Stalin’s Quest for Gold: The Extraordinary Sources of Soviet Industrialization

Speaker: Elena Osokina, Professor of History, U of South Carolina
Chair: Lynne Viola, Professor of History, U of Toronto

At the end of the 1920s, the Soviet Union started industrialization with no gold and currency reserves. The government feverishly sought gold to pay the tremendous foreign debts acquired to purchase equipment, materials, and technologies abroad. State-run stores called Torgsin (1930-36), which sold food and goods to the Soviet people at inflated prices in exchange for their heirlooms - foreign currency, gold, silver, and diamonds, became an important source of revenues to finance industrialization and the major strategy of survival for people during the mass famine of 1932-33.

Elena A. Osokina is Professor of Russian History at the University of South Carolina. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of History at Moscow University, Russia (1987). She has authored 5 books published in Russian, English, Italian and Chinese, and numerous articles published in the major journals in Russia, USA, Canada, France, Germany, Finland, and Italy. More specifically her research focuses on the impact that the Soviet industrialization of the 1930s had on everyday life, social hierarchy, transformation of the economy, and the nature of Stalinism. The most recent book came out in 2021 by Cornell UP Stalin’s Quest for Gold.

Sponsored by the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine; the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium.

#stalin #stalimism #torgsin #ussr #holodomor #hrec #ceres #uoft #elenaosokina

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