Francis Spufford's Genre-Bending "Red Plenty" While many look back on the Soviet Union and fixate on the politics, purges and wars, the British writer Francis Spufford, in his latest high-wire act, has devoted Stakhanovite study and considerable literary muscle to another endeavor. He tells the story of "an idea," the dream that mobilized a generation, created one of history's largest industrial monsters and ultimately doomed it to failure. "Red Plenty," as its title suggests, is the story of the Bolshevik promise of abundance. Spufford's odds of success were tall, for he has not only created a genre-bender - part novel, part history - he's taken as his subject what may be the most boring corner (central planning) of a very boring field (Soviet studies). From the preamble: "This is not a novel. It has too much to explain, to be one of those. But it is not a history, either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story. Radical? Not really. At least, not on Russian turf. Think: "Darkness at Noon," "Doctor Zhivago," "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." "Storifying" history, for Solzhenitsyn, was old hat. "The Gulag Archipelago," though he did not deem it literature, bears the subtitle "An Experiment in Literary Investigation." Still, Spufford juggles well, and includes 53 pages of endnotes. The result is a marvel - at once pure skazka, an old-style Russian fairy tale, and a deeply researched history populated with characters, episodes, even dialogue, snatched from history. Spufford the fabulist conjures up the fluo­rescent dead-dull drone of Soviet life, the post-Stalin, pre-Brezhnev heyday, flowing with dread and promises, a realm where briefcases bang "hollow" on knees, clouds "unzipped their bellies and let down the snow," skin in banyas (bathhouses) looks "like willow-pattern china" and wheat fields "smell like bakery dust." We gain entrance, as well, to a realm normally roped off to trespassers: Soviet cybernetics - the science of control systems. Making Soviet theory sexy, Spufford describes flirtations at the "Cybernetics Kaffee-klatch" in Akademgorodok (the Siberian Mecca of Soviet science) and duels over "irrational pricing" at a Politburo dacha. Spufford tells us, in the notes, how often he has "cheated." And yet he has not only researched in the hinterlands but devoured shelffuls of abstruse tomes, everything from "Factory and Manager in the U.S.S.R." (Joseph S. Berliner, Harvard University Press, 1957) to the "Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia" (Steidl, 2004). Who else has parsed the "potato-­optimizing program" of the Moscow Regional Planning Agency or delved into "Building the Svetlogorsk Artificial Fiber Plant" (Sovetskaya Belorussya, Dec. 2, 1962)? Pity the double vision: the novelist dreaming plotlines while scouring Gosplan statistics till the eyeballs turned red. But it was worth it. In one memorable scene, we meet the future Nobel Prize-winning economist Leonid Kantorovich in 1938, his mind set spinning by a request from the Plywood Trust of Leningrad to optimize production. What if, he daydreams, "in the face of the patched and mended cosmos, always crumbling of its own accord, always trying to fall down, it built; it gained 3 percent more of what humanity wanted, free and clear, just as a reward for thought"? And here is Spufford's young believer, Volodya, late of Moscow State University, when a price hike on meat yielded the Soviet Union's most violent postwar strike, in Novocherkassk in 1962. Volodya watches in horror as his bright shining future begins to bleed: "These bullets were not disappearing into the blue, they were being drilled deliberately into the flesh of the crowd - which shook, which fissured, which fell apart and revealed that it was made only of the single bodies of men and women and children. A man of 60-­something, gray beard, drinker's cheeks, was turning baffled on the spot just where Volodya was looking, everyone around him lurching into motion. Just where one of his neighbors with the guns was looking too, evidently: the near side of the old man's head caved in, the far side blew out in a geyser of red and gray. A woman holding a baby got the spray in her face and began to scream. Andrew Meier is the author of "Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall."