Red Plenty Quotes

“Seen from that future time, when every commodity the human mind could imagine would flow from the industrial horn of plenty in dizzy abundance, this would seem a scanty, shoddy, cramped moment indeed, choked with shadows, redeemed only by what it caused to be created.

Seen from plenty, now would be hard to imagine. It would seem not quite real, an absurd time when, for no apparent reason, human beings went without things easily within the power of humanity to supply and lives did not flower as it was obvious they could.”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream

“If you went to England, it was all hand-made trousers. If you went to France, it was cheese from cows who munched away on one particular hillside. How could you possibly arrange plenty for everyone on that sort of small-scale, old-fashioned footing? You couldn’t.

But the Americans got it. Of all the capitalist countries, it was America that hand-most nearly trying to do the same thing as the Soviet Union. They shared the Soviet insight. They understood that whittling and hand-stitching belonged to the past. They understood that if ordinary people were to live the way the kings and merchants of old had lived, what would be required was a new kind of luxury, an ordinary luxury built up from goods turned out by the million so that everybody could have one.”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream

“Who the hell ever said that plenty was supposed to abolish unhappiness? But what it will do is free our hands to concentrate on unhappiness.”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream

“Where Western tales begin by shifting us to another time – ‘Once upon a time’ they say, meaning elsewhen, meaning then rather than now – Russian skazki make an adjustment of place. ‘In a certain land’, they start; or, ‘In the three-times-ninth kingdom …’ Meaning elsewhere, meaning there rather than here. Yet these elsewheres are always recognisable as home. In the distance will always be a woodwalled town where the churches have onion domes. The ruler will always be a Tsar, Ivan or Vladimir. The earth is always black. The sky is always wide. It’s Russia, always Russia, the dear dreadful enormous territory at the edge of Europe which is as large as all Europe put together. And, also, it isn’t. It is story Russia, not real Russia; a place never quite in perfect overlap with the daylight country of the same name. It is as near to it as a wish is to reality, and as far away too. For the tales supplied what the real country lacked, when villagers were telling them, and Afanaseyev was writing them down. Real Russia’s fields grew scraggy crops of buckwheat and rye. Story Russia had magic tablecloths serving feasts without end. Real Russia’s roads were mud and ruts. Story Russia abounded in tools of joyful velocity: flying carpets, genies of the rushing air, horses that scarcely bent the grass they galloped on. Real Russia fixed its people in sluggish social immobility. Story Russia sent its lively boys to seek the Firebird or to woo the Swan Maiden. The stories dreamed away reality’s defects. They made promises good enough to last for one evening of firelight; promises which the teller and the hearers knew could only be delivered in some Russian otherwhere. They could come true only in the version of home where the broke-backed trestle over the stream at the village’s end became ‘a bridge of white hazelwood with oaken planks, spread with purple cloths and nailed with copper nails’. Only in the wish country, the dream country. Only in the twenty-seventh kingdom.”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty

“Why isn’t he dead?’ he said eventually. ‘That is a good question. After all, meaning well hasn’t been a completely adequate shield in this century of ours.”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty

“Coca-Cola bottles exactly fitted the average person's hand. Bandages came as a packet of pink patches with a glue just strong enough for the human skin already applied to each one. America was a torrent of clever anticipations.”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream

“The word 'more' on the bottom corner of a poster, which he knew at once would read in full 'Life has become better, more cheerful!' Those posters were all over the place. The slogan advertised Soviet Champagne. Or the existence of Soviet Champagne advertised the slogan, he wasn't sure which.”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream

“Moreover he worked in film: he saw this city, and he couldn’t help but notice the way its surfaces habitually turned face-outward to be seen, instead of inwards for the comfort of the inhabitants. He recognised the thinness of the scrim, the cutting of corners where the audience would have its attention elsewhere and be content to register a general blur of grandeur. Those doors would be out of focus anyway: who needed to make sure they actually fitted their frames? The skyscrapers blocked out bold volumes of air, the walls of the city were receding planes, leading the eye back to a sky painted on glass. Moscow was a set, and like all sets looked more convincing from the middle distance than close up. He had started to brood lately on what was behind it; on what you would find if you peeled back a corner of the painted hardboard. Some”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty

“What is the tactful, the effective way of announcing that your life’s work has been wasted?”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty

“He too had plans... he wasn't embarrassed by the idea of carefully thinking through what would be necessary to achieve them. You made a picture of the life you wanted to have, and then you worked back from there to the present.”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream

“Trees into sweaters! Brute matter uplifted to serve human purposes! What could be more dialectical?”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty

“The world was lifting itself up out of darkness and beginning to shine, and mathematics was how he could help. It was his contribution. It was what he could give, according to his abilities. He was lucky enough to live in the only country on the planet where human beings had seized the power to shape events according to reason, instead of letting things happen as they happened to happen, or allowing the old forces of superstition and greed to push people around. Here, and nowhere else, reason was in charge.”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty

“But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead. Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping; the quickened and the deadened, whirling on.”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty

“The labourer awoke and saw that the princess, the flying carpet, and the magic table loth were gone. Only his walking boots remained.”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty

“Once a turnip said, 'I taste very good with honey.' 'Get away, you boaster,' replied the honey. 'I taste good without you.”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty

“People were dreaming the dream along with him; they were worrying, worrying helpfully, over its details. Take the man who wanted more taxis. He’d noticed that the Draft guaranteed an automobile for every family, and not just any automobile either but one which, like all material blessings of full communism, would be ‘of considerably higher quality than the best products of capitalism’. All well and good; but where would they be parked, these Zhigulis so creamily powerful they put Porsche to shame, these Ladas purring more quietly than any Rolls-Royce, these Volgas whose doors clunked shut with a heavy perfection that reduced Mercedes-Benz to impotent envy? Had the Party considered the number of garages that would be required? The ‘deleterious effect on the hygienic conditions of city life’? The extra roadworks?”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty

“But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead.”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty

“That’s right,’ said Morin smoothly. ‘We had better just let Marfa Timofeyevna finish keeping us on the straight and narrow.’ Somehow his tone as he said this managed to suggest both that censorship was silly, and that it was silly to mind it. Galich conceded Morin a small internal round of (Applause), his headache whispering in his temples. He was highly accomplished himself at finding pleasure-giving, urbane descriptions of what couldn’t be helped, but Morin, moreover, had hit the precise note of the moment, liberally-minded yet unchallenging, ironic yet inoffensive. The”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty

“A drip of knowledge from here and a drip from there, till he saw that his lucky world was founded on horror. Like Peter the Great’s city beside the Neva, his city was built upon a layer of crushed human beings, hundreds of thousands of them, or perhaps even millions. And you were not supposed to mind too much. It was enough to be assured that such things no longer happened, that mistakes had been made but were now corrected. It served no purpose to look back. It did no good to toss in bed in your elegant apartment and remember the ways in which you’d helped to give horror its showbiz smile, its interludes of song and dance.”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty