Through the experience of ordinary people living through the Russian revolutions of 1917, this talk will explore some fundamental institutions of everyday economic life--owning a sofa, selling one's coat, finding a roommate--and how they were turned upside down in the Bolshevik revolutionaries' quest for power and search for socialism. It tells the story of how private property was unmade in Russian cities after 1917, how people tried to hold, exchange, and bequeath things in its absence, and how the improvised methods of tenure and valuation developed in the revolutionary era grew up into enduring features of socialist governance and everyday life.

Anne O'Donnell is associate professor of history and Russian & Slavic studies at New York University. She earned her PhD from Princeton University. Her first book, Power and Possession in the Russian Revolution, was published in 2024 by Princeton University Press.

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