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REVIEWS
| A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917–1953. By Julie Hessler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. xviii plus 366 pp.).
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| In this excellent social and political history of the origins and development of the Soviet retail system, Julie Hessler advances compelling arguments about the nature of the NEP (New Economic Policy, 1921–29), the Stalinist economic system, and the relationship between state and society. Hessler's main argument is that despite the abolition of the NEP, which allowed limited private retailing and manufacture, private trade persisted, albeit in reduced and often illegal forms, and provided a significant proportion of consumer goods to Soviet citizens throughout the Stalinist era. |
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Much of the historiography on the NEP has emphasized pluralism and tolerance for experimentation. In focusing on the policies of the Soviet government toward private traders and consumers, Hessler challenges this view of the era, replacing it with a "darker" interpretation. As she sees it, governmental policies did not celebrate the diversity of NEP's mixed economy. Instead distrust and the "native impulse" of policy makers to repress private businessmen amounted to a "war on the market" that culminated in the decree on the eradication of private, permanent shops and stores at the beginning of the 1930s. The significance of Hessler's conclusion lies in its emphasis on continuities between the political culture of the NEP and Stalinist political culture, i.e., the continuities between Bolshevism and Stalinism. At least in the retail sector, the Stalinist agenda of the late 1920s and early 1930s did not represent a rupture with the program of the NEP, but continued and fulfilled it. The goals of centralization, bureaucratization, and social differentiation, pursued during the NEP through prejudicial tax policies, show trials of trade officials, and coercion and repression in times of crisis, bridged the two eras and laid the foundations for the socialist economy of the Stalinist years. The very persistence of private trading and its attendant "proprietary psychology" also linked NEP and the Stalinist era. Moreover, Hessler suggests that the Stalinist economy was even more flexible than the NEP. In 1932, for example, the state regularized peasant markets once and for all, an indication of the state's acceptance of the utility of private trade. |
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In pursuing this argument, Hessler develops a model of state/society relations. Between 1917–53, policy makers alternated between two modes of socialism: crisis and recovery. During the economically difficult years of the revolution and civil war of 1917–22, the famine of 1928–33, and World War II, Soviet consumers sought to avoid the deprivation and hardship of shortages and inflation through panic buying, hoarding, "bagging," profiteering, and other coping strategies. The state responded with crisis mode policies of socially discriminatory rationing, increased taxation on traders, heightened repression of illegal trade and "speculation," and reliance on informal provisioning. In the years following a crisis, policy makers and consumers switched to recovery mode, comprised of a reduction of prices, relaxation of rationing and repression, and consumers' abandonment of survivalist behaviors such as selling their personal belongings at markets. |
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According to Hessler, these cycles of crisis and recovery inculcated in both the state and consumers habits that eventually developed into a Soviet "exchange culture," based on, among other things, bureaucratism, solicitude for urban consumers, especially Muscovites, a neglect of the rural market, and a tolerance among citizens for breaking the law in the interests of survival. The most significant result, of course, was the persistence of peasant markets and private sales of manufactured goods. In one of her most important and interesting chapters, Hessler goes further to demonstrates that private trade not only persisted, but expanded in the mid-1940s as private vendors invaded new venues, including the state department store TsUM, to sell their goods and as cooperatives sold concessions, which allowed individuals to operate restaurants, pool halls, barbershops, and retail stores under the protective guise of the coop. Private trade did not exist only in the dark corners of Soviet society, but openly in state-sponsored venues. |
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