This book explores the history of private internal trade in the USSR during the NEP of the 1920s. Private traders operated in a politically hostile but economically promising environment. Their contribution to post-war reconstruction was a crucial one. An exhaustive portrayal of the markets and dimensions of private trade is contrasted with the felt anxieties of Bolsheviks concerning traders' destabilising intentions and abilities. Retrospectively, many of these apprehensions were misplaced.