February Books 9) Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford

[nwhyte]

This is a really interesting book, a light on an important period of history (the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1969) of which I knew much less than I had realised, looked at through the eyes of true believers in the economic system of Communism as it developed under Khrushchev, who were then bitterly disappointed as Brezhnev and Kosygin (and later

Comments

[gareth_rees]

I've just read this (based on your recommendation, among others), and it's great stuff: a clear presentation of how the Soviet planners believed the economic system was supposed to work, and why the system failed, without falling into simplistic anti-communist propaganda or losing sympathy for the people who were caught up in the mess.

I was particularly interested in the section on the Soviet computer industry. Coming from a computer science background, I'm aware that Russian computer scientists were pioneers in several areas. Red Plenty features Leonid Kantorovich's discovery of linear programming and Sergey Lebedev's early electronic computers, but other famous computer scientists include Lev Korolyov, operating system designer, and Leonid Levin who discovered NP-completeness in 1973.