
Introduction: Pleasures in Socialism?
David Crowley and Susan E. Reid
Command Happiness and Pleasures Taken
What is the place of pleasure in socialism? More precisely, what can a study
of pleasure contribute to our historical understanding of “real existing socialism”
as experienced in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe between
the end of the Second World War and the crumbling of the Soviet
Bloc? After all, these are best known as societies of shortage in which the
state exercised “dictatorship over needs.”1
To make pleasure and,specifically,
leisure and luxury the focus of a study of state socialist society and culture
might seem a perverse or, at best, trivial undertaking.
This was not,however,a world without pleasure.Nor was it one in which
authority eschewed interest in its production and modes of consumption.
Pleasure was integral to the utopian promise of communism, based as it
was on notions of future abundance and fulfillment. But to speak of “socialist
pleasures,” as if such pleasures as were taken reproduced the state’s
ideology or were the direct and intended product of planning, is problematic.
Soviet musicals of the Stalin era such as Grigorii Aleksandrov’s Spring
(Vesna, 1947) were, of course, intentionally amusing, complete with song
and dance routines, glamour, and spectacle, even as they projected messages
about “politically correct” behavior or the moral superiority of socialism
over capitalism. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, such cinematic pleasures
were supplemented by televisual ones. Soap operas set in supermarkets and
panel-housing estates, as well as spy thrillers and detective series, engaged
 david crowley and susan e. reid
the free time and fantasy of citizens of the Bloc. Although ethical, social,
and ideological messages of enlightenment continued to be woven into
popular entertainment, it is debatable to what extent the pleasure it gave
was “socialist” in the sense that the viewer derived his or her pleasure from
the ideological content.2
Pleasure is an elusive phenomenon. As an emotional state, it is seemingly
immaterial and ahistorical. For the purpose of analysis in the specific
conditions of Eastern European state socialism, we may draw a provisional
distinction between happiness and joy, on the one hand, and pleasure and
enjoyment, on the other. The citizens of the Soviet Union and its allied
states were represented in official ideology as the most joyful people on
Earth. Optimism was a statutory requirement of socialist realist aesthetics,
as numerous novels, films, and paintings of the Stalin era exemplified.3
Conversely, pessimism became a crime against progress. Advancing toward
utopia, Eastern Bloc states claimed to be fulfilling the Enlightenment pursuit
of happiness through the exercise of reason. In the name of achieving
the greatest happiness for the greatest number in the radiant future, the
official value system generally emphasized asceticism and self-denial in the
present,along with industrial production,international security,and the rule
of rationality and planning.Joy was,in this context,a kind of abstracted,disembodied
higher goal. Meanwhile, the satisfaction of everyday, individual,
and ephemeral needs associated with bodily gratification was often inadequately
provided for by the party-state, which perpetuated—and imposed
on the masses—the revolutionary intelligentsia’s traditional disdain for “petit
bourgeois” material comfort and suspicion of sensuality.
The image of compulsory happiness,official optimism,and highly regulated
leisure—which was both part of the authorized self-representation
of these regimes and often taken at face value by outside observers—cannot
tell us what people actually did or how they experienced such places
and events. The time off work granted by the state was used not—or not
solely—for demonstrations of loyalty to the regime and accession to its
definition of joy, or for purposeful recreation of body and mind. It was also
spent in less edifying pleasures, such as feasting and drinking with friends
and family,for indulgence,play,relaxation,and enjoyment.The spaces given
by the state for the people’s constructive recreation were also used in ways
that were not necessarily coterminous with their intended purpose. Take
the Parks of Culture and Rest, for example, an institution laced with lofty,
civilizing ideals introduced in Moscow in the 1920s and brought to the new
People’s Republics of Central Europe in the course of their Sovietization
as evidence of progress in the late 1940s.4
In the more remote regions of
Moscow’s Gorky Park couples would roam for illicit sex, or a group of men
introduction 
might share a bottle of vodka. Meanwhile, Black Sea sanatoriums, intended
for healthy rest, were associated in popular mythology in the Soviet Union
with sexual adventure.5
While happiness and pleasure were different, they were not necessarily
mutually exclusive. After all, participation in highly valorized activities
such as a May Day parade or labor competition did not necessarily preclude
pleasure,even if the pleasures taken did not coincide with the official inten-
tion.6
Pleasure,whether sanctioned or not,cannot be compelled,planned,or
even fully regulated.Whatever the conditions and the resources at hand,it is
always produced in and by the subject.It can even be found in the most desperate
of circumstances and in the smallest of things.Ethnography provides
examples of the small pleasures that may be found in hard times. Nancy
Ries, in her study of Russian conversation during the period of perestroika,
describes the perverse pleasures to be found in shopping even in conditions
of shortage. She cites one Muscovite who loved “the peacefulness of standing
in line,and the thrill of maybe getting something at the end.”7
However
exceptional voices of this kind might be, they remind us that attitudes toward
such matters as poverty or income distribution are subjective.8
Young people partying in the woods, Soviet Union, 1963
burtglinn(magnum)
 david crowley and susan e. reid
Pleasure, understood in these terms, also has the potential to cast light
on one of the much-discussed and most problematic conceptual frameworks
used in many analyses of Eastern European life under communist
rule: the public-private dichotomy.9
Control over one’s environment and
its boundaries, access to secluded space or mobility—a separate apartment,
a dacha, a car—which allowed one to choose the pleasure of one’s own
company, were not, in themselves, guarantees of pleasure.10
But their denial
could cause distress. Moreover, pleasurable withdrawal might take place
within the most public of settings—in the Parks of Culture and Rest or
Black Sea sanatoriums as suggested above—or in the darkened space of the
cinema while the newsreels played.
To prioritize the concept of pleasure is to insist on some degree of agency
on the part of the subject. Pleasure—as a concept that encapsulates voluntary
and sometimes irrational and unregulated behavior and attitudes—emphasizes
subjective experience. Understood in these terms, pleasure could
be a wayward aspect of everyday life in an environment that claimed to be
governed by collective reason and consciousness rather than spontaneity.
The fantastic,psychological,and physiological aspects of pleasure have been
emphasized by many writers in terms of the “pleasure principle” or “jouis-
sance.”11
Typically, such psychosexual interpretive schemata represent seemingly
universal experiences taking place within abstracted, even ahistorical
bodies.There may be merits in stressing the common dimensions of pleasure
across geography and time.But history requires historicity.Accordingly,the
contributors to this volume were invited to explore two fields in which pleasure
was both materialized and subject to wide public scrutiny: leisure and
luxury. Our focus is on the concrete historical conditions in which pleasure
was produced and taken, and on the specific historical practices and experiences
of pleasure in postwar Eastern European state socialism.
How to historicize pleasure? And to what sources should the historian
turn in order to write its histories? It need hardly be said that fleeting pleasures
such as a summer night in a park orchestrated around a bottle of vodka
leave little immediate material or textual trace beyond, perhaps, a few glass
shards upon whose ritual significance some future archaeologist might ponder.Thus
they mark a cognitive limit for the historian. From the outset it is
important to stress that the ways, places, and times in which pleasure could
be taken during the historical period of state socialism in Europe were delimited
or structured,if not determined,by material,spatial,ideological,and
legislative frameworks. Production priorities, the economic plan, allocation
of space, pricing policies, the length of the working day, the pensionable
retirement age, all set limits on what pleasures could or could not be taken,
where and when, and, ultimately, on who could enjoy them. How citizens
introduction 
chose to spend their leisure time or consume luxury commodities were matters
of considerable state interest,not least in terms of how to manage these
activities. If pleasures could not be dictated, they were nonetheless subject
to regulation and constraint.Legislation,pricing structures and tax regimes,
authorized discourses, infrastructure, and access to material equipment or
space—whether in the form of sports facilities, cinemas, or countryside for
camping, rambling, and hunting—all combined to define what were (or
were not) “legitimate” or “normal” forms of pleasure. Other pleasures had
to be taken against the grain or gleaned in the interstices of the working
day, involving significant resourcefulness and sometimes the transgression
of limits that were set in law.
To acquire the material resources of pleasure frequently entailed activity
in the second economy, since this was in many cases the only source of
commodities and services that were in short supply or disregarded by the
central planning agencies.12
It also required the careful cultivation and deployment
of social networks, as well as the appropriation of time from the
workplace or from sanctioned forms of leisure.13
The pleasures which official
discourses defined as “legitimate”or “illegitimate”were not constant sets
of artifacts and activities; the content of these categories varied significantly
in different parts of the Bloc and changed over the course of its forty-year
history. The interests and desires of ordinary citizens were also subject to
change. Although not necessarily directly determined by official sanctions
and policies, they varied in response to evolving material and social conditions
and shifting horizons of knowledge and expectation.
How, then, to gauge the effects of this fugitive phenomenon, pleasure?
The categories of leisure and luxury can serve, we propose, as two such
indices. Leisure and luxury constituted key contexts in which pleasure was
apprehended.Moreover,leisure and luxury have left traces that can be written
into history, in the form of artifacts, spaces, discourses, and legislation.
Viewed abstractly,luxury and leisure seem like distinct analytical categories.
But considered in terms of experience and material traces, they often overlap.
Tobacco, alcohol, pornography, and television—the subjects of some
of the essays in this book—are all commodities that have been resources
for leisure, consumed at moments of rest. At the same time, they have, in
different times and places, all been classed as luxuries in the sense that they
serve wants rather than meeting needs—concepts which are inevitably understood
in terms of, and are contingent upon, the sumptuary, moral, and
ideological frameworks of the societies in which they have been produced
and consumed.This corresponds to a classical definition of luxury advanced
in many analyses from Plato onward,according to which distinctions can be
drawn between necessary and unnecessary desires.14
Moreover, such com-
 david crowley and susan e. reid
modities point to a further feature of luxury that has been described by
Colin Campbell as the capacity to promote “sensuous or pleasurable experience.”
As he points out, mundane things can become luxuries in particular
conditions: “One may contrast a ‘luxury item’ with a ‘basic necessity,’ but
to ‘luxuriate,’ for example in a hot bath, is to contrast a rich sensuous and
pleasuring experience with an ordinary, unstimulating or unpleasant one.”15
In other words, ostensibly ordinary things, consumed in moments of leisure
or in conditions that render them special, can produce a heightened
sense of pleasure.
In this volume, the authors reflect on the ways in which leisure and luxury
were produced in the conditions of Soviet-style socialism between the late
1940s and the end of communist rule.They do so in terms of the dynamic
relations between ideology, policy, and the material environment, on one
hand, and the range of practices that characterized the consumption of leisure
and luxury, on the other. Each essay approaches a particular national
setting, for it is necessary to be attentive to ways in which the historical
experience of leisure and luxury was shaped by varying historical and cultural
experience, as well as by diverse material conditions across the Bloc
that was formed after the Second World War. Only by bringing together
scholarship that considers the historical experience of the different societies
are we able to grasp both the differences and the similarities between these
contexts.The contributions also represent different academic traditions, including
anthropology,social history,and cultural studies.These fields,while
distinguished by their preferred sources, concerns, and methods, share a
common interest in the ways that the broad forces of ideology as well as
economic and technical change are registered in everyday life. They also
share a concern with the relation between social, economic, and ideological
structures and the agency of the individual or social group in the production
of their own pleasures. In so doing, many of our contributors have developed
approaches to their subject matter that engage with subjectivity.Thus,
György Péteri, a historian, has turned to an unorthodox body of materials
to document a largely unrecorded history: that of elite hunting practices in
Hungary in the 1960s. His sources include snapshots from his own family
albums, that is, from a “private”resource that provides evidence that cannot
be found in the official, public record of Kádár’s Hungary. Narcis Tulbure
and Anna Tikhomirova, in their chapters, combine anthropological approaches
to their historical subject matter—the production and consumption
of alcohol in Ceauşescu’s Romania, and the meanings attached to fur
garments in Russia since the 1960s.Through oral history and ethnographic
interviews, they reveal how people engaged in consumption practices that
introduction 
were disparaged or proscribed.Writing history through testimonials of this
kind is not without its oft-noted limitations, which are magnified by the
continuing controversy attached to the memory of and, in particular, nostalgia
for socialism in the region.16
This notwithstanding, it is important to
gather and reflect on such unrecorded sources while the people involved are
still alive and their memories can be recorded.
To historicize pleasure the authors were also encouraged to treat things—
or what is sometimes called “material culture”—as an important category
of historical evidence in its own right. Objects are far from mute.They are
capable of embodying values in their forms and signifying meanings in their
usage.17
Things can “speak”even when the people who use, inhabit, or even
destroy them are silenced. This book is thus, in part, a contribution to the
writing of what anthropologist Victor Buchli has called “the archaeology
of socialism.”18
In this regard, perhaps a lesson can be learned from Slavoj
Žižek. Power is inscribed with contradictions, which he describes as “imps
of perversity.”19
That which is ostensibly repressed by an “ideological edifice”
returns, not as political rhetoric nor even in the parapraxes of speech,
but in the form of things; it is articulated, that is, in “the externality of its
material existence.”20
The artifacts and spaces of leisure and luxury in the
Bloc were just such “imps of perversity” that materialize repressed contradictions.
In the historical and concrete manifestations of leisure and luxury,
many of the paradoxes of state socialism are revealed.In this book,these include
state-published pornography in East Germany,a society which trumpeted
the liberation of women; “people’s cars”which could only be acquired
with extraordinary investment of time and money; and tiers of Soviet shops
which served different classes of consumers in a “classless society.” Such
materializations of socialist leisure and socialist luxury can be read to reveal
the particular form of modern civilization that constituted the Bloc.
State Socialism Found Wanting: Shortage and Consumption
The dominant paradigm for the analysis of ordinary people’s everyday experience—both
material and subjective—of state socialism has not been
luxury, leisure, and pleasure, but on the contrary, need, command, and shortage.
Reports of life in the Eastern Bloc have conventionally been framed
in terms of uniformity, grayness, and the ubiquitous queue.21
These themes
were not the unique property of right-wing Cold War hawks. They have
been core preoccupations of most writing on the Bloc,including the analyses
produced by commentators on the left from the 1970s and,in recent years,by
social historians writing after the collapse of Soviet socialism.We need only
glance at the titles of some of the most important studies to confirm this:
 david crowley and susan e. reid
Ferenc Fehér, Ágnes Heller, and György Márkus’s Dictatorship over Needs
(1983); János Kornai’s Economics of Shortage (1980); Julie Hessler’s innovative
dissertation, “Culture of Shortages: A Social History of Soviet Trade,
1917–1953” (1996); Ina Merkel’s Utopia and Need (Utopie und Bedürfnis)
(1999); and Mariusz Jastrząb’s Empty Shelves: The Problem in the Provision
of Everyday Goods in Poland, 1949–1956 (Puste półki: Problem zaopatrzenia
ludności w artykuły powszechnego użytku w Polsce w latach 1949–1956)
(2004).22
It is axiomatic in much of this scholarship that consumption in
state socialism was subordinated to the requirements of heavy industry and
defense. Shortage and need have been deployed to explain a remarkable
range of phenomena, thus becoming a governing paradigm of analyses of
Soviet-style socialism and its collapse. In their controversial 1983 intervention,
Fehér, Heller, and Márkus presented short supply and high demand
not merely as incidental effects of state planning and its inefficiencies but as
systemic instruments of control that maintained the hierarchies and structures
of power.23
Others have claimed shortage as a determinant of Eastern
Bloc aesthetics, arguing, for example, that the modernist Existenzminumum
apartments of the Khrushchev era owe their “efficient” forms and proportions
to attempts to manage deficits.24
Shortage has been considered by
some as the source of social anomie and by others as a key ingredient in the
social glue which bound the people together in opposition to the state.25
Our purpose is not to replace the gray-tinted glasses of Cold War observers
or indigenous dissidents by rosy retro-spectacles. The persistence
or—in the case of the more industrialized Central and Eastern European
states, which before World War II had enjoyed a high standard of living—
the return of shortage cannot be denied or ignored. The problem of “deficit”
goods (those in inadequate supply) was encountered by the majority of
citizens living in the Bloc in the course of everyday life. The indignity of
having to buy toilet paper on the black market in Poland in the 1980s or the
disappearance of meat from Soviet shops was amplified by the increasingly
surreal claims of progress made by the state.26
Ordinary citizens coped as
best they could through various tactics: by always going out armed with a
“just in case” bag (avoska in Russian) for chance purchases;27
by hoarding
and home-preserving; by hand-making and adapting; and by exchanging
goods or services and exercising blat (pull) in the shadow economy.28
Consumers
also expressed their daily frustrations in various ways, ranging from
carefully phrased petitions addressed to official institutions to explosive outbursts
of rage.29
Dissatisfaction with the low purchasing power of wages as
well as with the uncertain supply of the most basic staple goods occasionally
erupted into angry demonstrations, notably in East Germany and in Plzeň,
introduction 
Czechoslovakia, in 1953, Novocherkassk in southern Russia in 1962, or
the Hunger Marches in Łódż in 1981.30
Regarding a world where people
took to the streets to protest the unavailability of bread or price increases
for staples such as meat or milk, and where such protests were brutally
repressed, leisure and luxury may seem a misguided and historically irresponsible
focus for analysis.
Yet there is no shortage of evidence that luxury goods and modern forms
of leisure were produced and enjoyed in the Soviet Bloc.Sometimes luxuries
were even produced in excess of demand and at the expense of necessities,
creating the paradox of a glut of luxuries in what is often referred to as a
shortage economy.31
The consumption and gradual redefinition of luxury,
along with access to particular forms of leisure, not only by a privileged few
but increasingly by the masses, together mark one of the most fundamental
yet still widely overlooked historical changes that took place in the period
studied in this volume: beginning in the late 1950s and 1960s,the countries
of socialist Eastern Europe became mass consumer societies. The process
was not inexorable, nor was the pace uniform across the Bloc; by the end of
the 1960s, the East Germans, Hungarians, and Czechs, as well as citizens
in nonaligned Yugoslavia, were coming to enjoy the reputation of being the
most affluent citizens of state socialism (particularly in comparison with
their comrades in the central Asian Soviet republics).
By the late 1970s the transition had taken place even in Soviet Russia.
For wide and growing sections of the population, having a dacha or chata,
having the leisure time to enjoy a holiday there,and possessing a car to drive
there, became “reasonable” expectations.32
Likewise, wearing fashionable
clothes or perfume, dining out in restaurants under gilded chandeliers, and
celebrating with champagne—once the preserve of the rich and privileged
few—came to seem normal aspirations for the many by the 1970s, that is,
“common”or “democratic luxuries”for special occasions,if not for every day.
Moreover, entirely new categories of goods and experiences—televisions,
private automobiles, refrigerators, foreign holidays—began to be acquired
and enjoyed by ordinary citizens.33
Can the existence, indeed, the centrally planned production of such
commodities and services simply be dismissed as tokens of a Potemkin
modernity, that is, as ideological facades that obscured the “true” nature of
socialist rule dominated by austerity and work? Such characterizations have
had the effect of maintaining unassailed a constitutive Cold War distinction,
according to which Soviet-type societies continue to function as the
antithesis of Western modernity. If mass consumerism is a—or perhaps
the—defining aspect of modernity in the capitalist West, as many scholars
 david crowley and susan e. reid
concur,the socialist Other in the East was excluded a priori from this experience:
it was tacitly assumed that communist countries could not, by definition,
be consumer societies.34
Leisure and luxury have thus been at once accommodated
and marginalized within a conceptual apparatus that excludes
state socialism from modernity. For the purpose of analysis, in the following
section we will distinguish two chief characterizations of leisure and luxury
which have effectively underpinned Western Cold War paradigms for understanding
life in Eastern Bloc societies: first, as a privilege reserved for an
elite which, as a correspondent of shortage, maintained social hierarchies
Window-shopping in Warsaw in 1960
STOLICAmagazinecover,
introduction 
and relationships of domination; and second, as a safety valve or palliative
that served to maintain the status quo.
Privileges and Palliatives
Luxury, insofar as its existence in state socialism has been addressed at all,
has primarily been characterized in terms of privilege enjoyed by the ruling
elite at the expense of the majority. Such representations have often been
sharply polemical, written by the enemies of communism or by left-wing
critics of the existing socialist regimes. Writing in 1936, Leon Trotsky in
The Revolution Betrayed identified the formation of an elite class in Stalin’s
Russia marked by privileged access to consumer goods:
One of the very clear, not to say defiant, manifestations of inequality
is the opening in Moscow and other big cities of special stores with
high-quality articles under the very expressive,although not very Russian,
designation of “Luxe.” At the same time ceaseless complaints of
mass robbery in the food shops of Moscow and the provinces, mean
that foodstuffs are adequate only for the minority . . .
Granted that margarine and makhorka [cheap tobacco] are today
unhappy necessities. Still it is useless to boast and ornament reality.
Limousines for the “activists,” fine perfumes for “our women,” margarine
for the workers, stores “de luxe”for the gentry, a look at delicacies
through the store windows for the plebs—such socialism cannot but
seem to the masses a new re-facing of capitalism, and they are not far
wrong. On a basis of “generalized want,” the struggle for the means
of subsistence threatens to resurrect “all the old crap,” and is partially
resurrecting it at every step.35
The most strident accusations of communist avarice often came from
revisionist Marxists. Identifying what he called “the new class,” in 1959
former high-ranking Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas wrote that “in
Communism, power or politics is the ideal of those who have the desire
or the prospect of living as parasites at the expense of others.”36
Similarly,
a former Polish United Workers’ Party member and latterly a strong critic
of the regime, Kazimierz Brandys, writing in 1980, the year of Solidarity’s
sharp rise in Poland, identified the spread of what he ironically dubbed
“classless luxury.”37
The private villas, hunting grounds, swimming pools,
and exquisite kitchens acquired by the ruling cadres at the expense of the
majority were material evidence of acute social distinctions in what was
supposed to be a classless society.
 david crowley and susan e. reid
Privilege has also been a key analytical tool of historical analyses of
social stratification in Soviet-type societies. Vera Dunham, in her pioneering
study of Soviet literature in the late Stalin period, coined the term
“Big Deal” to describe the tacit contract between the regime and technical
specialists and senior managers in the hungry years after 1945. Under the
unspoken terms of the Big Deal, the regime agreed to provide this vital
group with material comforts in return for supporting its efforts to build
socialism, for “loyalty to the leader, unequivocal nationalism, reliable hard
work, and professionalism.”38
Thus a narrow tier came to enjoy concessions
unavailable to the broad masses, such as spacious single-family apartments,
housemaids, access to a chauffeur-driven car, and free trips to Black Sea
sanatoriums. The Big Deal was a symptom of a larger cultural turn in the
Soviet Union that had begun in the mid-1930s but which was consolidated
after the war, whereby social stability was valued over the Leninist project
of social transformation, and the private interests of a few were indulged at
the expense of the living standards of the many.39
One of the important contrasts between the Stalin years and the Khrushchev
period,both in the Soviet Union and in its Eastern European satellites,
is the way in which the needs of the majority began to be addressed.A crisis
of legitimacy followed Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation
of his “excesses,” manifested as a wave of anger and criticism that climaxed
in the Hungarian Uprising.In response,the post-Stalinist regimes throughout
the Bloc extended what are conventionally described as “concessions”to
their populations, seeing improvements in living conditions as a means to
shore up support and reclaim legitimacy. Khrushchev and his allies in the
Kremlin interpreted the causes of the Polish and Hungarian uprisings not
primarily as political demands for greater personal freedom but as protests
against poor living standards, and feared that mass disorder could erupt in
the Soviet Union, too, for the same reasons.40
The events of 1956 in the
satellites thus lent added urgency to the reorientation of Soviet economic
priorities toward raising the material well-being of Soviet workers, which
had begun already in 1953. Soviet living standards had to be improved to
forestall political conflict, to reclaim the legitimacy of state socialism, and
to inject credibility into claims—intensified in the conditions of Cold War
“peaceful competition”—that central state planning would provide a better
life than either free market capitalism or the mixed economies of social
democratic states.
To make these claims a reality—and not only for the few but for the
many—a significant reorientation of the command economy toward the
mass production and distribution of consumer goods took place in the Soviet
Union and its satellites. Post-Stalinist regimes built the material and
introduction 
ideological conditions for a relatively rapid growth in consumption and
the production of socialist consumer culture. Improved social security and
a reduced working week set new conditions for life.The cornerstone of attempts
to improve the conditions of life was the massive housing programs
initiated throughout Eastern Europe.These stimulated,in turn,the demand
for consumer goods such as domestic furniture and appliances.
What was the deal now, after the watershed years of the mid-1950s? If,
in the late Stalin period, a degree of “private” life and material benefits had
been afforded to a narrow sector of the population in exchange for loyalty,
what was demanded in return for the extended range of goods and services,
now that these were supposed to be accessible to all? It must be stressed that
during the Khrushchev period, the extension of mass consumption in the
Soviet Union coexisted with concerted efforts to reinvigorate mass political
activism; the promise of Soviet socialism demanded both the political
mobilization of the masses and full refrigerators.41
Mass consumption was
a socialist project alongside other large-scale Khrushchevist visions including
the Virgin Lands program, the reform of Party organizational structures,
and the voluntary espousal of “communist morality.” Above all, the
post-Stalinist leadership sought to increase the production levels of Soviet
industry to raise living standards. Elsewhere in the Bloc, post-Stalinist regimes
launched major projects to demonstrate their command of modern
technology in prestigious fields like nuclear power generation and highrise
housing, alongside political reforms such as the initiation of (shortlived)
worker councils.42
In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, however,
the two-pronged approach—predicated both on mass consumption and on
socialist construction and political mobilization—was replaced by a new
kind of contract based on political passivity, acquiescence, and a ritualized
semblance of support.43
This was perhaps most evident in the period of
“normalization” in Czechoslovakia following the suppression of the political
reforms of the Prague Spring.44
Václav Havel,writing in 1978,described
this uneasy contract in succinct terms when he wrote,“The post-totalitarian
system has been built on foundations laid by the historical encounter between
dictatorship and the consumer society.”45
The ordinary consumer—and no longer the outstanding individual
Stakhanovite worker,or technical specialist favored by the Big Deal—came,
after the Stalin years, to occupy the hallowed place in consumption politics
and representation. As Khrushchev would brag to Richard Nixon in 1959,
when faced with the American dream home implanted on Soviet soil as an
advertisement for “people’s capitalism”:“In Russia all you have to do to get a
house is to be born in the Soviet Union.You are entitled to housing.”46
Bluff
aside, such claims indicated a legitimate horizon of expectations. Moreover,
 david crowley and susan e. reid
in constantly trumpeting production statistics in fields such as housing and
consumer goods to underpin the slogan that the Soviet Union would imminently
“catch up and overtake America,” the party-state set suburban,
white American living standards as the ambitious benchmark against which
Soviet success was to be measured.
Such rhetoric was inflationary.Goods and services that had once seemed
like luxuries came, within a decade, to be considered normal or commonplace,
particularly by those without memory of the grinding poverty of
the 1930s and the war years. As early as 1959 Edward Crankshaw, writing
about the attitudes of young people in Khrushchev’s Russia,detected a shift
in their horizon of expectations:
They are taking for granted certain material improvements which
still fill their elders with delight—though with less delight than one
might expect: memories are short, and the appetite grows with feeding
. . . Ten years ago they would have given their eyes to see in the
shops what can now be seen every day. Now they grumble because all
these undreamt-of things are so dear that they cannot all be bought
simultaneously.47
Much the same point was made by Paul Neuburg in his 1973 survey of
youth attitudes in the People’s Republics.48
The post-Stalinist regimes
which took power in these states in the mid-1950s also addressed the appalling
living conditions that still prevailed a decade after the end of the
Second World War. During the late 1950s and 1960s commentators first
pointed to “goulash socialism” and then to its “refrigerator,”“car,” and even
“weekend cottage” variants, such was the inflationary push and pull of provision
and expectation.49
Such possessions, hitherto “undreamt-of”even by
the elite, slipped down the hierarchy of things to become necessities of
modern urban life.
By the late 1980s, these same citizens had come to understand themselves
as frustrated consumers unable to command goods and services to
which they had a right.That state socialism had engendered expectations it
could not satisfy may well have had a critical,even decisive effect on the fate
of the common project of the Bloc.It is fast becoming orthodoxy in analyses
of the failure of Soviet-type socialism in Europe that it was caused by the
late socialist regimes’ inability to match goods to promises and reality to
the aspirations they raised through their own pronouncements, and by the
failure to balance consumer interests with those of the military-industrial
complex.50
Yet if the system was as fraught with contradictions as is widely
charged, would it not be more illuminating to ask: how did it survive as
introduction 
long as it did? Any analysis of the Eastern Bloc that is built on shortage or
command alone is ill-equipped to explain its endurance—and indeed much
else about the experience of living under state socialism.
To understand socialist modernity better we need to investigate the
specificity of socialist consumerism. This requires a more dynamic understanding
of the relations of shortage to entitlement, of need to want, and of
necessity to luxury. Except in the most abject circumstances, “shortage” is
a relative, culturally ascribed, historically contingent term. We must, then,
be historically specific. Against what norm or horizon of expectations were
shortages, as experienced in Eastern Bloc societies, defined? Where, when,
and how did people acquire their sense of what constituted “normal”entitlements
to leisure and consumer goods? What role was played by the awareness
of lifestyles in the West or, for that matter, other parts of the Bloc?
What impact did travel and tourism, both within the Bloc and through the
“Iron Curtain,”have on ordinary expectations of life? What were the social
and political effects of periodic attempts to introduce “market socialism”and
make the economy more responsive to consumer demand?51
And what new
needs and entitlements were produced by attempts to manage social expectations
through the introduction of rational consumption norms at different
times in different places in the history of the Bloc?52
These questions cannot
be dealt with exhaustively here. All require further research in the diverse
national contexts of the Bloc.In what follows we shall examine the dynamic
relationship between luxury and modern consumer goods in state socialism
before turning to the effects of leisure in socialist societies.
Modern Luxuries in Socialist Lives
Luxury is neither a static category whose content is fixed nor an essential
quality inhering in particular objects. Rather, it is dynamic and historically
contingent. It is determined by changes in technology and the mode
of production, shaped by ideological preoccupations and discourses, and
managed through resource allocation, pricing policies, or tax regimes, all
of which in turn reflect state priorities. It is also defined through popular
attitudes and horizons of information and comparison.53
It can operate in
many different keys, conjured up in bacchanalian displays of abundance as
well as in subtle, even highly coded, measures of refinement and assertions
of taste.The practices which have shaped luxury have historically contained
strong, if sometimes suppressed, moral imperatives. In her contribution to
this volume, Ina Merkel explores the paradoxes of luxury in the German
Democratic Republic (GDR). Luxury was written into socialist economics
in the form of differentiated pricing categories and classes of shops, thereby
 david crowley and susan e. reid
contradicting claims to an egalitarian, classless society. Tapping the savings
of East German citizens, relatively expensive, up-market stores selling
branded goods and high-quality foodstuffs were presented and justified as
a mechanism for ensuring general prosperity.54
The revenue they drew from
wealthy pockets would be reinvested for the benefit of all.Such explanations
could not, however, explain away the social distinctions the availability of
such luxuries exaggerated. Although these high-end stores were presented
as a short-term measure, they became a permanent feature of the retail environment
of East Germany. Over the years such structured distinctions, as
Merkel demonstrates, came to seem normal.
The systemic and long-term failure of Soviet Bloc economies made the
production of “luxury” goods like cigarettes, “exclusive” foodstuffs such as
caviar, and, of course, distilled liquor a necessity of a particular kind: the
export of such products was one of the few ways in which hard currency
income could be ensured.Export goods were another face of socialist luxury.
As Mary Neuburger notes in her discussion of the manufacture and consumption
of cigarettes in Bulgaria, tobacco was made into a vital national
product that could be exchanged on international markets for tractors, machinery,
and other capital goods, which would ensure that socialism could
be built. At the same time, Georgi Dimitrov, Bulgaria’s first communist
leader, encouraged abstention at home: tobacco smoking was represented,
in the early years of socialist rule, as a Western affliction. However, over the
course of the 1950s and 1960s, as Neuburger shows, the consumption of
cigarettes came to be seen as the birthright of socialist workers. The ordinariness
of this product was written into policy when, in the early 1960s,
tobacco was regarded by state economists as a staple feature of Bulgarian
household budgets. Like the structural distinctions in East German retailing
described by Merkel, cigarettes—with their bright packaging and
showy brand names—came to be regarded as everyday pleasures.55
The processes by which erstwhile luxury was “normalized” comprise a
key motor of modernity. Progress is often measured in the invention and
distribution of things, not least in the “standard of living,”a gauge by which
material things are interpreted in ontological terms.In the Cold War contest
of images of modernity and the good life, representations of socialist abundance
were accompanied by another trope to argue the superiority of state
socialism over capitalism: that of redistribution.56
Furs,champagne,palaces,
and hunting were persistent motifs in communist discourse throughout the
history of Eastern European socialism for precisely this reason. For the
Bolsheviks in revolutionary Russia, the presence of such things in the real
and imagined lives of the tsarist aristocracy and as markers of foreign capitalist
decadence had provided a rich reservoir of images of selfish luxury
introduction 
against which their own asceticism could be positively judged. But such
things acquired a different valence in the 1930s; at that time, the Stalin
regime turned the accession of the people to forms of luxury that had once
been the preserve of the upper classes into a measure of progress.According
to Jukka Gronow in his groundbreaking book on Soviet luxury, Caviar with
Champagne, the presence of such traditional luxuries in the Soviet Union
in the 1930s can be explained by the rhetoric of democratization: their
consumption by Soviet citizens was to symbolize the redistributive power
of socialist economics.57
The order of “aristocratic luxuries”—goods with
long and symbolic genealogies—required careful management by the state
and its ideologues to re-present these as “democratic”or “common luxuries.”
Such negotiations continued throughout the history of the Soviet Union.
In her essay in this volume, Anna Tikhomirova addresses the networks and
semiotics of fur consumption in Brezhnev-era Russia. She establishes the
complex and subtly structured hierarchies in which fur coats, an expensive
and rare commodity,were ranked according to their material and their place
of origin. Her work is based on a large number of interviews with educated
women living in provincial cities. Most expressed their support for the core
principle of Soviet economics, the equitable distribution of common resources.Yet,
at the same time, her informants viewed without bitterness the
privileged access to fur enjoyed by the nomenklatura. Reproducing in their
discourse the hierarchies and class differences that operated in late Soviet
society, they demonstrate the extent to which such benefits had come to be
seen as “natural”returns for talent or effort. Moreover,Tikhomirova’s interviewees
indicate that even as they coveted the elite lifestyles of actresses and
wives of leading Party members, unspoken “sumptuary codes” operated in
Soviet society,which ensured that some luxuries remained exclusive,limited
to elite social groups.
While some traditional notions of luxury persisted in Eastern Europe
throughout the life of the communist system, new material distinctions
emerged. One category of luxury goods that gained new meaning in Eastern
Europe consisted of commodities from the West. Crossing national
borders, they found new meanings in translation. Particular significance
was attached by ordinary citizens of the Bloc to everyday Western things,
including clothes,toiletries,foodstuffs,and long-playing records.The biographies
of such things were diverse and included forms of aid such as the
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration parcels which
were distributed in Eastern Europe in the wake of the Second World War,58
contraband and other smuggled goods, and the goods on sale in special
hard currency shops.59
Objects that were mundane in their original, capitalist
context came to carry heightened significance not only because of
 david crowley and susan e. reid
their rarity: the unfamiliar materials and seductive forms of Western consumer
goods could trigger fantasies about capitalist civilization. Fantasy
came to play an important role in ordinary people’s relations with things.
This was particularly acute in East Germany. By imagining life in the West
as more beautiful, satisfying, and substantial—a vision stimulated by the
ready access to West German media—citizens of the GDR could imagine
that the world in which they lived was somehow illusory and unreal. As
Milena Veenis has described, “All answers to, all alternatives for, and all
flights out of a daily life characterized by tensions between what is and
what appears to be, and what is supposed to be, could be transported to the
other side of the wall.There, they were attached to the material goods that
were such identificatory tropes for their countrymen but were at the same
time so elusive.”60
Western goods also provided actual models for the socialist states to
adopt and adapt, in their attempts to demonstrate their hold on modernity.
The Khrushchev regime recognized as a legitimate social aspiration the
desire to have up-to-date and attractive clothes and to acquire new ones
not only when the old ones were worn out but in accordance with changing
fashion. To fill this need, Soviet experts turned to Western luxury fashion
for models of the best clothing production. Soviet fashion designers—as
Larissa Zakharova describes in her essay in this volume—went to Paris
in 1957, 1960, and 1965 to study the working methods of French haute
couture houses producing custom-made garments for the very rich. While
evidently fascinated by what they saw, these Soviet experts were unable
to transpose their findings onto the reality of Soviet garment production.
Fashion was a luxury which the Soviet clothing industry, oriented to mass
production and long production cycles, was ill-equipped to deliver. Moreover,
the five-year succession of the state economic plan was hardly commensurate
with the seasonal cycles of haute couture. The achievements of
Soviet fashion were largely impressionistic,appearing as prototypes in fashion
shows and as images on the pages of the embryonic fashion press in the
Soviet Union. The designs of Yves Saint-Laurent for Christian Dior did,
however, have a material impact on Soviet fashion, albeit in narrow social
circles. Zakharova traces the influence of his designs shown on a catwalk
in Moscow in 1959 on elite Soviet women who commissioned workshops
with suggestive names such as Liuks (Luxe) to make up garments in the
Dior style, sometimes in fabrics smuggled into the U.S.S.R. from the West.
In what appears to be a classic “trickle-down”pattern, Dior style was reproduced
on the pages of the Soviet press, simulated by designers employed in
the official fashion institutes, popularized in films such as Carnival Night
(Karnaval’naia noch’, 1956, dir. El’dar Riazanov), copied by seamstresses
introduction 
working in commercial ateliers, and ultimately imitated by home dressmakers.
Emulation required adjustment to Soviet conditions; Dior’s luxury
fabrics were unavailable, and highly structured tailoring was not easy to
reproduce by amateurs. It also required some negotiation of meaning. The
final product of such cycles of style and taste was not a symbol of socialism;
yet it resulted, albeit indirectly, from the tacit recognition by a socialist state
that the desire to possess fashionable clothes was legitimate.
Fashionable clothes were not the only category of modern goods in
which matters of style carried powerful symbolic associations. With industrial
production and the increasing use of synthetic materials, entirely new
categories of luxury unimagined by Marx, Lenin, or Trotsky (or even by
the class enemy whose tastes they repudiated) emerged in the course of the
Soviet experiment.Such modern luxuries,we suggest,have different origins,
material characteristics, and social effects from their glittering forebears.
The symbolic value of automobiles,refrigerators,televisions,tape recorders,
and other modern consumer goods when they first appeared lay not only in
their potential for democratization; their very forms and the materials from
which they were made were crucially important too.Electronic components
and synthetic materials like plastics,nylon,and synthetic fur,as well as their
employment in novel designs or their status as representatives of modern
technology in domestic everyday life,all staked a claim for the advanced nature
of state socialism and its ability to benefit ordinary people, a claim that
was particularly urgent in the context of Cold War “peaceful competition.”61
In science fiction films and novels of the period—a thriving Eastern Bloc
genre—synthetics and electronics were projected into the zones of unfettered
fantasy, thereby serving popular utopian dreams as well as ideology.62
Regimes of Socialist Consumption
The engagement with the material culture of capitalist modernity during
the late 1950s and 1960s did not necessarily amount to an unequivocal
surrender of socialist principles, contrary to the hopes and expectations
of cold warriors that the popular appetite for consumer goods, once unleashed,
would destabilize the socialist order. Rather, the socialist regimes
were engaged in a careful, if ultimately unsuccessful, balancing act. They
sought ideologically legitimate ways to raise living standards and satisfy
demand without triggering the unending process of demand generation and
insatiable desire that was the original sin of consumerism in the capitalist
West. As George Breslauer noted with reference to the Soviet Union, the
regime needed simultaneously to meet and depress consumer expectations
of current consumption.63
The management of consumption played a par-
 david crowley and susan e. reid
ticularly important role in the maintenance of power after Stalin’s death.
New economic priorities were put in place in Kádár’s Hungary after the
violent trauma of the events of October 1956, while in East Germany, the
movement of people, things, and (especially after the erection of what Ulbricht
called his “antifascist protection wall”in August 1961) images of the
West German Wirtschaftswunder put socialism under pressure.64
Regimes
across the region struggled to reconcile rising consumer expectations with
Marxist doctrine. The new, socialist person was supposed to possess a rational
consciousness of the relation between his or her individual needs and
the greater good of the collective, to better serve the challenge of building
communism.
Excess and extravagance became the object of a good deal of hostile
attention in the U.S.S.R. after Stalin’s death. They were repudiated ex cathedra
by Khrushchev as early as December 1954, in relation to the elaborate
architectural ornament and the use of artisanal, labor-intensive construction
methods in late Stalinist architecture.65
This was an early shot
in what was to become a new campaign for socialist modernity. Attacks
on overrefined luxury goods and superfluous ornament became widespread
in the Khrushchev-era Soviet Union. This was, in effect, a moral as well
as aesthetic discourse, which associated the Stalin years with “excess” and
waste. Overproduction of unwanted or poor-quality goods which failed to
meet demand and,as a consequence,sat gathering dust in warehouses or on
store shelves was also singled out as a symptom of Stalinist profligacy. In
the new climate,modern needs were now to be satisfied by applying rational
principles of economy and utility. The rational socialist consumer would
find pleasure in the beauty of utility. Armed with historical consciousness
and distinguished by civil self-discipline, she would limit her own potential
desires voluntarily within “rational consumption norms.”66
Plain, simple, “functional” designs were valorized in post-Stalinist discussions
of consumer goods, not least because they facilitated mass pro-
duction.67
A crucial distinction drawn by Khrushchev-era modernizers was
whether or not items could be made available en masse, in terms of their
design, mode of production, and materials. Synthetics such as man-made
fibers, plastics, and building materials were claimed as a new field of socialist
achievement, capable of making the promise of abundance for all a
reality.68
New types of scent that made use of the latest advances such as
synthetic oils, presented in vials with plastic stoppers and encased in synthetic
velvet, were a modern, socialist solution to the “problem” of luxury.
Recuperated as both socialist and modern, they were reconstructed as a
democratic luxury that was a gift to all women from the solicitous state
in exchange for their labor and loyalty, while at the same time serving as
introduction 
compensation for putting up with daily privations.The democratization of
this luxury was made possible by modern science and industry: chemistry
had freed the art of perfumery from reliance on precious oils and essences
by synthesizing natural aromas. Modern synthetic scents such as “Sputnik”
might not be as potent or enduring as those of the past, but they were affordable
and available to the masses. And their production would, it was
hoped, curb desire for—and black market trade in—French perfume.69
As
modern demonstrations of democratic luxury, industrially produced Soviet
perfumes testified to the redistributive capacity of the command economy.70
Such commodities, which had once been the prerogative of social elites,
could now become the herald of future abundance for all. At the same time,
they seemed to corroborate the party-state’s claims that socialist science was
uniquely positioned to benefit everyday life. That perfume—the most immaterial
and inessential of commodities—had been allotted a place in the
state economic plan at all may be less the product of policy than a consequence
of unexamined assumptions on the part of planners and economists
about what was needed for a modern, urbane lifestyle.
Certain “democratic luxuries,” made widely available after the Thaw,
never quite shook off their associations with individualism and acquisitiveness,
however.71
In 1960 the Soviet ideologue Georgii Shakhnazarov
defined communist consumption morality precisely in these terms: “Communism
excludes those narrow-minded people for whom the highest goal
is to acquire every possible luxurious object.”72
In similar fashion, Marx’s
writings on the fetishistic relations that were characteristic of commodities
under capitalism were invoked by Hungarian critics of “goulash social-
ism.”73
One Hungarian commentator, writing in 1961, outlined the threat
to socialism in blunt terms:
The desire to own personal goods is on the rise . . . And, if the person
achieves his desires, doesn’t the fact that he locks himself up in
his apartment with his television, that he is isolated from pedestrians
when sitting in his car, blunt him into a petty bourgeois and a Philistine?
Isn’t the mentality of the petty bourgeois being reproduced
in this television-automobile-weekend house-motorcycle lifestyle? . . .
Some would put it sharply: on one side there is television, automobile,
foreign trips, hoop skirts, and on the other, declining interest in politics,
languishing attention to the products of socialist culture, the revival
of bourgeois morality, individuation.74
Discussing camping in East Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, Scott
Moranda’s essay in this volume examines the anxieties concerning com-
 david crowley and susan e. reid
modity fetishism held by the authorities there.Camping equipment threatened
to disturb the egalitarianism and ascetic idealism associated with this
leisure activity. With nature highly valorized in the official culture of the
German Democratic Republic, the comforts of modern life were to be kept
in check to ensure that “noble,” and as such, properly socialist, relations to
nature could be experienced by East German citizens on holiday. Camping
enthusiasts,however,took a very different view,as Moranda shows,imagining
the natural world as a type of outdoor “parlor” complete with modern
amenities and small luxuries. Camping in East Germany in the 1970s was
pulled two ways, between the earnest asceticism advocated by loyalists as a
distinctly socialist form of leisure, and the standards of comfort that others
demanded as a modern right for socialist citizens.
The “problem” of acquisitiveness was addressed during the Thaw in
other ways, too. In the Soviet Union, Khrushchev and his allies set great
ideological store by collective consumption and socialized services. These
were supposed to represent a specifically socialist route to higher living
standards. Thus, writing in 1960, a Soviet journalist presented the official
line on car ownership:
The U.S. still enjoys a higher standard of transport facilities due to the
large number of private cars. N. S. Khrushchev has indicated that the
Soviet Union does not intend to vie with the U.S.A. in this respect. In
very many cases air transport is much more convenient and economical.There
will also be much wider use of taxis, hired cars, motorcycles
and scooters, with charges progressively reduced, as they are being already
. . .The socialist method is a comprehensive solution by developing
all types of transport facilities. Where necessary and convenient,
some of these facilities will remain in individual use, but the bulk will
be operated as a public service.75
But as Gronow and Zhuravlev show here in their examination of the
car as one of the key markers of luxury and its transformation in the Soviet
Union, alternative forms of collective ownership foundered in the face of
growing demand for private cars,not least from influential quarters,including
the Kremlin under Khrushchev’s successor,Brezhnev.76
Their work joins
a growing body of studies that see the automobile as a revealing artifact in
the archaeology of late socialist consumer society.77
By the mid-1960s the
highly automated AvtoVAZ factory was being built in Togliatti in conjunction
with Fiat. Its declared aim was to provide the average Soviet citizen
with access to a car of European quality, the Zhiguli, to be produced in
three models, “standard,” “luxury,” and “family.” Production of the new car
introduction 
began, after delays, in 1970 and capacity was reached in 1974. This pattern
of trumpeting collective consumption and communal services while
delivering commodities for individual or private possession was repeated
in other fields. Shared services like public canteens and public laundries
were also much vaunted. Yet at the same time, great emphasis was placed
on the image of labor-saving devices such as vacuum cleaners and washing
machines designed for the private home. Such symbols were required to
demonstrate the advances of socialist modernity in the Cold War competition
with the West.
Rational norms,collective consumption,and other instruments through
which to curb the destabilizing effects of consumer modernity may perhaps
be seen, with hindsight, to have come to little.78
But to assume that this
was inevitable is to commit the mistake of teleology. How, when, and why
this happened, and indeed whether the legacy of state socialism is, rather, a
particular hybrid consumer culture, requires further research and analysis.79
Nevertheless, it is not premature to assert that in the course of the 1960s
and 1970s the range of modern luxuries and leisure experiences that were
licensed and, indeed, provided by the state expanded greatly. Advertising,
packaging, and commodity aesthetics articulated a clear claim that Eastern
Bloc states had become “consumer societies” in the Western mold. Life—
at least as illustrated in the pages of color “lifestyle” magazines and in the
windows of hard currency shops—appears to have been lived increasingly
in a “brandscape”which took its cues from the West and spoke in a kind of
international consumer Esperanto: in Poland a man could dab on “Konsul
woda kolo˙nska”(“Consul”eau de cologne) while a woman might apply “Być
może” (“Maybe”) perfume with the fictional legend “Paris” on the label. A
Budapest apartment might be furnished with Ikon furniture, made locally
in the Kanizsa factory to foreign designs, and a Videotron stereo made in
Hungary in partnership with the Japanese manufacturer Akai.80
Or consider
the Polski Fiat 126P,a car which was designed in Turin but made with
low-grade recycled Soviet steel, the base matter of socialist alchemy. It was
prone to premature rust and, consequently, had a shorter life expectancy
than its Italian progenitor.Nevertheless,despite its material limitations and
poor performance on the potholed roads of Poland, it was a luxury to the
extent that it took years on a waiting list to acquire one and because of the
attention that had to be lavished on it by its owner to keep it running.81
This latter case confronts us with one of the many paradoxes of late socialism.
Objects in short supply such as cars could simultaneously represent
norms—in the sense that citizens came to understand them as a requisite
of a normal, modern, civilized life—while, at the same time, their scarcity,
along with the constant investment of time and precious resources they
 david crowley and susan e. reid
demanded and their sometimes questionable usefulness (in the conditions
of the Bloc), aligned them with luxury.82
The Scales of Luxury
Reflecting on the long life of artifacts—or what is sometimes called the
“biography of things”—in Eastern Bloc societies offers ways to understand
shifts in the hierarchies of value against which things have been judged, as
well as the kind of emotional and practical investments they have attracted
from their owners and users.83
Take, as an item that at one time enjoyed
the status of a modern luxury, the refrigerator. What can its vertiginous
slide down the career ladder of things during the postwar period tell us?84
What is the relationship of images of such commodities to their availability
(or lack thereof)? Might ordinary consumer goods such as this serve as a
barometer of socialist modernity, of changing modes of governance and
regime-society relations, and of the development of the socialist countries
of Central and Eastern Europe into mass consumer societies?
The refrigerator was a key image of prosperity in the context of the Cold
War, combining in one symbol the promise of abundance with technological
modernity. In the German Democratic Republic, as Katherine Pence
writes, “the politics of iceboxes became a central aspect of how the Cold
War came home to German kitchens.”85
In West Germany,1953 was designated
the year of the consumer,focused on the production of household appliances
to “help the housewife.”In the same year the GDR also embarked
on its consumer-oriented New Course following the June 17 uprising over
shortages and low wages.86
There too,“the push for modernization and rising
living standards in the mid-1950s featured a greater state effort to offer
women labor-saving appliances which were rational, scientific and modern.”
New apartments on East Berlin’s Stalinallee—the model of socialist
housing in East Germany built in the mid-1950s—allocated a space for a
refrigerator in their small, efficient “working kitchens.”87
Distinct, socialist
meanings were attached to such consumer durables; they were claimed as
a means to alleviate the domestic labor of working women; as such, these
socialist objects were to be distinct from capitalism’s chrome-plated frame
for a full-time “professional housewife.”
Refrigerators first began to enter ordinary people’s lives on a significant
scale during the 1960s,serving as a marker of rising prosperity,convenience,
and modernity. Until the postwar period only the highest nomenklatura in
the Soviet Union had had domestic refrigerators.88
Mass production of domestic
refrigerators began there in 1949 with a single model. Although
introduction 
refrigerator production rose from 49,000 in 1953 to 910,000 in 1963, they
remained expensive and hard to come by. It was not until the Brezhnev
era that refrigerators became truly mass items,“standard”home equipment
accessible to ordinary Soviet households.89
There and in other parts of the
Bloc the relative cost, measured in terms of the work hours required to
earn the money for the purchase, remained, however, much higher than in
the West.90
If refrigerators were given symbolic status in the West as emblematic
items of individualistic consumption, they were capable of carrying rather
different meanings in the context of state socialism.91
They could be coopted
for collective consumption; one refrigerator might serve numerous
Soviet refrigerators, 1961
TOVARNYISLOVAR’,vol.,ed.i.a.pugachev(moscow:gos.izdatel’stvotorgovoiliteratury,)
 david crowley and susan e. reid
neighbors. The satirical magazine Krokodil told of how one man became
popular overnight when he acquired a refrigerator, which all his neighbors
immediately claimed a natural right to use.92
Meanwhile, any claim to be a
marker of a rational, scientific, and modern lifestyle might be equivocated
by the refrigerator’s contents. A glance into any Soviet refrigerator from
the 1960s to the 1990s would reveal that it was filled not with the products
of an advanced food-processing industry but with jars of home-preserved
fruits grown at the dacha or gathered in the forest, holdovers of a preindustrial
subsistence economy.
In assessing the impact of refrigerated domesticity on Soviet society, it
is important to stress that it began to exercise social effects in advance of
actually entering mass consumption.As the subject of jokes,feuilletons,and
cartoons, the refrigerator had already become part of the common culture
by the late 1950s.93
The domestication and “demotion” of such erstwhile
luxuries was due not only to their mass production but also to their reproduction
as images in Soviet public culture. By the mid-1960s authoritative
statements in the Soviet press would routinely include refrigerators among
“normal” needs for the modern Soviet home.94
Thus in terms of discourse,
if not of everyday life, they were already a “necessity” before they arrived in
ordinary homes. In this regard, the history of the appearance of the refrigerator
in the Bloc conforms to one of the key aspects of modern consumerism:
consumer societies are systems of representation in which it is not only
the thing itself that is acquired but also its image.95
Even if refrigerators were only available in a limited range of models
inscribed in the official economic plan or by international trade within the
Bloc, this does not exhaust their significance as consumer goods. While
Eastern Bloc consumers enjoyed relatively limited choices in the shops,they
nevertheless exercised other kinds of choices in their consumption practices.
The fact that the penetration of “time-using” devices like radios and, beginning
in the 1950s, televisions into homes was faster than that of “timesaving”
kitchen appliances can tell us something about the priorities set by
the state; while the Soviet regime raised prices on certain luxury consumer
items in 1959, not only were television sets excluded, but their price was
even reduced.96
But it also has the potential to tell us about the choices being
exercised by ordinary people in their consuming practices, about social
attitudes toward the home and to women’s work, about decision-making
in relation to household budgets, and about the significance of leisure in
late socialism.97
High levels of what Western economists call “market penetration” were
achieved in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s (a few years after the more
introduction 
affluent People’s Republics). Despite this, the refrigerator was never fully
naturalized into its domestic landscape. It remained a conspicuous feature,
not least because the tiny kitchen of the standard apartments designed in
the mid- to late 1950s, into which people began to move en masse by 1960,
offered insufficient space for this new item of household equipment (unlike
those in the earlier Stalinist design of Stalinallee apartments in East Berlin).
Soviet planners had not seen far enough ahead into the mass technological
future to allocate adequate space for these modern necessities. At the
same time, they also deprived apartment dwellers of the traditional, preindustrial
method of keeping food chilled—a cold cupboard beneath the
kitchen window—by installing a radiator there.98
Even when highly coveted and difficult to obtain, modern luxuries such
as refrigerators or private cars cannot be conceived as discrete, autonomous
things in the way that the objects of desire of earlier eras might be. They
function as nodes in spatial,servicing,and energy networks and,as such,depend
either on the market or on the state’s capacities to provide not only the
commodities but also the conditions that allow their operation.99
Practices
of repair played a key role in people’s relations with their possessions. It appears
that householders viewed their refrigerators as utilities to be repaired
more than as alienable commodities to be replaced.The cycles of acquisition
and disposal that came to operate in the West—particularly in the United
States—did not, or not yet, shape the consumption patterns of such goods
in the Soviet Union. Despite the pronounced difficulties of securing spare
parts,repair was widely conducted in official workshops or,more frequently,
by enterprising householders themselves. Moreover, high cost (relative to
wages) and the difficulty of securing the appliance from the Soviet distribution
system in the first place ensured that while the refrigerator was a common
feature of the Soviet home, it remained an object of solicitous care.100
Even as commodity fetishism was condemned as a bourgeois capitalist relation
with things, the shortcomings of socialist production and distribution
produced a particular emotional relationship with material things, which,
according to Ekaterina Degot’, came to be treated as friends who should
be cared for when they hit hard times.101
Soviet appliances, like the Soviet
cars described by Jukka Gronow and Sergei Zhuravlev in their essay in this
book, required considerable maintenance to offset the risk of failure.102
A
sparkling, new refrigerator might be presented as evidence of the distributive
capacities of socialism; standing unplugged and dysfunctional, positioned
in the crowded hallway of a communal apartment,or dominating the
tiny Khrushchev-era flat,it testified,rather,to the disconnected and uneven
experience of socialist modernity.
 david crowley and susan e. reid
Socialist Leisure
Leisure—the “right to rest”—was an essential aspect of the promise of
communism. Citizens were warned not to envisage the radiant future as a
life of untrammeled ease, however. Leisure without labor was like dessert
without savory; a fully human, rounded life consisted of both, not least because
unalienated labor, quite unlike alienated drudgery under capitalism,
was a path to self-realization. In an oft-cited passage in Das Kapital, Marx
described communism as a realm of freedom and fully human existence in
which both leisure and work would satisfy the intellectual,social,and material
needs of the individual.103
The utopia of full communism was only loosely sketched in Soviet
futurology, despite its hallowed position as the target of history’s arrow.
Nevertheless, progress was calibrated in a number of ways, among which
the increased provision of leisure featured as an important measure.104
The
Third Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, promulgated
in 1961 as a modern-day Communist Manifesto, announced that incremental
reductions in the working week would take place over the next two decades,
made possible by increased labor productivity.As a result,“the Soviet Union
will thus have the world’s shortest and, concurrently, the most productive
and highest paid working day.Working people will have much more leisure
time, and this will add to their opportunities for improving their cultural
and technical level.”105
As the 1961 pronouncement made clear, virtuous socialist leisure was
understood in communist morality as productive or reproductive activity. It
was distinguished from the alienated forms of “amusement” that prevailed
under capitalism in that it was to contribute to the integration of the individual,to
allow her full self-possession and realization of her human essence
as well as restoring her for the next day’s labor.106
A visit to the house of
culture or the cinema, or a Sunday spent listening to Tchaikovsky in the local
Park of Culture and Rest would reinvigorate the worker in readiness for
the great challenges in the workplace and for building socialism. Socialist
leisure was charged with realizing the untapped potential of the working
classes for self-development.The emphasis on cultural enlightenment (with
roots in nineteenth-century socialist movements) was put into practice immediately
after the Bolshevik Revolution by the Proletarian Culture organization,
which sought to accompany political and economic revolution with
a cultural one.107
Some of the major achievements of experimental revolutionary
architecture resulted from the need to invent a new building type,
the workers’club.108
The collectivization of agriculture was accompanied by
an infrastructure of new houses of culture, staffed by professional cultural
introduction 
workers who sought to shape the political consciousness of the working
people through education and the arts. Houses of culture and workplace
clubs not only promoted high culture (understood in the canonical terms
associated with the official aesthetic doctrine of socialist realism), but also
sought to inculcate positive attitudes toward the socialist order, to shape
the New Person, and to cement the collective. Czesław Miłosz, in his early
Cold War critique of Sovietization,The Captive Mind, wrote about the new
program of cultural enlightenment introduced into the People’s Republics
in the late 1940s in the darkest terms:
People who attend a “club”submit to a collective rhythm, and so come
to feel that it is absurd to think differently from the collective . . .
as these individuals pronounce the ritual phrases and sing the ritual
songs, they create a collective aura to which they in turn surrender.109
For Miłosz writing in 1953, the emphasis on active, participatory, collective
enjoyment in the form of mass songs or group tourism was a suppression
of the individual.110
The emphasis on collective forms of leisure was gradually supplemented
after Stalin by a number of innovations that may be identified in general
terms with modernization and—with caveats—with privatization. These
included the provision of separate apartments beginning in the late 1950s—
accompanied by the growth in TV set ownership and airtime—as well as a
more positive revaluation (or at least sanctioning) of individual or familyoriented
interests such as car maintenance and dacha ownership.111
Nevertheless,the idea that properly socialist leisure should have improving
effects, whether for the collective or the individual, did not disappear
with the redrawing of leisure and its spaces. How people spent their leisure
time was presented as a measure of rising living standards. At the same
time,the way young people,in particular,spent—or misspent—their leisure
was the cause of no little anxiety to Party and Komsomol and on the part
of official sociology.112
Gender differences in access to leisure time were
recognized as an issue; when Soviet sociology revived, beginning in the
Khrushchev era,time budget surveys provided worrying evidence of gender
inequalities in access to time for self-improvement and sleep,which resulted
from women’s “double burden.” Inequalities in this regard were recognized
as inhibiting women’s self-actualization and ability to participate in political
and social activity.113
Even in the 1980s, by which time the concept of
a comfortable private life had become accepted, de facto, as a legitimate
social aspiration—and even a need—across most of the Bloc,the party-state
continued to direct the free time of its citizens in structured occupations.
 david crowley and susan e. reid
Amateur film and photography clubs continued to operate in factories,theater
productions were mounted in local houses of culture,and housing committees
undertook to improve the environment by collective gardening and
house painting schemes, often by mounting “actions” on symbolic days on
the calendar such as May Day.114
Houses of culture hosted discos, ten-pin
bowling, and other fashionable pursuits in an effort to attract the young
through their doors and demonstrate relevance.115
By the late socialist period two pictures of the socialist citizen at leisure
emerge: in one, she was engaged in the production of socialist identities
through increasingly banal collective activities; in the other, she had
withdrawn from public culture into a privatized realm of individual and
home-oriented interests. Their differences notwithstanding, both characterizations
accord with the dominant paradigms for understanding the ways
in which the state influenced the behavior of its citizens. In a discussion of
the “etatization of time” in Romania in the late 1980s, Katherine Verdery
has, for instance, identified attempts by the communist state to “seize time”
by compelling individuals into particular activities which, in addition to
work, included parades and queues and organized leisure such as group
tours.116
According to this model, the choices facing individuals were either
to acquiesce (or simulate acquiescence) or to withdraw from the temporal
economy of state socialism.Collective and privatized forms of leisure represent
the polar extremes of the same phenomenon, that is, state control over
its citizens’ time outside work.
But are control and compliance the only, or even the most productive,
paradigms with which to approach the practices of leisure—even stateprovided
and sanctioned leisure? What did people get out of it? And what
did they put into it? How did they use state leisure facilities and the time
spent in sanatoriums or on “cultural” tourist trips, to form relationships,
have sex and indulge the body, establish little dominions of power, go shopping,
indulge in fantasy and dream . . . in short, enjoy themselves? What
emotional investment did ordinary people of different social groups have in
certain forms of leisure? What role did such experiences as “wild tourism”or
the deluxe camping holidays with full home comforts discussed here by Scott
Moranda,or air travel to sun-and-sand holidays in Black Sea resorts play in
“real existing socialism”? And what were the effects of these transformations
on the lifestyle and expectations of ordinary citizens back home in the daily
grind? Answers to such questions are beginning to emerge as scholars turn
their attention to the phenomenon of tourism by Eastern European citizens
both within the Bloc and further afield.Essays in Anne Gorsuch and Diane
Koenker’s recent edited volume, Turizm, explore not only the mechanisms
of control which sought to align the Eastern European tourist experience
introduction 
with socialist principles of collectivity and cultural enlightenment, but also
the “private”interests driving tourism, which sometimes included shopping
and sexual adventure.117
Alongside tourism, it is important to acknowledge
here that some spheres of popular culture closely connected with leisure,
such as rock music, have also enjoyed the attention of scholars. Writers like
Timothy Ryback and Uta Poiger have both explored the aesthetic qualities
of Soviet-style rock ’n’ roll music and attended to its social effects.118
From
the mid-1950s youth cultures that made Western musical and sartorial
fashions their own upset the conventionalized cultural and class categories
on which state socialism was predicated.119
Initially socialist regimes (and
many elements of society) responded with censure, often equating affection
for these styles with ideological wavering, treachery, and thralldom to the
capitalist West. But with time they became more tolerant and pragmatic,
seeking to compete with the seductions of Western products and media by
fostering the production of homegrown socialist equivalents and licensing
youthful experimentation,if only as a safety valve,through an infrastructure
of radio programs, record companies, and rock festivals.
Katherine Lebow explores the early tensions between the Polish state
and young people over the “correct” forms of leisure. Focusing on the new
city of Nowa Huta, a flagship project designed to demonstrate the vitality
of socialist industry and planning, she explores the attitudes of young men
and women drawn to work in constructing the city in the early 1950s. By
organizing their labor and directing their leisure time, the state imagined
that it was not only building a new city but also new citizens. As Lebow
shows,the young builders of Nowa Huta were at times indifferent and even
antagonistic to improving activities organized for their edification in the
świetlice—or “red corners”—of the cramped hostels in which they lodged.
Surveying the official reports sent from the city to the Polish capital, she
records the growing sense of disappointment and frustration among cultural
activists who expected socialist realist novels and lectures on politics
to prevail over the pleasures of alcohol, jazz, and sex. Unsurprisingly, the
preference of Nowa Huta’s young builders for such pleasures led to conflict.
In Lebow’s analysis, the battle lines being drawn over leisure were as much
generational as ideological, with young people rejecting the stifling cultural
elitism of the older generation.
New cultural forms came to occupy the leisure hours of the citizens
of the Eastern Bloc in the 1960s and 1970s, with television claiming the
prominent role. In this volume Paulina Bren and Kristin Roth-Ey offer
novel ways of investigating this key instrument of modern leisure. Eschewing
the narrow hermeneutic analysis characteristic of many film and television
studies, Bren focuses on the interplay between televisual images and
 david crowley and susan e. reid
political events in Czechoslovakia during the years which saw the emergence
of the Charter 77 dissident movement. In her analysis, the highly
popular television series The Woman Behind the Counter, set in the unmistakably
symbolic location of a well-stocked supermarket, was not simply a
spectacular distraction from real events, as critics of television on both sides
of the East-West divide have characterized the medium.120
On the contrary,
the Czechoslovak state, recognizing the magnetic appeal of television
characters for ordinary Czechoslovak viewers, employed the serial to frame
women’s roles and their relationship to consumer desires and pleasures.
Josie McLellan, in her contribution to this volume, explores another
leisure product co-opted by the state as a political instrument. Framed as
a luxury in terms of the pricing and distributive mechanisms of the East
German economy,various forms of erotica were licensed there as legitimate
pleasures in socialism. In her essay, McLellan examines the publication of
erotica in the GDR from the 1960s to German reunification. Focusing on
the most popular magazine in the country, Das Magazin, she explores the
reasons why this publication included nude “pinups” in its pages, alongside
other seemingly bourgeois themes such as home and family, the “art of seduction,”tourism,and
fashion.Das Magazin was published largely to satisfy
East German demands for erotica (and, in particular, to dent the demand
for material smuggled from the West).This inexpensive, extremely popular
but hard-to-obtain luxury functioned as a palliative and is an example of
how leisure and luxury are overlapping categories. As McLellan argues,
the editors of this magazine and other erotic material produced with official
imprimatur in the GDR were uncertain about the extent to which
their products were to emulate those published in the West or were to offer
an alternative. Liberal attitudes to sexuality were supposed to support the
projection of East Germany as a young, healthy socialist society, yet what
prevailed on Das Magazin’s pages was hardly liberating.Its editors conflated
emancipated sexuality with pornography.
Leisure as Production
Marxist futurology, as we noted above, predicted that the differences between
work and leisure would disappear in the conditions of full communism.
In a world without alienation, the individual would take complete
pleasure in her work, and her leisure would be oriented to productive tasks
like self-education. It is a nice irony that, as several essays in this volume
demonstrate, “free time” in the Bloc societies was often productive, just as
official ideology prescribed. But neither the practices nor the products nor
the types of pleasures taken in the process were ones the party-state had
introduction 
in mind. Narcis Tulbure, in his study of alcohol consumption in Romania
in the 1980s, shows how it was associated with the exchange of goods and
services appropriated from state enterprises and circulating in the sphere
of the second economy. Drinking on the job was also a way of pocketing
control back from the state and expropriating work time that “belonged”
to the commonwealth. Despite the official campaigns promoting restraint,
this form of leisure was not only tolerated but actually facilitated by the
state; for the government held a near monopoly over alcohol production
and distribution, as well as over the spaces in which it could legitimately
be consumed. Moreover, the monopoly over production ensured the flow
of tax revenues to state coffers. Alcohol was, nevertheless, widely produced
at home during leisure hours or in the workplace, while the foreman or the
manager turned a blind eye.Like many other products that circulated in the
second economy, moonshine was manufactured in the interstices of work
and leisure. Ostensibly distinct spheres of economic life were blurred in
such illegal though tolerated practices. Leisure time was, in other words, a
time of industry, while the time spent at work often constituted an interval
of relative leisure.
The productive effects of leisure in the form of hunting, as practiced
by communist elites on publicly owned estates in Hungary in the 1960s,
are described here by György Péteri. Hunting, one of the elite’s preferred
forms of leisure, not only put cheap and high-quality meat on the tables
of those who enjoyed this chain of privileges, but also enabled the social
reproduction of elite networks. The right to extend the invitation to hunt
to those of higher or lower rank, or the opportunity to shoot on the richest
hunting grounds, represented a kind of power within Party circles. Hospitality
produced indebtedness. And distinctions of rank within the Hungarian
Communist Party could, as Péteri shows, be measured by the number
and quality of invitations received by a hunter, often in excess of the skills
he possessed.Thus this leisure activity could play as important a role in the
social reproduction of elite groups as education and work.121
Accordingly,
leisure and luxury should not simply be viewed as the privatization of common
resources by the powerful; they were also the means by which that
power reproduced itself.
Kristin Roth-Ey, in her essay exploring the early years of Soviet television
broadcasting in the late 1950s and subsequent developments in the
Brezhnev era, approaches the question of the creative uses of leisure from a
different perspective. The mass media in the Bloc has conventionally been
analyzed in terms of its propaganda effects or its capacity to distract.122
Roth-Ey concentrates here on the agency and interests of the people who
made Soviet television in the early years of its development. The first gen-
 david crowley and susan e. reid
eration of television makers was drafted into this embryonic but very rapidly
developing industry with little consideration for their expertise or their
political credentials. Genuine enthusiasts for the medium, they imagined it
in terms of its capacity to capture the spontaneity and truth of everyday life.
In a particularly vivid episode, Roth-Ey describes the live, interactive program
VVV (Vecher veselykh voprosov; Evening of Merry Questions) broadcast
in 1957, which invited its viewers to participate in the shows as themselves
and not as the stereotypical characters of Soviet socialism (the “leading
worker,” the “prize-winning athlete,” the “model plant manager,” and so
on). When the studio was swamped with brawling contestants dressed in
homemade costumes competing for its modest prizes, the broadcast had to
be suspended.The carnivalization of the ideal of collective leisure had backfired.
Though short-lived, this approach to live broadcasting was shaped
by the conviction among television’s pioneers that the medium by its very
nature revealed “truth,”“reality,” and the contemporary lichnost’ (individual
or personality) to its viewers. In the intellectual setting of the Thaw, these
values would help Soviet society remake itself after the corruption of Stalinism.Spectatorship
was to become participation,akin,as Roth-Ey argues,to
a civic act.This brief experiment was not, however, shaped by a democratic
or participatory conception of cultural production: Soviet TV pioneers saw
their efforts in terms of moral education,as well as providing an opportunity
for political mobilization. In this regard, they assumed a position close to
that occupied by the artistic avant-garde of the 1920s.
The differences between Péteri’s Hungarian hunters and a Romanian
peasant manufacturing hooch with a homemade still in the 1980s or even,
for that matter, the viewers of early Russian TV programs, whose enthusiasm
for the medium roused them to invade the production studios, are
evident. Yet the free-time activities of each can only be understood by interpreting
them as creative and productive actions in which individuals produced
things, identities, and forms of sociality. Moreover, in attending to
the ways in which individuals and groups asserted control over their own
pleasures, we have to come to terms with the fact that social identities are
neither fixed nor necessarily consistent. This is not to say that they are
incoherent from the perspective of those concerned, however. As Lebow’s
essay on the builders of Nowa Huta shows, young people in Poland in the
1950s could be both active constructors of the new world as the muchfeted
pedocracy of socialism, and rock ’n’ roll–loving hedonists, disparaged
in the press as bikiniarze (bikini boys). In conventional political discourse,
their love of American music and Hollywood fashion positioned them as
enemies of socialism.123
Their leisure-time interests were, it seems, diamet-
introduction 
rically opposed to their productive role in the socialist economy.The coincidence
of two apparently conflicting signifying systems in one social being,
the “socialist bikiniarz,” testifies to the elective aspects of identity even in
what are still sometimes described as “totalitarian” conditions, and to the
importance of consumption in self-fashioning even under state socialism.
Similarly, Alexei Yurchak has recently noted the ways Russian Komsomol
youth in the 1980s participated in the official sphere while at the same time
adopting the signifiers of Western style such as rock music and fashionable
clothes. He argues that the apparently dichotomous ordering of social
identities in Soviet society was not necessarily in contradiction. “Without
the hegemony of the authoritative rhetoric,”he writes,“the Imaginary West
would not exist, and vice versa, without such imaginary worlds, the hypernormalized
authoritative discourse could not be reproduced.”124
Feelings and emotion—along with Yurchak’s preoccupation in this passage,
fantasy—are among the most challenging realms of investigation for
the historian. Here the potential of leisure and luxury comes to the fore as
an analytical tool through which to understand the experience of socialism
in the Bloc. Recently some scholars have steered what has been dubbed an
“emotional turn” in historical studies, identifying negative feelings of fear
and disgust as important drivers of action and social attitudes in contexts
like the Gulag or war.125
But,as the essays in this book demonstrate,investigation
of more positive emotions such as pleasure may also help us grasp the
ways Soviet-style socialism was experienced in less extraordinary settings,
and the diverse and manifold ways in which life in the Bloc was imagined
beyond the terms set by ideology. Fantasy and emotion are constitutive of
the self in ways that, in the context of the Bloc, may well have exceeded the
narrow social frames of class,ethnicity,and occupation into which individuals
were inscribed by the state. Imagining “otherness”may well have constituted
an attempt to escape from the alienating effects of modern life. But,
as the sociologists Phil Cohen and Laurie Taylor have argued,fantasy is not
only a flight from reality; it is produced in relation to the actual conditions
of life, often employing the resources at hand.126
Moreover, the relation of
fantasy to “paramount reality” is never static or ahistorical. The development
and spread of imaginary worlds within the fabric of socialist societies
changed them. In turn, the fantasies of everyday life were transformed by
socialism.It seems likely that the repertoire of fantasies of leisure and luxury
were more richly textured and diverse at the end of the communist system
than at the outset. This was in part because the borders between the East
and West (and those within the Bloc) were far more permeable than conventional
accounts allow. But the resources for fantasy, as of pleasure, were
 david crowley and susan e. reid
not exclusively alien, originating outside the Bloc; as we have argued here,
official policy attempted to allow cultural and material innovations, and
then struggled to contain their unwanted results.127
Leisure and luxury, as this essay has set out to map and as the chapters
that follow will demonstrate,present rich seams of material deeply ingrained
with diverse,changing,and sometimes conflicting meanings.These materials
and their meanings can be explored to expose the persistence not only
of need and scarcity in Soviet Bloc societies but also of desire and excess.
Analysis of their forms and discourses can reveal both the uneven processes
of socialist modernity and the persistence of older attitudes and traditional
practices. The presence of social distinctions in these “classless” societies
comes into sharp focus when viewed through these prisms,as do the ambiguous
relations of socialist modernity to capitalism. Above all, research into
leisure and luxury demands that we pay attention to the relations between
provision—usually, though not invariably, managed by the state—and appropriation,
that is, the practices of individuals and groups. The pleasures
that could be found in socialism were the products of this dialectic.
Notes
1. Ferenc Fehér, Ágnes Heller, and György Márkus, Dictatorship over Needs (New
York: St. Martin’s, 1983).
2. Denise J. Youngblood, “Entertainment or Enlightenment? Popular Cinema in
Soviet Society, 1921–1931,” in New Directions in Soviet History, ed. Stephen White
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 41–61; Richard Stites, Russian
Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1992).
3. Katerina Clark, “Socialist Realism with Shores: Conventions for a Positive
Hero,”and Leonid Heller,“A World of Prettiness: Socialist Realism and Its Aesthetic
Categories,”both in Socialist Realism Without Shores, ed.T. Lahusen and E. Dobrenko
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 27–50 and 51–75, respectively; Marina
Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style (London:
Anthem, 2009).
4. Katharina Kucher, “Raum(ge)schichten: Der Gorkij-Park im frühen Stalinismus,”
Osteuropa, no. 3 (2005) (special issue on space: “Der Raum als Wille und
Vorstellung: Erkundungen über den Osten Europas,”guest edited by Karl Schlögel):
154–67; Karl Schlögel, “Der ‘Zentrale Gorkij-Kultur und Erholungspark’ (CPKIO)
in Moskau: Zur Frage des öffentlichen Raums im Stalinismus,” in Stalinismus vor
dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: Neue Wege der Forschung, ed. Manfred Hildermeier, Schriften
des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 43 (Munich, 1998), 255–74; Stephen Bittner,
“Green Cities and Orderly Streets: Space and Culture in Moscow, 1928–1933,”Journal
of Urban History 25, no. 1 (1998): 40.
5. Anna Rotkirch, “Traveling Maidens and Men with Parallel Lives—Journeys
as Private Space During Late Socialism,” in Beyond the Limits: The Concept of Space
in Russian History and Culture, ed. Jeremy Smith (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen
introduction 
Seura,1999),131–65.Similarly,group tourist trips abroad,with the official purpose of
acquiring knowledge and culture,often served for the acquisition of other experiences,
and not least for shopping, real and virtual. See especially Anne Gorsuch, “Time
Travelers: Soviet Tourists to Eastern Europe,” and Wendy Bracewell, “Adventures in
the Marketplace: Yugoslav Travel Writing and Tourism in the 1950s–1960s,”in Turizm:
The Russian and East European Tourist Under Capitalism and Socialism, ed. Anne
Gorsuch and Diane Koenker (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press,
2006), 205–26 and 248–65, respectively. See also the following essays for Yugoslav
and Hungarian perspectives on this theme: A.Wessely,“Travelling People,Travelling
Objects,”Cultural Studies 16,no.1 (2002): 3–15;T.Dessewffy,“Speculators and Travelers:The
Political Construction of the Tourist in the Kádár Regime,”Cultural Studies
16, no. 1 (2002): 44–62; Alenka Švab, “Consuming Western Image of Well-Being:
Shopping Tourism in Socialist Slovenia,” Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2002): 63–79;
Breda Luthar,“Remembering Socialism: On Desire,Consumption and Surveillance,”
Journal of Consumer Culture 6, no. 2 (2006): 229–59.
6. See Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the
Time of Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); David Crowley, “People’s
Warsaw/Popular Warsaw,” Journal of Design History 10, no. 2 (1997): 203–24;
Carol S. Lilly, Power and Persuasion: Ideology and Rhetoric in Communist Yugoslavia,
1944–1953 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2001); Paweł Sowiński, Komunistyczne święto:
Obchody 1 maja w latach 1948–1954 (Warsaw: Trio, 2000). A recent essay on GDR
town planning asserts, by contrast: “What kind of happiness can exist outside the
official framework of ‘really existing socialist society’? Clearly none.” Ed Taverne,
“Henselmann,a Socialist Superstar,”in Happy: Cities and Public Happiness in Post-War
Europe, ed. Cor Wagenaar (Rotterdam: NAI, 2004), 129–49, esp. 129.
7. Nancy Ries, Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation During Perestroika (Ithaca,
N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 59–60.The pleasure of the chase
could be a luxury, however. Ries distinguishes between the shopping of mothers and
grandmothers under pressure to procure the necessities for the family and forced to
endure daily lengthy waits in queues to feed them; and that of “browsers”who because
of age, gender, or marital status were “free to fail at their shopping attempts, or to
wander freely, reaping the thrill of serendipity.”
8. See Jeni Klugman, ed., Poverty in Russia: Public Policy and Private Responses
(Washington, D.C.: Economic Development Institute, World Bank, 1997), 249.
9. V. Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in
Post-Stalin Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); M. Garcelon, “Public
and Private in Communist and Post-Communist Society,”and O. Kharkhordin,“Reveal
and Dissimulate: A Genealogy of Private Life in Soviet Russia,” both in Public
and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy, ed. Jeff Weintraub
and Krishan Kumar (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,1997),
303–32 and 333–64, respectively; Lewis Siegelbaum, ed., Borders of Socialism: Private
Spheres of Soviet Russia (Houndmills, Eng.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
10. See Katerina Gerasimova, “Public Privacy in the Soviet Communal Apartment,”
and David Crowley, “Warsaw Interiors: The Public Life of Private Spaces,”
in Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, ed. David Crowley and
Susan E. Reid (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002), 181–206 and 207–30.
11. Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973).
12. Alena Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal
 david crowley and susan e. reid
Exchanges (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Stephen Lovell,
Alena V. Ledeneva, and Andrei Rogachevskii, eds., Bribery and Blat in Russia: Negotiating
Reciprocity from the Middle Ages to the 1990s (Houndmills, Eng.: Macmillan,
2000); Dennis O’Hearn,“The Consumer Second Economy: Size and Effects,”Soviet
Studies 32, no. 2 (April 1980): 218–34; G. Grossman, “The ‘Second Economy’ of the
USSR,” Problems of Communism 26, no. 5 (1977): 25–40.
13. See Elżbieta Firlit and Jerzy Chłopecki, “When Theft Is Not Theft,” in The
Unplanned Society: Poland During and After Communism, ed. J. Wedel (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1992), 95–109. On kinship ties in socialist and post-socialist
society, see Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); and M. Burawoy, P. Krotov, and T. Lytikina,
“Involution and Destitution in Capitalist Russia,”Ethnography 1, no. 1 (2000): 43–65.
14.For a survey of different concepts of luxury,including what he describes as classical
definitions,see Christopher Berry,The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical
Investigation (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
15. Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1987),59.See also Werner Sombart,Luxury and Capitalism
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 59.
16. See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 1991);
Paul Betts,“The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory and Material Culture,”
Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 731–65; D.Berdhal “(N)ostalgie for the Present:
Memory, Longing, and East German Things,” Ethnos, 64, no. 2 (1999): 192–211;
Martin Blum, “Remaking the East German Past: Ostalgie, Identity, and Material
Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture 34, no. 3 (2000): 229–53; Zala Volcic, “YugoNostalgia:
Cultural Memory and Media in the Former Yugoslavia,”Critical Studies in
Media Communication 24,no.1 (March 2007): 21–38; Filip Modrzewski and Monika
Sznajderman, eds., Nostalgia: Eseje o tęsknocie za komunizmem (Wołowiec, Pol.: Wyd.
Czarna, 2002). Recent work on the Soviet experience making use of oral testimony
includes Ries, Russian Talk; Donald Raleigh, Russia’s Sputnik Generation: Soviet Baby
Boomers Talk About Their Lives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); and
Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). Susan Reid is currently
completing a project on “Everyday Aesthetics in the Modern Soviet Flat,”funded by
the Leverhulme Trust, which makes extensive use of oral testimony.
17. See various essays in Ian Hodder, ed., The Meaning of Things: Material Culture
and Symbolic Expression (London: Routledge, 1991); Judy Attfield, Wild Things:
The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000); and Steven Lubar and
W. David Kingery, eds., History from Things: Essays on Material Culture (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian, 1993).
18.Victor Buchli, The Archaeology of Socialism (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999).
19.Slavoj Žižek,“When the Party Commits Suicide,”New Left Review (November–
December 1999): 46.
20. Slavoj Žižek, “Design as an Ideological State-Apparatus,” lecture presented at
ERA05,the World Design Congress held in Copenhagen in 2005.See www.icograda
.org (accessed November 2006).
21. For example, Vladimir Sorokin, The Queue (London: Readers International,
1988); V. O.Rukavishnikov,“Ochered’,”Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 16,no.4 (1989):
3–12; Joseph Hraba,“Consumer Shortages in Poland: Looking Beyond the Queue in
introduction 
a World of Making Do,”Sociological Quarterly 26,no.3 (1985): 387–404; Małgorzata
Mazurek and Matthew Hilton, “Consumerism, Solidarity and Communism: Consumer
Protection and the Consumer Movement in Poland,” Journal of Contemporary
History 42, no. 2 (2007): 315–43; Elena Osokina, “Proshchal’naia oda sovetskoi
ocheredi,”and Vladimir Nikolaev,“Sovetskaia ochered’: Proshloe kak nastoiashchee,”
both in Neprikosnovennyi zapas 5, no. 43 (2005): 48–54 and 55–61.
22. Fehér, Heller, and Márkus, Dictatorship over Needs; János Kornai, Economics
of Shortage, 2 vols. (Amsterdam and Oxford: North-Holland, 1980); Julie Hessler,
“Culture of Shortages: A Social History of Soviet Trade, 1917–1953” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Chicago, 1996) (the first part of the title is dropped from her book
based on this research, A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practice,
and Consumption, 1917–1953 [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004]);
Ina Merkel, Utopie und Bedürfnis: Die Geschichte der Konsumkultur in der DDR (Cologne:
Böhlau, 1999); Mariusz Jastrząb, Empty Shelves: The Problem in the Provision
of Everyday Goods in Poland, 1949–1956 (Puste połki: Problem zaopatrzenia ludności
w artykuły powszechnego użytku w Polsce w latach 1949–1956) (Warsaw: Trio, 2004);
David M.Kemme,“The Chronic Shortage Model of Centrally Planned Economies,”
Soviet Studies 41, no. 3 (1989): 345–64.
23.Fehér,Heller,and Márkus,Dictatorship over Needs, 84.See also Elena Osokina,
Ierarkhiia potrebleniia: O zhizni liudei v usloviiakh stalinskogo snabzheniia 1928–1935
gg. (Moscow: MGU, 1993); Mark G. Meerovich, Kak vlast’ narod k trudu priuchala:
Zhilishche v SSSR—sredstvo upravleniia liud’mi: 1917–1941 gg. (Stuttgart: IbidemVerlag,
2005).
24. Stephen E. Harris,“In Search of ‘Ordinary’Russia: Everyday Life in the NEP,
the Thaw, and the Communal Apartment,”Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian
History 6, no. 3 (2005): 583–614.
25. Verdery, What Was Socialism? 55; Kathy Burrell, “The Political and Social Life
of Food in Socialist Poland,” Anthropology of East Europe Review 21, no. 1 (2003):
189–94; Charlotte Chase, “Symbolism of Food Shortage in Current Polish Politics,”
Anthropological Quarterly 56, no. 2 (April 1983): 76–82; and Wojciech Pawlik, “Intimate
Commerce,” in Wedel, The Unplanned Society, 78–94.
26. In a perverse gesture of international solidarity, in the mid-1980s the Polish
government spokesman Jerzy Urban organized a campaign to collect donations of
blankets from Polish households for the homeless of New York.See Associated Press,
“Sourly, the Poles Offer Blankets to New York,” New York Times, May 14, 1986.
27.The avoska was a key piece of equipment for chance purchases. It came synecdochically
to represent consumer anxiety.During perestroika,Raisa Gorbacheva was reputed
to have declared that the avoska “must disappear from the Soviet home.” Irina H.
Corten,Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture (London: Adamantine,1992),19; Ries,
Russian Talk, 54.
28. Reet Piiri, “This Storing Habit: About Food Culture in Soviet Estonia,” and
Reet Ruusmann,“Deficit as Part of Soviet-Time Everyday Life in the Estonian SSSR,”
both in Yearbook of the Estonian National Museum 49 (Tartu: Eesti Rahva Muuseum,
2006), 49–90 and 125–56; Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Blat in Stalin’s Time”; Alena Ledeneva,
“Continuity and Change of Blat Practices in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia”;
and Caroline Humphrey, “Rethinking Bribery in Contemporary Russia,” all in Bribery
and Blat, ed. Lovell, Ledeneva, and Rogachevskii, 166–82, 183–205, 216–41.
29. Elena Bogdanova, “Gazetnye zhaloby kak strategii zashchity potrebitel’skikh
 david crowley and susan e. reid
interesov: Pozdnesovetskii period,”Teleskop: Nabliudeniia za povsednevnoi zhizn’iu peterburzhtsev,
no. 6 (2002): 44–48; Księga listów PRL-u. part I, 1951–1956 (Warsaw:
Baobab, 2004); Księga listów PRL-u. part II, 1956–1970 (Warsaw: Baobab, 2004);
Księga listów PRL-u. part III, 1971–1989 (Warsaw: Baobab, 2005).
30. Katherine Pence,“‘You as a Woman Will Understand’: Consumption, Gender
and the Relationship Between State and Citizenry in the GDR’s Crisis of 17 June
1953,” German History 19, no. 2 (2001): 218–52; Matthew Stibbe, “The SED, German
Communism and the June 1953 Uprising: New Trends and New Research,” in
Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe: Challenges to Communist Rule, ed. Kevin
McDermott and Matthew Stibbe (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 37–55; V. A. Kozlov, Massovye
besporiadki v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve (Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronograf,
1999).On Plzeň,see Kevin McDermott,“Popular Resistance in Czechoslovakia:The
Plzeň Uprising: June 1953,” forthcoming; and Samuel H. Barron, Bloody Saturday
in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk, 1962 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
2001). On Łódż, see Padraic Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance in Communist
Poland,” American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999): 399–425.
31. The paradoxical overproduction of luxuries at the expense of necessities was
identified as a key problem of the Soviet planned economy under Khrushchev. Stockpiles
of unwanted goods allegedly accumulating in the early 1960s included silk dresses,
and jam and jelly. See, for example, K. Skovoroda, “Zadachi dal’neishego uluchsheniia
torgovogo obsluzhivaniia naseleniia,”Planovoe khoziaistvo, no. 2 (1960): 43–53.
32. On organized leisure and tourism in the Bloc, see the essays in Gorsuch and
Koenker, Turizm; and Paweł Sowiński, Wakacje w Polsce Ludowej: Polityka władz i
ruch turystyczny (1945–1989) (Warsaw: Trio, 2005). On the dacha, see Paulina Bren,
“Weekend Getaways: The Chata, the Tramp and the Politics of Private Life in Post-
1968 Czechoslovakia,”and Stephen Lovell,“Soviet Exurbia: Dachas in Postwar Russia,”both
in Crowley and Reid, Socialist Spaces, 123–40 and 105–22; Stephen Lovell,
Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710–2000 (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell
University Press, 2003); and Diane P. Koenker, “Whose Right to Rest? Contesting
the Family Vacation in the Postwar Soviet Union,”Comparative Studies in Society and
History 51 (2009): 401–25.
33. Jennifer A. Loehlin, From Rugs to Riches: Housework, Consumption and Modernity
in Germany (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999); Karin Zachmann, “A Socialist
Consumption Junction: Debating the Mechanization of Housework in East Germany,
1956–1957,” Technology and Culture 43, no. 1 (2002): 73–99; Susan E. Reid,
“The Khrushchev Kitchen: Domesticating the Scientific-Technological Revolution,”
Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 2 (2005): 289–316; Jane Zavisca, “Consumer
Inequalities and Regime Legitimacy in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia” (Ph.D.
diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2004).
34. Similar reasons for the neglect of consumption in GDR are offered by Pence,
“‘You as a Woman Will Understand,’” 218–52. In recent years a tide of studies have
demonstrated the emergence of mass consumer societies in the countries of socialist
Eastern Europe, and especially in regard to the GDR. Examples include Konrad H.
Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR,
trans. Eve Duffy (Oxford: Berghahn, 1999); Stephan Merl, “Sowjetisierung in der
Welt des Konsums,” in Amerikanisierung und Sowjetisierung in Deutschland 1945–
1970, ed.Konrad Jarausch and Hannes Siegrist (Frankfurt am Main: Campus,1997),
167–94; Stephan Merl, “Staat und Konsum in der Zentralverwaltungswirtschaft:
introduction 
Russland und die ostmitteleuropäischen Länder,” in Europäische Konsumgeschichte:
Zur Gesellschafts-und Kulturgeschichte des Konsums, 18–20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hannes
Siegrist, Harmut Kalble, and Jürgen Kocka (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1997),
205–41; André Steiner, “Dissolution of the ‘Dictatorship of Needs’? Consumer Behaviour
and Economic Reform in East Germany in the 1960s,”and Ina Merkel,“Consumer
Culture in the GDR,” both in Getting and Spending: European and American
Consumer Societies in theTwentieth Century, ed.S.Strasser,C.McGovern,and M.Judt
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 167–85 and 281–99, respectively;
Merkel, Utopie und Bedürfnis; Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War
Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000); Milena Veenis, “Fantastic Things,” in Experiencing Material Culture in
the Western World, ed. Susan M. Pearce (New York: Leicester University Press, 1997),
154–74; Judd Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism: Clothing, Politics and Consumer Culture
in the GDR (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005). Regarding Soviet Russia, see Jukka
Gronow, Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in
Stalin’s Russia (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003); Susan E. Reid, “Cold War in the
Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union
Under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 211–52; and Zavisca,
“Consumer Inequalities.” For the way the concept of consumption—and by extension,
modernity—has tended to be monopolized by the anglophone West, leaving
China, for example, on the margins of its discourses, see Craig Clunas, “Modernity
Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the West,” American Historical Review
104, no. 5 (1999): 1497–511.
35. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 119–20.
36. Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (San
Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959), 46.
37. Kazimierz Brandys, A Warsaw Diary 1978–1981 (London: Chatto, 1984), 105.
38. Vera Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction, 2nd ed.
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), 17.
39.The classic account is Nicholas Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and
Decline of Communism in Russia (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946). For counterargument
see David L.Hoffmann,Stalinist Values:The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity,
1917–1941 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).
40. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War (New York:
Norton, 2006), 140–41. For the Soviet regime, the 1953 crisis in East Germany had
already reinforced the need to attend to matters of consumption.
41.Theodore Friedgut,Political Participation in the USSR (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1979); Jeffrey W. Hahn, Soviet Grassroots: Citizen Participation
in Local Soviet Government (London: I. B.Tauris, 1988).
42. Francois Fejtö, A History of the People’s Democracies (Harmondsworth, Eng.:
Pelican, 1974), 362–412.
43. James Millar, with reference to Vera Dunham, calls this phenomenon in
the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union the “little deal.” James R. Millar, “The Little Deal:
Brezhnev’s Contribution to Acquisitive Socialism,” Slavic Review 44, no. 4 (1985):
694–706.
44. M. Simecka, The Restoration of Order: The Normalization of Czechoslovakia,
1969–1976 (London: Verso, 1984), esp. chap. 15, “Corruption.”
45. Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless (1978; London: Hutchinson 1985),
 david crowley and susan e. reid
37–40. For Havel’s views on consumerism, see Robert B. Pynsent, Questions of Identity:
Czech and Slovak Ideas of Nationality and Personality (Budapest: Central European
University Press, 1994), 23–26.
46. For a transcription of the “kitchen debate” in English, see http://www.cnn
.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/14/documents/debate/ (accessed November
2006).
47. Edward Crankshaw, Khrushchev’s Russia, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin
Books, 1962; 1st ed. 1959), 136. Compare the results of surveys of youth attitudes
conducted in the early 1960s under the auspices of Komsomol’skaia pravda.
B. A.Grushin,Chetyre zhizni Rossii v zerkale oprosov obshchestvennogo mneniia: Epokha
Khrushcheva (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2001), esp. chap. 2,“Dinamika i problemy
urovnia zhizni naseleniia.”
48. Paul Neuburg, The Hero’s Children: The Post-War Generation in Eastern Europe
(New York: William Morrow, 1973), 273–74.
49. William Shawcross, Crime and Compromise: János Kádár and the Politics of
Hungary Since Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), 176; Heino
Nyyssönen, “Salami Reconstructed: ‘Goulash Communism’ and Political Culture in
Hungary,” Cahiers du Monde russe 47, nos. 1–2 (2006): 153–72.
50. The most influential articulation of this argument in recent years has been
Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? It was already a premise of David
Riesman’s 1951 essay “The Nylon War,”in Riesman’s Abundance for What? (New York:
Doubleday, 1964), 65–77.
51. See Zsusanna Varga,“Questioning the Soviet Economic Model,”in Muddling
Through in the Long 1960s: Ideas and Everyday Life in High Politics and the Lower
Classes of Communist Hungary, ed. János M. Rainer and György Péteri (Trondheim:
PEECS, 2005), 109–34; H. G. Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution
(Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press,1976),119–25; Abraham Katz,The Politics
of Economic Reform in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1973); Philip Hanson,
The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy (London: Longman, 2003). For some preliminary
discussion of the cultural implications,see Susan E.Reid,“Khrushchev Modern:
Agency and Modernization in the Soviet Home,”Cahiers du Monde russe 47,nos.1–2
(2006): 227–68.
52. Jane Shapiro, “Soviet Consumer Policy in the 1970s: Plan and Performance,”
in Soviet Politics in the Brezhnev Era, ed.Donald R.Kelley (New York: Praeger,1980),
104–28.
53. Berry, Idea of Luxury; Matthew Hilton, “The Legacy of Luxury: Moralities of
Consumption Since the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Consumer Culture 4, no. 1
(2004): 101–23.
54. A similar approach was adopted in Lenin’s Russia under the New Economic
Policy. See Alan M. Ball, Russia’s Last Capitalists: The Nepmen 1921–29 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987).
55.Of course,cigarettes might be considered necessities when used to stifle hunger
during periods when food was in short supply.
56. On the relations of luxury to abundance, see Werner Sombart, Luxury and
Capitalism (1913; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967).Tamas Aczel and
Tibor Meray describe Budapest’s shops during the Second Festival of Youth held in
the city in 1949 with these words: “The shops abounded in goods. The bread shone
introduction 
white as snow. Red meat filled the windows of the butcher shops, and, on the market
stands, the apples smiled, the pears, juicy in their golden-yellow skins, offered themselves,
and multi-coloured grapes stood in mountains. The war was far away . . . The
standard of living rose steeply, and it seemed as though the road to socialism were
running straight and sunny toward the not-so-distant pinnacles.” Tamas Aczel and
Tibor Meray, The Revolt of the Mind (London: Thames and Hudson: 1960), 70.
57. Gronow, Caviar with Champagne.
58. Rodger P. Potocki Jr., “The Life and Times of Poland’s ‘Bikini Boys,’” Polish
Review 39, no. 3 (1994): 259–90.
59.Torgsin shops were first introduced to the Soviet Union in 1936, according to
Elena Osokina,Za fasadom stalinskogo izobiliia (Moscow: Rosspen,1998).For a report
on Czechoslovakia’s Tuzex hard currency stores, Polish Pewex shops, and the Bulgarian
Corecom, see J. L. Kerr, Hard Currency Shops in Eastern Europe, Radio Free Europe/Research
RAD Background Report 211 (October 27,1977); Jonathan R.Zatlin,
The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany (Cambridge,
Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. chap. 6, “Consuming Ideology.”
60. Veenis, “Fantastic Things,” 170.
61. Raymond Stokes, Constructing Socialism: Technology and Change in East Germany,
1945–1990 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000);
Ina Merkel and Felix Mühlberg, Wunderwirtschaft: DDR-Konsumkultur in den 60er
Jahren, ed. Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (Cologne: Böhlau, 1996). See also
Alfred Zauberman, Industrial Progress in Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany,
1937–62 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
62.Eli Rubin,Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic
Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 109–10.
63. George Breslauer, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders (London: Allen and
Unwin, 1982), 139–40; Marshall Goldman, “More for the Common Man: Living
Standards and Consumer Goods,” Problems of Communism 9, no. 5 (1960): 33; M. E.
Ruban, “Private Consumption in the USSR: Changes in the Assortment of Goods,
1940–1959,” Soviet Studies 13, no. 3 (1962): 37–54. For fuller argumentation, see
Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen”; Reid, “Khrushchev Modern,” 244–55.
64. Although Hungarians enjoyed a rapid rise in living conditions under Kádár
(prompting one commentator to conclude that “consumerism was the principal
means by which the State built its bridges with the people” [Fejtö, History of the
People’s Democracies, 166–67]), there was considerable discussion within Party circles
about what were perceived to be the malign effects of “refrigerator socialism” on society
and the individual. See Tibor Iván Berend, The Hungarian Economic Reforms,
1953–1988 (Cambridge: CUP Archive, 1990), 147–67; Steiner, “Dissolution of the
‘Dictatorship of Needs’?,” 170–71.
65. N. S. Khrushchev, O shirokom vnedrenii industrial’nykh metodov, uluchshenii
kachestva i snizhenii stoimosti stroitel’stva: Rech’ na Vsesoiuznom soveshchanii stroitelei,
arkhitektorov i rabotnikov promyshlennosti stroitel’nykh materialov, stroitel’nogo i dorozhnogo
mashinostroeniia, proektnykh i nauchno-issledovatel’skikh organizatsii, 7 dekabria
1954 g. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1955); N. Khrushchev, “Remove Shortcomings in Design,
Improve the Work of Architects,” Pravda and Izvestia, December 28, 1954,
trans.in Architecture Culture 1943–1968, ed.Joan Ockman (New York: Rizzoli,1993),
184–88.
 david crowley and susan e. reid
66.Grey Hodnett,ed.,Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, vol.4:The Khrushchev Years 1953–1964 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1974), 209–10, 247.
67. Susan E. Reid,“Destalinization and Taste, 1953–1963,”Journal of Design History
10, no. 2 (1997): 177–201; Reid, “ Khrushchev Modern,” 227–68; V. Buchli,
“Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight Against Petit-Bourgeois Consciousness,”
Journal of Design History 10, no. 2 (1997): 161–76; A. Minta, “The Authority of the
Ordinary: Building Socialism and the Ideology of Domestic Space in East Germany’s
Furniture Industry,” in Constructed Happiness: Domestic Environment in the Cold War
Era, ed.M.Kalm and Ingrid Ruudi (Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Arts,2005),102–
17; Eli Rubin,“The Form of Socialism Without Ornament: Consumption, Ideology,
and the Fall and Rise of Modernist Design in the German Democratic Republic,”
Journal of Design History 19, no. 2 (2006): 155–68.
68. Stokes, Constructing Socialism. In 1958 a conference on synthetic plastics
opened in East Germany under the motto “Chemicals Provide Bread, Prosperity, and
Beauty.” See Betts, “Twilight of the Idols,” 756.
69. T. Trotskaia, “Kompozitory aramatov,” Ogonek, no. 10 (March 6, 1960): 25.
The insufficient supply of suitable oils and fats had presented the main obstacle to
the development of the Soviet cosmetics and perfume industry on a mass scale in the
1930s. Anastas Mikoian, Tak bylo: Razmyshleniia o minuvshem (Moscow: Vagrius,
1999), 297–99.
70.This was an extension of a pattern identified by Jukka Gronow in the industrialized
production of caviar and “Sovetskoe”champagne in the 1930s.Gronow,Caviar
with Champagne.
71. Cars in private ownership, for instance, remained particularly problematic in
the 1960s. See Lewis Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades:The Life of the Soviet Automobile
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), 235–38.
72. Cited by Jerome M. Gilison, The Soviet Image of Utopia (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1975), 173, from G. Shakhnazarov, Kommunizm i svoboda
lichnosti (Moscow, 1960), 48.
73. Társadalmi szemle (October 1959): 2, cited by G. Gömöri, “‘Consumerism’ in
Hungary,” Problems of Communism 12, no. 1 (1963): 64.
74. Cited by Akos Rona-Tas, The Great Surprise of the Small Transformation: The
Demise of Communism and the Rise of the Private Sector in Hungary (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press), 92, from Új írás 8 (1961): 737.
75. P. Mstislavsky, “The Standard of Consumption,” New Times, no. 22 (May
1960): 11.
76. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, “Cars, Cars, and More Cars: The Faustian Bargain of
the Brezhnev Era,”in Borders of Socialism, ed. Siegelbaum, 83–106; Siegelbaum, Cars
for Comrades; Larissa Zakharova, “Fabriquer le bon goût: La Maison des modèles de
Leningrad a l’époque de Hruščev,” and Nordica Nettleton, “Driving Towards Communist
Consumerism,” both in Cahiers du Monde russe 47, nos. 1–2 (2006): 195–226
and 131–52; Zatlin, Currency of Socialism, 203–42. The most “chic” Soviet car of
the 1960s–80s was the Chaika, produced at the Gorky car factory starting in 1959
and based on the American Picard. The ordinary person could only admire this car,
according to Nataliia Lebina, for it was never put on sale, being intended only for official
use by the highest bureaucrats and as a gift to such notables as cosmonauts Iurii
Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova. Even by the end of the 1980s it still represented
introduction 
untold luxury for the Soviet person, and was even mythologized in the rock music of
the perestroika period, for example, in a song by Zh. Aguzarov; “And you once again
are on foot, while I fly past in a Chaika.” Nataliia Lebina, “XX vek: Slovar’ povsednevnosti,”
Rodina, no. 5 (2006): 107.
77. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades; Zatlin, Currency of Socialism, 203–24; Karol
Jerzy Mórawski, Syrena: Samochód PRL (Warsaw: Trio, 2005).
78. We should be careful not to make premature judgments about the effects of
Soviet consumer policy. There are indications that official policies and experience
continue to shape attitudes to consumption in the former territories of the Bloc.
Evidence thrown up by oral histories of life in the Soviet Union suggests that there
was considerable popular support for the moral framework of Khrushchev- and
Brezhnev-era policies that accentuated thrift,and that patterns of behavior and moral
economies established thirty or forty years ago continue to influence actions in the
present. Susan Reid, interviews conducted with the support of the Leverhulme Trust,
“Khrushchev Modern: Making Home and Becoming a Consumer in the Soviet Sixties,”
2004–07.
79. Studies of post-socialist consumption include Olga Shevchenko, Crisis and the
Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Jennifer
Patico, Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class (Palo Alto,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008); Zavisca, “Consumer Inequalities.”
80. See Örökség: Tárgy- és környeszetkultúra Magyarországon, 1945–1985 (Budapest:
Műcsarnok, 1985), 88.
81. For reflections on the woes of Moscow car owners, see Vladimir Polupanov,
“Krutaia tachka—i roskosh’, i golovnaia bol’,” Aif-Moskva, no. 17 (2001).
82. The ethnographer Krisztina Fehérváry has observed that in post-communist
societies, “people regularly describe as ‘normal’ high-quality commodities and living
environments otherwise considered extraordinary in their local context.”This was no
less true before the fall of the Wall. Krisztina Fehérváry,“American Kitchens, Luxury
Bathrooms, and the Search for a ‘Normal’ Life in Postsocialist Hungary,” Ethnos 67,
no. 3 (2002): 369–400.
83. Igor Kopytoff,“The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Cultural
Process,” in The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge, Eng.:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–94.
84.Compare,on the refrigerator’s shift from luxury to necessity in West Germany
in the 1950s and 1960s, Loehlin, From Rugs to Riches, 61–66, here 64; and on the
status of appliances in interwar France,Robert Frost,“Machine Liberation: Inventing
Housewives and Home Appliances in Interwar France,” French Historical Studies 18
(1993): 109–30.
85. Katherine Pence,“Cold War Iceboxes: Competing Visions of Kitchen Politics
in 1950s Divided Germany,” unpublished paper for the workshop “Kitchen Politics
in the Cold War,” Deutsches Museum, Munich, July 1–3, 2005.
86. Stibbe, “The SED.”
87. Pence, “Cold War Iceboxes.”
88.Over the same period the manufacture of vacuum cleaners rose from 45,000 to
720,000 units, and washing machines from 4,000 to 23,000,000. By the mid-1960s,
there were three models of refrigerators available, and in 1965, 1.5 million refrigerators
were to be produced. Lebina, “XX vek,” 106; “Novye tovary (Tsifry i fakty),”
Sovetskaia torgovlia, no. 10 (1961): 61–62.The latter source gives 1951 as the start of
 david crowley and susan e. reid
mass production of refrigerators. By 1968 there were 27 million TV sets, 25 million
washing machines, 13.7 million refrigerators, and 5.9 million vacuum cleaners for
some 60–70 million homes, but as Matthews notes, we do not know how many of
these appliances were working. Mervyn Matthews, Class and Society in Soviet Russia
(London: Allen Lane, 1972), 84. See also Zavisca,“Consumer Inequalities”; Shapiro,
“Soviet Consumer Policy.”
89. According to official statistics, the number of refrigerators produced (or “guaranteed
to”) per 1,000 population rose from 29 in 1965 to 210 in 1977. Equivalent
figures for washing machines were 59 and 200, and for television sets 68 and 229.
Shapiro,“Soviet Consumer Policy,”116, table 5.2, based on Tsentral’noe statisticheskoe
upravlenie, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1975 g. (Moscow: Statistika, 1976), 595;
Tsentral’noe statisticheskoe upravleniia, SSSR v tsifrakh v 1977 g. (Moscow: Statistika,
1978), 204.
90.Bogdan Mieczkowski,Personal and Social Consumption in Eastern Europe (New
York: Praeger, 1975), 287.
91. Sandy Isenstadt, “Visions of Plenty: Refrigerators in America Around 1950,”
Journal of Design History (Winter 1998): 311–21.
92. Parsadan, “Istoriia s kholodil’nikom,” Krokodil, no. 7 (March 10, 1958): 3.
93.What to do when the notoriously unreliable refrigerator breaks down became a
common subject of humor,for example,a cartoon by S.Kuz’min,“Kogda kholodil’nik
‘Oka’ ne rabotaet,” Krokodil, no. 35 (December 20, 1959).
94. For example, Russian State Archive of the Economy (RGAE), f. 4372, op.
65, d. 177 (Initsiativnye predlozheniia po proizvodstvu predmetov potrebleniia,
28.12.1962–27.12.1963), l. 10; Skovoroda,“Zadachi,”43–53; and see the luxury edition
of Tovarnyi slovar’ for articles on dishwashers (vol. 9, 1961) and “universal domestic
electric machines” (vol. 8, 1960), 1135–44.
95.Jean Baudrillard characterizes the refrigerator as an emblematic object of capitalism
in these terms.He argues that the function of this piece of domestic equipment
is less important than its capacity to symbolize modern consumer lifestyles. See Jean
Baudrillard, “The System of Things,” in Design After Modernism: Beyond the Objects,
ed.J.Thackara (London:Thames and Hudson,1988); Daniel Miller,ed.,Acknowledging
Consumption (London: Routledge, 1995).
96. Kristin Roth-Ey, “Mass Media and the Remaking of Soviet Culture, 1950s–
1960s”(Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2003), chap. 4,“Finding a Soviet Home for
Television,”247–313; Kristin Roth-Ey,“Finding a Home for Television in the USSR,
1950–1970,” Slavic Review 66, no. 2 (2007): 278–306.
97. The faster take-up of television sets than other appliances is corroborated repeatedly
in many of the more than seventy interviews conducted for Susan Reid’s
project “Everyday Aesthetics in the Modern Soviet Flat,” supported by the Leverhulme
Trust.
98. N. I. Andreeva, “Gigienicheskaia otsenka novogo zhilishchnogo stroitel’stva v
Moskve (period 1947–1951 gg.),” Gigiena i sanitariia, no. 6 (1956): 22. In this survey
of Moscow residents in 1955, some expressed the desire for a refrigerator in the
kitchen or, if too expensive, to be provided with a space to install one in the future.
99. See, for example, Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades.
100. Appliances that took more labor to make them work than they saved were a
common comic theme in the popular Soviet press in the Khrushchev era,for example,
in the illustrated magazines Ogonek and Krokodil. See also Matthews,Class and Society,
introduction 
84. For problems of washing machines that stood useless, see A. Holt,“Domestic Labour
and Soviet Society,” in Home, School and Leisure in the Soviet Union, ed. J. Brine,
M. Perrie, and A. Sutton (London: Allen and Unwin, 1980), 26–54. Khrushchev,
during the notorious kitchen debate at the outset of the drive to modernize the home
with white goods in the late 1950s,had challenged America’s endorsement of product
obsolescence by asserting the long durability of Soviet products. This feature, he argued,was
valued by Soviet civilization and designed into its products.Today,many old
Soviet-era refrigerators continue to work, not because of the quality of their manufacture,
but because of the care and repairs of their owners. On the labor demanded
by Soviet durables and on their longevity, see Ol’ga Gurova, “Prodolzhitel’nost’
zhizni veshchei v sovetskom obshchestve: Zametki po sotsiologii nizhnego bel’ia,”
Neprikosnovennyi zapas (2004), no. 2. http://magazines.russ.ru/n2/2004/34/gurov9
.html; Galina Orlova, “Apologiia strannoi veshchi: ‘Malen’kie khitrosti’ sovetskogo
cheloveka,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas (2004), no. 2. http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2004/
34/ovl10.html; and Olga Shevchenko, “In Case of Fire Emergency: Consumption,
Security, and the Meaning of Durables in a Transforming Society,”in Journal of Consumer
Culture 2, no. 2 (2002): 147–70. The Russian sociologists Ekaterina Gerasimova
and Sofia Chuikina designate the Soviet Union a “mending society”: see Ekaterina
Gerasimova and Sofia Chuikina, “Obshchestvo remonta,” Neprikosnovennyi
zapas, no. 34 (2004), available at http://www.magazines.russ.ru/nz/2004/34/ger85
.html (accessed November 1, 2004).
101. Ekaterina Degot’, “Ot tovara k tovarishchu: K estetike nerynochnogo predmeta,”
Logos, no. 5–6 (2000), http://www.ruthenia.ru/logos/number/2000_5_6/
2000_5–6_04.htm (accessed December 8, 2003).
102. On luxury American cars from the 1950s still in use and lovingly maintained
in Cuba today, see Viviana Narotzky, “Our Cars in Havana,” in Autopia: Cars and
Culture, ed. Peter Wollen and Joe Kerr (London: Reaktion, 2002).
103.“The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined
by necessity and mundane considerations ceases.”Karl Marx,Capital, vol.3 (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1997), 820. Increased leisure was promised as part of the
transition to communism,for example,in the Third Party Program in 1961.Hodnett,
Resolutions and Decisions, 229–30.
104.See,for example,S.Strumilin,“Mysli o griadushchem,”Oktiabr’, no.3 (1960):
140–46; Gilison, Soviet Image.
105. Hodnett, Resolutions and Decisions, 231.
106. For a Western Marxist critique by Frankfurt School philosophers on the
relation between leisure and work under capitalism, see Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947; London: Verso, 1979). See also Rudy
Koshar, Histories of Leisure (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 1–26.
107. Lynn Mally, Amateur Theater and the Soviet State, 1917–1938 (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 2000). See also Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian
Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1989).
108. See, for example, the Rusakov Workers’ Club, Moscow (1929), designed
by Konstantin Melnikov, and discussed in Vigdariia Khazanova, Klubnaia zhizn’ i
arkhitektura kluba 1917–1941 (Moscow: Zhiraf, 2000). See also Anne White, DeStalinization
and the House of Culture: Declining State Control over Leisure in the USSR,
Poland and Hungary, 1953–89 (London: Routledge, 1990), 35; and Simone Hain
 david crowley and susan e. reid
and Stephan Stroux, Die Salons der Sozialisten: Kulturhäuser in der DDR (Berlin: Ch.
Links, 1996).
109. C. Miłosz, The Captive Mind (1953; Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1980),
197–98.
110.The received view that only collective leisure was valorized is nuanced, however,
by Diane Koenker’s findings regarding Soviet proletarian tourism in the 1930s.
Diane P. Koenker, “The Proletarian Tourist in the 1930s: Between Mass Excursion
and Mass Escape,” in Gorsuch and Koenker, Turizm, 119–40.
111. Vladimir Shlapentokh, The Public and Private Life of the Soviet People (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Siegelbaum, Borders of Socialism; White, DeStalinization;
Lovell, Summerfolk.
112.Concern with youth leisure was frequently expressed in the Soviet Komsomol
press already in the early 1950s; for example, “Zabota o byte i dosuge molodezhi,”
Komsomol’skaia pravda, August 2, 1952.The Komsomol Central Committee decreed
in 1956 that a number of periodicals should carry materials on young people’s leisure
activities. Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and
Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 353. The
reborn discipline of sociology in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the Soviet Union
paid particular attention to problems of youth leisure and consumption, undertaking
surveys of youth attitudes under the auspices of Komsomol’skaia pravda. B. A.Grushin,
Chetyre zhizni Rossii: V zerkale oprosov obshchestvennogo mneniia: Epokha Khrushcheva
(Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2001); Boris Grushin, USSR: The Problem of Leizure
[sic] (Moscow: Novosti, 1968). See also M. Edele, “Strange Young Men in Stalin’s
Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945–1953,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte
Osteuropas, vol.50 (2002): 37–61; Juliane Fürst,“The Arrival of Spring? Changes and
Continuities in Soviet Youth Culture and Policy Between Stalin and Khrushchev,”
in The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization, ed. Polly Jones (London: Routledge, 2006),
135–53; Allen Kassof,“The New Soviet Generation: Youth vs. the Regime: Conflict
in Values,” Problems of Communism 6, no. 3 (May–June 1957): 15–23; S. Strumilin,
“Rabochii byt i kommunizm,” Novyi mir, no. 7 (1960): 208; Gilison, Soviet Image,
119–22,146–47; Erich Goldhagen,“The Glorious Future—Realities and Chimeras,”
Problems of Communism 11, no. 6 (1960): 17–18.
113.L. A.Gordon and E. V.Klopov,Chelovek posle raboty (Moscow: Nauka,1972).
See Matthews, Class and Society (97–98), for some examples of time budget studies;
and, with a focus on gender, Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society:
Equality, Development, and Social Change (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1978), 269–78.
114. White, De-Stalinization, 74–75; Alfred DiMaio Jr., Soviet Urban Housing:
Problems and Policies (New York: Praeger, 1974).
115. Krzysztof Kosiński,“Prywatki młodzieże w czasach PRL,”in PRL Trwanie i
Zmiana, ed. Dariusz Stol and Marcin Zaremba (Warsaw: Trio, 2003), 324–26.
116. Verdery, What Was Socialism? 29–57.
117. Rudy Koshar,“Seeing,Travelling, and Consuming: An Introduction,”in Koshar,
Histories of Leisure; Anne E. Gorsuch, “‘There’s No Place Like Home’: Soviet
Tourism in Late Stalinism,”Slavic Review 62,no.4 (Winter 2003): 760–85; Christian
Noack, “Coping with the Tourist: Planned and ‘Wild’ Mass Tourism on the Soviet
Black Sea Coast,”and Scott Moranda,“East German Nature Tourism 1945–1961: In
introduction 
Search of a Common Destination,”both in Gorsuch and Koenker, Turizm, 281–304
and 266–80.
118. Key works in what is now a significant field of scholarship include Sabrina
Ramet, Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia (Boulder,
Colo.: Westview, 1994); Timothy Ryback, Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock
Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press,1990); Artem Troitsky,Back in the USSR (London: Faber and Faber,1987);
Hilary Pilkington,Russia’s Youth and Its Culture: A Nation’s Constuctors and Constructed
(London: Routledge, 1994); Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics
and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2000); Przemysław Zieliński, Scena rockowa w PRL (Warsaw: Trio, 2005).
119. Edele, “Strange Young Men.”
120. See, for instance, Ellen Propper Mickiewicz, Split Signals: Television and
Politics in the Soviet Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Neil Postman,
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York:
Viking, 1985).
121. For a recent discussion of the operation of different social and professional
networks in Eastern Bloc societies,see various essays in György Péteri,ed.,Patronage,
Personal Networks and the Party-State: Everyday Life in the Cultural Sphere in Communist
Russia and East Central Europe, Trondheim Studies on East Europe Cultures and
Societies 13 (Trondheim: PEECS, 2004).
122.See David Wedgwood Benn,Persuasion and Soviet Politics (Oxford: Blackwell,
1989).
123. See Potocki, “Life and Times of Poland’s ‘Bikini Boys,’” 259–90.
124. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 204.
125. See various essays in Slavic Review 68, no. 2 (2009), a special issue under
the title “Emotional Turn? Feelings in Russian History and Culture,” edited by
Jan Plamper; J. Plamper and B. Lazier, eds., Fear: Across the Disciplines (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming 2010); Jan Plamper, S. Schahadat, and
M. Elie, eds., Rossiiskaia imperiia chuvstv: Podkhody k kul’turnoi istorii emostsii [In the
Realm of Russian Feelings: Approaches to the Cultural History of Emotions] (Moscow:
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, forthcoming 2010).
126. Phil Cohen and Laurie Taylor, Escape Attempts (London: Routledge,
1992), 85.
127. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 213.