Spufford on Soviet science

[sawyl]

Fascinating Guardian Review article by Francis Spufford on the ups and downs of the Soviet Union, with a particular focus on the lost decade of the 1950s. The piece manages to maintain a careful balance: critical of the Soviet project, but determined to learn from its lessons:

Alongside our well-documented, well-founded knowledge that Soviet history was a tragedy ought to run a sense of it, too, as a comedy; a comedy of ideas and of things; a comedy in which material objects spin out of control, like the production line running awry in Chaplin's Modern Times, and refuse more and more catastrophically to play the roles assigned to them by bossy human intentions. Think of Laurel and Hardy pushing the piano up flight after flight of stairs until, right at the top, it gets away from them and slides right back down. That's the economic history of the Soviet Union in a nutshell: ascent, followed by pratfall.

But this shouldn't be the kind of comedy in which we laugh from a position of comfy security at the fools over there; and not just because the ascent of the Soviet piano was achieved at a monstrous price in human suffering. It should be the comedy of recognition we register, at this point in the early 21st century, when we're in mid-pratfall ourselves.

Which is not entirely unlike Marx's most famous comment about history...