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The Buyers’ Market and Soviet Consumer Goods Distribution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Roger Skurski
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During most of the Soviet industrialization period, consumer goods enterprises and the distribution network could rest assured that almost any consumer product—any size, color, style, and quality—would be sold if offered to the public. This was the nature of the market during that period; the sellers held the upper hand, and they tried to fulfill their plans without being concerned much about the demands of buyers. But in the postwar period, especially after the death of Stalin, the production of consumer goods and personal incomes increased simultaneously, and gradually more and more consumer demands were answered. A concern for consumer welfare was emerging. With the advent of buyers’ market conditions, no longer were all consumer goods that arrived on the market automatically sold; inventories accumulated and the problems of the trade network multiplied.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , December 1972 , pp. 817 - 830
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1972

References

1. Goldman, Marshall I., “The Reluctant Consumer and Economic Fluctuations in the Soviet Union,” Journal of Political Economy, 73, no. 4 (August 1965): 366–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. The support for this statement comes from a calculation of inventory/sales ratios from 1954–69 for all the individual product groups which Soviet trade data permit. Twenty-one out of thirty-six nonfood groups exhibited ratios rising markedly after 1958 and coming down somewhat after 1964.

3. A word concerning sources is in order. The sources for the long-term and annual plan results are cited in the text or the tables. The results of the quarterly turnover plans, which constitute the largest part of our data set, were collected from the trade newspaper, Sovetskaia torgovlia, which publishes these percentages more or less regularly. The gaps in our data reflect gaps in the publication of these achievements. Some statistics for the republics and for the territories of the RSFSR were also collected on their annual and semiannual sales plans, but these results have been published only sporadically, and therefore will not be used in our analysis.

4. Karcz, Jerzy, “Seven Years on the Farm: Retrospect and Prospects,” in U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, New Directions in the Soviet Economy (Washington, D.C., 1966), p. 386.Google Scholar

5. The original reason for selecting the fourth quarter of 1965 as the start of the new period was that the new reforms were technically to begin then, but as it turns out, some plan results improved even earlier in 1965.

6. The statistic, assuming the population of plan results to be normally distributed, has approximately a t distribution with f degrees of freedom where and where X= sample mean, S2 = sample variance, N = sample size. This statistic was used in our analysis. For a description of this test see Dixon, Wilfrid J. and Massey, Frank J. Jr., Introduction to Statistical Analysis, 2nd ed. (New York, 1957), pp. 123–24.Google Scholar

7. Nove, Alec, An Economic History of the USSR (London, 1969), p. 308.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., p. 309.

9. Pavlov, C. V., Sovetskaia iorgovlia v sovremennykh usloviiakh (Moscow, 1965), p. 39 Google Scholar, and Sovetskaia torgovlia, 1967, no. 6, p. IS.

10. Skurski, “Distribution of Consumer Goods,” p. 319.

11. Ibid., p. 320.

12. Goldman, “Reluctant Consumer,” p. 367, and TsSU, , Trud v SSSR (Moscow, 1968), p. 138–39.Google Scholar

13. Sovetskaia torgovlia, Oct. 6, 1960.

14. For example, one of the major Soviet works on demand has just appeared in a revised edition: Korzhenevsky, I. I., Osnovnye sakonomernosti razvitiia sprosa v SSSR (Moscow, 1971).Google Scholar

15. Skurski, “Distribution of Consumer Goods,” pp. 105-6.

16. V. Batyrev, “The Economic Reform and the Increasing Role of Credit,” Kommunist, 1966, no. 2, translated in Problems of Economics, 9, no. 5 (September 1966): 55.

17. See, for example, Tarun'ian, S., “Nuzhen strogii finansovyi kontrol1 za rabotoi torgovykh organizatsii,” Finansy SSSR, 1961, no. 11, p. 18 Google Scholar, or M. Zotov, “Sposobstvovat' kreditom dal'neishemu razvitiiu torgovli,” Den'gi i kredit, 1961, no. 7, pp. 16-17.

18. Garvy, George, Money, Banking, and Credit in Eastern Europe (New York, 1966), p. 65.Google Scholar

19. A. Zolov, “Razvitie torgovli v Belorusskoi SSSR,” Den'gi i kredit, 1967, no. 6, p. 18.

20. S. Mezhiborskaia, “O kreditovanii torgovykh organizatsii osushchestvliaiushchikh dosrochnyi zavoz tovarov,” Den'gi i kredit, 1967, no. 6.

21. Trud v SSSR, pp. 24-25, 264-65.

22. Ibid., pp. 24-25, 282-83.

23. Goldman, Marshall I., Soviet Marketing (New York, 1963), pp. 17–18 Google Scholar, describes tbe traditional retailing setup which the Russians call the kassa system.

24. Shimansky, V., “Effektivnee ispol'zovat’ osnovnye fundy,” Sovetskaia torgovlia, 1968, no. 6.Google Scholar

25. Skurski, Roger, “The Factor Proportions Problem in Soviet Internal Trade,” Soviet Studies, 23, no. 3 (January 1972): 450–64 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discusses this point in some detail.

26. Current Abstracts of the Soviet Press, March 1970, p. 31, indicates that at least some Soviet analysts feel that putting the burden on the shopper has an indirect negative influence on national production through its effects on morale, productivity, and workmanship