Book description
The Soviet Union was founded on a fairytale. It was built on
20th-century magic called 'the planned economy', which was going to
gush forth an abundance of good things that the penny-pinching 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
Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich
communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter
Manhattan, every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche and
sputniks would lead the way to the stars. And it's about the
scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream
come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.
Francis Spufford, a former Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year
(1977), has edited two acclaimed literary anthologies and a collection
of essays on the history of technology. His first book, I May Be Some
Time: Ice and the English Imagination, was awarded the Writers Guild
Award for Best Non-Fiction Book of 1996 and a Somerset Maugham Award,
and also inspired a Frankfurt Ballet production and a clown show at
the Edinburgh Festival 2001. His second book, The Child that Books
Built was described as ' witty, compelling and elegant' by the New
Statesman. His third book, Backroom Boys, was called a ' beautifully
written book' by the Daily Telegraph and was shortlisted for the
Aventis Prize and longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Francis
Spufford lives in Cambridge.
