“Book Bazaars” in the Late Soviet City: Functions, Mechanisms, Participants

Abstract

Book fairs, or “book bazaars” as they were called, were well known in most cities of the late Soviet period. They signified a social space where individuals engaged in free trade, thus being a grey zone for commercial activity that was censored by the Soviet state. They simultaneously represented a stage for commercial speculation and a kind of club for the booklovers, at any rate their meeting spot. They played a part of the terminal or connection point between the official state trade and the black market and were also a platform for exchange among private sellers who were not after commercial profit. These book fairs emerged as a result of the literature deficit that was engendered both by the general drawbacks of the Soviet economic planning and by the increasing demand for books among the educated urban strata. Today, we can arguably view these book fairs as a proper case for studying other types of Soviet informal bazaars (barakholka, tolchok, etc.), posing questions about their appearance, institutionalization, functioning, relationships with power authorities, actors, and interaction practices. The topic is important insofar as these book fairs seem to be disappearing from social memory, following the drastic changes in the present-day economy and the very place that books occupy in the contemporary digital society. There are fewer and fewer sources for their ethnographic or cultural study.