"It's a commonplace that the fifties and early sixties was the high water mark of the American Dream - but what about the Soviet Dream? For a minute, with Sputnik and Gagarin, they were in the lead. Under Khrushchev, there was a sense that after the price of war and Stalinism had been paid, maybe this was where the revolution finally started making good on its promises. After all, they were meant to be materialists, weren't they? Shouldn't that mean they ended up with more and better stuff than the capitalists?
As we all know now, it was not to be. That supposedly rational system was already too much of an ideology, too resistant to change, with too many people invested in its existing form (albeit glad to have some of the murderous pressure off). The similarities to other economic systems which may have ended up with utterly perverse outcomes and yet a stranglehold on their societies - say, late capitalism - is never even hinted at, but left for the reader to note. The similarity to cancer, on the other hand, is made painfully well in one late chapter.
I found this on the non-fiction shelf, but as is made clear from the off, some characters are stand-ins for real people or examples of types, some processes have been foreshortened, and other tweaks have been made. Essentially, then, it's kin to Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle and, while unlike Stephenson it has footnotes, belongs on the same shelf. I'd say the biggest difference to Stephenson's work is that he's showing us the birth of the world we have, whereas this is about the stillbirth of another world that maybe, almost, could have been."