The vanishing dream
"As ambitious as a Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant - and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne." Thus the blurb on the inside of the dust cover of this most unusual book, and, for once, it sums it up pretty well. This is history, history of a brief moment in Soviet life, just after the worst shackles of stalinism had fallen away and just before - so it seemed - the command economy started at last to deliver the shiny consumerist future rashly promised by Nikita Krushchev. You know it is a history because there of masses of endnotes, and entire sections in italics which explain historical developments. But though the endnotes give you precise sources and references, they often also say things like: "this was actually said three years earlier by this character as a different conference, but it seemed to fit better into my story here," or "I made this up, but it sums up what was happening better than any of the actual events"...
What we have is novelised, fictionalised, history. Spufford takes mostly real events and people and tells stories about them which illustrate this remarkable period. He shows how a sincere belief (of many) and the great talent dedicated to it by a relative few seemed briefly to offer genuine hope that the dream could be fulfilled, and of how and why it fell apart. We meet genius mathematicians, striving geneticists, scheming apparatchiks, sincere comrades, leaders both optimistic and cynical, idealistic students, bemused peasants, harassed factory managers, smart journalists, sleazy gangsters, violent thugs and militia men who follow orders.
This book works because Spufford's technique allows him to show us why people behave as they do. A novel narrative can take us inside people's motivations, make us understand their hopes and delusions and see why the cumulative actions of (mostly) sincere and well-meaning individuals lead to the disintegration of the dream. We see the mathematical genius gradually shunted off into eccentric irrelevance because to carry out his plans would raise absurdly unrealistic but long-standing prices to levels which would provoke unrest. We see a brilliant geneticist awarded a prestigious position in Akedemgorodok (Science City) but then ostracised because her science does not gel with the prejudices of a uneducated party bigwig, how her research reveals uncomfortable facts about Soviet history and ends up making her a proto-dissident expelled from the academic paradise in Siberia. We see how it is utterly reasonable - a smart move indeed - for a factory manager, faced with egregiously disproportionate production targets, to arrange the sabotage of vital machinery in his own factory. We see how, and why, managers everywhere cook the books, falsify data, but also how magnificent economic plans are based on that same data. We see how the rational chains of production and careful planning by skilled administrators break down entirely when a single link in the chain fails (or is stolen). We see how gangsters and corrupt officials feed off the irrationality of the Rational System and how honest men and women fall inevitably into their clutches. We see tired, cynical survivor-leaders opt for stability over the hope of progress. And we see, in a shocking episode, the state violence which underpins the system and its usually more subtle oppression, as good-natured protesters are gunned down in the streets of Novocherkassk on Party orders - an incident which really happened, but about which little was known outside the town itself, then or indeed now.
This book really is most remarkable. It humanises bureaucracy, captures genuine optimism, sympathises with misdirected science, indulges misguided idealism and explains catastrophic systemic failure in terms of understandable human behaviour. It takes liberties with form and historical content, but, for this reader at least, succeeds in explaining and empathising with an era better than anything else I have read.
Recommendation? Assuming you're even slightly interested in this place and this time, then definitely.
No comments:
Post a Comment