I recently finished reading two books, and re-read
portions of a third.
Red Plenty, by
Francis Spufford, is a recent publication. Aside from some small parts taking place in
the 1930s and 1970s, the majority of the book takes place from 1959 to
1965. It’s a lengthy (not too long)
analysis in narrative form about the Soviet economy in the Krushchev era. The best and brightest Soviet economists and
mathematicians believed that if they found the right algorithms and mainframes
they could replace supply and demand of the capitalist market economy with an
efficiently planned economy.
Answer? Well, we know they
couldn’t handle that and by the 1970s (Brezhnev era) the Soviets had given up. I liked one character – a “fixer” (almost
like a “NEP-Man” who “gets things done”) - and one reference to a Western slam
on the Soviet economy as a “permanent seller’s market.” 70% of the book is the
narrative, followed by a full 30% of extremely detailed and illuminating
footnotes. If you’re curious about how
and why the Soviet experiment failed, from an economic perspective, this is a
good book to read.
Ilif
& Petrov’s American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers. It’s mentioned in the footnotes to Red Plenty, so I decided to check it out
myself. Because half the material is
photographs it was fairly quick and easy to read: I finished it in one day.
Basically it’s a photo essay of two Soviets who went
from New York to California and back in 1935 and took pictures. They were on assignment from Stalin to tell a
story about America for ordinary Russians back home, something along the lines
of “it’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.” New York and L.A. are crucified as plastic
places, Hollywood as a factory for terrible films, and Americans are racist
against blacks. They also accuse
Americans of being a country full of morons who mindlessly accept 100% of
commercial advertising and Hollywood movies.
There are no “theaters” in America, only movie houses for the terrible
films, so Americans are presumably “nekulturny” (uncultured). So they’re also trying to make ordinary
Russian workers and peasants feel superior to Americans. I started out enjoying the book until I saw
the trend emerge. The first half is actually
pretty complimentary, but as the book goes on the insults pile up. While
some are astute and reasonable, they pass that point halfway through and then
veer off into “stupid American” territory – and never come back.
“One story” refers to small town America where the towns
are all the same and they don’t have multiple story skyscrapers like they do in
New York or Chicago. “If you’ve seen one
of these small towns you’ve seen them all.”
They were also highly amused by the American habit of naming many such
towns after large, better known European cities, e.g. Moscow, Ohio. They did acknowledge that St. Petersburg,
Florida, is actually a fairly large city.
You know how we laugh when the Chinese or Iranian state
agencies cluelessly pick up Onion articles and report them as true? Well, these clownskis did the same: an ad for
Boners, a Dr. Suess-illustrated
collection of the funniest “stuff kids say” (the book is still around, you can
check many of the hilarious entries on Amazon.com) simply pulled out the quote,
“Revolution is a form of government abroad”.
These two idiots thought Americans really believe that.
Seven
League Boots. I
had to follow this up with re-reading portions of another book, Seven League Boots, by Richard
Halliburton. Indeed, that book arguably deserves a blog entry of its own, but I’ll cover it here, because among many
other topics, Halliburton covers the Soviet Union – at almost exactly the same
time as Comrades Beavis & Butt-head were touring the US collecting their
literary fertilizer – Communist propaganda – masquerading as a travelogue.
The range of topics of this book is remarkable. Halliburton, who was an American
adventurer-journalist in the 1930s, apparently did the following: met with AND spoke
to Ermakov, the surviving Bolshevik who murdered the Romanovs in Sverdlovsk in
July 1918 AND burned off and disposed of the whole family’s bodies – thus finally
confirming what sensible people knew, i.e. Anastasia died there and did not
escape; went to Ethiopia and spoke to Haile Selassie himself; visited the
castle of Henri Christophe, Haiti’s short-lived dictator in the early nineteenth century; rented an elephant (!) and retraced Hannibal’s journey across the Alps
into Italy; and even – unsuccessfully – attempted to enter Mecca despite being
an infidel. These are just some of the adventures
he describes in his book.
But it
was his visit to Stalin’s Russia in 1935 which interested me. As I said, the flip side of the Soviet
idiots. He met Comrade Krupskaya, Lenin’s
widow. He married his interpreter and
immediately divorced her – an experiment to demonstrate the USSR’s liberal
divorce laws. He visited ballet and
circus schools. He visited Leningrad,
Moscow, and other places in the USSR.
And
what was Halliburton’s impression? Well,
he was impressed that so many women were working at men’s jobs. He was impressed with the circus school. That was about it. The regime’s brutality, its censorship, the
consistent poverty – a deliberate result of the regime’s policies – and overall
drabness of the cities and the people, and also this business of destroying
Russia’s vast culture in a heartbeat for this “social experiment on the lives
of 160 million Russians”, who are forbidden to leave, to speak out, to protest,
to accumulate any wealth or private property, to learn about the outside world
or about Russia prior to 1917 – the sum total of the Soviet regime’s
totalitarian nature, horrified him. Of
course he was also shocked at the hypocrisy of Soviet propaganda against the United
States – much of which can be read first-hand in the Ilif & Petrov
book.
This is
even more remarkable because Halliburton had a fairly open mind about
Russia. He was bending over backwards to
find positive things to observe and acknowledge. He also hoped – even perhaps expected – that in
20-30 years, the worst excesses of the regime would be over, that Russian society
would be more like ours, and that in this time we ourselves would be more
socialist and thus the two countries and societies would converge. Alas, he died in 1939, trying to sail a
Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco, so he never lived to see the
reality as depicted in Red Plenty.
While
the Soviet Union I saw in 1983 was doubtless different than the one Halliburton
saw in 1935, the similarities are more significant than the differences. And vicariously, these three publications
complement each other for an illuminating contrast of America and the USSR.
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