Red Plenty

Name: Red Plenty
Brand: Tantor Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Francis Spufford
ISBN: 9781541485006

Author: Francis Spufford

Narrator: Roger Clark

Unabridged: 13 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/10/2017

Categories: Fiction, Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.

Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.

About Francis Spufford

Francis Spufford is the award-winning author of several books, including The Child That Books Built, Golden Hill, and Unapologetic. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College and lives near Cambridge, England.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Elf on January 31, 2013

Red Plenty is probably one of the finest, and saddest, books I have ever read. It's hard to tell what it is. The best description I've heard is that it's science fiction-- only the science is economics, and the fiction is entirely based on real history. Red Plenty is about the rise and fall of the S......more

Goodreads review by Paul on May 19, 2021

This is not a novel. It has too much to explain, to be one of those. But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story; only the story is the story of an idea, first of all, and only afterwards, glimpsed through the chinks of the idea’s fate, the story of the people i......more

Goodreads review by Paul on May 31, 2016

A fascinating mix of history and fiction focusing on the Soviet Union from the late 1950s to 1970 and its attempt to engineer the economy into prosperity and to outpace the Capitalist economies of the West. It is the story of the collapse of the Soviet dream. A really interesting read, and one that......more

Goodreads review by George on August 09, 2019

This is a story of how a dream is born and how it dies. The book is written as a novel, but it is definitely nonfiction, or maybe better, it is a dramatization. Yes, this is a dramatization of a usually dry and academic subject of planed economy and creating true Communism in the 50s and 60s. It star......more

Goodreads review by Nigeyb on May 17, 2020

I loved Golden Hill, which is also by Francis Spufford, and so came to Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream with high expectations. It's set in Soviet Russia, during the Khrushchev era, primarily the late 1950s through to the early 1970s, and comprises a series of short stories which highligh......more