The end of the bazaar? Morphology of a post-Soviet marketplace

ABSTRACT

The proliferation of online commerce has modified retail and wholesale trade. This paper discusses the consequences for the large outdoor marketplaces that emerged in post-Soviet space. These markets, locally designated as bazaars, have become an important feature of economic life, attracting transnational, foreign traders and offering a huge range of commodities. Rather than attempting to define the bazaar as an economic category fixed in time and space, the article draws on anthropological and historical approaches and shifts attention to the idea of bazarnost’ (‘bazaar-ness’, that is, the kind of behaviours and practices seen locally to have a ‘bazaar-like’ quality). Using the case-study of a large container market in Odessa, Ukraine, it is argued that gentrification, changing attitudes to various ‘outsiders’, and the widespread shift to the online commerce have not (yet) annihilated the bazaar as a physical marketplace; rather, while becoming more abrasive, bazarnost’ has adapted to, and found its own niche among, regional unfolding economic and political processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Online trade
• transnational traders
• container market
• Odessa (Odesa)
• Ukraine

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Most of the material for this article was gathered through interviews, conducted in Russian and Ukrainian, and personal observation in the field.

2 The prices on Soviet informal/illicit bazaars (tolkuchka) cum ‘black market’ were also often high (cf. Svetlitsa 2002, 116–117) – as high as the sellers could squeeze out of Soviet consumers.

3 Skvirskaja, personal communication, fieldwork in Odessa and Skt. Petersburg (2012–2016).

4 http://nov-bazar.od.ua; https://www.tour-odessa.com/novyj.

5 New migrants are escaping from pro-Russian power in eastern Ukraine for various ideological and personal reasons.

6 On Soviet kommunalka see e.g. Utekhin (2004).

7 It is significant that the historic ‘Privoz’ bazaar has also sprouted a ‘modern’ offshoot, ‘New Privoz’, which is an elegant shopping mall (Polese and Prigarin 2013).

8 Investors, gambling on Shestoi achieving the same success as Sed’moi, built the shops hoping to sell them later at triple the price. These shops lay empty, business was slack, and as a result, investors had to sell or rent at lower prices.

9 Today Internetchiki use various online platforms, from Instagram to Viber and WhatsApp. Initially, they also used social networking sites popular in the Russophone, post-Soviet realm, such as VKontakte and Odnoklassniki.ru (‘the Classmates’).

10 These practices characterise both traditional, old bazaars and more recent large-scale informal markets, like the Sed’moi, that have emerged on the outskirts of European cities following the post-Cold War globalisation. See e.g. Mörtenböck and Mooshammer (2008a, 357).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme 669 132 – TRODITIES, ‘Yiwu Trust, Global Traders and Commodities in a Chinese International City’.