Mujda’s Reviews > Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream > Status Update

“At the next corner, a giant banner rippled and flapped against the end wall of a block, with the honest face of Yuri Gagarin on it, six storeys high and underneath the words he was supposed to have said, back in April… LET’S GO. Upwards with Yuri! Up to the stairs; up Mr K.‘s ladder to the heavens, whose foot stood in a mulch of blood and bone.
The radio roared its approval.”

“The Soviet Union could give its populace some jam today, and reinvest for tomorrow, and pay the weapons bill of a superpower, all at once. The Bolshevik simulation of capitalism has vindicated itself.”

If you were young in 1953, and lucky enough to come from a family that had not yet experienced the sharp end of his rule, you had no clear idea of what you had escaped, because an old Georgian had twitched his last on a government carpet; and you didn't know, either, what there was to escape into. No other world for the inhabiting...you had always been told the inevitable, the only possible version of existence.'

“Whether or not they wanted him there, the force & capacity of the Soviet state had obliged them to let him in. Think of it! Miners had gouged at the stubborn earth, rail road men had blown on their hands at dawns colder than rigor mortis, machinists had skinned off bright curls of swarf, soldiers died in shit and mud, so that one of their own could demand to be received in this quiet, rich room as an equal.”