The economic ministries along

Kalinin Prospekt

Hindsight

The period I’m writing about in Red Plenty – the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s – has effectively been crushed flat by hindsight.  It’s part of a story we think we know already, about how twentieth-century communism moved from utopian hope, through totalitarian menace, to senile decay and collapse.  What’s more, it’s a part that doesn’t matter very much in the story as we now tell it.  It’s an interlude, a brief period  of delusory Soviet confidence and reformist false dawn, in between the much more important dramas of Act Two (Stalin) and Act Three (Collapse).  If many Soviet citizens thought at the time that they were living in a moment of vindication, when previous sufferings paid off and something good was just beginning, well, they were just flat wrong, weren’t they?

This did not seem like a good footing on which to try to tell a different story of that moment – a story of what it seemed to be meaning at the time rather than of what it means to us now.  (A story of the first kind bringing with it the possibility of discoveries, the second kind only of confirmations.  Which are a lot less interesting.)   I realised that I would need some means of re-inflating flattened time.  I needed the time of my story to swell back up into spacious three-dimensional complexity, or at least an honourable simulacrum thereof.  Anyway, it had to become a place in which readers would perceive a single on-pushing direction to events as little as they did, ideally, in their lives off the page in our present moment, where narrative threads (so far as real life is even story-shaped at all) lead off in all directions, faint and tangled and multiple.  This was one of the main reasons why I decided I needed to dramatise the story Red Plenty tells, and then, having decided to dramatise, why I didn’t want to join the pieces up the way that historical novels usually do, with the cast doing their interrelated different things so as to sweep out, pretty much, one emotionally unified figure in space. I needed a cloud of lives; I needed a form which did build as it went, I hoped, and did do something emotionally coherent, but which  was held together by logics other than the end-stopped logic of story.   I needed a form which felt like the recreation of a world.  I needed a microcosm robust enough to hold off hindsight.

I didn’t hope to make people forget how the story of the Soviet Union came out – how could I? – but I wanted them to enter as far as possible into the lives of people who didn’t know what we know, and who therefore hoped and schemed about the future without any guidance from our judgement of what (in hindsight) it would be realistic for them to expect.  I wanted to get readers as far as possible inside the enclosing reality of a present which was, to those who were living it, the one and only real world.  Hindsighted knowledge wouldn’t, couldn’t vanish while people were reading, but I hoped that it might recede, that it might draw back into being just a factual and abstract thing, floating as it were off to one side of the characters’ experience, which (because it was experience) would feel richer and more solid and more involving than a mere piece of fact.  More authoritative, somehow.  I wanted people to participate in the urgencies of the Khrushchev time.  I wanted them to hope the hopes and be disappointed by the disappointments, without them having those emotions peremptorily closed down before they had time to be felt.  I wanted readers to be rooting for the success of the mathematical reformers trying to remake the planned economy make sense – and not because those readers necessarily felt any sympathy for the project at all, on the level of opinion and personal judgement.  If the book were only to appeal to people who were already disposed to look kindly on mid-20th century state socialism, it would have failed completely at its task of imaginative bridge-building.  (And it would have excluded me, too.)   Instead, I wanted people to care because they’d put down roots to a degree as they read, and become imaginatively committed to the people among whom they seemed to be finding themselves, and therefore had joined in as we do with any demanding human enterprise if we view it from amidst the effort to make it happen.  I wanted building the cybernetic infrastructure for communist abundance to seem as frantic as writing the code for a start-up’s launch product, to be as chaotically enveloping as a military advance is to someone who’s on the battlefield, to be as natural an object of yearning as getting to the lighthouse is in To the Lighthouse.   Also, though everyone knows that the reform attempts did fail, it’s part of our hindsighted obliviousness that mostly we don’t really know how they failed, so though there’d be no suspense about the outcome, there could at least be some dramatic surprise, some unexpectedness, in how we got there.

But hindsight would not be so easily eliminated.  My microcosm had to be an explanation too.  Its elements had to be selected so that they would lay out a picture of Khrushchev’s USSR that was intelligible to us, remote from it by fifty years of transforming change.  They had to be chosen, in part, because they were helpfully adjacent to the things we already have hindsighted knowledge of.  I constantly had to be concerned with spelling out bits of behaviour a contemporary Soviet citizen wouldn’t have thought required dwelling on for an instant (or would have been frightened to comment on out loud).   Under these circumstances, the hindsight I was carefully keeping out of the perceptions of the characters, popped straught back up again for the reader – displaced rather than abolished.  The more my characters were carefully oblivious on subjects the reader would know were important, the louder the dramatic irony grew.  In fact, let me propose a Law of the Conservation of Hindsight, for the use of historical novelists: the less the hindsight within the text, the greater the dramatic irony outside it.  An immense overhang of obvious consequences teeters above the events of Red Plenty, invisible to characters.  And so the book became a kind of comedy, an unwitting comedy whose jokes don’t exist within the world of the story. 

I want people to laugh (among other things) as they read it.  But I don’t want them to laugh comfortably, from a position of comfortable superiority, snickering at the deluded inhabitants of the past.  I want, I hope for, the nervous laughter of fellow-feeling.  We should laugh like what we are: people whom the observers of 2060 will be able to see are naively going about our business beneath our own monstrous overhang of consequences.  Whatever it is.