The customer is always wrong: Consumer complaint in late-NEP Russia

Russian Review

Volumn 68, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 1-25

  Hilton, Marjorie ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77950740790     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: 14679434     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9434.2009.00510.x     Document Type: Article

References (69)

1. Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana, 1988), 91.
2. see "Historical Background," TsAGM, f. 1953, op. 1; Georgii Ivanovich Fokin, Flagman sovetskoi torgovli (Moscow, 1968), 3;
3. and Doklad chrezvychainomu obshchemu sobraniiu aktsionerov "Mostorg" o deiatel'nosti obshchestva za polugodie: Noiabr' 1923 g.-Aprel' 1924 g. (Moscow, 1924), 11.
4. On the founding of Larek See V. A. Arkhipov and L. F. Morozov, Bor'ba protiv kapitalisticheskikh elementov v promyshlennosti i torgovle (Moscow, 1978), 66-67;
5. and Vseukrainskoe paevoe torgovoe t-vo "Larek" Otchet pravleniia za 1924-25 gg. (No city or date), 6-7, 14-16.
6. Richard Hellie, "The Origins of Denunciation in Muscovy," Russian History/Histoire Russe 24 (Spring/Summer 1997): 11-26.
7. Josh Sanborn's work on changes in the conscription law examines how Russians contemplated the relationship between a man's socioeconomic status and military service ("Conscription, Correspondence, and Politics in Late Imperial Russia," Russian History/Histoire Russe 24 [Spring/Summer 1997]: 27-40).
8. Mark Steinberg explores Russians' articulation of their experiences and aspirations during 1917 in Voices of Revolution, 1917 (New Haven, 2001).
9. Lewis Siegelbaum argues that a contestation of the "self" and the "social" was framed by larger "public narratives about the proper behavior of workers and state servants" ("Narratives of Appeal and the Appeal of Narratives: Labor Discipline and its Contestation in the Early Soviet Period," Russian History/Histoire Russe 24 [Spring/Summer 1997]: 65-87).
10. Golfo Alexopoulos's work on petitions from the disenfranchised for reinstatement of their rights in the 1920s and 1930s shows an older discourse of victimization and a new political discourse of the enemy. See her "Victim Talk: Defense Testimony and Denunciation under Stalin," in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed. David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis (New York, 2000).
11. Sheila Fitzpatrick finds that denunciations and complaints from the 1930s mix pre-Soviet and Soviet conventions, blending "comradeship and supplication" See Fitzpatrick, "Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s," Slavic Review 55 (Spring 1996): 78-105.
12. See also idem, "Signals from Below: Soviet Letters of Denunciation of the 1930s," Journal of Modern History 68 (December 1996): 831-66.
13. Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 1917-1991 (New York, 1992), 99;
14. Alan M. Ball, Russia's Last Capitalists: The NEPmen, 1921-1929 (Berkeley, 1987), chap. 1.
15. Elena Osokina, Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin's Russia, 1927-1941 (Armonk, NY, 2001), 55-70.
16. Ball, Russia's Last Capitalists.
17. Elena Osokina, Za fasada Stalinskogo izobiliia: Raspredelenie i rynok v snabzhenii naseleniia v gody industrializatsii, 1927-1941 (Moscow, 1999);
18. Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade (Princeton, 2004).
19. Osokina argues that the NEP should not be idealized as a golden age for either town or city, given that the standard of living was consistently low (Our Daily Bread, 3).
20. See also William G. Rosenberg, "Introduction," in Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick et al. (Bloomington, 1991), 3.
21. Hessler identifies the 1930s as a turning point in the invention of socialist trade and, more particularly, in the inauguration of a Soviet "exchange culture" (Social History of Soviet Trade, 197-98).
22. see Sally West, "The Material Promised Land: Advertising's Modern Agenda in Late Imperial Russia," Russian Review 57 (July 1998): 345-63;
23. and Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, "Commercial Culture and Consumerism," in Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution : 1881-1940 (New York, 1998): 106-64.
24. see Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca, 2003).
25. The literature on the development of a consumer-oriented society in the West is vast. Some of the most influential for this project include Michael Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton, 1981)
26. Porter-Benson, Counter Cultures; Victoria de Grazia, ed., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, 1996)
27. and Rosalind Williams, Mass Consumption in Late-Nineteenth Century France (Berkeley, 1982).
28. See, for example, A. Gudvan, Ocherki po istorii dvizheniia sluzhashchikh v Rossii (chast' pervaia do 1905) (Moscow, 1925), esp. 125-39 (Gudvan dedicated himself to work among commercial employees).
29. The merchant I. A. Slonov recounted the harsh life and working conditions of retail apprentices in his Iz zhizn' torgovoi Moskvy (polveka nazad) (Moscow, 1914), 65-66.
30. See also issues about life as a prikazchik in the trade-union publications Vestnik torgovykh sluzhashchikh and Zhizn' prikazchika.
31. see Daniel Orlovsky, "The Hidden Class: White-Collar Workers in the Soviet 1920s," in Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity, ed. Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny (Ithaca, 1994).
32. Pravda, September 17, 1925.
33. Golos rabotnika, May 31, 1924.
34. See also ibid., May 15, 1924. The ideal retail worker was also laid out in K. Remtzen and V. Tsuberbiller Organizatsiia roznichnoi torgovli (Moscow, 1925);
35. and in GUM's employee handbook, Pravila vnutrennogo rasporiadka dlia Gosudarstvennogo Universal'nogo Magazina GUM (Moscow, 1925), 5.
36. Personnel files (ankety) of GUM's employees from 1921 to 1931 are preserved in TsAGM, f. 474, op. 4, dd. 1-3952.
37. See V. S. Akselrod, Kak my uchilis' torgovat' (Moscow, 1986), 41-42.
38. Remtzen and Tsuberbiller, Organizatsiia, 81-31;
39. and Rabochaia Moskva, December 5, 1926.
40. Daniel K. Brower, "The Penny Press and its Readers," in Cultures in Flux Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg (Princeton, 1994);
41. Louise McReynolds, "V. M. Doroshevich: The Newspaper Journalist and the Development of Public Opinion in Civil Society," in Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Edith W. Clowes et al. (Princeton, 1991).
42. See Diane P. Koenker's examination of Pravda's 1922 contest for best and worst factory directors, "Factory Tales: Narratives of Industrial Relations in the Transition to NEP," Russian Review 55 (July 1996): 384-411.
43. Jeffrey Brooks, "The Press and Its Message: Images of America in the 1920s and 1930s," in Russia in the Era of NEP;
44. Jeffrey Brooks, "The Press and Its Message: Images of America in the 1920s and 1930s," and Regine Robin, "Popular Literature of the 1920s," both in Russia in the Era of NEP;
45. Michael S. Gorham, "Tongue-Tied Writers: The Rabsel'kor Movement and the Voice of the 'New Intelligentsia' in Early Soviet Russia," Russian Review 55 (July 1996): 412-29.
46. see Fitzpatrick, "Supplicants and Citizens," 93, 200-205
47. and Jeffrey Brooks, "Public and Private Values, in the Soviet Press, 1921-1928," Slavic Review 48 (Spring 1989): 23.
48. See A. P. Chekhov, Sobranie Sochineneii (Moscow, 1960), 2:199-200, 566.
49. Thus far, I have found no references to complaint books in other countries. In many department stores in the United States, dissatisfied customers who complained on the sales floor or wrote a letter of complaint were referred to an executive or "diplomat." See Porter Benson, Counter Cultures, 94-96
50. and William R. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993), 133-34.
51. The Bon Marché in Paris had a "complaints service," which resolved complaints on the spot. Any complaint letters would have been received by the correspondence bureau and likely passed on to an executive (Miller, The Bon Marché, 63-64).
52. Retailers and vendors with little capital, in particular those operating from booths and stalls, were temporarily exempt from keeping a complaint book. See rules as set forth in Pravila vnutrennogo rasporiadka dlia sluzhashchikh, 5. For a discussion of the Narkomtorg decree and the types of infractions frequently committed
53. see Vecherniaia Moskva, July 10, 1928. The actual decree may be found inside most complaint books preserved in GUM's and other archives.
54. Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929 (New York, 1985), 157.
55. See T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the U.S.S.R 1917-1967 (Princeton, 1968), 361.
56. Nancy Ries, Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika (Ithaca, 1997), 52-56.
57. Vechernaia Moskva, October 19, 1926.
58. see, for example, Torgovoe delo, April 20, 1908;
59. and Torgovyi mir, March 1 and 15, 1911.
60. Vechernye izvestiia, March 7, 1927.
61. Fitzpatrick, "Ascribing Class," 755-58.
62. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1995), chap. 3.
63. See also the rant against fashion and its corrosive effects on women in Iu. L. Elets, Poval'noe bezumie (k sverzheniiu iga mod) (St. Petersburg, 1914).
64. See the satirical stories "Izo dnia v den'," Odesskie novosti, June 5, 1901
65. and Vecherniaia pochta, April 17, 1912;
66. cartoons in Damskii mir, 1908, no. 2:25, no. 3:25, and no. 8:25
67. Aleksandr Tarasov-Rodionov, Chocolate, trans. Charles Malamuth (New York, 1932). Although Tarasov-Rodionov's novel was later criticized for ideological errors, it struck a chord among Communist youth
68. According to Eric Naiman, a slender, androgynous body was fashionable and endowed with ideological purity, as it symbolized restraint. See Naiman, "NEP as Female Complaint (II): Revolutionary Anorexia," in his Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997).
69. Orlovskaia pravda, March 28, 1925 (preserved in TsAGM, f. 474, op. 3, d. 204, l. 95).