Ironside will present a selection from her recently published monograph, which looks at how money, an ideologically problematic “vestige of capitalism” was mobilized by the Soviet state after the Second World War in the intertwined projects of recovering from the war’s damage and moving toward the promised abundance of communism. A "full-value ruble,” that is, one with increasing purchasing power, was seen as key to the Soviet Union’s revolutionary economic advance. However, the increasing importance of money in Soviet life after 1945 did not necessarily correlate to improved living standards, helping to undermine faith in the ruble, in Soviet power, and in communism, itself.
Watch the event recording on YouTube here.
Kristy Ironside is an Assistant Professor of Russian history at McGill University. She focuses on the economic, social, and political history of the Soviet Union. Her first book, A Full-Value Ruble: The Promise of Prosperity in the Postwar Soviet Union was published by Harvard University Press in 2021. Ironside is also in the early stages of several projects on the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia’s international political economy.
