Atomic Express

I first read Francis Spufford’s “Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin ” some years ago. “The Boffins” was a wonderful compendium of British technological history that started with the death of the Black Arrow rocket-yet another “AVRO-Arrow”-like advanced aeronautical project that was doomed to be destroyed once it was built because of incompetent government bureaucratic bean-counters lacking a vision broader than their balance sheets. The Black arrow was a British attempt to have a modest but independent space programme, specifically, the ability to place British communications and reconnaissance satellites in orbit without having to go to the United States for help in doing so. The destruction of the Black Arrow programme in 1971 was the culmination of  a 1950s popular-cultural dream that Spufford calls “Flying Spitfires to other planets”-to have the United Kingdom go where no Empire had gone before into space. After that, technologically-inclined Britons focused on things like cell phone systems.

His new book, “Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties Soviet Dream” looks at similar themes of ‘where we might have gone IF…’  but from a Soviet perspective. Where “the Boffins” is technological history, “Red Plenty” is, for want of a better term, historical economic fiction.  

No. Please. Don’t run away. Bear with me.

Yes, historical economic fiction. And why is this important? The Cold War ends because the Soviet Union collapses economically in part because it cannot maintain pace with the free-market West in, as Ambassador Desadesky put it in “Dr Strangelove”  in the  “The arms race, the space race, and the peace race.” “Red Plenty” explains why the Soviets were first in space and why ultimately they fell from the great heights they strove for.

If I were offering a course in the Cold War, I would have my students read “Red Plenty.” Interspersed between evocative short stories depicting the 1957-1961 period of optimism and confidence that existed in the Soviet Union after Sputnik and through Gagarin, are a series of short essays by Spufford that are possibly the best summation of the Soviet economic position before and during the Cold War. The idea that the Soviet Union’s economic growth was seriously outpacing the Western economic system in the 1950s was true and Spufford explains how it happened, and why it was temporary. Just as the Americans today romanticize the 1950s, so do Soviets from that period, and with good reason. The rust had not yet set in and the system was not yet seen to be self-defeating.

And, I hasten to point out, this is not some gloss over, some apologia. Spufford reminds us that we saw happen to Cambodia in the 1970s was really just a smaller, pint-sized version of what happened in the Soviet Union in the 1930s:

“With a reliable substitute in place for the old intelligentsia, Stalin could afford to sweep away most of its surviving members in the purges of the late 1930s, along with most of his own political generation within the Party, and most of the people, formed by the pre-revolutionary world, who had risen to lead industry, the army, and the state bureaucracies. He was left with the promotees: grateful, incurious, ignorant of the world outside of the Soviet Union, and willing to accept the Stalinist order as the order of reality itself. A great silence reigned about the parts if intellectual life that had disappeared….”

For all the literature that seeks to smear the American space programme because of its relationship to Werner von Braun and what he knew/did not know/did not want to know about the Dora concentration camp where the V-2s were constructed, Spufford is the first to dare to obliquely suggest that the Soviet space programme with its Sputnik and Gagarin achievements was built on a mountain range of human skulls:

“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 and were now corrected. It served no purpose to look back. It did no good for you 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.”

Ultimately, “they started to suspect that truth and power might no be so united ; that what was enthroned in Russia, after all, might be stupidity.” And that stupidity brought the world to the brink of destruction in the pursuit of an abstract, inhuman economic system.

“Red Plenty” can be viewed from many angles but I think the most important one is the academic one. The subversion of academia for ideological ends and the academics unwillingness to stand up to these changes is reminiscent to what happened in the late 1980s-1990s in North American universities. The humanities are in effect the first line of defence against technocratic solutions to social problems. But what happens when the humanities are transformed into “social sciences” and placed in the service of the technocrats?  Food for thought.