Abolition of private trade

Abolition of private trade is a rule whose formal reach repeatedly collides with the practical demands of survival. In the novel, it does not end exchange: it drives commerce into concessions and workarounds, makes household goods and food into currency, and exposes the widening gap between revolutionary policy and everyday life.

The Rule and Its Exceptions

The government abolishes private trade, yet economic difficulties lead it to grant occasional concessions to suppliers, concessionaires, and authorized agents, who are charged with procuring goods. These businessmen are not simply remnants of the old propertied class: the narrative describes them as a new, rootless category formed from people swept up from below by war and revolution. The exception is therefore part of the rule’s operation. Private dealing is officially forbidden, but the state selectively permits intermediaries when its own needs make prohibition impracticable.

That contradiction is made explicit in a conversation about business in the revolutionary period. Activities have been abolished in name, a speaker explains, while people are still asked to carry out incompatible tasks: enterprises are nationalized, but municipal authorities need fuel and the Provincial Economic Council needs transportation. Everyone still has to live. The rule persists as an official statement, while the competing demands of institutions and ordinary survival create space for informal operators.

Household Survival and Barter

In Moscow, scarcity turns domestic labor into a small, uncertain source of income. For a long time, daily food consists largely of thin millet boiled in water, soup made from herring heads, and kasha from unground wheat or rye. A friend teaches Antonina Alexandrovna to bake bread in an improvised Dutch oven, hoping sales will cover the cost of heating the tile stove. The bread is good, but the plan fails; the family has to return to its smoky, inefficient iron stove and remains short of money.

Fuel brings the prohibition’s material pressures into the family home. With only two logs left, Antonina goes out to find a peasant selling goods away from the main streets, where sellers carrying loads risk arrest. She brings a young peasant and his sleigh into the yard. Its load is birch only in name: the logs are poor, freshly cut, and unsuitable for burning, but there is no realistic alternative. In exchange for several armloads carried upstairs, he takes Tonia’s small mirrored wardrobe as a present for his bride. The transaction extends beyond fuel: while discussing a possible future deal in potatoes, he asks what the piano would cost. Under scarcity, the household’s possessions become potential means of exchange, and the boundary between permitted livelihood and prohibited trade is negotiated in private.

The same economic strain appears in the form of payment for professional work. Yurii Andreievich and Alexander Alexandrovich are consulted by public institutions and paid not in ordinary money but in credit slips redeemable for goods at a newly opened distribution center. The center occupies an old army warehouse beside Simonov Monastery; the men pass through the monastery grounds and a barrack yard, then descend through a low stone door into a vaulted cellar. There they exchange their slips for flour, cereals, macaroni, sugar, suet, soap, matches, and Caucasian cheese. Their compensation is usable because it secures necessities, not because money has recovered its familiar purchasing power.

Money, Necessity, and Unequal Exchange

The economy’s instability also alters the meaning of prices. A prospective medical fee offered to Yurii Andreievich is a bottle of German cognac or a pair of stockings, an arrangement that strikes Antonina as vulgar and out of touch with how the family lives. The offer comes from a supplier, one of the officially tolerated intermediaries created by the prohibition’s exceptions. Professional service, scarce commodities, and delegated procurement meet in a single proposed payment.

The departure preparations of Antonina and her family show how exchange and survival shape even the choice of what to carry. Advice passed on by people who had left earlier stresses compact bundles that a woman or child can carry, usable clothing, salt and tobacco, money in Kerenkas, and the difficulty of keeping documents safe. The list treats belongings not as a stable household inventory but as possible resources whose usefulness must be weighed against the risks and limits of travel.

Later, the collapse of currency becomes especially visible in the account of newly printed banknotes. The old Siberian notes have been declared invalid, and for a time there is no currency at all. A trainload of replacement money is said to have arrived: sheets in red and blue, divided into small squares, with denominations of five and ten million rubles. The notes are badly printed, fade, and smear. Their enormous face values do not signify restored economic confidence; the account makes nominal money itself look fragile and provisional.

The New Economic Policy and the Rule’s Afterlife

When Yurii Andreievich and Vasia return to Moscow in the spring of 1922, at the beginning of the New Economic Policy, the prohibition has been relaxed: private enterprise is permitted within narrow limits. Trade resumes on the modest scale of flea-market dealing, but the transactions largely resell goods that have already passed through many hands. They produce speculation and abuses without creating new wealth or relieving the city’s squalor.

The change is also apparent in the visible reuse of closed spaces and familiar skills. Owners of small private libraries gather their books into cooperative shops after securing premises from the Town Soviet; former shoe shops or florists, shut since the revolution, become places of sale. Professors’ wives who had once baked white rolls secretly in defiance of regulations now sell them openly in a requisitioned bicycle repair shop. The rules governing trade have changed, and so has the public posture of those who trade: the women accept the new conditions and drop their genteel language. The policy’s history is not a simple passage from prohibition to freedom, but a sequence in which official rules, institutional need, and household practice continually reshape one another.