HIS 242
Unit 8: NEP and the Roaring 1920s

GUM Department store

In the 1920s during NEP (the New Economic Policy), heeding the slogan to "enrich yourselves," Soviet leaders had but to look out the windows of the Kremlin, across Red Square to see GUM, (Gosudarstvennyi Universalnyi Magazin, the "State Department Store") pronounced "goom," that takes up almost the entire east side of Red Square. Built between 1890 and 1893 by Aleksandr Pomerantsev, GUM symbolized the capitalist spirit in the late tsarist regime and then the early Soviet years (until turned into office space by Stalin at the end of the 1920s). Photo courtesy Thomas T. Hammond.

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