Red Plenty

by Francis Spufford

He had seen victory on a sheet of cardboard. It was proven.

But here he was, where the sky was scraped;

Moscow was a set, and like all sets looked more convincing from the middle distance than close up.

‘The lady has passed from a state of insufficient bafflement to one of excessive bafflement, without stopping at the point of optimal bafflement in between. For God’s sake, Kostya – help her, help her.’

True, clothing manufacturers were waiting for the ordinary yarn it made, but compared to the tire plants they were a distinctly low priority; because, one single step beyond them, you arrived at the consumer, and the consumer was an end-point of the system, and therefore a natural sink for shortages.

‘I learned that it was never about the bloody herrings. The herrings were the least important part of the whole thing. Always, every time, it was about whether I could make a connection with the person I was talking to, in that couple of minutes I was hovering there with the case open. If they liked you, if they enjoyed you, maybe they’d buy. If they didn’t, they definitely wouldn’t.

He had told the story of Mr Gersh’s herrings so many times now he barely remembered the experience, as opposed to the anecdote;

The Soviet economy did not move on from coal and steel and cement to plastics and microelectronics and software design, except in a very few military applications. It continued to compete with what capitalism had been doing in the 1930s, not with what it was doing now.