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

Citizens of the British Commonwealth and seasoned royal watchers are used to the commodification of the House of Windsor, with images of Diana, Kate, William, and George emblazoned across mugs, ceremonial plates, and tea towels. Such tacky excesses are usually assumed to stem from the pervasive commercialism of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century capitalism. However, as Marjorie Hilton shows us in her excellent Selling to the Masses: Retailing in Russia 1880–1930, pictures of the Romanovs were ubiquitous in shops, on foodstuffs and cosmetics in late imperial Russia. From the “Tsarina’s Cream” line of cosmetics to “Aleksandra,” “Imperial,” and “Rodina” cookies, members of the imperial family were not merely distant objects of reverence but also everyday symbols of the accessibility of elegance, refinement, and nobility. This small example is just one of the many Hilton offers to buttress her argument that far from being inherently backward, retailing in late imperial and early Soviet Russia exhibited many of the traits we associate with “modern” consumerism. These included cooperation between the state and the retail sector (rather than the traditionally presumed Russian state antagonism for private enterprise), mass merchandising and advertising, and ideals of buying and selling as “rational” and edifying practices in contradistinction to the perceived anarchy of the traditional market or lavka.

Hilton opens the book with an overview of the pre-1890 Russian retail landscape, focusing particularly on the expansion and diversification of the retail sector that accompanied mass urbanization and industrialization from the 1860s. She identifies two distinct retail models operational in Russia by the turn of the century, broadly defined as the “customary” and “modern” and typified by the lavka and magazin, respectively (P. 16). Hilton is careful to point out that the advent of the supposedly modern did not displace the customary, but rather the two retail modes operated alongside and to a certain extent intertwined with one another well into the twentieth century. Chapter 2 introduces one of the key reference points of the book, the Upper Trading Rows on Red Square in Moscow. Hilton carefully traces plans for and debates about a new “palace of retailing and consumption” that became the building we now know as GUM (after its later, Soviet incarnation). As the case of the Upper Trading Rows demonstrates, efforts to remake Russian retailing were never merely about buying and selling; rather, the construction of a grand arcade in the Russian nationalist style was a “self-conscious attempt to aesthetically capture the meaning of contemporary urban life, to reconcile past, present and future into one grand architectural statement” (P. 31). As Hilton demonstrates in subsequent chapters, nationalism as well as Orthodox religion were essential elements of the modern Russian retailing culture of the late imperial period, an observation that underscores her insistence that religion and modernity should not be seen as dichotomous in the Russian context. Merchants in Moscow opened their stores with ceremonial blessings, while popular forms of Russian Orthodoxy were “enmeshed in urban life” (P. 91), in part through the sale of religiously themed merchandise such as chocolates for religious holidays, traditional Easter food, and wine and cognac for Passover and Rosh Hashanah (P. 92). Thus, far from being diametrically opposed, Hilton argues with a Weberian flourish that religion and capitalism coexisted comfortably in late imperial cities, a fact heretofore underappreciated by historians of Russia.

As they did with so much else, World War I and the Revolution caused drastic disruptions and changes to the Russian retail market, although socialism was not as great a break in the culture of consumption in Russia as one might have thought. Hilton’s argument is one that very much emphasizes continuity between the late imperial and early Soviet eras rather than all-encompassing change, pointing to the remarkable similarities between post-1905, New Economic Policy (NEP)-era, and even high Stalinist programs to remake shopping as a...