In the fall of 1979, as a young and ambitious disc jokey in charge of the student disco club at Dnipropetrovsk University's dorm, I had a very bad incident before the official opening of my dance party. I realized that our Soviet audio equipment was broken a few days before the very important Komsomol ideological commission's visit to check the “ideological reliability and technological efficiency” of our discotheque. My friend, our electric engineer, who had a special business assignment in Moscow, went immediately to a Beriozka store there, and using his connections and extra money, he bought the Japanese audio equipment in this shop, and the next day brought it to our club. We thus replaced our broken Soviet technology with a “capitalist machine” from a Moscow Beriozka, and prepared a wonderful dance party, which was evaluated by Komsomol apparatchiks as an “ideological and technological success” and awarded with a special prize. I still remember how this state-run retail store, which sold foreign goods that were generally unavailable in regular Soviet shops, not only saved my reputation, but also contributed to the promotion of my Komsomol career.

That is why I was pleasantly surprised to discover the meticulously researched and well-written study by Anna Ivanova devoted to a history of the so-called “dollar shop” Beriozka (little birch-tree), which became the most important feature of the entire system of everyday (including cultural) consumption during late socialism in the USSR. This chain of Beriozka shops was created in 1964 to allow Soviet citizens who lived and worked abroad to use foreign currency or its equivalents (certificates and checks of Soviet financial institutions such as Vneshneposyltorg) inside the Soviet Union. Eventually, these shops provided foreign manufactured goods not only for the fortunate Soviet visitors to foreign countries, but also for those Soviet citizens (like my engineer friend) who could buy Vneshneposyltorg checks on black market.

Unfortunately, despite the recent growth of new literature about the history of cultural consumption in the Soviet Union, a history of the Beriozka phenomenon was still missing as a serious topic of historical research. Ivanova's book, which is based on her Ph.D. dissertation of 2012, will change the entire historiographic perception of the role of Beriozkas during late socialism. Using various archival documents, personal interviews, and contemporary periodicals, Ivanova in her history of Beriozkas tries to analyze the “problematic relations between economics and morality in Soviet society, through various interconnected ideological problems of relations to the West, consumption and social stratification” (11). All these problems became obvious in the functioning of Beriozka shops, initially opened by the Soviet state for “the extraction of extra currency profits” (15). Ivanova explores the evolution of Beriozka shops through three chronological periods: the transition from the Khrushchev Thaw to the Brezhnev era, Brezhnev's “stagnation,” and Gorbachev's “perestroika.”

In Chapter 1, Ivanova studies the reasons for the opening of Beriozka shops in 1964; how various Soviet “trade checks” and certificates were introduced as substitutes for hard currency; what kind of Soviet laws and financial documents during the 1960s–1980s regulated these shops; and the reasons for closing these stores at the end of the 1980s. Chapter 2 is devoted to analyzing the major consumers of these shops: the Soviet diplomats, journalists, and specialists who worked in the countries of Asia and Africa; actors and sportsmen who travelled abroad; and those Soviet citizens who had been receiving hard currency transfers from friends and relatives abroad. Chapter 3 is about the range of these Beriozka stores: how these shops differed from the traditional Soviet trade system, who selected goods for these stores and how, and how important for the Soviet hierarchy of consumption were the various manufactured goods sold there, including cars, stereo audio systems, and perfumes. In Chapter 4, Ivanova describes various illegal practices of trade emerging around the Beriozka shops, and their connections to legal Soviet markets and the “black market.” In Chapter 5, the best one in this book, she explores the role of hard currency trade in the everyday life of Soviet citizens, analyzing moral evaluations of this trade and the public perception of Beriozka shops in the mass media, especially during perestroika.

Ivanova uses the story of Beriozka shops to illustrate “the gradual dissolution” of the Soviet economic system, which was replaced by a new market economy and system of values during the 1980s (229–30). Ivanova's book reminds us again that all so-called post-Soviet market practices and entrepreneurship were rooted in the Brezhnev era of the late 1960s and 1970s, and the chain of Beriozka shops became instrumental in developing these new business practices for future post-Soviet capitalism.