Selling to the Masses: Retailing in Russia, 1880–1930

4. Visions of Modernity

110 The merchant elite’s orchestration of promotional events publicizing associations with tsarist power and the Orthodox faith clashed with self-perceptions some merchants had developed in the decade prior to World War I. As the Russian retail sector continued to grow, diversify, and serve a rapidly increasing population, the political situation in Russia became volatile. The Revolution of 1905, which brought limited political rights, relaxed censorship laws, and gave workers the right to organize, led to increased opportunities for public expression, as well as disillusionment in state-guided reform. Throughout this period, educated professionals began to organize, dedicating themselves to finding a solution to society’s ills. A new generation of activist merchants, aided by allies in the educated classes, began to move away from symbolic alliance with the tsarist state and Orthodox Church. The activist merchants sought to self-consciously articulate a new ethic and vision of modernity in which a new kind of male merchant, supported by emergent sources of authority, including middle-class ideals of masculinity and a model of modern commerce, played a leading, progressive role. Conservative social critics, troubled by new forms of retailing and changes in urban life, advocated a society founded on patriarchy and native Russian structures and customs, free from the influence of Western business methods and unruly women and young men. As one of the centers of public life that had helped to usher in enormous changes, the retail marketplace became a flashpoint for changing definitions of 4 Visions of Modernity Gender and the Retail Marketplace, 1905–1914 visions of modernity 111 modern urban society. Gender was inextricably bound up in these definitions. Conceptualizations of modern urban society were based on the creation of new icons of merchants and consumers in which men figured either as rational leaders of a just and efficient retail marketplace or as obsequious manipulators and women, as either rational consumers or wayward, profligate shoppers. Activist merchant-journalists mounted a campaign to promote modern retailing and the businessman as emergent progressive forces in Russia. There emerged in Russia an economic conceptualization of modern retailing that advocated the department store as an efficient, democratizing institution for all citizens. Critiques and condemnations of the department store also arose, and some of these characterized modern retailing and the fashion industry as threats to male authority . Although a consensus on the value of modern retailing did not emerge, discourses about its merits and drawbacks reveal the tensions about social class and gender roles that characterized late imperial Russia. The Kupets and the Kommersant Decades and even centuries of accumulated resentment toward merchants and the retail trade had resulted in a stock of negative stereotypes, offset by romantic and idealized characterizations. Neither represented the complex social realities of early-twentieth-century Russia. By 1905, a new generation of merchants, born between the 1860s and 1880s to wealthy, socially prominent commercial-industrial families that were educated, culturally refined, and politically active, had emerged and established a solid presence. At the same time, a corps of merchant-journalists in cities throughout the empire had founded commercial publications dedicated to the joint goals of rehabilitating the image of merchants and reforming the retail sector and, more generally, the economy. The men who edited and wrote for these publications hoped they could bypass the obtuseness of the economic policies of Nicholas II and reeducate merchants . They hoped to use their expertise and training to resolve problems of politics and social relations. The most activist merchant-journalists launched a campaign to inspire merchants to model themselves after a new ideal founded on middle-class standards of masculine behavior and contemporary retailing practices, in essence, to remake the kupets, or small shopkeeper, into a kommersant , or professional businessman. Their agenda signaled a new social and political awareness on the part of a small group of men who sought to accomplish with such a campaign nothing less than a thorough transformation of Russian society. Afewjournalsandnewspapersdevotedtocommerceandindustryhadbeenin circulation prior to 1905, the longest-running ones being Torgovo-promyshlennaia gazeta (The Commercial-Industrial Newspaper, St. Petersburg, 1901–1916) and 112 visions of modernity Torgovyi biulleten’ (The Commercial Bulletin, Odessa, 1901–1916). After 1905, however, the number of such publications rose to more than twenty-five, as business leaders in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Odessa and even in smaller commercial cities, including Tiflis, Samara, Khar’kov, and Irkutsk, founded their own journals. These publications appeared in part in response to...