Bag people
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Bag people (in Russian мешочники, or "people with bags") is a term in Russian and other Slavic languages that refers to people from the cities who travel to the countryside to buy food for small scale trade or for personal consumption, often exchanging it for material goods from farmers due to collapse of the monetary system. Historically, the bag people have appeared in response to economic and political collapse that ended organized delivery and distribution of food in the cities. The phenomenon was very widespread during and soon after the Russian Revolution. It also flourished throughout Eastern Europe and Germany after the devastation of World War I. No well-known English language term for this phenomenon exists because English-speaking countries have not experienced crises that would have given rise to it.
In literature, bag people are mentioned, for example, in Remarque's The Road Back and Karel Čapek's The Absolute at Large.