“Who wants to be the thimble?” I asked. The class, which had been rather quiet, began buzzing as students—particularly those from the United States—reached for their favorite game pieces. Several international students looked around blankly, wondering what kind of board game asked its players to pose as irons and boots. The more seasoned players quickly brought them into the fold, describing past Monopoly games that stretched into weeks or dissolved into epic feuds. Students regaled each other with stories about notorious uncles who embezzled from the bank and little sisters who surreptitiously nudged their game piece a few squares ahead when they thought no one was looking. “Sheltering in place” during COVID, it seems, had inspired more than a few family games of Monopoly.
Determined to reignite their interest and make the tragedy of privatization meaningful for them, I proposed a game.
I was just glad to hear them talking. It was week three of my undergraduate seminar on post-Soviet Russia, and I was on the verge of losing them. This was an introductory course with no prerequisites in Soviet history, and the learning curve in weeks one and two had been steep. Fundamental information about the Soviet Union, including what socialism was and why it collapsed, swirled uneasily in my students’ heads. They had enrolled in my course hoping to hear about glitzy oligarchs and Kremlin intrigue, but they found themselves—like Gorbachev—mired in the tedium of the Congress of People’s Deputies. Our class discussions grew halting as they struggled to wrap their tongues around “perestroika” and “glasnost’.” Today’s class was our first foray into the privatization of the socialist economy. While I was prepping, I realized that the reading I had assigned was dry, technical, and would be a slog to unpack. It was time for something hands-on! Determined to reignite their interest and make the tragedy of privatization meaningful for them, I proposed a game.
“Why do you think we are playing Monopoly?” I asked them. “To teach us about capitalism?” one student suggested. “Yes,” I replied, “but this version has a few tweaks.” Twenty pairs of eyes flitted down to the gameboard. The names of Soviet companies had replaced “Marvin Gardens” and “Park Place.” The spaces for utilities had been covered up, and the currency had been converted to rubles. “Passing Go” now meant losing 20 rubles due to inflation, but jail—a mainstay of western capitalism and Soviet socialism—was still there.
In groups of five, each with its own gameboard, students elected one member to be the (state) banker. They each received 200 rubles in starter funds and—following the privatization plan executed by the Yeltsin administration—a voucher for 10,000 rubles. Next, I instructed the banker to give an extra 10,000 rubles to whoever had selected the top hat game piece and 5,000 extra to the player with the race car. I added another wrinkle: only the race car and top hat could draw from Community Chest. The rest of the players had to try their luck with Chance. The deck was stacked against them from the start.
We rolled the calendar back to 1992. They tossed the dice and started to play. Basic properties, like the Mikoyan Shoe Plant or the Novosibirsk Chocolate Factory, cost 10,000 rubles to buy with a “rent” (landing penalty) of 100 rubles. More elite properties like the AvtoVAZ car plant cost 20,000 rubles to buy, 200 to “rent.”
In the first round, the unlucky students who had seized the thimbles, dogs, and boots and who were financially disadvantaged as a result, clung to their vouchers. Afraid to lose what little they had, they avoided buying anything. Even so, they soon landed on a “mafia tribute” square, passed “go,” or drew a Chance card, which depleted their funds. “Because of inflation, your monthly wages are only worth half as much. Give 50 rubles to the top hat,” one orange card instructed. Another announced: “The local governor is excising a new tax” or “Currency devaluation! Give up 50% of your money to the state bank.” Meanwhile, the top hats and race cars purchased properties quickly and often, egged on by the Community Chest: “Your daughter marries a mafia boss, so you no longer have to pay when you land on a tribute square!” Another card proclaimed: “Your cooperative has formed a joint-stock company and now has the chance to sell oil abroad! Give the state bank 20 rubles for the license and collect 500 rubles from the foreign bank.” So it went. By the time the players completed one sojourn around the board, at least one of the poorer game pieces had been bankrupted and eliminated from each group. Others survived but had to pawn their vouchers for cash.
The race cars and top hats snatched up Yukos and Aeroflot, feeling what it was like to buy political power and obtain unparalleled wealth.
In round two, the clock rolled forward to 1993, and I introduced a foreign banker (played by myself), who had much larger sums of cash to dispense to elite players. I thrust new Community Chest cards into the deck, like: “The ruble is in free fall. You transfer 200 rubles to the foreign bank, where it is converted into dollars. As the ruble falls further, you make a 100 rubles profit. Collect that from the foreign bank.” More boots and doggies declared bankruptcy, while toppers and roadsters prospered. For round three, we fast-forwarded to the year 1995, and I uncovered the utility squares on the gameboard to reveal major oil and gas companies, now for sale. “To raise funds for his 1996 presidential bid,” I explained, President Yeltsin is asking for a loan, putting up these companies as collateral. If you land one, you can buy a controlling share by paying 2,000 rubles to the state bank.” The race cars and top hats snatched up Yukos and Aeroflot, feeling what it was like to buy political power and obtain unparalleled wealth through Yeltsin’s “loans for shares” scheme. Sly smiles spread across their faces; they had carte blanche in a world where everything was for sale.
During round four, my plan was for the foreign bank to cut deals with the owners of big oil and gas, but no thimbles, dogs, or boots made it out of round three. The room grew thick with frustration and the games dissolved. As the students began returning the game pieces to their boxes, we started to discuss what had transpired. The first comment several students made was how much shorter this version, which I dubbed Monopoliia, was than Monopoly. Many remarked on how unfair it was to start with such an uneven playing field, frustrated that they had different amounts of money and unequal access to financial opportunities, credit, and foreign markets from the outset. “Were you excited to purchase something when I first handed you your voucher?” I asked. “Yes, but I had to cash it in just to get out of mafia tribute,” one thimble protested, “I never got a chance to invest it.”
Many remarked on how unfair it was to start with such an uneven playing field.
For the oligarchs (top hats) and New Russians (race cars), the thrill of easy money made them buy and risk more in each round. All they had to do was dabble in currency speculation or arbitrage; they did not even need to build hotels, as the traditional version of the game instructed. “Why didn’t you invest some of your profits in your companies with hotels?” I asked the top hats. “Why bother?” was the gist of their replies. They had learned firsthand how and why the post-socialist Russian economy was driven by capital, not by production. So the Soviet rust belt was born.
Moreover, Yeltsin’s loophole economy, represented as a “Community Chest,” allowed social elites to avoid legal and criminal obstacles, like tax-hiking governors and avid crime bosses. For the thimbles and shoes in this unjust world, there was no social safety net. Currency devaluation, unpaid wages, and skyrocketing prices ate up their reserve.
In three short rounds, Monopoliia taught my students what the lumbering article I assigned explained over 25 dense pages: during the 1990s, the highly anticipated “magic of the market” failed to materialize in Russia. Privatization of state assets brought neither democratization nor a redistribution of wealth. Those who were well connected or affluent from the start became richer; the poorer never had a chance. Inequality only grew with each new round, each new set of economic opportunities. With this lively experience under their belts, the students turned to the assigned reading, the policies it described already concretized, even personalized for them. “How do you think your person”—represented by your game piece—“might have felt about capitalism and the promise of democracy after these tumultuous three years covered by the game?” I asked. Hands shot up. The thimbles were deeply resentful, the top hats giddy with power. The game had conjured within them an ability to imagine and empathize with a range of Russians’ reactions to the economic crisis. It kindled the students’ powers of historical imagination and empathy.
The board game was also a Soviet pastime, one that similarly fed expectations about ‘the magic of the market’ and allowed people in the USSR to play at capitalism.
Researchers like Jessup Michael, Catherine Coghlan, and Denise Huggins have explored how playing Monopoly can shift the players’ senses of equity and stratification. Since its first Depression-era edition in 1935, Philip E. Orbanes notes, “Monopoly has presented capitalism as a fantasy dreamland. It encourages a sense of superiority in the player who accumulates property, wealth, and power until everyone else is broken.” But, as Mary Pilon has recently shown, the game’s original though uncredited inventor created it to teach about exploitative landlords in New York City. An afternoon game of Monopoly becomes a romp through the triumphs and tragedies of capitalism. And this was true for Soviet people too.
When I made my crude, glue-and-scissors version, Monopoliia, I had no idea that playing the board game was also a Soviet pastime, one that similarly fed expectations about “the magic of the market” and allowed people in the USSR to play at capitalism before such experiments became a matter of state policy. In 1988, under the liberalizing reforms of perestroika, Parker Brothers exported to the USSR a “limited edition” (though this is misspelled in Russian on the box), “Moscow Version” of the game called Monopoliia. Parker Brothers did not change the rules or the eclectic assortment of tokens for a Soviet audience, but it did add one new game piece: a stereotypical Russian bear. In this version, the currency was in rubles, the properties were mostly in Moscow, and “Community Chest” was rebranded the “Societal Fund.” But the goal was still greed: “Become the richest player by buying, selling, and renting property,” the instructions commanded Soviet players, endorsing actions that had been vilified and criminalized in their society for over seventy years.
Monopoliia was a hit. It spawned several Soviet imitators such as Manager, created by the cooperative Petropan in 1988, and NEP (New Economic Policy), created by the cooperative Osen’ in 1989. These enterprising cooperatives were the type of private companies that were legalized during perestroika and that often became the bases for future oligarchs’ multi-billion-dollar enterprises.
That a socialist country would import this game and allow its citizens to play it speaks volumes about the ideological disintegration that Gorbachev’s perestroika unleashed. But, of course, there were cracks in the dam well before Gorbachev opened the flood gates. In the early 1980s, a few Monopoly sets arrived in the USSR and Eastern Bloc through consulates and foreign visitors, and the game garnered a mystique as a highly coveted, forbidden treasure from the west. As Roman Abramov has shown, it became popular for young Soviets who had heard of the game to make their own versions to play with friends—a kind of samigrat. They developed their own rules and titles—some renamed the game “United States”—and drew what they imagined American greenbacks looked like to use as currency. Some players, woefully ignorant of American placenames, made their gameboards international, such that moving from space to space also provided a virtual way to travel abroad—another fantasy route out of the Soviet system. Later, when these youngsters got their hands on the officially imported version of Monopoliia or the locally produced imitators, they were often disappointed that they were narrowly focused on a national, as opposed to global, financial market. Whether imported, produced domestically, or homemade, all versions of the game reinforced the dream of capitalism in the USSR.
Winning Monopoly, Abramov points out, is based on a combination of randomness and rational action. My homespun Monopoliia placed a far greater emphasis on chance than on skill to give my students a sense of the disappointment and helplessness that Yeltsin’s “shock therapy” unleashed on working and middle-class Russians.
All told, we only played Monopoliia for about fifteen minutes that day. This experiment was short-lived, but it opened my eyes to a world of pedagogical possibilities. Next time, I will give the class some context on the history of this board game in the United States, Soviet Union, and Russia, asking them to think critically about how the act of playing a game can shape one’s sense of reality. I will assign each game piece—the thimble, the top hat, and so on—a specific historical personage that matched its social status. Or, I will ask my students to invent historically plausible biographies for their game tokens. I used the game as a one-time exercise but, looking back, I could have expanded it by creating more players—“red managers,” “young reformers” from Yeltsin’s cabinet, and foreign businessmen. I could have introduced more complex financial opportunities to the top hats and race cars, such as allowing them to form joint-stock companies. I could have added in new rounds with events like the war in Chechnya, the parliamentary elections, or Putin’s anti-monopoly laws intended to rein in oligarchs. Finally, the game could also be used to teach about nostalgia for the Soviet Union in Russia today. In 2021, Hasbro, which acquired Parker Brothers, released a Monopoly SSSR edition in Russia. Alongside the iconic Mr. Monopoly (aka “Uncle Moneybags”) caricature, Yuri Gagarin smiles up from the center of the gameboard. The board itself features Soviet landmarks like Hotel Rossiia and Luzhniki Stadium. But the goal is still to bankrupt the other players. The eclectic tokens—including the plucky thimble—remain the same with one important change. Instead of the bear, the game includes a tiny Gagarin waving from inside his cosmonaut suit. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to be an iron when they could be the first man in space.
How can the act of playing a game shape one’s sense of reality?
I now see the potential of turning this into a month-long, even semester-long game in the style of Reacting to the Past, famously created by historian Mark C. Carnes. Still, even as a short exercise, D.I.Y. Monopoliia is an efficient, effective way to present uninitiated students to what some Russians called “prikhvatizatsiia” (grabbing) rather than “privatizatsiia” (privatization). There is so much interest in contemporary Russia today. Students are asking: “how did Russia’s politics and economics end up this way?” Monopoliia is an engaging way to help them begin their journey toward understanding. Plus, there is a new movie in the works from producers Lionsgate and Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap. It promises to lampoon Monopoly as it did Barbie. Monopoly will surely spark more interest and political commentary among our students in the years to come.
Alexis Peri is an Associate Professor of History, specializing in Russian, Soviet, Cold-War, and women’s history. She has published The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad (Harvard University Press, 2017) as well as articles in Kritika, The Russian Review, and Diplomatic History. Her new book, Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women, comes out with Harvard University Press in October 2024. Peri teaches courses on Soviet, Russian, American, and wartime history, and she is the recipient of the Gitner Family Family Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, conferred by the History Department in 2019, and the Metcalf Award for Teaching Excellence, conferred by Boston University in 2024.
