Cannonball Passport: a recommendation from Chris, spasibo
How to explain this book, which was exactly what was promised on the back cover and yet hard to fully explain? It is historical fiction, with some characters plucked from the annals of the USSR and others constructed—not from whole cloth, but from several scraps who did exist (or who probably did). It’s a different take on the Soviet Union, painted not with satire but not with nostalgia/wistfulness either? I wonder how much would resonate with someone from that era, Russian or not. As someone who’s ended up consuming a lot of Russian-y things in recent years, I found it all fascinating and have gamely attempted to pass along the recommendation.
As the blurb says, this is about that “brief era when, under the rash leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists.” It’s funny to hear people now talk about global superpowers of the future and add, as a sidenote, that the only true superpower of the post-WW2 era was the US because as we know now it was never really an even battle in anything other than the court of public propaganda. But that’s just my American capitalism bias showing, isn’t it?
At some point, and for a lot of people, the great Soviet experiment was going to demonstrate to the world that there was no need for the scourge of capitalism to deliver the unending growth that’s required to achieve our modern materialistic goals. You could try communism! And to help you understand how that worked, Spufford has a series of interconnected chapters that each follow a separate segment of the USSR apparatchik. Sometimes we loop back to the same people, sometimes we see the consequences of prior events. Sometimes we’re in entirely different locations for the purposes of seeing how the other side was living, but from the vantage point of the comrades who regard everything with reasonable suspicion.
Given where the Soviet experiment is today—a weird, post-strict-imperialism-imperialist-state that’s basically capitalism but stripped of some of the veneer of Truth Freedom and the American Way, and oh also waging a land war in Asia—it’s hard not to look at media like this (or Chernobyl, on HBO, which I watched very late) and see the positives for what they were and bemoan, somewhat, their failure. But as Brexit diehards say—maybe it’s because true communism has never been tried before?
And now, for the first time: my little CBR Passport!
