Irina Mukhina, Women and the Birth of Russian Capitalism: A History of the Shuttle Trade (DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2014), 173 pp.
Irina Mukhina, Women and the Birth of Russian Capitalism: A History of the Shuttle Trade (DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2014), 173 pp.

Summary/Abstract: In the 1990s after the end of the socialist regime, many Russian factories stopped producing consumer goods and the distribution system stopped functioning. Shelves in state-run stores were empty, so people tried to get hold of everything in markets and on the streets—from a bar of soap, drugs, food, plates, stationery, clothes, to electronic appliances. Those products were increasingly imports. The subject of this book, chelnoki (shuttle traders) are the people who traveled abroad to buy consumer goods for resale in Russia. Remarkably, this book tells us that in the heyday of shuttle-trading in the mid-1990s, shuttle traders provided 75% of all consumer-goods in Russia. In addition, most of these traders were women. (4–5) This book is the first monograph on this unprecedented history of women who crossed all borders, European and Asian, to feed and clothe the Russian nation in the 1990s as a stopgap measure between the collapse of socialist planned production and the arrival of basic market mechanisms of supply. As a brief, passing and relatively undocumented phase, it is all the more important to record this historical moment and social experience.

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