Overview

Stalin's Quest for Gold tells the story of Torgsin, a chain of retail shops established in 1930 with the aim of raising the hard currency needed to finance the USSR's ambitious industrialization program. At a time of desperate scarcity, Torgsin had access to the country's best foodstuffs and goods. Initially, only foreigners were allowed to shop in Torgsin, but the acute demand for hard-currency revenues forced Stalin to open Torgsin to Soviet citizens who could exchange tsarist gold coins and objects made of precious metals and gemstones, as well as foreign monies, for foods and goods in its shops. Through her analysis of the large-scale, state-run entrepreneurship represented by Torgsin, Elena Osokina highlights the complexity and contradictions of Stalinism. Driven by the state's hunger for gold and the people's starvation, Torgsin rejected Marxist postulates of the socialist political economy: the notorious class approach and the state hard-currency monopoly. In its pursuit for gold, Torgsin advertised in the capitalist West, encouraging foreigners to purchase goods for their relatives in the USSR; and its seaport shops and restaurants operated semilegally as brothels, inducing foreign sailors to spend hard currency for Soviet industrialization. Examining Torgsin from multiple perspectives-economic expediency, state and police surveillance, consumerism, even interior design and personnel-Stalin's Quest for Gold radically transforms the stereotypical view of the Soviet economy and enriches our understanding of everyday life in Stalin's Russia.

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9781501758515

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Osokina's narrative is a deeply researched, engagingly written institutional history of Torgsin, with crucial macro-economic calculations and statistics, as well as insightful details about Soviet life in the 1930s. * HISTORY: Reviews of New Books *

Elena Osokina's analysis of a key Soviet business affords a fascinating angle on diverse aspects of Soviet life. Soviet historians have traditionally focused on collectivization as the regime's solution to the urgent need for hard currency but Osokina draws attention to Torgsin as a still more important source and emphasizes the extent to which famine was the engine of the company's growth. A richly rewarding book. * Kritika * A fascinating book to read. All of its richly researched topics, from relations between Torgsin and the state security apparatus to interior design offer intriguing insights into the relationship between plan and market, state and society, practice and ideology. Elena Osokina is an eloquent storyteller and a thoughtful commentator, expertly mediating between individual stories and larger historical-and historiographic-questions. * Slavic Review *

Osokina's narrative is a deeply researched, engagingly written institutional history of Torgsin, with crucial macro-economic calculations and statistics, as well as insightful details about Soviet life in the 1930s. * HISTORY: Reviews of New Books * Elena Osokina's book is unique in its genre. It sheds new light on the history of the Soviet economy and the industrialization of the USSR. * Franz Steiner Verlag Journals * Osokina explored several archives and a large literature in order to reconstruct the history of this un-Bolshevik understanding in the workers paradise. Her book is all the more valuable since it provides a glimpse into the social practices, which appeared in the shadow of the Torgsin. * Recensio.net * A fascinating book to read. All of its richly researched topics, from relations between Torgsin and the state security apparatus to interior design offer intriguing insights into the relationship between plan and market, state and society, practice and ideology. Elena Osokina is an eloquent storyteller and a thoughtful commentator, expertly mediating between individual stories and larger historical—and historiographic—questions. [Reviewing the Russian edition.] * Slavic Review * Elena Osokina's analysis of a key Soviet business affords a fascinating angle on diverse aspects of Soviet life. Soviet historians have traditionally focused on collectivization as the regime's solution to the urgent need for hard currency but Osokina draws attention to Torgsin as a still more important source and emphasizes the extent to which famine was the engine of the company's growth. A richly rewarding book. [Reviewing the Russian edition.] * Kritika *

Author Information

Elena Osokina is Professor of Russian History at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of books in Russian, Italian, Chinese and, in English, Our Daily Bread.

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