonight, though, the computer is being used to perform probability math based on Kantorovich’s equations.
  • Kantorovich’s equations are optimizing the delivery of potatoes for the Moscow regional planning agency. The computer is using shadow prices to do what a market in potatoes would in a capitalist country, only better. The equation’s results can be compared to the actual market in potatoes which still exists in Moscow. Using the new computer, a primitive pre-electronic calculator, the new delivery time can be improved by 20%.
  • The computer is a wonder out of the old tales, but it is a materialist wonder. Cybernetics can achieve Khrushchev’s dream.
  • The computer scientists recognize that they are working from a ‘photograph’ of the problem but not the problem itself. They are working with statistics reported to them from a corrupt bureaucracy, not the problem itself.


3.       Stormy Applause 1961 (120-140)

  • Lucky Sasha Galich, the pop star has come to visit the newspaper editor Morin. Sasha is the a folksinger and the author of the play Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears. The press people are working on Khrushchev’s speech for the Party Congress that night and editing in audience responses like ‘Stormy Applause”. Sasha thinks. “Would that a theatre crowd was so easy.”
  • Sasha sits and reads a back issue while the editors work. He notes the number of letters to the editor about the new Draft Programme which realigns party rules. The letters themselves indicate how the people are ready to participate constructively in change.
  • Then Sasha and Morin are off to lunch at the Writer’s Union. En route they discuss how to deal with the Gavlit censor, Marfa. Morin is happy that he can still publish ‘controversial’ items if he feels they are important enough—like Yevtushenko’s poem. Sasha thinks to himself, “But is he ready to help me produce a play about a typical Soviet family, a Jewish one like his own?” and he thinks “Not!”
  • The Party Congress is going on. It’s a big news day, and as they ride through Moscow, it seems as if the public is responding with hope not cynicism to the promises of the future. Sasha thinks “Moscow is a set which only looks good in half distance.”
  • At the Writers’ Union door they are met by two French journalists covering the Congress who have not realized that you cannot just walk into a Moscow restaurant off the street. You need connections. Sasha lets them in on his responsibility. “Two plates of lunch is a price worth paying for good publicity.” (Mottoes of the Thaw).
  • Meanwhile Morin is taking in the celebrity floor show: Ehrenburg, Sholokov. Morin pitches a TV series to Sasha: “Life in the 1980’s” while they dine on veal escallops in cream sauce. One of the scripts his team has written is “The Universal Abundance of Products”, the dream of the ages: mashed potatoes, wooly socks and the shared use of a trombone… Too dry, eh? Morin suggests, “How about the future from the point of view of the human heart?” The private life of the future! You are an expert on feeling!
  • Sasha crosses the line by asking, “Do you believe it?” What a question! That’s the kind that gets you in trouble!
  • Riding again through Moscow, Sasha muses about the limits of the new ‘freedom’ for him. All he need do is imagine real characters, and he immediately bumps up against the state’s censorship laws. Now that he realizes what is missing, his rapture for the state that he had nurtured throughout his privileged youth at the dacha by the lake is finally gone. Singing for the troops during the war: “The Little Blue Shawl” “Lonely Death” “Goodbye Momma, Don’t Be Sad” In 1949 he barely escaped death when he wandered into a Writers’ Union Jewish Section which was purged two weeks later. He has heard stories from an old dancer who survived the Gulag for ten years. He remembers an old policeman talking about 1937 and the prison drains clogging up with blood and brains.
  • He has come to understand that his lucky world was based on horror, like St. Petersburg itself. Now he looks at Moscow’s endless apartment buildings and thinks they may represent a clean new page. His taxi driver says that Khrushchev is a miracle worker, but he uses the term khruchchevoby which rhymes with the Russian word for slums. They pass the astronaut Yuri Gargarin’s face on a billboard.

 

Part Three pp. 141-201

 

Introduction (141-149)

 

1.       Midsummer Night, 1962 (151-186)

2.       The Price of Meat, 1962 (187-201)

 

Introduction (141-149)

  • Stalin’s reforms of the education system: In 1930 the universities had been closed and then reopened as factories for the production of a new kind of intellectual. The old type of intellectual had been shaped by an ethical tradition more than a century old. Pre-revolutionary members of the old intelligentsia had felt a public obligation to speak truth to power, to oppose the tsarist regime and to try and build up an alternative Russia in culture. After the revolution the universities had been left alone for a decade in the hands of the old intelligentsia, and they had continued to offer an education based on the traditional European liberal arts curriculum. By the end of the 1920’s, however, the Party was in a position to enforce ideological conformity. The bourgeois specialists now were ousted, and Stalin called for ‘the working class to create its own productive-technical intelligentsia’. The universities were abolished and replaced by ‘schools of higher technical learning’. Students were drafted from the Party itself, and these vydvizhentsy ‘promotees’ became representatives of a new class of bureaucrat. They included the future leaders of the Politboro: Khrushchev, Kosygin and Brezhnev.
  • Once his campaign to destroy all independent factions within the party had been accomplished, Stalin charged the universities with a implementing a fiercely utilitarian curriculum: engineering, pure sciences, medicine, agricultural science. Literature, philosophy, anthropology, law and economics withered. Culture was no longer the responsibility of professors. During the period of Socialist Realism, the Party wished the people to know a conservative selection of the classics and censored all avant-garde art and literature. The task of speaking truth to power was now unnecessary because truth was in power. The old intelligentsia perished in the purges of the late 1930’s, and Stalin was left with the promotees: grateful. Incurious, ignorant of the world outside the Soviet Union and willing to accept Stalin’s version of reality. By the 1960’s the Soviet Union had gone from being one of the most illiterate places on earth to being, by some measures, one of the most literate and well educated in technical skills. The Soviet Union was a society ruled by engineers, mathematicians and physicists who brought with them faith in the solvability of all problems. (Biology continued to be a disaster area with power handed to Trofin Lysenko, an anti-Darwinist.)
  • Research did not take place at the universities, but instead at the ‘science towns’ which had been built to house the experts working on projects deemed to be strategic priorities: nuclear physics, aeronautics, computer science, and mathematical economics. The people living in these towns were among the most privileged in the country. Khrushchev, though, enforced laws which required all scientists to do two years of work in factories. The intellectuals began to chafe under the leadership of the Party’s vydvizhentsy. And the Jews, the most high-achieving of the group, continued to suffer under a wave of anti-Semitism which had begun during the last years of Stalin’s life.

 

 

1.       Midsummer Night, 1962 (151-186) 

 

  • Zoya Vaynshteyn has just moved to Akademgorodok (Google satellite map of Akademgorodok and the Ob Sea),  the scientist’s city near Novibirsk in central Russia. She is a geneticist, a fruit fly biologist, but she comes from a school which rejects Lysenko’s charlatanism. She is 31 and a single mother of a little boy who will be arriving with his grandmother from St. Petersburg in a few days. So for the first time in ages. Zoya has the evening to herself. She brushes her hair, puts on a green summer dress, and goes out to explore her new home. She is not impressed by the ‘standard lumps of public architecture’ she wanders past, but the path through the pine forest is nice. A stream of intellectuals flows past her, and one says, “Welcome to the island,” which seems strange to her because this town is in a landlocked region.
  • Kostya and Valentin, two grad students in economics and cybernetics, introduce themselves and invite her to a party. They say that this is a service they perform for all the pretty new arrivals, and Zoya tells them that lines like that have not worked on her since she was their age, but later she decides what the hell and joins up with them for the party.
  • At the party they question her about her work and she says she is studying environmental influences on genetics, and the young men scoff, but she reminds them that she is NOT one of Lysenko’s mob who believe that the environment directly influences genes; however, genes must survive in order to influence future generations, so ultimately the environment does select for genes, particularly those which encourage mutation.  The young cyber-economists are excited to discover that genes operate on a binary system, just like their computers. They are believers in Kantorovich’s economic theories and have faith that a properly planned economy will bring about a new golden age. They have been applying game theory to Kantorovich’s concept of linear programming: the equilibrium point in a many person non-coalition game must be an optimum. Instead of pushing factories to continually raise their production levels year after year, they hope to get them to do the least necessary that will still fulfill the current five year plan. What they ultimately hope to automate is the shifting value of a given commodity to the overall economy at any given time; then they can set an appropriate price and take away the discretion of the bureaucrats. (164-65) The responsibility for setting prices and production levels would shift to the algorithm in the machine. Zoya thinks the idea is like a soap bubble. It turns the heaviest, most dangerous parts of the order of things into something as light as air.
  • Emil Shaidullin, the economist whom we met nine years earlier in White Dust, introduces himself and puts Zoya through the inevitable political test, which requires some discretion. They want her to be a good geneticist, but to be a good comrade, she must not offend the politicos who support Lysenko. Once in, though, Zoya is now eligible to be Kantorovich’s dance partner. He is fascinated by the ‘robust homeostasis of biological systems’ and hopes to apply the idea to his economic system.
  • Zoya, Valentin and Kostya head off to dance at the new club “Under the Integral” and then are invited to the after party at Kantorovich’s home. After riding out to the house, crammed in Kantorovich’s Volga with the other partygoers, Zoya thinks his neighborhood looks like the American suburbs she had seen in that slideshow at the American Exhibition. Kantorovich’s house is the biggest private dwelling she has ever seen. At the party the intellectuals are defining ‘plenty’ as a state which avoids unnecessary suffering. When ‘plenty’ is achieved a truly human life will begin.
  • Zoya hears Shaidullin inform Kantorovich that he has just heard the news: the price rises on butter and meat they have recommended have been approved: they are overjoyed, and Zoya thinks their attitude callous. Valentin explains why a price rise is necessary to increase meat production: it is the only way to pay the kolkhozniks enough to allow them a surplus. It is the essential first step to getting beef that is both cheap and available. Once production rises, the price will drop. It is essential to winning the political argument for active pricing.  What is the difference between not being able to find something you can afford and being able to find something you cannot afford? In any event they don’t have to pay that price for beef! We’re on the Academy’s special list!” (178-79)
  • At the end of the evening, near dawn, the partygoers walk to the ‘sea’. Zoya is incredulous: the sea? Here? What an amazing night! She has heard words spoken out loud that could only be thought in St. Petersburg. And her amazement increases when she dances on to the beach of the Ob Sea: sixty kilometers long, twenty wide, and ten deep, cool and saltless.  It is a recreational site for yachting, water-skiing and swimming built from an old quarry. Zoya laughs out loud with real pleasure as she dives in.

 

 

4.       The Price of Meat, 1962 (187-201)

 

  • Bloody Saturday, Novocherkassk Massacre, 3 June 1962: Volodya, a novice soldier in the local security force (whom we remember as Galina’s boyfriend from Little Plastic  Beakers 1959 ), is watching the front rank of strikers moving across the square holding signs protesting the rise in butter and meat prices. The ‘visitors from Moscow’, Mikoyan and Kozlov of the Central Committee, have arrived to dress down Basov, the regional first secretary, who was held captive at the local factory overnight. Volodya broke up with Galina: she had become reluctant and then her reliability had been questioned. His career had not taken off either: now back in the provinces, the bloody South, only a few kilometers from his own home town. Novocherkassk suffered from hunger. It’s allocations of food were restricted because it had been classified as a college town but not re-classified once the factory had been built and fully staffed with 40,000 workers. As a commissar, Volodya was supposed to be motivating these workers for the cost-cutting competition with another regional factory in Rostov, but the workers had not displayed any enthusiasm.
  • Kozlov dresses down Kurochkin, the factory director, as the “Marie Antoinette of Novocherkassk”. He had met with the protestors complaining about wages, apartment shortages, broken equipment, and especially the meat prices, but instead of placating them, he antagonized them by saying, “Let them eat pirozhki!” He debates what to do with Mikoyan. The senior politburo member argues for negotiation: “We’re all Soviet people here... they had a price rise right on top of a pay cut.” Kozlov retorts “This could be irredentism (ethnic political movement demanding reunion with larger ethnic state)…. We do not negotiate with a gun pointed to our heads.” They call Nikita Sergeyitch and inform him that the workers are way over the fucking line. The troops should break up the crowd.
  • But there is no riot. The protestors in the square are angry but calm. When ordered to disperse, they demand to meet with Mikoyan, and then the troops fire over them. The response is incredulous: “Are you out of your mind? In our time?” At this point, the troops on Volodya’s roof top start firing directly into the crowd. Volodya cries out for them to stop, and the grizzled monk-faced veteran next to him pulls him down and tells him to shut up and get used to it.


Part IV (203-265)

Introduction (205-209)

  • The Method of Balances, 1963 (212-223)
  • The Prisoner's Dilemma, 1963 (224-233)
  • Favours, 1964 (234-264)


Introduction (205-209)

  • In a speech to teenagers on the same day as the massacre, Khrushchev tried to explain the rationale behind the price rise: they were necessary in order to jump start the production of basic commodities like meat. In the current situation, no farm worker saw any purpose in raising more cattle than necessary for his personal use because the price set for beef would not pay for the grain necessary to raise the cattle. Result? A tiny supply of meat. Khrushchev tried to explain that if the prices rose, production would increase and prices would eventually go back down again. This was one of the only times a Soviet leader had ever tried to share his reasoning with the public, but the result had been fruitless: the situation had made him a mass murderer again. Not a word about the massacre would ever be publicized in Russia. And worse, the fall of Khrushchev had begun, only to be accelerated by the Cuban Missile Crisis and then the disastrous wheat crop of 1963. For Khrushchev to have survived, a 10% rise in the economy would have been necessary over a ten year period, but instead growth had begun to slow.
  • The actual function of the Soviet economy was administered through the tekhpromfinplan  which set targets of production as the result of negotiations between three main players: the actual enterprise at the bottom, the Kremlin directors of the Gosplan at the top, and the sovnarkhoz regional economic council as intermediary.
  • Each spring the planning for the following year would begin when Gosplan sent out the zaivaki  (the indents) to the enterprise which would use these forms to request estimated supplies for the next year. By end of June Gosplan set draft production targets for the year which would arrive at the sovnarkhoz at about the same time. Only at this point did the sovnarkhoz and the enterprise explore the actual production possibilities of the enterprise. Then the sovnarkhoz would issue its plan: typically with taut output predictions and lean input provisions. Gosplan then tabulates all the zaivaki from around the country to measure demand for the each commodity and compares them with all the sovnarkhoz production targets to measure supply: the 'method of balances'. At this stage Gosplan and the sovnarkhoz negotiate to lower demand and increase supply if possible. Only in late October is the process completed, and in late December the managers at the enterprise level come to Moscow to report this finalized plan for the coming year.


 
1. The Method of Balances, 1963 (212-223)

  • Maksim Maksimovich Mokhov, a director at Gosplan, has a mind as sharp as a razor. He has risen as high in the system as competence can take you. (Beyond is the realm of pure politics.) He is a member of  Kosygin's kitchen cabinet of advisors. He understands why the West's criticism of the socialist economy as a permanent seller's market. (Too much money is chasing too few goods. The consumer must accept what the seller will give him almost regardless of quality or convenience.) The problem is not getting the money together; the problem is actually finding the commodity you need from a seller willing to sell.
  • Maxim works in the brain of the Soviet economy, a long library-like room lined with 215 filing cabinets in whose drawers 373 folders contain the real work-in-balance figures for each commodity. Today Maxim is concerned with a little problem at Solkemfib, the viscose plant at Solovets, a chemical fibre operation. Artificial fiber production is supposedly a robust enterprise, fairly insensitive to disruption. Just feed the raw materials into the plant, and it chugs along turning trees into sweaters, cellophane, and high strength cord for tires. It's waste run-off is high in lignins and poisonous sulfide compounds, but so what...Solovets is a long way from anywhere. However, there is now a problem at Solovets: an accident has destroyed the machinery neccessary for stretching the viscose filaments of celluose once they have emerged from the sulphur baths. So the whole #2 line at the factory, which produces the tire cord, is out of action.
  • For Maxim, the effect of problems like these has always required tightening the plan a notch or two further than originally intended which makes the whole system more vulnerable to crisis if something else goes wrong. Even so,  Maxim insists on taking responsibility for making a decision because the alternative is 'the incoherent wonderland of the mathematicians'. This is not a mathematical problem. It is a human problem whose solution depends on what he chooses to do about it. In the old days heads would have rolled on principle, and an accident like this would be labeled sabotage. But according to Maxim's conception of probability, accidents like this one are bound to happen. So he orders up a new PNSh-180-14S for the company. It would have been better if the side of the factory devoted to producing fibre for clothing had broken down because the consumer in Russia can always be squeezed. But tires are a higher priority with strategic improtance to the military. So there it is. The machine must br replaced. This will put Uralmash, the company which produces the machinery,  in a bind, but someone has to pick up the slack.


  2. Prisoner's Dilemma, 1963 (224-233)

  • Kosoy, Mitrenko and Aekhipov, the managers at Solkemfib, are off for their annual December visit to Moscow to deliver their tekhpromfinplanfor the following year. This year they are in grand spirits, carving up a ham and opening their flasks while comparing shopping lists from their wives. Last year at this time they had lamented their posting to Solovets as a career killer way out in Buttfuckistan. In this business the difference between hitting 99% of your production targets and 103% can be the difference between termination and a bonus of 40% or more. Hence the absolute necessity of low balling your target in negotiations with the sovnarkhoz. The mediators, of course, know what you are doing, so the trick is to make the opening bid's deceit as transparent as possible, thus flatttering their superiors' saavy, and hinting at where the 'true' figure may lay. The master player of the game completes his act when  the sovnarkhoz set a figure close to your original estimate (the true low ball) and then you moan and groan your way out of their office.
  • But what if you know that your plant has a problem beyond the scope of gaming the negotiation? The managers at Solkemfib know their machines: the viscose yarn line works fine, but the tyre cord line does not. The machinery's paper rating is just too high, and actual production can never match it. Last year at this time they had managed to hit their production targets, but the mix had leant toward clothing yarn, and there was not enough tire fiber to keep the auto combines smiling. So they were in trouble, big trouble.
  • The most maddening part of the situation is that a simple mechanical fix exists: an upgraded PNSh-180-14S can increase production of the tire cord without additional resources, but it will probably take two decades before the planners decide it is replacement time for the 'career killing piece of shit' they have to use. What they need is a play in the game so outrageous that the planners will not recognize it as a move at all. They decide to blow up the machine!
  • If anyone can pull it off and make it look like an accident, Ponomarev can. What's more they have leverage on him: Ponomarev is an ex-prisoner with a 'Siberian tan': skin so pale you can see the forked blue veins in his temples.When they tell him what he must to do to keep his residence permit, he says nothing at all, and he does a beautiful job! Furthermore, Moscow does not even require a culprit, as it turns out,  so they need not  feed Ponomarev to the police. Toast!  Let's light up the cigars!


3. Favours, 1964 (234-264)

  • Chekuskin is dancing the tango at Senora Lopez's hall. He is the equivalent to a master salesman in the West, except that in this economy, it is not the salesman who needs saavy, but someone who can procure the necessary items from reluctant sellers. still, the same people skills are necessary, and Chekusin is talented:  he has a photogrphic memory for the names and stories of everyone he meets: for instance, he knows that his tango teacher is a refugee from Spain whose husband had been mouthy and gotten himself shot. She has now been deported to the East and will not refuse him a favor, such as Spanish lessons for another apparatchik, if necessary.
  • At the Post Office, his office, he hands a bunch of violets to the Postmistress who in turn hands him his letters for the day. His contact list is huge and ever expanding. His clients pay him to solve problems, and his method is to get into the head of the person who possesses the commodity he needs and never quit their consciousness until they deliver.
  • Ah, the business of the day: this Solkemfib matter: they need a PNSh something or other and Uralmash has declined to deliver. Hmmm... No need to go to the top. It would be better to work someone near the bottom of the top. Ryszard the Pole from Ukraine comes to mind. He has a family and a drinking problem. Perfect! He whizzes through his mental rolodex, comes up with the number, and calls him, but Ryszard says nothing doing: there is no joy to be had in this deal. Ever optimistic, Chekuskin talks him into stopping off for a drink at the train station that night.
  • And Chekuskin is off to his next appointment: lunch at the Central Hotel with another client, but this one is anxious: he has never dealt with a black marketeer before. Chekuskin soothes his concern by explaining the vital role he plays in the plan: "I make what's supposed to happen, happen." For instance, in this man's situation, he has the purchase order for what he needs, but Chekuskin reminds him, "But when: that's the question, isn't it?" So you need my talents.
  • It used to be the other way round, even in Soviet Russia the buyers could sit around and pare their their fingernails while the salesmen groveled and made their pitch. People didn't just buy anything they could get their hands on like today. Chekuskin got his start way back during the NEP, selling pickled herring in jars. Even then, though, it was never really about the product. It was always about making a personal connection with the client.Chekuskin's First Law: "Everything is Personal." Chesukin's Second Law: "Friends look after Friends." (He does not bother to tell the story of how he got out of the business when the NEP went sour by serving up his Boss to the Party.)
  • After lunch, he is off to the banya with a good fat bankroll. He shifts the brown colored 100 rouble bill to the inside and moves a plum colored 25 rouble bill to the outside. (The 100 rouble bill looks too much like a one rouble bill.) He does not usually work with money: he traded in favors, but sometimes cash is indispensable. He was voyaging into the kingdom of thieves where Kolya the gangster holds sway (249ff) Kolya controls all the materials stolen from building construction sites, and to do business in Kolya's city a monthly payment was necessary.
  • Outside a police car is waiting and the officer rolls over to Chekuskin. "Button your mouth, you little cunt. Get in. We're giving you a lift." The police car is in bad shape: it's muffler is shot and its gears stridulate. The cops take Chekuskin out of the city, beat him up, and only leave him in a snow drift after Chekuskin has promised to get them a new car.
  • He does not freeze to death only because a truck driver picks him up (another friend of his). He wanders, looking like 'a depraved midgit', to his appointment at the train station and meets up with Ryszard from Uralmash. After plying him with fifth of vodka, Chekuskin discovers the real problem: everyone knows that the fuckers at Solkemfib deliberately sabotaged their own machine, and for the first time in history, no one got shot. But everyone is watching now! Uralmash would love to sell them the new machine, but the problem is that even though it is a better machine, it costs less.(Chekuskin: Cost? When did that ever matter?) The idiots at the sovonarkhoz price the equipment based on its weight. Now we have to worry about the bottom line because selling a new machine will rip a great big gaping hole in our sales target. So to make budget, we need to sell them the good old, crappy but more expensive machine.Chekuskin must figure out a way to compensate the executives at Uralmash invisibly, in plain sight, with the whole world watching.
  • Chekuskin goes home and falls asleep dreaming of this terrible machine, vilely alive, with purplish black fluids pulsing beneath its membrane. The machine has hold of his hand and it will not let him go, and he is being drawn into it!!!!..... But by the next morning Chekuskin has conceived a new plan. a beautiful plan: a  complex scheme of favors arranged in a braided circle.

 

Part V (269-318)

Introduction (269-274)

 

Part V (269-318)

Introduction (269-274)

  • Theory always came first in the Soviet experiment: the enlightened intelligence given absolute power unrestrained by law or moral code would serve the people better than politicking. Hence, the Party! Rule by heavily-armed virtue! Self-righteous brutality! Enlightened despots in baggy suits (no longer in Stalinist martial garb) remained social scientists who thought principle required them to behave like gangsters. In practice, though, the vydvizhentsy who refilled the Central Committee in the 30’s were not selfless, principled or scrupulous. They were instead the most ambitious, domineering, manipulative, greedy and sycophantic. The ideas they embraced were the ones that enabled them to grab power. Stalin had been a gangster who believed he was a social scientist. Khrushchev was a gangster who hoped to be a social scientist. After Khrushchev, though, the Soviet Union would be governed by gangsters pretending to be social scientists.
  • To consolidate his power, Khrushchev had remade the Central Committee by filling it with vydvizhentsy loyal to him alone: Brezhnev, Kosygin, Andropov, etc. But he had made alarmingly verifiable public promises about economic growth, and by 1963 its growth rate was trending down. In 1963, draught and falling yields had the country on the brink of bread rationing, and the Cuban missile crisis had embarrassed Khrushchev by appearing weak. By October 1964, a majority of the Central Committee was ready to replace him.

 

1.       Trading Down, 1964 (276-282)

  • The Coup: Khrushchev’s Zil, a copy of the Cadillac El Dorado, was gone, and a Chaika had replaced it. A Chaika was a copy of the Packard Patrician. But later in the morning, even it was gone, replaced by a Volga, a copy of the Ford Crestline. The driver and the cook are worried. In the past, the fall of a big boss hadn’t included a pension, and it had dragged the whole household staff down with it. Now Mr. K is off to the dacha for good.

2.       Ladies Cover Your Ears! 1965 (283-301)

  • Emil has shaved his head to look more macho, only he has sunburned it too. His reaction to Khrushchev’s fall? Maybe this is good news: the reform agenda had to be proteted from its own erratic patron. Now Brezhnev and Kosygin will protect us from ‘hair-brained schemes.’  The economists at Akademagorsk have been directed to 'not comment on decisions that have already been taken.’ Now everyone has to answer to the district committee in the town. Scholars no longer police themselves. Kosygin’s reforms intended to free the economy from centralized control, but the proponents of optimal pricing (shadow prices) did not hear from Kosygin until late in the game.
  • At that meeting with Kosygin, the Party leaders accepted many of the mathematicians' economic proposals, but they balked on rational pricing. Kosygin backed changes that would enable managers of enterprises to pursue profit, but the Central Committee, Gosplan,  would still set the volume of any enterprise's output. In his last gasp plea for Kantorovich's optimal pricing theory, Emil wonders how even the best informed committee can set prices for myriad commodities that reflect their true need for one another. He argues that one part of the system will think in terms of profit while the other managers will remain fixated on obtaining materials whatever they may cost.  Emil argues that mathematics can calculate a value for each product which reflects the overall plan then the manager can seek profit while output is guaranteed to be in accord with central planning. Productivity increases because raw materials are processed into commodities more efficeintly. Prices remain active, though, and must be recalculated frequently.  Kosygin and his assistants all condemn this idea as simply a market economy, but Emil insists it is not. A market economy produces more waste. However, the Party leadership remains unconvinced. The politicians will be blamed just the same for price changes that the machine recommends. "We're not going to tear up a working system for the sake of some little theoretical gain in efficiency." (292) Mokhov later explains to Emil that Kosygin's hesitation results from a desire for stability. We know that all that prevents the machine from seizing up is our discretion, and your foumulae would take that discretion away. (297) Your optimal prices also depend on managers supplying good data. How can you guarantee that? No, money will never be permitted to become an autonomous power in the Soviet system. (301)

3. Psychoprophylaxis, 1966 (302-318)

  • Galina goes into labor. She has married Fyodor and finally obtained a residency in Moscow, but is it worth the sacrifice? Her husband is a sexist pig who forces her to live in a flat with her mother-in-law. Recently he has taken to beating her. When Galina's water breaks, Fyodor drives her to the maternity ward and leaves her there. This hospital's service is terrible. Galina is forced to climb stairs, ignored or insulted by the nurses, and denied pain medication. She should be able to give birth 'naturally' via psychoprophylaxis: i.e. breathing and self-massage.Labor pain is only an illusion promoted by capitalist doctors. (313) Only after Galina loudly identifies herself as the wife of a Komsomol secretary do the nurses even listen to her, and they promptly give her morphine.

Part Six (1968-70) pp. 323-363
Introduction (323-27)
  • The Kosygin Reforms of 1965 gave incentives to managers but failed to re-start the economy which stagnated until 1970 and then declined. By 1970 Breznhev controlled the Politboro: the best strategy had not been trying.
  • But by 1969 geologists, many working out of Akademgorodok, had discovered rich oil deposits in Western Siberia which were pumping in time for the 1973 oil shock. The Soviet Union had become a  producer for the world market and was awash in petrodollars. Everyday appliances like TV setswashing machines and refrigerators became available. But the oil windfall was nowhere near big enough to pay for military spending, consumer goods and a new retooling of industry. The Soviet economy did not move on from coal, steel and cement to plastics, micro-economics and software design. It continued to compete with what capitalism had been doing in the 1930's. Since the production system possessed no effective stop signals except ruthless commands from above, and the people at the top no longer did ruthless, control grew erratic, the information sent up the chain became more corrupt, and the system ceased to create value. The gap with American standards of living widened precipitously. During Breznhev's regime the cultural thaw ended: film, literature, science withered. The secret police (the Fifth Department now) pioneered use of the psychiatric hospital as a means to suppress dissent. But tere were no more Novocherkassk solutions applied to disgruntled workers, and the Soviet people accepted their lot with cynicism and black humor.
  1. The Unified System, 1970 (329-340)
  • A most accurate and terrifying depiction of the acquisiiton of lung cancer on the cellular and genetic level. (329-30) Benzopyrene from tobacco smoke is drawn into a cell and then diol epoxides are drawn into the cell nucleus where the chromosomes lie exposed. An epoxide gloms on to a place in the loops where it becomes an 'adduct' and re-writes the code. Usually, though, the chemical attaches itself to nonsense or turns sense into nonsense, but usually it does not turn sense into another sense. That is bad, particularly if the change in code effects the gene which controls growth.  Then it has become a functional piece of software which throws the lever for growth on and then breaks the lever. If this transformation takes place at the moment that the cell is dividing then it reproduces itself and noww both cells continue issuing growth orders. If the cell does not recognize what is going on and destory itself, then the disease has taken root and a tumor begins to grow.
  • Now, why does Spufford intertwine the story of lung cancer with Lebedev's failed mission to Kosygin's office in his dying attempt to save the Soviet hardware industry rather than 'playing it  safe' and copying IBM machines from the West to run the Unified System?
  1. Police in the Forest, 1968 (341-356)
  • Akademgorodok and Zoya are in trouble. (Spufford telescopes two adjacent events at Akademgorodok: the disciplinary trials of  academics who had signed a letter protesting the trial of the dissedent Alexsander Giznberg in Moscow (April 1968) and the one and only performance by Sasha Galich of his satirical songs (May 1968). Anti-semitism is now being directed at Kantorovich. Valentin meets with Zoya on the path in the woods to give her some money from the grant they won together, but he is afraid of being seen with her. Kantorovich's group of economists is sub-contracting to businesses throughout Siberia, but dreams of the big time are gone. Zoya has been studying the relationship between stress and mutation rates over time: the active tendency towards mutation offers a differential advantage to the organism, and these rates in the USSR had peaked in the mid 1930's and the late 1950's, passed on first from parents who had lived through the 'demographic disasters' of the WWI and the Civil War and then those who lived through the WWII  invasion by the Germans in 1941. According to her theory, history is written in the human body itself.
  • The Academic Council rebukes Zoya for her participation in the protest. Her residence permit is revoked and she is asked to resign. That night she goes to the Folk Festival of Bards where Sasha Galich sings "The Gold Miner's Waltz".  "We know there's more profit in silence/ Yes, we know that silence is gold." (‘Goldminer’s Waltz’ is the third song down here.) At the end of the song, the audience is stunned, and Lucky Sasha stands on the stage laughing 'like a man released from an ancient burden.'
  • Emil Shaidullin wanders by and whispers in Zoya's ear that Kostya, her ex, has been knocking at the door of the Fifth Department.
  1. The Pensioner, 1968 (357-361)
  • As his pet rook Kava hops about, the former First Secretary is writing his memoirs which would be published in the West as Khurushchev Remembers. He had hoped that the Central Committee would let him return to the grassroots level of the Party from which he had originally sprung, but the word was out: he was untouchable. So now all he can do is mull over his career and watch war movies on his new television. There were things to be proud of in his career. The war for instance... Ah, bludgeoning those brave boys on towards the enemy... but other memories come forth as well: human guts frozen on the path to his bunker in Stalingrad... the groanings trees loaded by the hangmen in Western Ukraine... the starving child vomitting grass during collectivization.... So much blood and only one justificaton: as prologue to the birth of a kind new world. He concludes, "Paradise is a place where people want to end up, not a place they run from. What kind of socialism is that? What kind of shit is that when you have to keep people in chains?"