Flappers and Foxtrotters: Soviet Youth in the “Roaring Twenties”

Abstract

With the introduction of the New Economic Policy in March 1921, cities such as Moscow and Leningrad appeared to change overnight. Expensive food and clothing stores, flashy nightclubs, gambling casinos, and other manifestations of the changing economic climate resurfaced for the first time since the war. William Reswick, a Russian who had emigrated to the United States before the revolution and returned as a journalist during the Civil War, wrote that as he made the rounds of Moscow, he was astonished by the great change that the NEP, a comparatively free economy, had wrought in a matter of nine months or so. "It was a change from a state verging on coma to a life of cheer and rapidly growing vigor. "

The  New York Times Moscow correspondent Waiter Duranty also marveled at the changes.