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A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917-1953. By Julie Hessler. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. xvi + 366 pp. Index, notes, bibliography, photographs, tables. Cloth, $39.50. ISBN: 0-691-11492-7.
When Vladimir Lenin led the Bolshevik Party to power in 1917, he predicted that citizens of a socialist state would obtain the necessities of everyday life according to the high principles of justice announced by Karl Marx in The Critique of the Gotha Program (1875): "to each according to his work" in the aftermath of the revolution, and finally, in the truly communist Utopia, "to each according to his needs." Julie Hessler's study of Soviet trade demonstrates not only that the hopes of the Bolsheviks turned out to be naive, as many commentators have maintained, but that the functioning of the institutions of trade revealed the political, economic, and moral failings of the entire Soviet system under Lenin and Joseph Stalin.
Hessler's book supplements the recent work of other social historians of the Soviet Union. Most of all, this book stands as a tribute to the pioneering research of Sheila Fitzpatrick, author of Everyday Stalinism (1999) and Hessler's major professor at the University of Chicago. Unprecedented in its geographic and chronological scope, Hessler's book constitutes a genuine social history of Soviet trade. In support of her analysis of the interaction of economic policies, patterns of retail trade, and consumption, she cites a huge array of sources, many of them unavailable to researchers before...