Point of no return: Soviet paper reuse, 1932–1945

Abstract

The article examines Soviet paper reuse as an ideological, economic daily practice, implemented through the advanced, but hitherto undescribed Soiuzutil’waste collecting system by the early 1930s as the reverse side of Stalinist industrialization. It argues that Soiuzutil’waste paper handling attempted to form a new socialist collective by reworking old print while cultivating citizens as classless scrap-collectors, for the sake of an (ir)rational resource optimization. While World War II intensified recycling efforts among the Allied and Axis powers, invasion and evacuation damaged Soviet waste collection to a point where no return of paper into a centralized system was possible. War forced printers and consumers to retreat to local self-supply networks, as paper remained a crucial, yet scarce resource. By analyzing technical-educational literature and correspondence of the reutilization offices, the article demonstrates the changing attitudes in the Stalinist war economy, the industries, and the population towards mobilizing and saving paper.

Keywords:

• Soviet Union
• World War II
• war economy
• waste utilization
• paper history
• print culture
• Soiuzutil’

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Birgitte Beck Pristedis Associate Professor in Russian Studies at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She holds a Ph.D. from the Johannes-Gutenberg-University of Mainz, Germany, awarded with distinction 2014. She is author of an illustrated monograph on contemporary Russian book design and print culture The New Russian Book. A Graphic CulturalHistory (Palgrave, 2017). Her main research areas are print and media history, visual and material cultures of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras with a second strand in Russian children’s books. Her current research project focuses on the history of Soviet paper.

Notes

1 An earlier version of the article was presented at the international workshop ‘Waste Recycling, War and Occupation: A Transnational Perspective on World War II’, at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, 14-15 June 2018. I wish to thank all participants for an inspiring discussion, and especially the editors, Chad Denton and Heike Weber, and the two anonymous reviewers from Business History for valuable comments to the manuscript.

2 These gross figures refer to ‘apparent consumption’ (domestic production minus export, plus import). As evident from the title ‘A short course in paper technology,’ Fotiev’s 1944 book was itself a strongly reduced, paper-saving version of his three volume Paper Technology (1933-37) but still gave space to a lengthy cultural history of paper rather than offering the urgently needed industrial and practical advice for the new Soviet paper engineers it should educate.

3 First printed in Izvestiia, vol. 91, April 6, 1933, re-issued as an illustrated booklet in 100,000 copies in 1934.