New Losses, New Opportunities: (Soviet) Women in the Shuttle Trade, 1987-1998

Abstract

The economie, social, and political reforms of perestroika in the USSR gave rise to a form of international trade, called "shuttle trading," "suitcase trade," or "trading tourism." Individual traders, involved in these activities, began to purchase merchandise abroad in small quantities and sold it back ho me in local, mostly open-air markets. Though this form of trade became commonplace after 1990, it originated in the midst of the Soviet transition from a socialist to capitalist system in 1987. The progressive unraveling of the cenrrallv-planned economy facilitated new forms of international trade. By the late 1980s, the economic demands of the Soviet population, fueled bv greater openness under glasnost, suddenly escalated. Due to the growing influx of information about the living standards of people in Western European nations and the US, the Soviet people became increasingly consumer conscious at a time when the inefficiency of the Soviet economy and its growing inabilitv to provide even basie consumer goods became obvious to everyone. Distortions and inefficiencies in the supply system that were exacerbated by the liberalization and restructuring of the Soviet economie system in the late 1980s, frustrated and aggravated Soviet consumers who, instead of jeans and colored TV sets in the stores, saw only endless queues for basic necessities and in some places the reversion to rationing. Simultaneously, legalization of private enterprises and self-employment in 1987 minimized legal restrietions on the type of activities pursued individually by Soviet citizens. The lifting of travel restrietions and simplification of visa requirements für trips to socialist countries, especially after 1989, allowed many Soviet people to easily cross the border. Finallv, the ambiguity or non-existence of regulations concerning goods in small qualities that crossed the border left many legal loopholes by the means of whieh both people and goods could and did pass.'Small at first, this peddling came to attract as many as three million wouldbe entrepreneurs by the time that the economy of post-Sovier Russia began to progressively collapse under Boris Yeltsin in the early 1990s. 2 By the mid-1990s, nearly 30 million people were directly involved in the shuttle trade, which had come to provide 75% of all the consumer goods in the Russian market.' In 1995-96, shuttle traders supplied the Russian market with 70% of all clothing and fabrics, 30% of imported fish and processed and raw meat, 50% of color TV sets, and 80% of VeR players, while the volume of tracle was estirnated to be $15 billion US dollars annually, with the most profitable Ankara-Moscow trade alone providing a sizeable cash flow of $8 billion annually by 1997. 4 Uniquely, estimates for the scale of this trade abound but precise numbers are hard to come by, as no official records were kept. Although the shuttle trade had come to constitute the backbone of Russian consumer trade, this sort of business remained semi-legal. Presumably, shuttle traders legally brought various ...

Hierarchies of trade in Yiwu and Dushanbe: The case of an Uzbek merchant family from Tajikistan

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The Political Economy of Border Checkpoints in Shadow Exchanges

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