Selling to the Masses: Retailing in Russia, 1880–1930 by Marjorie L. Hilton (review)

Using contemporary journals and government archives in Moscow, Odessa and St. Petersburg, Marjorie Hilton provides an excellent overview of Russian consumer culture over the fifty-year period between 1880 and 1930. This book, which is part of the University of Pittsburgh “Series in Russian and East European Studies,” compares the late Tsarist and early-Soviet periods, distinguishing between Russian retail trade practices during World War I, the Provisional Government, the Civil War, New Economic Policy, and early-Stalinist eras. Drawing on the theorist Clifford Gertz, the author details how retail locations served to bring people together on a daily basis, promoting social interactions that involved ideas that were central to society and which “most vitally” influenced their lives (95). Her primary argument is that the merchant elite in late 19th and early 20th century Russia constituted a civil society that coexisted and cooperated mostly harmoniously with the state in constructing a modernity that balanced traditional and progressive agendas. Merchants’ prominence in local political, civic, and cultural institutions permitted them to influence modernity. Their construction of individual roles related to consumer culture often posed a challenge to, and even disrupted, long-standing social, ethnic, religious, and gender-related structures. The complexity of this relationship intensified in the 1920s when new state-owned and operated retail stores mostly unsuccessfully competed with the established private firms (8–9).

Hilton’s account supports recent historiography that emphasizes continuity more than change, particularly in the years after 1914. Asserting that “traditions and innovations” coexisted mostly “without conflicts and tensions,” the author even presents the Stalinist period, considered a turning point by many historians, as an extension of long-term trends. Indeed, she does an admirable job of portraying how citizens, merchants, and politicians in local government bodies, formed their identities through everyday activities involving the purchase and consumption of products. This process began early in life and included discovering local shops by caprice, encountering advertisements or other promotional devices, learning to “haggle” over transactions, and other personal and interpersonal experiences. Merchants wrote petitions to the Moscow city council regarding strategies for construction of marketplaces and interacted with the city regarding related political matters. They read and responded to local popular media about sales tactics, etiquette, and protocol (7).

One of the strong points of the book is how the author guides the reader from the Tsarist period through the war years, explaining the complex changes that occurred in the relationship between merchants and the state. Up until 1905, retailers used the traditional imagery of the Orthodox Church and the state to support their business and marketing strategies (75). Conflict increased after World War I began. Severe hardships prompted further state intervention, causing a shift in retail trade culture “not in ways that members of the trade press and conservative commentators had hoped” (173). Groups of foreign merchants had their businesses seized as “enemies” during the late-tsarist period, then as “former exploiters” during the Provisional Government and Bolshevik periods (193). “Ideological imperatives” and political opposition compelled the Bolsheviks to place small and medium privately-owned businesses, buildings and industries at the disposal of the state and municipalities (181). Soviet culture touted increasing municipal authority as transforming an effeminate bourgeois sphere focused on profit into a more rational, masculine enterprise (184). Government workers labored vigorously amid “messy stacks of paper, noisy typewriters, and abacuses,” reflecting a more democratic—and thereby socialist—atmosphere (185). Demanding middle-class women disappeared from the marketplace (186). Mounting hardships and peasant turmoil in the early 1920s brought about a retreat. Pragmatists such as the Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin argued that coexistence of private and state enterprises would promote agricultural, industrial and commercial advances, and mollify the peasantry. Consumers continued to desire the high-quality goods that state officials considered anathema to socialist society. Hilton portrays the New Economic Policy (NEP) as a period that proved the superiority of private over state-run enterprises...