From Treatment to Vacation 171or use value, inevitably contributing to production and overproduction of
goods in order that some might become the “latest thing.”^12 Rational social-
ism, however, would avoid this trap of conspicuous consumption through
the inculcation of a socialist aesthetic based on utility and simplicity of form.
Katherine Verdery argues for an even more fundamental distinction between
capitalist and socialist consumption: the tension in authoritarian socialist re-
gimes between legitimating socialist rule through redistributing things to the
people and the need to accumulate things at the center in order to maintain
power. The paradox implicit in this regime leads necessarily to the stimula-
tion of more demand than socialist economies are allowed to provide, mak-
ing the consumption of goods an act of individual self-defi nition, as under
capitalist regimes, but also an act of political self-expression.^13
In the Khrushchev era, household consumption served as a site “for the
projection of tomorrow,” writes Susan Reid: Soviet consumers acquired fur-
niture, appliances, and decoration not just for their utility but for their sym-
bolic value. “Regimes of taste,” she writes, “were a means of everyday social
positioning and hegemony in which a certain part of the increasingly mas-
sive and diverse intelligentsia assumed the prerogative to defi ne legitimate
culture.”^14 If the Stalinist consumer regime emphasized hierarchy and looked
to an egalitarian future only in promises, in the post-Stalin years, everyone,
and not just Stakhanovites, could engage with a consumer regime that offered
suffi cient abundance to permit choices and self-defi nition.
The years between the death of Stalin in 1953 and the breakup of the So-
viet Union in 1991 cover four decades, a longer span than the period between
the 1917 revolution and the end of the Stalin era. The era of Khrushchev
and the Thaw has particularly captured the attention of historians who seek
to explore the complicated and tortured response to Stalinist authoritarian-
ism. In shorthand political terms, the Thaw included the dismantling of the
Stalin-era camp system, the opening of the USSR to the outside world begin-
ning in 1955, and the relaxation of orthodox political controls over literature,
history, and many other branches of knowledge and culture. Yet the Party
remained the primary and unitary authority, and the legacy of war and Stalin-
era repression curbed expectations and instilled a deep fear of the Thaw’s re-
versal. Many scholars note the incomplete and complex nature of this “thaw”
and then observe a new freeze symbolized in 1963 by Khrushchev’s response
to an exhibition of modern art and the withdrawal of permission to publish
- Baudrillard, Consumer Society ; Douglas and Isherwood, World of Goods ; and of
course, Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class. - Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton, NJ,
1996), 26–29. - Reid, “Khrushchev Modern,” 243; see also Susan E. Reid, “The Khrushchev Kitchen:
Domesticating the Scientifi c-Technical Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary History 40,
no. 2 (2005): 289–316; and Susan E. Reid, “This is Tomorrow! Becoming a Consumer in the
Soviet Sixties,” in The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World , ed. Anne E.
Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (Bloomington, IN, 2013), 25–65.