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Dossier. Histoires économiques de l’Union soviétique

A movable feast: Property-breaking and property-making after the Russian Revolution

Faire et défaire la propriété après la révolution russe : une politique mouvante
Anne O’Donnell
p. 35-62

Abstracts

The article focuses on the dispossession of movable goods as a site where the key processes of the Revolution—political violence, social transformation, and state-building—came together. Its scope is chronologically limited to the period between the summer of 1917, when forms of seizure that had been legally defined for state use during the First World War as “requisition” and “confiscation” jumped off of their wartime rails, and April 16, 1920, when the Sovnarkom returned the seizure of movable property to a clear legal footing with a decree defining “requisition” and “confiscation” for the first time since the Revolution. After a brief look at the many ways there were to lose things in the revolutionary era, the article examines the afterlife of dispossession: what happened to seized goods, and how to make erstwhile personal possessions the property of the state. This problem undergirded the state’s nationalization programs in every sphere of economic life. But it posed a special challenge in the realm of household goods, because of their qualities and because of the significance invested in their redistribution as a metric for the progress of the Revolution itself. Ultimately the state proved unable to fashion itself into an adequate proprietor of movable goods and dealt with its incapacity first by trying to eliminate the category as a whole before reintroducing legal formats of personal possession into revolutionary society.

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Excerpt

Cairn

Full-text article available to subscribers or on a "pay per view" basis. It will be available on this URL in January 2026.
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Outline

The Case of no. 3 Sadovaia-Chernogriazskaia Street
From property owners to accidental holders
Making state property in movable things
The failed immobilization of movable things
Conclusion

First lines

The Case of no. 3 Sadovaia-Chernogriazskaia Street

On the morning of September 13, 1918, an order appeared in the pages of Izvestiia VTsIK concerning the defense of the city of Moscow. Specifically, the order related to the defense of the city from “parasites,” who were to be identified and expelled by commissions formed specially for the task. So it was that four days later, a group of railway workers appeared at the door of an apartment building on Moscow’s ring road, a stone’s throw from the city’s major train stations. When it came to the expulsion of parasites, the railway workers did not need to be asked twice. In fact, they did not need to be asked once. As a subsequent investigation would clarify, in the intervening stretch days between the publication of the order and their decision to show up on the front step of no. 3 Sadovaia-Chernogriazskaia Street, the railway workers had formed themselves into what they called the “commission on the requisition of building no. 3 Sadova...

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References

Bibliographical reference

Anne O’Donnell, “A movable feast: Property-breaking and property-making after the Russian Revolution”Cahiers du monde russe, 64/1 | 2023, 35-62.

Electronic reference

Anne O’Donnell, “A movable feast: Property-breaking and property-making after the Russian Revolution”Cahiers du monde russe [Online], 64/1 | 2023, Online since 01 January 2026, connection on 29 March 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/13929; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/monderusse.13929

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About the author

Anne O’Donnell

New York University
aodonnell[at]nyu.edu

By this author

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Copyright

The text and other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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