Kristy Ironside offers an important entry in the literature on the economic history of the Soviet Union, charting post–World War II efforts by Stalin and then Khrushchev to offer Soviet citizens a kind of consumer prosperity after years of economic upheaval and total war. The core dilemmas facing this project, as this impressively researched volume repeatedly illustrates, derive from the particular nature of the Soviet monetary system.

In the mid-1920s, the Bolsheviks had decided to react to unwelcome upward price pressure by instituting fixed prices for goods in state-controlled shops. However, fixed prices did not eliminate the need to manage the amount of money available to consumers. Any excess monetary demand led to shortages of available goods, resulting in rationing, at times organized explicitly and at times enforced de facto by the need to queue. Minimizing rationing in either form was a more or less constant ambition of Soviet authorities, one they pursued via efforts to control the flow of money into consumers’ hands, as well as to canalize its outflow away from the shops, for instance, into purchases of mass-subscription bonds. By the late 1930s, this jury-rigged monetary plumbing functioned well enough to permit a significant reduction in rationing. War, however, forced rationing's reintroduction and the free use of monetary outlays to address the desperate challenges of resisting invasion. In war's aftermath, a December 1947 currency reform confiscated 90 percent of cash holdings and a sizable portion of bank deposits. The significance of the 1947 reform, in Ironside's view, lay not so much in what it took away but in what Soviet authorities promised it would offer: a “full-valued ruble” that ordinary citizens could spend freely on the products of a growing economy. But, as she shows, this promise was extraordinarily difficult to reconcile with efforts to offer citizens expanded benefits as part of an implicit “social contract.”

Chapter 1 discusses price policy. Stalin followed the currency reform with a series of loudly touted annual reductions in consumer prices. Ironside's behind-the-scenes account reveals the practical difficulties that ensued in a system where every microeconomic decision was simultaneously a macroeconomic one. Shifts of purchases into lower-priced goods left these in shortage, while more expensive ones, which had been expected to absorb consumer rubles, moldered in warehouses. Making a virtue of necessity by lowering prices on these too undermined the effort to balance goods available against wages. Khrushchev abandoned the annual price cuts in 1956 but struggled to deal with the underlying problems. Price increases remained an expedient of last resort, as they contradicted promises of prosperity and manifestly hurt the poorest, better able to tolerate the inconveniences required to accomplish purchases amid pervasive shortages than to pay higher prices. When Khrushchev reluctantly acceded to price hikes for scarce foodstuffs in 1962, the result was significant mass discontent.

How matters came to such a pass emerges in chapters 2 and 3, which deal with flows of money into consumers’ hands. Stalin had presided over a system of remarkable income inequalities, including outsize payments to political and cultural elites and a wage system skewed to skilled labor and workers in high-priority sectors; workers on collective farms received derisory incomes, and those largely in kind. As detailed in chapter 2, Khrushchev and expert policy advisers sought to redress these inequities and rationalize the system. The press published scandalous accounts of the uncomradely lifestyles of the famous and excessively rich, and some payments to elites were scaled back, though they retained privileged access to scarce goods. On the wages side, measures to bring up wages at the bottom end of the scale and expand monetary payments to farm workers bumped up against incentive concerns and the fear that they could exacerbate shortages. Parallel issues plagued the reform of pensions, considered in chapter 3. As Ironside shows, many midcentury Soviet pensioners—retired workers as well as the families of war dead and those disabled in combat or otherwise—had an understandable sense of betrayal. The sums they received were miserly and available only to those able to clear a thicket of arbitrary rules, deriving in part from efforts to use pension policy to promote acquisition of skills and minimize labor turnover by rewarding long tenures at a single workplace. Postwar planners’ desire to preserve these incentives limited their ability to address fairness concerns. The pension law eventually adopted in 1956 simplified and expanded coverage, raising the average pension by 80 percent. However, putting so much more money in the population's hands again worsened shortages.

Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the mechanisms used to drain the liquidity injected by wages and pensions. Soviet workers’ pay packets were reduced by tax charges; they were also heavily pressured to purchase mass-subscription bonds. Aware of the resentment these charges provoked, Khrushchev aimed to substantially reduce them from the early 1960s but soon had to retreat in the face of the macroeconomic consequences. Voluntary long-term savings were an alternative means of diverting monetary demand. Propagandists portrayed these as a virtuous path to accumulating the means to make big-ticket purchases, but the limited availability of cars and other relevant goods meant that with time, savings simply added to the monetary overhang.

Tracing the intricate monetary circulatory system permeating Soviet bureaucracy and society, Ironside renders vivid the unresolved difficulties of macroeconomic management that were to plague the system to its demise. While there is much to admire, readers may regret some authorial choices. The bearing of the struggle for a full-valued ruble on high-level politics and on Khrushchev's notorious “hare-brained schemes” to increase production deserved more attention, as did the role of the State Bank. Thematic rather than chronological exposition leads to a fragmented presentation of key episodes, complicating understanding of their context, likely particularly for those little versed in Soviet history. However, those drawn to the book because of a more general interest should persevere, making the most of the rare opportunity its painstaking research offers to reflect on the politics of money when the seemingly foundational distinction between fiscal and monetary policy becomes manifestly arbitrary.