170 Chapter 5
Consumption in Soviet History
Sochi represented the promise of the abundant socialist path to moder-
nity, a consumer’s Eden that became increasingly central to the Soviet proj-
ect in the post-Stalin years. Socialist consumerism had always loomed as a
key promise of the revolution, but political and economic decisions in the
post-Stalin era expanded access to consumer goods and experiences, creat-
ing in effect a new kind of consumer society.^8 Soviet postwar development
provided an opportunity for the state to reevaluate its consumption goals
and to put in place its own “consumer regime” that could be compared with
changing consumer regimes in twentieth-century Europe. Interwar Europe-
an consumption had been characterized by a “bourgeois” regime based on
small-scale retailing and a stratifi ed, class-based access to goods, but this
system was supplanted after 1945 (with active involvement by American
commercial interests) by what historian Victoria de Grazia labels a “Fordist”
consumer regime of low unit costs, standardized goods, high turnover, mar-
ket research, and consumer choice.^9
The socialist consumer regime also changed over this period. The hi-
erarchical Stalinist regime rationed access by social position: worthy citi-
zens such as party leaders and exemplary workers received special access
to goods, and indeed access defi ned status.^10 At the same time, it promoted
the notion that socialism would eventually provide abundance for all. The
meaning of “abundance,” however, remained open to debate, even if offi cials
in the Khrushchev era and beyond agreed to redirect the economy toward
the production of more consumer goods. In the 1930s abundance meant lux-
ury: the champagne and caviar once consumed only by aristocrats would
someday be available to all. A socialist form of Fordist consumption might
privilege rational, standard, and mass but without the excess attributed to the
capitalist marketplace or to aristocratic culture. Certainly design profession-
als in the 1950s emphasized an austere functionalism in the production of
goods for everyday consumption.^11
The material goods promised and produced also carried symbolic mean-
ing. Under capitalism, theorists argue, consumers purchase goods as much
for their sign value—conveying status and identities—as for their utility,- Koenker, Republic of Labor.
- Victoria de Grazia, “Changing Consumer Regimes in Europe, 1930–1970: Comparative
Perspectives on the Distribution Problem,” in Getting and Spending: European and Ameri-
can Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century , ed. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern,
and Matthias Judt (Cambridge, 1998), 59–83, and de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s
Advance through 20th-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2005). - Osokina, Za fasadom “Stalinskogo izobiliia” ; Gronow, Caviar with Champagne ; Hes-
sler, Social History of Soviet Trade. - Iurii Gerchuk, “The Aesthetics of Everyday Life in the Khrushchev Thaw in the
USSR (1954–64),” in Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War East-
ern Europe , ed. Susan E. Reid and David Crowley (Oxford, 2000), 101–132; Reid, “Khrush-
chev Modern,” 227–268.