Red Plenty: Lessons From the Soviet Dream

From Francis Spufford, in The Guardian

It started with the launch of Sputnik and ended with the Cuban missile crisis, but for a moment – so brief it has almost been forgotten – it looked as if the Russian dream of unrivalled prosperity would be realised. Francis Spufford on the lessons to be learned from the Soviet experiment 1962. At the airport, Harry Palmer – not yet played by Michael Caine, not in fact even named in Len Deighton’s original novel – stocks up on his reading. For the flight he buys the New Statesman and History Today. And then he adds a copy of the Daily Worker. Not just because our Harry (as we might as well call him) is a British spy, keeping up with the communist enemy, but also because Harry, unlike the uppercrust nitwits he works for, is classless and intelligent and up-to-the-minute, and so in a menacing way at this moment in the 20th century does communism seem to be, thanks to the public image of its homeland the USSR.

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