Irina Mukhina

New Losses, New Opportunities: (Soviet) Women in the Shuttle Trade, 1987–1998

When Mikhail Gorbachev initiated economic reforms in the mid-1980s, many people in the USSR found international peddling more profitable than anything else they could do. At first, tens of thousands of Soviet citizens poured into ‘socialist’ Poland, Hungary, or China, but by the mid-1990s the trade expanded to include thirty million people and a wide range of countries and became the backbone of Russian consumer trade. Even though scholarly works have begun to acknowledge the unique role of this shuttle business in the post-Soviet Russian economy, this study analyzes the role of gender in the business based on extensive oral history fieldwork. The research demonstrates that even though the shuttle business gave women new opportunities for financial advancement, their prolonged absence from home and the specificity of this semi-legal trade also brought high rates of divorce and rising health problems for these women as well as lack of parental control for their children. These women-traders facilitated the transition to a free market economy in Russia but their shared experiences demonstrated the gap between the rhetoric of free market economy and the actual market practices of the 1990s.

Rural Women in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia

PART I. Employment patterns among rural women 1. Unskilled labor in the countryside 2. Female mechanics and machines operators 3. Women at the animal wards 4. Women as collective farm leaders and agricultural specialists 5. Rural intelligentsia 6. Migration to cities and the position of newcomers PART II. Private Life 7. The politics of private life: the evolution and transformation of the Soviet Family Code 8. Marriages 9. Conflicts and divorces 10. Domostroi 11. Alcoholism in the countryside 12. The female face of the criminal world 13. Women of the oldest profession 14. Religion 15. Triple-burden lifestyle 16. Household chores 17. The special environment of the village life 18. Protection of childhood and motherhood in the countryside 19. Abortions

To Be Like All But Different: Germans in Soviet Trudarmee

Abstract This article analyses a peculiar form of labour mobilisation, known as the ‘trudarmee’, to which ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union, along with some other nationalities, were subjected in 1942–1945 after their initial deportations from the areas in which they had lived. The labour mobilisation of the war years was a form of forced labour obligation which existed outside of the immediate realm of the ‘traditional’ forced labour of the Gulag. The article considers the compatibility of the two forms of labour mobilisation and demonstrates that the ‘trudarmee’ labour mobilisation had features of both free and forced labour and thus deserves a space of its own in the existing historiography of Stalinism.

Regulating the Trade: International Peddling in Post-Soviet Russia

The economic, social, and political reforms of the former Soviet Union gave rise to a flourishing international peddling trade variously termed “shuttle trading,” “a suitcase trade,” or at times “trading tourism.” Small at first in the later 1980s, by the mid-1990s the shuttle trade expanded to include millions of people and came to constitute the backbone of Russian consumer trade. Initially the government was willing to “look the other way” or even support the shuttle trade as a way to provide for the collapsing consumer market in Russia. Yet the government drastically underestimated the vast number of people that the trade would attract and subsequently the scale and longevity of the trade. By 1993 and then progressively into the 1990s, the government aimed to bring this highly problematic aspect of the emerging market under its control, both by the means of regulating private businesses and creating a more business-conducive environment and by improving border control in order to make the borders “hard”. Thus this article analyzes the shuttle trade to demonstrate the ways in which decision makers, by accumulating raw data about the scale of the trade, border crossing, and the trades social consequences, utilized these statistics in creating regulatory measures that simultaneously attempted to shape both the border control and customs regulations and the emerging free market space of the post-Soviet Russia.

New Revelations from the Former Soviet Archives: The Kremlin, the Warsaw Uprising, and the Coming of the Cold War

Using hitherto unavailable archival documents, this paper reveals the so-called ‘Soviet side’ of the Warsaw Uprising, 1944. These documents reveal that the Poles had repeatedly attempted to stage similar uprisings in other towns and cities when the Red Army was approaching. Polish rebels also actively resisted Soviet domination after the Red Army had liberated these cities. Moreover, Moscow knew well that Western Allied forces secretly participated in this ultimately anti-Soviet action. The British and the US governments trained the leaders of the Warsaw and other uprisings in military bases located in their own territories, although most of the training bases were located in the US. The British also parachuted these leaders into Warsaw shortly before the uprising. These and other facts presented in my work help us understand the perverted logic of the Kremlins decision-making process with regard to the Warsaw Uprising, which functioned in more complex ways than is usually attributed to the power-thirsty Uncle Joe. These documents also reveal attitudes on the part of the Soviet and Western governments that eventually paved the way for the Cold War.

Gendered Division of Labor among Special Settlers in the Soviet Union, 1941–1956

In the early 1940s, the Germans of the Soviet Union were mobilized into the labor armies to work for the Soviet war effort. Despite the nationwide ‘feminization of machinery’ in the Soviet Union during the war years, German women deportees were denied access to skilled employment out of a mixture of gender stereotypes and fear of treason. Labor patterns and access to technology in labor armies thus offer a curious insight into the workings of a large sector of economy of the Soviet Union based on forced labor as well as help expose stereotypes about the gendered division of labor that persisted in the Soviet Union despite its many years of gender equality propaganda.