If you loved how Red Plenty hopscotches from Leonid Kantorovich’s equations to a factory boss gaming plan targets to the dreamers in Akademgorodok, Grossman’s Life and Fate gives you that same sweeping, many-thread vision. You move among physicist Viktor Shtrum, censors and commissars, front-line soldiers, and families under pressure—each chapter refracting the same system from a different angle, much like Spufford’s economists, cyberneticists, and managers. The result is the same thrilling sense that a whole society is being mapped in real time, not just a single life.

Spufford’s vignette-like chapters—one moment on Khrushchev’s corn promises, the next at a Siberian research party in Akademgorodok—mirror the oral mosaics in Secondhand Time. Alexievich gathers dozens of brief, piercing testimonies from workers, students, and retirees who lived through the same planned-economy world your favorite chapters evoke: the thrill of grand targets, the everyday queues for shoes and sausage, and the disillusion that followed. Each voice stands alone, yet together they echo the cumulative power of Red Plenty’s linked episodes.

Did you appreciate how Red Plenty stages conversations in planning offices and labs—and then buttresses them with meticulous notes on Kantorovich’s linear programming and Soviet statistics? HHhH does a similarly bold dance between gripping scenes and the author’s candid, sourced commentary. As Binet reconstructs the plot against Reinhard Heydrich, he constantly interrogates what can be known, what must be imagined, and how to signal the difference—much like Spufford flagging where a textile manager’s dialogue is invented but the production numbers are real.

If the chapters in Red Plenty about cybernetics—those debates around Viktor Glushkov and whether computers could tame plan targets—lit you up, Medina’s history of Chile’s Project Cybersyn will scratch the same itch. You’ll see how engineers designed telex networks and control rooms to manage an entire economy, the way Soviet planners dreamed of, and how bureaucratic friction and political shocks unraveled it—echoing the factory-floor bottlenecks and ministry infighting Spufford dramatizes.

Spufford lets you feel the allure of Khrushchev’s promises to overtake America and the elegance of Kantorovich’s shadow prices—then shows why shoe factories still produced the wrong shoes. Scott gives you the intellectual x-ray of that dynamic: how states simplify reality, why targets get gamed, and how local knowledge beats centralized plans. If you were fascinated by the way Red Plenty turns a plan meeting into a battle of ideas, this will deepen the why behind those scenes.