A review by cdurbzz
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

4.0

pretty great, all things considered. on the whole, the brief dramatizations that constitute the book's "novelistic" elements were extremely effective, each one expounding upon internalized views of the soviet economic project (as opposed to exogenous, retroactive criticisms). what holds it back, as with any collection of thematically-adjacent vignettes, are the boring ones. standouts include the novocherkassk massacre, chekuskin the pusher, and zoya's expulsion from academgodorok, among others. well-researched and endlessly detailed; I learned a lot of little factoids about post-stalinist optimism and the kruschev thaw that I will forget in no less than one month. my fault, not the book's.