Epilogue

Model retailers such as GUM failed to deliver what the Soviet government promised with its version of modern retailing: abundance, comfort, efficiency, and respect for workers and consumers. Shopping was no longer a pleasure, a sport, or even a routine task but a humiliating, exacting chore. The significance of the state’s failure in the retail sector was that the failure to make available things like sugar, galoshes, chisels, and frying pans transgressed a basic principle of socialism: improving the material condition of the formerly disenfranchised working classes. The seemingly small currency of these kinds of goods only pointed out more