Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Postwar Normalisation and its Limits in the USSR: The Case of Trade

2001; Routledge; Volume: 53; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09668130120045889

1465-3427

Julie Hessler,

Post-Communist Economic and Political Transition

was an economy of crisis. R. W. Davies has documented the crisis that led to systemic reforms in 1932, and its continuation through 1935; Elena Osokina has drawn attention to the crop failure of 1936 and to the 'prewar' crisis of 1939-41; Mark Harrison has painted a desperate picture of Soviet resources during World War II; and V. F. Zima has published the first synthetic account of the 1946-47 famine.' Even the 1920s have appeared in a darker light since the opening of the archives; works are in progress on famine in 1924-25 and what appears to have been a large-scale famine in southern Ukraine in 1928.2 In the course of my own research on Soviet trade, I have kept a rough tally of starvation incidents; I believe that the only years between 1916 and 1949 in which no swath of the population starved were 1926, 1927 and-excluding prisoners and deportees-1938.3 This is a sorry record for the workers' paradise. It has led some scholars, including Osokina and Zima, to argue that a propensity to food crises was the distinguishing feature of Stalinism. Food crises had broad implications for retail trade in the era before World War II. As Osokina has shown in a series of pioneering works, the regime's response to such crises was to give priority to groups of consumers whose survival was most important to key industrial goals. This logic not only structured the centralised rationing system of the early 1930s but was behind a recurrent pattern of state intervention on behalf of the regime's most valuable consumers for nearly 15 years. Pointing to repeated incidents in which the open trade principles of the second half of the 1930s were violated for the sake of protecting the elite's privileged access to consumer goods, Osokina has argued that the abolition of rationing 'did not introduce fundamental changes into the system of supplying the population'.4 Accordingly, she portrays the reintroduction of rationing in 1939-40 as inevitable not because of such contingent factors as the Soviet war against Finland or preparations for total war, but rather because prioritising consumers was a core need of the Stalinist economy. The system 'claimed its own' when shortages, lengthy queues and a hierarchical rationing system returned to plague citizens' daily lives. Zima has made a similar point with regard to trade after World War II. Though elsewhere in his study he portrays 1948-49 as the end of the postwar famine, Zima opened a section on trade with the assertion that 'in 1948 people's everyday material situation did not significantly improve'.5 Even with respect to the early 1950s his portrait of trade is unremittingly negative: not enough affordable food in Moscow;