Tanasiuk V. The Establishment and Functioning of the Ukrainian Representative Office of the All-Union Hard-Currency Stores “Torgsin” (19311936).

The thesis for a PhD in History and Archeology (032 – History and Archeology).  Pavlo Tychyna Uman State Pedagogical University, Uman, 2021. Government regulation of economic processes is one of the forms of state participation in the economic life of society, and its active intervention in these processes increases sharply in times of instability. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the emergence of the Soviet model in the history of Ukraine, as well as the implementation of socioeconomic, political and cultural experiments. Therefore, the study of this period of Ukrainian history is considered to be important for evaluating the complexity and contradictions of the current socio-economic and political situation in Ukraine. The first half of the 1930s became an important period in Ukrainian history, which changed, without exaggeration, all aspects of society and the state. One can explain the interest of the scientific community in this period of current Ukrainian history by the whole internal logic of history’s development. Indeed, history seeks to solve many fundamental issues in the establishment and functioning of the Soviet socio-economic system. However, the socialist offensive as a transitional period is not easily amenable to theoretical study and cannot be reduced to a single understanding. An important aspect of the research value lies in studying the conditions of the society under a long and severe crisis, including the crisis of supply in the course of socialist modernization. In this regard, one should study the establishment and functioning of state-run hard-currency stores “Torgsin” (an acronym for “torgovlia s inostrantsami (trade with foreigners)) in the USSR in the first half of the 1930s. It will make it possible to specify the character of Soviet authorities’ interaction with society and clarify the specifics of the command- administrative system which strived to demonstrate the affordability and quality of goods in the domestic consumer market. In those days, the Soviet state itself acted as a businessman. It is through the activities of Torgsin that the Soviet state had proved to be the biggest speculator under the food shortage and famine it itself created. Such commercial activity became an important source of filling the budget. The history of Torgsin’s operations in the USSR in the first half of the 1930s is mainly the history of human strategies in the struggle for survival. It must be noted that the current state of the Ukrainian economy, the mismanagement of industrial facilities and the destruction of the property are leading to the practical loss of what was created and built by previous generations. Therefore, it is vital to determine the price paid by millions of people for the Soviet modernization during the first five-year plans. The relevance of the research topic relies on the insufficient coverage of the issue in question in Ukrainian historiography.