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Stalin's Quest for Gold - The Torgsin Hard-Currency Shops and Soviet Industrialization (Hardcover)
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Stalin's Quest for Gold - The Torgsin Hard-Currency Shops and Soviet Industrialization (Hardcover)
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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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