Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War
Introduction The Making of the Frontovichki 'War is not women's business' Sisters of Mercy 'Falcons' and 'Witches' Behind Enemy Lines Mass Mobilization Women's Volunteer Rifle Brigade The Sniper Movement Epilogue: Half-hidden from History Bibliography & Sources
Popular Resistance in the Stalinist 1930s: Soliloquy of a Devil’s Advocate
Over the last several decades, the western historiographical map of the Stalinist 1930s has expanded topically and conceptually, albeit incrementally and sometimes reluctantly, from cold war fixations on totalitarian control, repression, and societal atomization; to the revisionist arguments of the 1980s, which illuminated the social base of Stalinism, center-periphery conflicts, and the administrative weaknesses of Stalinist governance, while pioneering a more detached approach to source study; to, among other concerns of the present, an interest in resistance. Recent work on the topic of popular resistance to the Stalinist dictatorship in the 1930s derives chiefly from new evidence surfacing in previously classified archival holdings, although to ignore or dismiss altogether an element of historiographical virtue in these recent historical excavations would be, perhaps, shortsighted. A long entrenched tradition of historiographical bifurcation of Soviet history into a Manichaean world of good and evil based both on cold war and Stalinist mentalities (the latter seeping into the former on an all too regular basis and, more recently within Russia, the opposite as well) should serve as a cautionary tale, highlighting the polemical and potentially ahistorical pitfalls of either a valorization of resistance or a preoccupation with resistance to the exclusion of the rest of the historical record. Otherwise we risk projecting our own cold war, anti-Stalinist tropes onto the popular classes of the 1930s. The story of popular resistance in the Stalinist 1930s is not entirely new, although a clearer sense of its size and content is only now emerging. The significance of the topic resides less in the fact of resistance as an object in itself than in the light the topic sheds on its historical surroundings. Popular resistance is best treated as a kind of prism that refracts and distills what otherwise might be opaque dimensions of the social, cultural, and political history of the 1930s. And at the same time that we highlight a new and largely salutary trend in recent scholarship, it is important to recognize the inherent subjectivities and blurred outlines of the nature of resistance, and to question when, under what circum-
The Forum: The Puzzle of Marketing Costs
BY the mid 192o's considerable information was available showing that the cost of marketing goods was approximately equal to the cost of their production. Census figures indicated that many more workers were engaged in marketing and that the proportion of those engaged in marketing had been increasing for several years. Available figures suggested that more capital was used in producing than in marketing goods and that many of the workers engaged in marketing were employed in retailing at relatively low wages.1 This presented a puzzle. If a great many more people were engaged in production than in marketing, we would expect the cost of production to exceed the cost of marketing; but the figures indicated that this was not the case. Some early teachers and writers reasoned that the cost of marketing had been very low when production was less specialized and that this cost had risen along with the increase in the division of labor and in the distances between buyers and sellers. In 1935· Lough and Gainsbrugh2 presented material showing that the cost of distributing manufactured goods through wholesale and retail channels decreased from 3i.4 per cent of retail value in 19091914 to 29.9 per cent in 1931 and that the cost of distributing all consumers' commodities through these channels declined