Abstract
This is a book about Soviet retailing and consumption in the 1930s. In today’s post-communist Russia and the nations that once fell under the yoke of the Soviet Union, images and memories of shopping have become iconic. Whether it be surly salesclerks, mostly empty store shelves, window displays of canned sprats stacked in a pyramid, bread shortages, ill-fitting polyester suits, Lada cars, or sickly sweet champagne, the Soviet retail sector and consumer goods have come to epitomize all that was wrong with the socialist system and to explain why in the long run it could not last in the face of a capitalist West more capable of meeting the consumer needs of its citizens. As the writer Slavenka Drakulić noted about communism in Yugoslavia, as soon as people realized that quality toilet paper was a possibility and began to want better paper for themselves, “communism was doomed.”1 This was no less true throughout the Soviet Union.
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Notes
Slavenka Drakulić, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (New York, 1993).
Elena Osokina, Za fasadom “Stalinskogo izobiliia”: Raspredelenie i rynok v snabzhenii naseleniia v gody industrializatsii, 1927–1941 (Moscow, 1998), 83. For similar examples, see 81–5.
For more on provisioning-related labor unrest, turnover, and decreased productivity, see Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov, Stalinism as a Way of Life (New Haven, 2000), 37–41
Wendy Z. Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge, 2002), 84–5
Jeffrey Rossmann, Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 118–19
Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York, 1985), 220–1
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), 95–9
R. W. Davies, The Industrialization of Soviet Russia3: The Soviet Economy in Turmoil 1929–1930 (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 279–80
Arup Banerji, Merchants and Markets in Revolutionary Russia, 1917–1930 (New York, 1997), 147–8.
Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1982), 91.
G. L. Rubinshtein, Razvitie vnutrennei torgovli v SSSR (Leningrad, 1964), 7, 15
Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917–1953 (Princeton, 2004), 21.
Alan Ball, Russia’s Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921–1929 (Berkeley, 1987), 92–4; Hessler, 105–6.
Ball, especially 56–82, 100–8, 127–45; Sheila Fitzpatrick, “After NEP: The Fate of NEP Entrepreneurs in the 1930s,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 13: 2–3 (Summer—Fall 1986), especially 198–207; Davies, The Soviet Economy in Turmoil 76–7, 287–8.
I. Ia. Trifonov, Likvidatsiia ekspluatatorskikh klassov v SSSR (Moscow, 1975), 225–30.
Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1988), 306.
Alec Nove, An Economic History of the U.S.S.R.. (Middlesex, reprint 1986), 228.
For popular disgust regarding retail tactics and the commercial sphere, see Marjorie Hilton, “Commercial Cultures: Modernity in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1880–1930,” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 2002
Steve Smith, “Popular Culture and Market Development in Late-Imperial Russia,” in Reinterpreting Russia, eds., Geoffrey Hosking and Robert Service (London, 1999), 145–6.
Quotations from Christine Ruane, “Clothes Shopping in Imperial Russia: The Development of a Consumer Culture,” Journal of Social History 28: 4 (1995): 767–8
Robert Gohstand, “The Internal Geography of Trade in Moscow from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the First World War,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1973, 703
For more on anxieties about modern forms of retailing, “foreign” merchants, and Russia’s identity, see Gohstand, 121, 632; Hilton, 36–8, 89. For more on the contrast between the older Russian-style of retailing and the newer and often foreign style of retailing, see Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 1985), 60–5, 82–6.
Christine Ruane, “Clothes Make the Comrade: A History of the Russian Fashion Industry,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 23 (1996): 318, 321
Jeffrey Burds, Peasant Dreams and Market Politics: Labor Migration and the Russian Village, 1861–1905 (Pittsburgh, 1998), 167–9
Peter Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (New York, 2001), 78
Steve Smith and Catriona Kelly, “Commercial Culture and Consumerism,” in Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1880–1940, eds. Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd (Oxford, 1998), 112–13, 136–7
For more on the development of a mass consumer culture, see Sally West, “The Material Promised Land: Advertising’s Modern Agenda in Late Imperial Russia,” The Russian Review 57:3 (1998): 345–65.
Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1994), especially 41–63
Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA, 2005)
David Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca, 2003), 120.
Burds, 180–4; Smith, 149–51; Barbara Alpern Engel, “Not by Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia during World War I,” The Journal of Modern History 69: 4 (1997): 696–721.
Rubinshtein, 123–45; Mary McAuley, Bread and Justice: State and Society in Petrograd, 1917–1922 (Oxford, 1991), 280–304
Lars Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921 (Berkeley, 1990)
Mauricio Borrero, Hungry Moscow: Scarcity and Urban Society in the Russian Civil War (New York, 2003), especially chapters 1–3, 7; Hessler, chapters 1–2.
Ball, especially 165–6, 170–2; Banerji, especially 44–5; Trifonov, Likvidatsiia ekspluatatorskikh klassov v SSSR, 225–30; L. F. Morozov, Bor’ba protiv kapitalisticheskikh elementov v promyshlennosti i torgovle: dvadtsatye — nachalo tridtsatykh godov (Moscow, 1978); Hessler, chapters 3 and 4.
Hessler, especially 53–61, 87–94; S. P. Dneprovskii, Kooperatory: 1898–1968 (Moscow, 1968), especially 320–50; Rubinshtein, 176–83, 227–30.
Marjorie Hilton, “Retailing the Revolution: the State Department Store (GUM) and Soviet Society in the 1920s,” Journal of Social History 37: 4 (2004): 939–64.
Ball, 166–8; Fitzpatrick, “After NEP,” 192, 198; Hessler, 101, 109, 153–4; Randi Cox, “NEP without Nepmen! Soviet Advertising and the Transition to Socialism in the 1920s” in Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside, eds. Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman (Bloomington, 2006), 128–9; Hilton, “Retailing the Revolution,” 943, 954–7; idem, “Commercial Cultures,” chapter 5.
Ball, 165–6; Hilton, “Commercial Cultures,” 326–34; Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997), 138–9, 208–24; Hoffmann, 122–3; Cox, “NEP Without Nepmen!,” 121–2
Karen Kettering, “‘Ever More Cosy and Comfortable’: Stalinism and the Soviet Domestic Interior, 1928–1938,” Journal of Design History 10: 2 (1997): 120–5
Anne Gorsuch, “Moscow Chic: Silk Stockings and Soviet Youth,” in The Human Tradition in Modern Russia, ed., William Husband (Wilmington, 2000), 65–76.
Kiaer, especially 137; John E. Bowlt, “Constructivism and Early Soviet Fashion Design,” in Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington, 1985), Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites, eds., 203, 206, 210–17.
Vadim Volkov, “The Concept of Kul’turnost’: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed., Sheila Fitzpatrick (New York, 2000), 210–30.
Nicolas Timasheff, The Great Retreat (New York, 1946), especially 133–40
Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? (New York, 1937; Reprint 1972)
Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Becoming Cultured: Socialist Realism and the Representation of Privilege and Taste,” in The Cultural Front (Ithaca, 1992), 216–37; idem, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford, 1999), 107; Julie Hessler, “Cultured Trade: the Stalinist Turn to Consumerism,” and Volkov, “The Concept of Kul’turnost’,” both in Stalinism: New Directions, 182–209 and 210–30, respectively.
Vera Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (enlarged and updated edition, Durham, 1990), especially 49
For a similar point, see Lewis Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (Cambridge, 1988), 246.
In addition to works already cited, see Elena Osokina, Ierarkhiia potrebleniia: o zhizni liudei v usloviiakh stalinskogo snabzheniia, 1928–1935 gg. (Moscow, 1993); Za fasadom, ‘Stalinskogo izobiliia’: Raspredelenie i rynok v snabzhenii naseleniia v gody industrializatsii, 1927–1941 (Moscow, 1998); Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927–1941 (Armonk, 2001)
Catriona Kelly and Vadim Volkov, “Directed Desires: Kul’turnost’ and Consumption,” in Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881–1940 (Oxford, 1998)
R. W. Davies, The Industrialization of Soviet Russia 4: Crisis and Progress in the Soviet Economy, 1931–33 (London, 1996)
Oleg Khlevniuk and R. W. Davies, “The End of Rationing in the Soviet Union, 1934–1935,” Europe-Asia Studies 51: 4 (1999): 557–609
Randi Cox, “All This Can Be Yours! Soviet Commercial Advertising and the Social Construction of Space, 1928–1956,” in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, eds. Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle, 2003): 125–62
Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange (Cambridge, 1998). This explosion of interest in distribution, retailing, and consumption has not been limited to the 1930s, as many of my previous footnotes suggest.
Soviet Dream World joins a growing body of recent scholarship that uses a comparative perspective to better understand Soviet socialism. See Peter Holquist, “‘Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work’: Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Modern History 69: 3 (1997): 415–50
David L. Hoffmann, “Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Social History 34: 1 (2000): 35–54
Stephen Kotkin, “Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture,” Kritika 2: 1 (2001): 111–64
Forum: Adeeb Khalid, “Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization: Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective,” Adrienne Edgar, “Bolshevism, Patriarchy, and the Nation: The Soviet ‘Emancipation’ of Muslim Women in Pan-Islamic Perspective,” Peter A. Blitstein, “Cultural Diversity and the Interwar Conjuncture: Soviet Nationality Policy in its Comparative Context,” and Mark R. Beissinger, “Soviet Empire as ‘Family Resemblance’,” Slavic Review 65: 2 (2006): 231–303.
This literature is extensive. For a start, see Andre Steiner, “Dissolution of the ’Dictatorship over Needs’? Consumer Behavior and Economic Reform in East Germany in the 1960s,” and Ina Merkel, “Consumer Culture in the GDR, or How the Struggle for Antimodernity was Lost on the Battleground of Consumer Culture,” in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, eds. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt (Cambridge, 1998), 167–85 and 281–99, respectively
Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Postwar Eastern Europe (Oxford and New York, 2000)
Susan E. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61: 2 (2002): 211–52
Greg Castillo, “Domesticating the Cold War: Household Consumption as Propaganda in Marshall Plan Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 40: 2 (2005): 261–88
Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley, 2000)
Judd Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism: Clothing, Politics and Consumer Culture in East Germany (Oxford and New York, 2005).
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© 2008 Amy E. Randall
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Randall, A.E. (2008). Introduction. In: The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the 1930s. Consumption and Public Life. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584327_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584327_1
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