Kristy Ironside is Assistant Professor of Russian History at McGill University.
Ironside contests the view that money had limited value in the
Soviet system. She demonstrates that Soviet postwar governments
were very concerned with increasing the ruble’s purchasing power as
a means to economic growth and eventual abundance. This goal,
however, remained unfulfilled. By examining political leaders’
beliefs, economic experts’ debates, and citizens’ complaints to the
authorities, Ironside shows how a variety of economic policies
introduced in the decades after World War II repeatedly led to the
accumulation of unspendable money in the hands of the people.
*Foreign Affairs*
A brilliant piece of research, equally useful for historians and
economists…It offers a path-breaking narrative that expands on
established economic models of central planning such as soft budget
constraints, shortages and slacks, worker behavior under socialism
and economic coordination…A must read for economists ready to take
risks in interdisciplinary research and for historians willing to
undertake cutting-edge research interactions with quantitative
social science.
*H-Net Reviews*
Fascinating…Ironside’s highly original book fills in so many
important gaps in the scholarship and offers so many insights into
Soviet politics and economics that it deserves to be read by all
serious students of the postwar USSR.
*Soviet and Post-Soviet Review*
Even in an overwhelmingly state-owned, price-controlled economy
[like the Soviet Union], it was hard to get [Modern Monetary
Theory]-like policies to work, and even their successes came at
high cost to consumer welfare, labor productivity and public
opinion. [Ironside] has done a great service in illuminating this
little-known experience. It should be required reading for anyone
contemplating MMT.
*Central Banking*
A masterful account of Stalin’s and Khrushchev’s lost battle to
bring prosperity to the Soviet people and state through the
strengthening of the ruble.
*Elena Osokina, author of Stalin’s Quest for Gold: The Torgsin
Hard-Currency Shops and Soviet Industrialization*
As Ironside shows so convincingly in this highly original account,
Soviet leaders and experts saw the politics of the ruble and the
role of money as crucial to their efforts to engineer a better
society. An excellent, exciting contribution to the new history of
political economy, with implications for other welfare states and
the history of inequality far beyond the Soviet Union.
*Vanessa Ogle, author of The Global Transformation of Time:
1870–1950*
How should socialists deal with money? In A Full-Value Ruble,
Kristy Ironside examines the dilemmas posed by money in the postwar
Soviet Union. Though Bolshevik leaders promised that communism
would produce universal abundance, the postwar Soviet Union faced
severe scarcity. So money decided who got what. From prices to
pensions, from bread allowances to savings bonds, Ironside shows
how monetary debates were fundamental to defining the Soviet social
and economic order. A Full-Value Ruble revolutionizes our
understanding of Soviet political economy. And in doing so, it
poses profound questions about the meaning of money in our society,
too.
*Chris Miller, author of Putinomics: Power and Money in
Resurgent Russia*
An important entry in the literature on the economic history of the
Soviet Union, charting post–World War II efforts by Stalin and then
Khrushchev to offer Soviet citizens a kind of consumer prosperity
after years of economic upheaval and total war…Impressively
researched.
*Business History Review*
Kristy Ironside is the author of a series of seminal articles on
Soviet monetary and tax policy during and just after World War
II…The present superbly researched and explicated book is an
extension of that work; it looks at Soviet attempts during the late
Stalin and Khrushchev periods to stabilize and enhance the
purchasing power of the domestic currency.
*American Historical Review*
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