REVIEWS 349 they might, but that is a function of the book's ambitions. This is a very stimulatingstudywhich is to be highly recommended. University ofGlasgow EVAN MAWDSLEY Hessler, Julie. A Social History of Soviet Trade. TradePolicy, Retail Practices,and Consumption,I9I7-I953. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2004. xvi + 366 pp. Notes. Tables. Illustrations.Bibliography. Index. ?26.95. THIS is an excellent study.Hesslerhas dug deeply into a narrowsubject -the development of retail trade under Lenin and Stalin and has managed in the process to shed light on a wide range of issues:the natureof policymaking in the Soviet Union, the continuity or lack of it between the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the I930S and, indeed, by implication, some of the nature and limitationsof social change in thisperiod. The underlying theme of the book is that there was a recurrentpattern of crisisand normalizationin the economy from I9 I7 to the late I940s, a pattern repeated three times:around the time of the Civil War,of collectivizationand forced industrialization,and of the Second WorldWar;that the ways in which Soviet leadersand officialsacted in the face of each crisisof consumersupplies were conditioned by a set of attitudes, including a preoccupation with class war, that limited the success of the subsequent 'normalization'.The survival of private trade, in varying forms, throughout the period, is a sub-plot that runsthroughthe story. The main text consists of an introduction, seven chaptersand conclusions, with the seven chaptersgrouped into three blocks,each block concerned with a crisis: revolution, restructuring(Stalin's industrialization drive) and war. The author expresses in the Preface a regret that the book as published is 'leaner'than she would have liked. She refersthe 'trulydedicated reader'to a website where some of the omitted material is to be found: . This includes details of a particularly intriguingdatabase she has created from credit reportsof an NEP-era credit bureau which, in effect, providesa number of businesscase histories,some of them discussedin chapterthree. The scholarshipbehind thisstudyis exemplary.Hesslerhas used the central municipal archive of Moscow and the state archives of Odessa, Kursk and Riazan oblasts,aswell as the main relevantRussian Federationstate archives, a wide array of Soviet periodicals, and compendia of laws and decrees. She has paid a good deal of attention to Soviet-erahistoriansof Soviet distribution such as G. A. Dikhtiar and of price-setting (Malafeev, Turetskii),and brings out clearly the fact that these authors,writingin the Khrushchevperiod, had interesting and substantialthings to say. As for her coverage of the Western literature, the only item I can suggest she might have found useful and does not referto is Michael Ellman'spaper on the I947 famine, published in 2000 in the Cambridge Jfournalof Economics.She also interviewed in the I990S some survivingparticipants,including LilianaIsaevna,whose adventuresin private enterprisein the late Stalinperiod are describedin chaptersix. 350 SEER, 83, 2, 2005 The only kind of source she might have made more use of for insights and colour is fiction. There is a brief reference to TheMasterandMargarita on Torgsin shops (thepredecessors of the Berezki)on p. 200, and a vivid, pagelong description of a wartime market by Boldyrev, used as an epigraph on p. 250. That is all. Still, the book is full of intriguingdetail as it is. There is the storyof Liliana Isaevna building up an underground business with a workforce of three in 1951, providing feathers for hats made by underground milliners for Party elite wives: she got the feathers from a kosher butcher and the Aragvi restaurant (pp. 290-9I). Admiring mid-1930S official reports on Macy's of New Yorkas a model of culturedtrade (pp. 207, 2 I0) illustratethe anomalies in what Soviet officialstried to do. So do storieslike that of the I940S TsUM shop assistantwho escorteda customerto herbicycle and then slasheditstyres when she refusedhim a tip (p. 322). The photographs help to convey the diversityof this segment of everyday life in Lenin's and Stalin's Soviet Union. They range from 'cultured trade' (the Eliseev food store in 1935 and the TsUM lace department in I948) to grim depictions of trading to survive, including a German army photograph ofapeasantmarket in 194 I. Hessler has documented and partlyquantifiedwhat she calls 'thepersistent...