111 To understand popular reactions to the constitution and how workers and peasants felt during the recurring discussion sessions, let us look at the economic context of everyday life and the peasants’ mood. The few descriptions of the 1936 economy existing in historiogra- phy focus mostly on the macro process, which presents positive growth after the strains of the frst Five-Year Plan. At the grassroots, however, the economic circumstances did not look so optimistic. After a good har- vest in 1933 when the famine receded, relative economic improvements made it possible to end the rationing of meat, fsh, sugar, potatoes, and fats on 1 October 1935 and of manufactured goods on 1 January 1936. Naum Jasny called the period of 1934–1936 “three good years.” Khlevniuk wrote that in 1934, Stalin initiated the shift from “leftist” extremes of rationing as the norm to an emphasis on trade and a mone- tary economy (Khlevniuk 2010, pp. 248–9). The economic (and political) landscape in 1936 is characterized by scholars as ambivalent and inconsistent. For villagers, it looked quite different than for workers and urbanites; for Muscovites, everyday life was not as hard as for the citizens of the small town in the Urals where Andrei Arzhilovsky lived. These constituencies saw the economy differ- ently, because of diverse state norms of supply. The frst half of the year was easier than the second. State statistics were more optimistic than conversations in the food lines. The British Foreign Of fce, using scarce sources available to diplomats residing in Moscow, reported on the CHAPTER 8 The Economic Condition at the Grassroots © The Author(s) 2018 O. Velikanova, Mass Political Culture Under Stalinism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78443-4_8