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  • The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the 1930s
  • Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild
Amy E. Randall, The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the 1930s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. xi + 251 pp. $89.00.

Scholarship on the Soviet period has focused heavily on the political. There is certainly justification for this, but the unfortunate result is that daily life has come under far less scrutiny. Amy Randall shines needed light on an important aspect of the process of developing a new Soviet way of life and culture in her excellent book.

Today the words “Soviet,” “customer service,” and “supply” are about as far from synonymous as can be. But in the 1930s, the new state’s planners were still in the throes of envisioning a new world. Randall focuses specifically on the Stalinist campaign, launched in 1931, to develop “Soviet trade” and thereby address a “major distribution and consumer goods crisis largely engendered by Soviet policies” (p. 1). Offering [End Page 168] an alternative to capitalist consumption, the “Soviet dream world” offered consumption “for cultural refinement and modernization,” uplifting and educating model citizens for the new socialist state (p. 2). Randall takes issue with scholars who see the attention to consumerism as evidence of the regime’s “embourgeoisement” and catering to “middle class values.” Instead, Randall argues, “the trade campaign and consumer policies of the 1930s were the first full-fledged attempt by Communist authorities to address the issues of distribution and consumption under socialism” (p. 10).

Situating her narrative in the context of socialist experimentation, Randall shows how difficult it was to reconcile rigid ideals about the role of the market in a socialist economy with the practice of supplying modern consumer needs. But she also shows that the process of seeking to create a revolutionary model of consumption expanded the definition of the Soviet citizen and provided opportunities for greater agency, or the illusion of agency, within the parameters of the Stalinist state. The book surveys the development of the new approach to retailing and consumption; the enunciation of the ideals of “revolutionary retailing”; the legitimization of Soviet trade, quotas, and Stakhanovism in the retail labor force; the tension between theory and practice and control from above and resistance from below; and the attempts to define the “new Soviet consumer.” Randall also offers a comparative analysis of Soviet, Western capitalist, and fascist consumer culture in the 1930s.

The book incorporates gender as a category of historical analysis in important ways, showing how in the retail sector Soviet understandings of gender changed from the 1920s to the 1930s and how this both drove and reflected the changing needs of the state. Before the revolution, female sales clerks were poorly paid and at the mercy of their bosses, and they often resorted to prostitution to survive. After the revolution, state policy emphasized the similarity between women and men, effacing difference in the name of a universal humanity. In reality, the norm was male, and both sexes were encouraged to strive for largely male attributes. In the 1930s, state policy changed, identifying and honoring specifically “womanly” characteristics, seeking to incorporate these into the general understanding of what constituted a model Soviet citizen. With the feminization of the retail labor force, “the ideal Soviet retail worker was expected to combine positive feminine traits of attentive service, honesty, and kultur’nost, with more traditionally masculine traits of efficiency and productivity” (p. 88).

The Soviet masculine ideal was reflected in the 1930s by the injunctions to increase production and the honoring of hero workers such as the coal miner Aleksei Stakhanov. Stakhanov is well known. Much less well known is the extension of similar incentives to the overwhelmingly female sector of retail trade. Serafima Borisova, honored in 1935 as an exemplary sales clerk, met sales norms, beautified her part of the store, and provided information to her customers. Borisova and her comrades modeled a form of marketing distinct from that often seen in the West. Rather than encourage rampant materialism, Soviet sales clerks were to be devoted to helping customers make informed choices. In using Stakhanovism in the retail sector, the state [End Page 169] was...

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