172 Chapter 5
controversial literary works. The removal of Khrushchev and the ascendency
of Leonid Brezhnev reinforced this cultural paralysis, it is traditionally ar-
gued, as limits to free political and cultural expression became ever more
tightly drawn. The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which put an
end to that country’s experiment with an alternate form of socialism, set the
USSR on a fi rm course of tight political regimentation that endured for an-
other seventeen years, until Mikhail Gorbachev launched his multipronged
effort, perestroika, to modernize Soviet socialism.^15
The history of the Soviet economy and Soviet consumerism, however,
does not follow this periodization.^16 Khrushchev’s successors may have con-
tinued to control political expression, but they sought legitimacy through
promises to modernize the economy and to deliver material well-being. In-
stead of Khrushchev’s hare-brained schemes to exploit virgin lands and out-
produce the United States in per capita meat consumption, the technocrats
under Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin encouraged economic reform and new
ways to stimulate the economy that would fulfi ll the consumerist promise of
socialism. That path had already been laid out in 1959 with the new seven-
year plan that would emphasize the provision of consumer goods: single-
family apartments, with furniture and appliances to fi ll them. The expansion
of this socialist consumer regime offered continuing possibilities for “social
differentiation, distinction, and self-fashioning.” In fact, the high postwar
Soviet growth rates had already begun to stall by 1958, stymied by declining
rates of labor productivity and increasing ineffi ciency in the productivity of
capital.^17 Although overall output continued to increase, the rate of growth
had slowed to 2 percent a year by the end of the 1970s. The rate of growth in
personal consumption had peaked in 1958 and then began a steady decline.
The inability of the economy to provide goods and services commensurate
with expectations became evident in growing lists of defi cit commodities.
But now a mass consumer society existed, frustrated by shortages, long lines,
and the hard work of satisfying its demands through backdoor channels and
connections.^18
Focusing on leisure travel as a target of consumer choice, this chapter trac-
es changes in the consumption of the Soviet spa vacation from the mid-1950s- Polly Jones, ed., The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social
Change in the Khrushchev Era (London, 2006); Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer:
Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca, NY, 2009); Bittner, Many
Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw. - Gorsuch, All This Is Your World ; Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time ; and Susan Reid in
her series of articles. - Reid, “Khrushchev Modern,” 249 (quote); Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in
Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers (Princeton, NJ, 1974),
chap. 6; Philip Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy (London, 2003), chaps. 2–3. - Hanson, Rise and Fall , 87–88; James R. Millar, “The Little Deal: Brezhnev’s Contribu-
tion to Acquisitive Socialism,” Slavic Review 44, no. 4 (1985): 695; see Alena V. Ledeneva,
Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat , Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge, 1998),
esp. chaps. 1 and 3.