<DIV><DIV><B>“Spufford cunningly maps out a literary genre of his own . . . Freewheeling and fabulous.” <I>—The Times </I>(London)</B></DIV><DIV> </DIV><DIV><DIV>Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called “the planned economy,” which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. <I>Red Plenty </I>is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending. <BR><BR><I>Red Plenty </I>is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as <I>Sputnik</I>, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.</DIV></DIV></DIV>