Liberating Consumption, Urban Communities, and Women's Activism during Late Stalinism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the first post-war decade, Stalinist authorities resumed pre-war practices of voluntary gatherings of store patrons in large cities. Such meetings, called “consumer conferences,” constituted embryonic manifestations of proletarian governance that municipal officials considered ideologically safe to employ in a period when Kremlin elites increased their crackdown measures against the wartime liberalization initiatives. Drawing on people's insider knowledge of local communities, city authorities aimed to gather economic information about consumer needs to improve the retail system. Yet, urban working-class women, the most committed conference participants, saw stores more than as simply places of consumption: the store contributed to the local community's safety, hygiene, health, emotional comfort, and mutual trust. Consumer conferences therefore turned into a forum for women's activism as female urbanites used customer gatherings to carve out part of a state-curated public space in which they exercised a measure of control over their neighborhoods’ well-being.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".