Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
Khrushchev was a funny guy. It is one of the things about him which was appealing and then, when you think about it, more worrying still. Of all the Soviet leadership Khrushchev is the one who is recognisable as a human being. He had that rare gift among politicians of remaining recognisable, thinking on his feet and cracking jokes. He had an almost Clintonesque gift of the gab, which really wasn’t a crucial skill among high-level Stalinists. In some ways I would guess that he survived at the top of Stalin’s Russia in spite of it.
Before we start with your choices, what is it about 20th-century Russia that hooked you in?
I think because it offers this frightening and strange yet still familiar cousin to the 20th century that I grew up in, as a safe comfortable Westerner. The Cold War was the ordinary shape of the world when I was young. I was born in 1964 and I am old enough to have had the absolutely conventional nuclear apocalypse nightmare which was a standard part of being a teenager in the 1980s. I took that to be the shape of things, then the world changed suddenly and drastically in the late 80s and the early 90s, and I found myself very interested in what was happening while the 20th century was so radically divided between the different groups. There were these different visions of how the world can be, and I like to look at what we can learn from both halves now they can be laid side by side.
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Francis Spufford is an award-winning writer and a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths College, London. His latest book Red Plenty is about Russia in the 1950s and 1960s, and the economists who tried to make good on Khrushchev’s impossible promise that Soviet citizens would shortly be richer than Americans.
