Story of the ruble in the postwar Soviet Union economy

Kristy Ironside's book A Full-Value Ruble: The Promise of Prosperity in the Postwar Soviet Union focuses on the attempts to increase living standards and create prosperity during Iosif Stalin's late leadership and the Nikita Khrushchev era. The book argues that money—in the case of the Soviet Union full-value ruble—was essential for the state's project to create prosperity in the postwar Soviet Union. The book aims to show that in the attempt to create prosperity there was a continuity from Stalin to Khrushchev. The book's time span is from Stalin's currency reform in 1947 to the currency reform during the Khrushchev leadership era in 1961.

Everyday life in the Soviet Union and attempts to increase living standards especially under Khrushchev's leadership has been studied from different perspectives, but money-related issues such as the value of the ruble and its purchasing power have not been in the pivot of the research. Ironside shows convincingly why the full-value ruble was essential for creating postwar prosperity during the Stalin administration and why it was continued by his successor. As she shows, the leaders believed that a ruble with real purchasing power would boost labor productivity and economic growth, and create abundance.

Ironside creates the story through five thematic chapters each focusing on one aspect of the process or state promises: low retail prices; income redistribution (reducing income inequality); socialist security (pensions); wages (taxes), and real return (state bonds, savings). She shows that there were serious attempts to create prosperity, but the intended outcome proved to have a series of unintended consequences. The money reforms did not have their desired impact, but the ruble had an important role in Soviet economic development and Soviet citizens’ everyday lives. Partly due to the unintended outcomes of the reforms, money became one of the diverging factors between the city and countryside. Khrushchev's optimistic vision of communism shimmering on the horizon was based on the Soviet economic experts’ calculations that the 1961 money reform would create much needed economic growth. The optimism was premature, and their calculations proved to be unrealistic less than a year after the launch of the reform. “The imbalance between money and goods to spend it on had grown severe and undeniable by the spring 1962” (195). Most of the promises were postponed, and increased prices of food products led to wide and violent protests.

The book shows how retail prices, income, and other taxes, state bonds, and other money policy-related issues were connected to state economic policy, and how the attempts to create prosperity and economic growth influenced Soviet citizens’ everyday lives. Although the outcome was hardly ever the desired one, Soviet citizens had the possibility to gain material incentive in the form of consumer goods. The Soviet government's cash-and-goods lottery that was introduced in 1957 in the context of the World Youth Festival in Moscow, provided an opportunity to win cash and the desired consumer goods. This was the case despite the lottery being the Soviet government's attempt to create a low-cost solution to the economic woes. As the author points out, discussion about money, prosperity, and lotteries in the Soviet context is not typical, but the aim behind all attempts to create prosperity was to attain a moneyless economy.

Ironside's Full-Value Ruble is a thorough and informative book about the role of money in the Soviet economy and everyday life in the Soviet Union. Her study is based on a decade of research and wide archival work. Materials have been collected from the State Archive (GARF), the economic archive (RGAE), and historical archives (RGANI) and (RGASPI) in Moscow. It is based on archival material and extensive literature of related topics combining the main economic discussions and analyses but also the main findings in the literature, and offers profound information such that that is possible to use it as a reference book for the research. Although the book covers a relatively small period of Soviet history, it shows the importance of money in the economy and the continuity of the aim to increase living standards and create prosperity with the help of a full-valued ruble from Stalin to Khrushchev.