A Full-Value Ruble

“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