Economy
Five-year plans, industrialization, shortages and the planned system.
Shortages and queues: how Soviet retail worked
Shortages and queues are among the defining memories of Soviet daily life. Why everyday goods were often impossible to buy, how people coped — and what was cheap and guaranteed.
The BAM: the last great construction project of the USSR
Three thousand kilometers across permafrost, seven mountain ranges and hundreds of rivers. A railway begun by prisoners, built by "the whole country," and finished in the year the country ceased to exist. The story of the project of the century, with its romance, its camp past, and a "what for" that was answered only recently.
Soviet cars: a waiting list five years long
An Italian factory on the Volga, a car priced at five annual salaries, and a years-long line to buy one. How the USSR built a people's car, why the Niva conquered Europe, and what the Zhiguli says about the planned economy more honestly than any textbook.
The Soviet ruble: money that could not buy
A currency whose rival, the dollar, could put you before a firing squad. Three different rubles in one country, shops for "real money" only, and two reforms that confiscated savings in three days. The Soviet economy, told through a banknote.
The Virgin Lands: a steppe plowed in a single summer
A territory the size of several European countries, raised by the plow in a handful of years. A record harvest that turned into dust storms, and grain that was literally blown away by the wind. The story of Khrushchev's great gamble and what it did to the steppe.
The Stakhanovites: the record that raised everyone's quota
A night shift, 102 tons of coal, and the party organizer with a newspaper editor down in the same pit. How one record became an all-Union cult, why fellow workers often hated the record-setters, and how the word Stakhanovite entered the world's dictionaries.
The kolkhoz: the village that lost its land
Work paid in tally marks in an accountant's notebook, a passport that did not exist, and a garden plot that outproduced every field around it. How the system that held the Soviet village for half a century worked, and why the whole world knows the word kolkhoz.
Five-Year Plans and the planned economy: how the Soviet economy worked
In the USSR the economy was run not by the market but by the state. What Gosplan and the Five-Year Plans were, how the country became an industrial power in a decade — and why shortages arose all the same.