Reviewed by: Hungry Moscow: Scarcity and Urban Society in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1921, and: Nelegalnoe snabzhenie rossiiskogo naseleniia i vlast 1917–1921 gg.: Meshochniki, and: A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917–1953 Julia Khmelevskaya Mauricio Borrero . Hungry Moscow: Scarcity and Urban Society in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1921. 228 pp. New York: Peter Lang, 2003.ISBN 082044975X. $65.95. A. Iu. Davydov . Nelegal’noe snabzhenie rossiiskogo naseleniia i vlast’, 1917–1921 gg.: Meshochniki [The Illegal Supply of the Russian Population and the Regime, 1917–1921: Bagmen]. 341 pp., illus. St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2002.ISBN 5020285293. Julie Hessler . A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917–1953. 384 pp., illus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.ISBN 0691114927. $42.00. The Russian Revolution and Civil War continue, as always, to be hot topics in Russian and international history. Until recently, however, authors who have studied these events (in particular, Russian authors) have focused their research primarily on the political and ideological aspects of the Russian crisis. It is in this context that scholars have typically examined the economic measures taken during the first years of Soviet power: matters associated with the supply of both food and goods, and the reaction to these measures by various levels of society. Russian scholars have tended to highlight either War Communism's need to address a crisis or, since the 1990s, to emphasize its compulsory and repressive aspects, actively using the category of "struggle" in both the positive and negative senses of that word (the struggle with hunger, against speculators, for bread, for organization, against the people, and so forth). Western historians—long forced to rely on secondary sources, periodicals, and other published materials—tended in turn to focus on structural and systemic factors. The methodological depoliticization of the field of Russian history, combined with greater access for foreign scholars to Russian central and local archives since the early 1990s, have led not only to a significant broadening of the topics of investigation and richer knowledge about various aspects of [End Page 371] Russian and Soviet history in the first half of the 20th century but also to a reassessment of received truth and of the methods employed for reconstructing and interpreting the Russian past. Increasingly, historians have moved away from an emphasis on great and dramatic events, away from the dominant role of political and economic structures, and toward an emphasis on the social and the cultural—matters of everyday life, household needs, social adaptation, and strategies of resistance and survival—as well as on the interaction of all the above with the political sphere. This trend is abundantly illustrated by the appearance in the past few years of several works that could be characterized as a peculiar kind of revival of "political economics"—not a return to the traditionally politicized and lopsided sense of that term, but rather a growing interest in the economic behavior of the authorities and the populace during crises and the interplay between them. Another characteristic of this trend is a heightened attention to local affairs. At first glance, such works may appear to differ substantially from one another in their portrayal of the issues and in their research strategies. On closer examination, however, it is clear that they actually have much in common, a similarity that is all the more striking considering that they were written using different methodological approaches. The first of these is Igor´ Narskii's multifaceted book on the Urals in the period from 1917 to 1922, a work that was something of a breakthrough in Russian and international historiography on everyday life in the era of revolution and civil war.1 As is well known, household affairs have a prominent place in the structures of everyday life, but the truly novel aspect of Narskii's work is not restricted to his scrupulous study of the complexities of everyday life in the economic emergency that characterized the first years of Soviet power. In describing that situation with familiar metaphors of "chaos," "destruction," "degradation," and "breakdown," the author—in contrast to the standard depictions in the historical literature—portrays these things...