Okay, we're alive. Hi, this is William Ramsey. Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates on today's show. I have a very special guest. Her name is Elena Ossachina, and she just published a book, September 15th, 2021. Title of the book is Stalin's Quest for Gold, the Torxen hard currency shops and Soviet industrialization. So we're going to talk about this kind of quasi-capitalistic system that was in Soviet Russia,

but she can talk more about that. So Elena Ossakina, are you there?

Hello everyone. I hope that there are people who are listening to me right now,

and I hope to have more listeners and viewers later.

So just a few words about myself because of course you already hear my accent and I guess probably that I'm not from the United States.

Yes, I was born and grew up in the Soviet Union and defended all my dissertations, received all my degrees in the Soviet Union.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, I received several grants from the European governments and some American grants and I began to travel, which was

not really that possible within the Soviet Union or from the Soviet Union.

And at some point I found a job here in the United States and settled down here.

And currently I'm professor of Russian history at the University of South Carolina in Colombia.

I teach Russian history from the very beginning, the first Slavic state to present, to Putin's elections that ended just two days ago.

Right. So a few words about how actually I came to this topic to write about a book on this

specific hard currency stores called Tarksin.

I'm a social and economic historian.

I'm interested in learning how the economic decisions and actions

influenced the life of people, social life.

My first research was on the Stalin's distribution system of the 1930s,

which included the rationing system, black market, strategies of survival,

all these interesting things. So I published several books on this topic.

The first came in Russian, which was called Behind the Facade of Stalin's Plenty. This book is translated into English and came out under the title Our Daily Bread. So it was also translated into Italy.

So when I worked on this topic, on Stalin's distribution system,

I found a state report that just surprised me, to put it mildly.

...