Abstract
Amy E. Randall, The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the 1930s, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; xi + 251 pp.; £52.00 hbk; ISBN 9780230573963.
Amy Randall’s focus in this short monograph is on the 1930s campaign to improve Soviet retail trade. This campaign took shape during the early 1930s against a backdrop of severe scarcity of foods and all basic consumer goods, rationing of most necessities, and the evisceration of the retail network as a result of the elimination of private shops. From this nadir, certainly, there was nowhere to go but up. Randall downplays the economic context, emphasizing instead the ideological roots of the new trade policy. Her main thesis is that Soviet retail reform should be understood as part of a larger ideological project of non-capitalist development, whose aim was simultaneously to modernize retailing and to recast consumption and retail workers in a socialist mould.
Randall’s book provides a first look at labor issues in Soviet trade. Randall devotes two chapters to what she sees as the valorization of retail workers. Soviet trade actively recruited women, whose numbers increased rapidly over the course of the 1930s. Focusing on the language of recruitment efforts, which asserted women’s ‘housewifely’ virtues of thrift and good taste, Randall portrays women’s employment as a vehicle for promoting ‘culturedness’ in the retail setting as well as helping engage women in public life. Randall’s discursive analysis could have been helpfully supplemented by a consideration of other kinds of evidence. How, for example, does she reconcile the discursive valorization of women retail workers with the fact of sharply declining retail wages compared with wages in other sectors of the economy? Was there any causal relationship between feminization and the growing wage gap between trade and industry? Was the decision to recruit women into retailing made because of women’s natural qualifications, as Randall suggests, or was the main purpose simply to get men out of retailing and into higher-priority industrial jobs?
Randall also discusses the relationship of the Stakhanovite movement to retail reform. In trade, unlike industry, Stakhanovites were recognized not just for quantitative achievements, but also for the qualitative aspects of their work, such as customer service, politeness, and store aesthetics, that defined ‘cultured trade’. As retail workers generally accepted the ethos of cultured trade, however distant they may have remained from it in practice, Stakhanovite salesclerks were not resented as much as their counterparts in industry, who were associated with work speedups. Stakhanovites themselves could create tensions in the workplace by accusing managers of corruption, Randall notes, but except in the case of Stakhanovite instructors sent in to tell retail workers how to do their job, Stakhanovites were rarely the focus of other workers’ hostility.
Stakhanovism clearly gave retail workers some positive publicity during the mid-1930s and may have helped them develop a sense of mission. My own sense, though, is that except for 1935 and 1936 (the leadup to the end of rationing and its immediate aftermath), negative images of trade predominated in the Soviet media. In fact, in the entire Soviet period, trade workers never overcame the pejorative association of trade with speculation and corruption that the Bolsheviks attached to them during the revolutionary years. Managers in trade not only fell victim to the purges of 1937–8, but were also caught up in large numbers in the 1933 purge of the cooperative system and in innumerable individual criminal cases throughout the decade. Randall could, I think, have done more to work through the relationship between the valorization of retail work and its stigmatization. Her main contribution in this respect is to describe the functioning of public ‘kontrol’ (monitoring) of retail spaces, which began in the mid-1930s after the breakup of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin). Although she observes that public ‘kontrol’ brought retailing into the ‘broader culture of surveillance’ that was characteristic of the 1930s, she also draws attention to the fact that it gave consumers a voice.
Randall’s chapter on consumption presents a number of topics that figured in my treatment of cultured trade – consumer conferences, an image of ‘cultured’ lifestyles and goods – but she takes them in a different direction. In her reading, the politics of consumption in the 1930s led to the construction of a Soviet ‘citizen-consumer’, who desired things not primarily as an individual, but as a member of the larger Soviet public. Consumers, she argues, readily adopted the equation of consumers’ rights as citizens’ rights, and although the world of plenty that socialism seemed to promise remained a dream, its articulation still helped to integrate citizens into the Soviet order. In conclusion, she takes issue with my assertion (A Social History of Soviet Trade, 2004, 229) that the outlines of a mass consumer culture were visible mainly in relation to books and cinema in the 1930s; with respect to other purchases, I argued, household budget data indicate that consumption was determined by basic needs rather than self-expression and choice. Randall finds this an inappropriate application of a concept of consumer culture derived from the American experience, and argues that the model of politically mobilized consumption and cultured trade purveyed by the Stalin regime constituted a distinctive consumer culture, one that positioned consumers in relation to the state.
Here, as elsewhere, Randall’s conclusions could have been strengthened if she had considered a wider range of evidence, particularly quantitative evidence. In addition, more attention to the chronological parameters of her study could have helped readers to situate her material. It seems to be drawn overwhelmingly from 1935–6, though the ideals she describes held sway for a longer time.
University of Oregon