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

Abstract

REVIEWS 905 expansion he dreamed of. He was thwarted, he felt, by Nicholas II’s poor judgment, as well as the increasing social unrest across the Russian empire — something he sought to address even if he did not fully understand it. Given the impressive range of archival sources the author has consulted, I still found myself disappointed that this was not a more conventional biography. Nevertheless, Tales of Imperial Russia is an engaging account of the Imperial Russia that Witte experienced and remembered. Northumbria University Charlotte Alston Hilton, Marjorie L. Selling to the Masses: Retailing in Russia, 1880–1930. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2012. x + 339 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $27.95 (paperback). There are perhaps fewer histories of consumption in Russia than of consumption in the other major European societies. Nevertheless, historians such as Julie Hessler and Elena Osokina have researched the history of domestic trade and the distribution of goods in the Stalin period; Jukka Gronow and Amy Randall have written cultural histories of ‘cultured’ consumption in the 1930s; the importance of consumerism in the New Economic Policy is selfevident , as Alan Ball and others remind us; Lars Lih and Peter Holquist have shown how the dynamics of food supply created the forms of dictatorship before and after 1917; Sally West, Louise MacReynolds and others have written consumers into what is now an elaborate cultural history of Russia during the thirty years before the Revolution; and hard-nosed economic evidence concerning the interplay of consumption and production in imperial Russia has been presented in the major studies of, for example, Boris Mironov. Marjorie L. Hilton’s original and interesting book complements these works by taking a long view on the experience of shopping, especially in Moscow and Odessa, and especially in department stores, between 1880 and 1930. Her socio-cultural approach throws useful new light on the status of the individual consumer, as well as on important elements of the infrastructure of consumerism, either side of the Revolution of 1917. One of the strengths of Hilton’s book is its vividness. The author writes well and her sketches of shops, shoppers and shop workers go some way to offering the reader an accessible and carefully realized entry into the world of late imperial and early Soviet consumerism. Entering this world, we encounter such developments as the transformation from trading rows to what would eventually become the State Universal Store (GUM), the opening of the Passazh in Odessa, and the ceremonial blessing of Eliseev’s in central Moscow in 1901. We observe people’s search for goods during the extreme shortages of the war years of 1914–21, the emergence of socialist shopping, and in SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 906 particular such innovations as the three-queue system (to look at the item, to pay for it, and finally to get it) during the period of the New Economic Policy. Hilton moves from description to analysis in her sections on shop workers’ and traders’ working conditions and benefits, the cultural significance of haggling, and the evolution of uncertain forms of consumer rights. She also explores the relationship between late imperial power, Orthodox iconography and consumerism, notably by probing the status of Jews and foreigners in the world of shopping, and seems to suggest ways that this amounted to a coherent and workable system of modernity before 1914. This positioning of shopping in the constellation of wider cultural-political relationships (rather than more straightforward economic ones) is also applied in the early Soviet period. Hilton draws on records of customer complaints in order to show that a primitive form of citizenship existed in early Soviet Russia, though one which she concedes was designed as much to take the heat out of tense shop encounters than to promote consistently defensible rights. Either through caution or because of limitations in her sources, Hilton is sometimes ambivalent in argument. She does not probe as far as she could have the relationship between consumer rights and the statist ethics of imperial autocracy and Soviet dictatorship. Where she is bolder in argument, in her contextualizing of shopping in a framework of masculinity, she...