ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 begins from a close-up look at the details of trading at Novosibirsk’s bazaar, known as the barakholka, as of 2015. Aside from tracking the routes that various goods take through borders and customs and depicting the on-site management of selling at barakholka containers, it examines how mobile traders recruit trustworthy personnel through kinship networks and how different modes of gendered labour-sharing link up to more or less business success. The second part of the chapter discusses the enforced relocation of the ‘dirty’ and open-air barakholka into newly built and comfortably roofed trade centres as an aestheticization of consumerism and a manifestation of the political attempt to register and ‘clean-up’ local trade across Russia. The chapter documents a continuous formalization of trade since the 1990s, which brought traders more onto the radar of tax and licensing authorities, but also relieved them from their previous exposure to arbitrary extortion by street-level public officials.
