A movable feast: Property-breaking and property-making after the Russian Revolution

Abstract

The article focuses on the dispossession of movable goods as a site where the key processes of the Revolution—political violence, social transformation, and state-building—came together. Its scope is chronologically limited to the period between the summer of 1917, when forms of seizure that had been legally defined for state use during the First World War as “requisition” and “confiscation” jumped off of their wartime rails, and April 16, 1920, when the Sovnarkom returned the seizure of movable property to a clear legal footing with a decree defining “requisition” and “confiscation” for the first time since the Revolution. After a brief look at the many ways there were to lose things in the revolutionary era, the article examines the afterlife of dispossession: what happened to seized goods, and how to make erstwhile personal possessions the property of the state. This problem undergirded the state’s nationalization programs in every sphere of economic life. But it posed a special challenge in the realm of household goods, because of their qualities and because of the significance invested in their redistribution as a metric for the progress of the Revolution itself. Ultimately the state proved unable to fashion itself into an adequate proprietor of movable goods and dealt with its incapacity first by trying to eliminate the category as a whole before reintroducing legal formats of personal possession into revolutionary society.