An accessible and authoritative analysis of barter in the former Soviet Union.

Introduction: barter networks and information islands Paul Seabright; Part I. Theory: 1. Some lasting thing: barter and the value of money Jayasri Dutta; 2. Barter Relationships Canice Prendergast and Lars Stole; 3. An anthropological view of barter in Russia Caroline Humphrey; Part II. Large Scale Empirical Studies: 4. Barter in post-Soviet societies: what does it look like and why does it matter? Alena Ledeneva and Paul Seabright; 5. Different types of non-monetary transaction in Russia Simon Commander and Christian Mummsen; 6. Barter in Russia Sergei Guriev and Barry W. Ickes; 7. The household in a non-monetary market economy Simon Clarke; 8. Barter in transition economies: competing explanations confront Ukrainian data Dalia Marin, Daniel Kaufmann and Bogdan Gorochowskij; 9. Barter and non-monetary transactions in transition economies: evidence from a cross-country survey Wendy Carlin, Steven Fries, Mark Schaffer and Paul Seabright; Part III. Ethnography: 10. How is barter done? The social relations of barter in provincial Russia Caroline Humphrey; 11. Shadow barter: economic necessity or economic crime? Alena Ledeneva; 12. Surrogate currencies and the wild market in Central Siberia David G. Anderson; 13. Bear skins and macaroni: the social life of things at the margins of a Siberian state collective Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov; Conclusion: what is to be done? Paul Seabright and Simon Commander.