But it was always cake tomorrow

Red Plenty: Industry! Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream. By Francis Spufford. Faber & Faber; 434 pages; £16.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

EVERYONE knows that economic central planning in the Soviet Union was a failure. Many people can make a stab at saying why. Few will expect to pick up a longish book on the topic by a non-economist and devour it almost at a sitting. But that is what you have in store with “Red Plenty”. It is part detective story—who or what is killing the Soviet economy?—and part a brilliantly clear explanation of some very intricate history and economics. Some of the characters are real, some invented. Everyone has words put into their mouths.

Francis Spufford begins with the father of mathematical planning, Leonid Kantorovich, struggling home on a Leningrad tram in 1938. The story ends with the opening up of Siberian oil in the late 1960s, which gives a broken economy and discredited party their reprieve. In between we meet Nikita Khrushchev, the post-Stalin boss who promised Russian consumers a land of plenty by 1980. We fly with him to the United States and see it, as he saw it, with envy and a touch of disbelieving mockery. We leave the Kremlin with him in his cramped, third-rank car in 1964 after his colleagues, who have had enough of his boastful schemes, give him the sack.

We meet a large cast of others, too long to list, who take us inside a strange, impersonal-seeming system. Mr Spufford has a gift for seeing things through others' eyes—and a wonderful eye of his own for comic detail. The book opens, like classic Russian fiction, with a daunting two pages of interchangeable-looking names. But everybody is there for a reason and everybody gets their say. The author has plotted his book with cunning. He gives us the big picture—the cold war, the terror, the thaw, strikes, dissidence, pollution—through personal close-ups. “Red Plenty” bursts with information. It never drags or lectures.

In the 1950s the Soviet economy was growing at around 5% a year, faster than the United States. But productivity was low and stagnant. For that extra output, the Soviet Union was burning capital. That, in a nutshell, is Mr Spufford's story of what went wrong—and was bound to go wrong.

Although most readers will have known this before, they will not have read it in such human and convincing detail. They will not have met Mokhov, the kind but world-weary cynic at Gosplan (the state planning committee), or Chekuskin, the unofficial fixer whose semi-legal deals stop the viscose industry from gumming up, or Galina, the clever Komsomol (youth organisation) girl who taunts a black guide about racism at an American exhibition in Moscow and much later, as a dissident researcher, loses her job in the post-Khrushchev crackdown.

Mr Spufford's “pre-history of perestroika”, as he calls it, is clear in its judgment that the Soviet Union was in most ways an awful place. But he has done something better than repeat the obvious. He has shown in human detail how and why the system was believable. Such sympathy saves the book from sneering. One way the author makes his characters come alive is by not crediting them with more than they knew or letting them see further than they could have done. When you are in a system, any system, it is hard to imagine yourself in another. Mr Spufford, who has turned the trick, knows how hard. He has no need to hammer the point—but “Red Plenty” is also a lesson against any Western smugness.

The author has read a huge amount, from the mathematics of linear equations and the transcripts of the 20th Party Congress to the encyclopedia of Soviet jokes. There are around 50 pages of footnotes, informative and funny on their own. Though he does not speak Russian, he puts questions to many Russian sources through interpreters. He apologises in advance to his sources and to his mother, a professional historian, for mixing fact and fiction. There was hardly a need. “Red Plenty” has bullet-proofed itself against specialists by its breadth of field and seriousness of purpose.

There is one problem. Is the prize it deserves to win to be for fiction or non-fiction? That is for the organisers of book awards to decide. In either case, somebody really ought to make it into a play or film.