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Women and the Birth of Russian Capitalism
A History of the Shuttle Trade
Irina Mukhina (Author)
9780875804804
Hardback, published 15 July 2014
355 pages
24.1 x 16.5 x 1.9 cm, 0.454 kg
This book is a valuable work in the field and fills an existing scientific void on the subject.... The author artfully connects international and national contexts and assesses the links between an economic transformation and a social shift. The book is also a meaningful testimony of an important period of Russian history. This volume is an important addition to student reading lists on socioeconomic and political change of the 1980s and 1990s, and on gender studies. It is a most rewarding read. The book was thoroughly researched and well written and it would be of interest to historians as well as scholars interested in the economic and political transition, migration, and gender. Mukhina provides a succinct, perceptive history that adds depth to a growing appreciation of how economic and political change can affect the lives of ordinary people-particularly Russian women-in the post-Soviet era.
Little has been known, acknowledged, or studied about the shuttle trade, one of the major manifestations of new Russian life of the 1990s. The term itself seems to suggest something of a rather small scale. Indeed, the amount of each transaction in this trade was miniscule. Individual peddlers traveled to near-abroad with their bulging bags and brought back home for resale only as many goods as they could personally carry in their enormous suitcases. The phenomenon hidden behind the term "shuttle trade" was by no means insignificant or small in scale. By the mid-1990s, it constituted the backbone of Russian consumer trade and was a substantial source of revenue. The primary participants in the shuttle trade were women, and in this enlightening study Mukhina assesses the reasons why women were attracted to this business, the range of the personal experiences of female shuttle traders, and the social impact of women's involvement in this sort of economic activity. By analyzing the social and gendered dimensions of the shuttle trade, the reader can begin to understand more broadly how gender shaped the "transition" period associated with the end of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Moreover, the difficulties that these women faced highlight the gap between the rhetoric of free market economy and the actual market practices. These women-traders had to create and shape the physical market (an open-air space) for their goods without the basic legislative and other provisions of market economies. The shuttle trade became an avenue of female suffering but also of survival and even empowerment during the time that most Russians now call "the wild 1990s."