Personal Consumption in the USSR and the USA PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Personal Consumption in the USSR and the USA PDF full book. Access full book title Personal Consumption in the USSR and the USA by Igorʹ I͡Akovlevich Birman. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Igorʹ I͡Akovlevich Birman
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312023928
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book provides much prime material on how the Soviets really live: what they eat, drink and wear; how cramped are their apartments and with what facilities; how many books they read; how any TV sets, roads and cinemas they have; why shopping is so difficult; and so on. The Soviet economy, the author contends, is much smaller than is commonly thought. In December 1987 Ronald Reagan told the Soviet readers of Izvestia that their living standards was only a third of that in the USA. This estimate was based on a special CIA study. The author of this book reviewed the study, discovered numerous mistakes, disagreed sharply with the methodology, considered mounds of additional facts and figures, and concluded that the CIA was wrong.
Author: Igorʹ I͡Akovlevich Birman
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312023928
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book provides much prime material on how the Soviets really live: what they eat, drink and wear; how cramped are their apartments and with what facilities; how many books they read; how any TV sets, roads and cinemas they have; why shopping is so difficult; and so on. The Soviet economy, the author contends, is much smaller than is commonly thought. In December 1987 Ronald Reagan told the Soviet readers of Izvestia that their living standards was only a third of that in the USA. This estimate was based on a special CIA study. The author of this book reviewed the study, discovered numerous mistakes, disagreed sharply with the methodology, considered mounds of additional facts and figures, and concluded that the CIA was wrong.
Author: Natalya Chernyshova
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135046263
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 526
Get Book Here
Book Description
After decades of turmoil and trauma, the Brezhnev era brought stability and an unprecedented rise in living standards to the Soviet Union, enabling ordinary people to enjoy modern consumer goods on an entirely new scale. This book analyses the politics and economics of the state’s efforts to improve living standards, and shows how mass consumption was often used as an instrument of legitimacy, ideology and modernization. However, the resulting consumer revolution brought its own problems for the socialist regime. Rising well-being and the resulting ethos of consumption altered citizens’ relationship with the state and had profound consequences for the communist project. The book uses a wealth of sources to explore the challenge that consumer modernity was posing to Soviet ‘mature socialism’ between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s. It combines analysis of economic policy and public debates on consumerism with the stories of ordinary people and their attitudes to fashion, Western goods and the home. The book contests the notion that Soviet consumers were merely passive, abused, eternally queuing victims and that the Brezhnev era was a period of ‘stagnation’, arguing instead that personal consumption provided the incentive and the space for individuals to connect and interact with society and the regime even before perestroika. This book offers a lively account of Soviet society and everyday life during a period which is rapidly becoming a new frontier of historical research.
Author: Timo Vihavainen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004303979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196
Get Book Here
Book Description
Consumption in Russia and the former USSR has been lately studied as regards the pre-revolutionary and early Soviet period. The history of Soviet consumption and the Soviet variety of consumerism in the 1950s-1990s has hardly been studied at all. This book concentrates on the late Soviet period but it also considers pre-WWII and even pre-revolutionary times.The book consists of articles, which survey the longue durée of Russian and Soviet consumer attitudes, Soviet ideology of consumption as indicated in texts concerning fashion, the world of Soviet fashion planning and the survival strategies of the Soviet consumer complaining against sub-standard goods and services in a command economy. There's also a case study concerning the uses of concepts with anti-consumerist content. Contributors include: Lena Bogdanova, Olga Gurova, Timo Vihavainen and Larissa Zakharova.
Author: Gleb Tsipursky
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822981254
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358
Get Book Here
Book Description
Most narratives depict Soviet Cold War cultural activities and youth groups as drab and dreary, militant and politicized. In this study Gleb Tsipursky challenges these stereotypes in a revealing portrayal of Soviet youth and state-sponsored popular culture. The primary local venues for Soviet culture were the tens of thousands of clubs where young people found entertainment, leisure, social life, and romance. Here sports, dance, film, theater, music, lectures, and political meetings became vehicles to disseminate a socialist version of modernity. The Soviet way of life was dutifully presented and perceived as the most progressive and advanced, in an attempt to stave off Western influences. In effect, socialist fun became very serious business. As Tsipursky shows, however, Western culture did infiltrate these activities, particularly at local levels, where participants and organizers deceptively cloaked their offerings to appeal to their own audiences. Thus, Soviet modernity evolved as a complex and multivalent ideological device. Tsipursky provides a fresh and original examination of the Kremlin's paramount effort to shape young lives, consumption, popular culture, and to build an emotional community—all against the backdrop of Cold War struggles to win hearts and minds both at home and abroad.
Author: Mr.Manmohan S. Kumar
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1451854765
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 18
Get Book Here
Book Description
Energy exports, which are already the primary source of Soviet convertible currency earnings and an important contributor to the budget, could bring in much more revenue if the Soviet Union were to reduce its extremely high levels of energy consumption. To encourage this process, energy prices need to be raised substantially. Under plausible assumptions, it is shown that an increase in prices could yield sizable foreign exchange earnings. Large increases in energy prices could, however, threaten the solvency of industrial enterprises, precipitate major economic and social dislocation, and severely strain interrepublican economic relationships.
Author: Julie Hessler
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400843561
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this sweeping study, Julie Hessler traces the invention and evolution of socialist trade, the progressive constriction of private trade, and the development of consumer habits from the 1917 revolution to Stalin's death in 1953. The book places trade and consumption in the context of debilitating economic crises. Although Soviet leaders, and above all, Stalin, identified socialism with the modernization of retailing and the elimination of most private transactions, these goals conflicted with the economic dynamics that produced shortages and with the government's bureaucratic, repressive, and socially discriminatory political culture. A Social History of Soviet Trade explores the relationship of trade--official and unofficial--to the cyclical pattern of crisis and normalization that resulted from these tensions. It also provides a singularly detailed look at private shops during the years of the New Economic Policy, and at the remnants of private trade, mostly concentrated at the outdoor bazaars, in subsequent years. Drawing on newly opened archives in Moscow and several provinces, this richly documented work offers a new perspective on the social, economic, and political history of the formative decades of the USSR.
Author: Jukka Gronow
Publisher: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura
ISBN: 9522227528
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book presents, above all, a study of the establishment and development of the Soviet organization and system of fashion industry and design as it gradually evolved in the years after the Second World War in the Soviet Union, which was, in the understanding of its leaders, reaching the mature or last stage of socialism when the country was firmly set on the straight trajectory to its final goal, Communism. What was typical of this complex and extensive system of fashion was that it was always loyally subservient to the principles of the planned socialist economy. This did not by any means indicate that everything the designers and other fashion professionals did was dictated entirely from above by the central planning agencies. Neither did it mean that their professional judgment would have been only secondary to ideological and political standards set by the Communist Party and the government of the Soviet Union. On the contrary, as our study shows, the Soviet fashion professionals had a lot of autonomy. They were eager and willing to exercise their own judgment in matters of taste and to set the agenda of beauty and style for Soviet citizens. The present book is the first comprehensive and systematic history of the development of fashion and fashion institutions in the Soviet Union after the Second World War. Our study makes use of rich empirical and historical material that has been made available for the first time for scientific analysis and discussion. The main sources for our study came from the state, party and departmental archives of the former Soviet Union. We also make extensive use of oral history and the writings published in Soviet popular and professional press.
Author: Tricia Starks
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501765752
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323
Get Book Here
Book Description
Enriched by color reproductions of tobacco advertisements, packs, and anti-smoking propaganda, Cigarettes and Soviets provides a comprehensive study of the Soviet tobacco habit. Tricia Starks examines how the Soviets maintained the first mass smoking society in the world while simultaneously fighting it. The book is at once a study of Soviet tobacco deeply enmeshed in its social, political, and cultural context and an exploration of the global experience of the tobacco epidemic. Starks examines the Soviet antipathy to tobacco yet capitulation to market; the development of innovative cessation techniques and clinics and the late entry into global anti-tobacco work; the seeming lack of cultural stimuli alongside massive use; and the expansion of smoking without the conventional prompts of capitalist markets. She tells the story of Philip Morris's "Mission to Moscow" campaign for the Soviet market, the triumph of the quintessential capitalist product—the cigarette—in a communist system, and the successes and failures of the world's first national antismoking campaign. The interplay of male habits and health against largely female tobacco producers and medical professionals adds a gendered dimension. Smoking developed, continued, and grew in the Soviet Union without mass production, intensive advertising, seductive industrial design, or product ubiquity. The Soviets were early to condemn tobacco, and yet, by the end of the twentieth century Russians smoked more heavily than most most other nations in the world. Cigarettes and Soviets challenges interpretations of how tobacco use rose in the past and what leads to mass use today.
Author: Caroline Humphrey
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801487736
Category : Mongolia
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Unmaking of Soviet Life brings together ten essays from award-winning author Caroline Humphrey. Humphrey explores such topics as the mafia, barter, bribery, and the new shamanism, locating them in the experiences of a wide range of subjects.
Author: Stephen Lovell
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199238480
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 169
Get Book Here
Book Description
Taking a fresh approach to the study of the Soviet Union, this Very Short Introduction blends political history with an investigation into Soviet society and culture from 1917 to 1991. Stephen Lovell examines aspects of patriotism, political violence, poverty, and ideology, and provides answers to some of the big questions about the Soviet experience. Throughout, the book takes a refreshing thematic approach to the Soviet Union and provides an up-to-date consideration of the Soviet Union's impact and what we have learnt since its end.
