About the book: 2022 / If you have read Mikhail Bulgakov's novel "The Master and Margarita", then you probably remember the scene in the capital's "Torgsin" store, located at the very end Arbat near the Garden Ring. In exchange for jewelry and currency, the magnificent store sold “fat pink salmon,” calicos, chiffons and other fashionable consumer goods and delicacies to Soviet citizens and foreigners. But did you know that in 1931–1935, one and a half thousand torgsins worked in the USSR? Gold, silver, diamonds, currency, which the Soviet people brought to Torgsin, fleeing hunger, allowed the country's leadership to buy foreign equipment for Magnitogorsk, Uralmash, Dneprostroy and other giants of the nascent Soviet industry. In the interests of industrialization, Torgsin actually legalized currency prostitution, and in the pursuit of gold, it was ahead of the main Soviet exporters of grain, timber, oil, as well as the OGPU, which confiscated currency values ​​from the population by force. The reader will learn about what happened to the gold of the Russian Empire, who invented Torgsin, how much the Ford cost, how the gold of the Spanish treasury ended up in the vaults of the State Bank in Moscow, what the precious harvest Torgsin collected and much more. Elena Osokina – Doctor of Historical Sciences, professor, author of works on the socio-economic history of the 1920s–1930s.