Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era

Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era PDF Author: Natalya Chernyshova
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135046263
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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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.

Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era

Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era PDF 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.

Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era

Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era PDF Author: Natalya Chernyshova
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135046271
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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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.

Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era

Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era PDF Author: Dina Fainberg
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498529941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
This volume contributes to a growing reevaluation of the Brezhnev era, helping to shape a new historiography that gives us a much richer and more nuanced picture of the time period than the stagnation paradigm usually assigned to the era. The essays provide a multifaceted prism that reveals a dynamic society with a political and intellectual class that remained committed to the ideological foundations of the state, recognized the challenges that the system faced, and embarked on a creative search for solutions. The chapters focus on developments in politics, society, and culture, as well as the state’s attempts to lead and initiate change, which are mostly glossed over in the stagnation narrative. The volume challenges the assumption that the period as a whole was characterized by rampant cynicism and a decline of faith in the socialist creed and instead points to the persistence of popular engagement with the socialist ideology and the power it continued to wield within the Soviet Union.

Material Culture in Russia and the USSR

Material Culture in Russia and the USSR PDF Author: Graham H. Roberts
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 147258614X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Material Culture in Russia and the USSR comprises some of the most cutting-edge scholarship across anthropology, history and material and cultural studies relating to Russia and the Soviet Union, from Peter the Great to Putin. Material culture in Russia and the USSR holds a particularly important role, as the distinction between private and public spheres has at times developed in radically different ways than in many places in the more commonly studied West. With case studies covering alcohol, fashion, cinema, advertising and photography among other topics, this wide-ranging collection offers an unparalleled survey of material culture in Russia and the USSR and addresses core questions such as: what makes Russian and Soviet material culture distinctive; who produces it; what values it portrays; and how it relates to 'high culture' and consumer culture.

Pleasures in Socialism

Pleasures in Socialism PDF Author: David Crowley
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810126907
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
This volume shows how the rise of consumer culture took a unique form in Eastern Europe. It investigates the ways in which pleasurable activities were both a space in which these communist governments tried to insinuate themselves and thereby further expand the reach of their authority.

Soviet Art House

Soviet Art House PDF Author: Catriona Kelly
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197548369
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 541

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Book Description
Drawing on documents from archives in St Petersburg and Moscow, the analysis portrays film production "in the round" and shows that the term "censorship" is less appropriate than the description preferred in the Soviet film industry itself, "control," which referred to a no less exigent but far more complex and sophisticated process. The book opens with four framing chapters that examine the overall context in which films were produced. The two opening chapters trace the various crises that beset film production between 1961 and 1970 (Chapter 1) and 1970 and 1985 (Chapter 2). These are followed by a chapter on the working life of the studio and particularly the technical aspects of production (Chapter 3), and a chapter on the studio aesthetic (Chapter 4). The second part of the book comprises close analyses of fifteen films that are particularly typical of the studio's production and which had especial impact within the studio and beyond. .

Russian Journal

Russian Journal PDF Author: Andrea Lee
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 030749036X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
“A subtly crafted reflection of both the bleak and golden shadings of Russian life . . . Its tones belong more to the realm of poetry than journalism.” –The New York Times Book Review At age twenty-five, Andrea Lee joined her husband, a Harvard doctoral candidate in Russian history, for his eight months’ study at Moscow State University and an additional two months in Leningrad. Published to enormous critical acclaim in 1981, Russian Journal is the award-winning author’s penetrating, vivid account of her everyday life as an expatriate in Soviet culture, chronicling her fascinating exchanges with journalists, diplomats, and her Soviet contemporaries. The winner of the Jean Stein Award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters–and the book that launched Lee’s career as a writer–Russian Journal is a beautiful and clear-eyed travel-writing classic. “[Lee] takes us wherever she is, conveying a feeling of place and atmosphere that is the mark of real talent.” –The Washington Post Book World “A book of very great charm . . . [Lee] records what she saw and heard with unassuming delicacy and exactness.” –Newsweek

Communism and Consumerism

Communism and Consumerism PDF Author: Timo Vihavainen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004303979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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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.

The Private World of Soviet Scientists from Stalin to Gorbachev

The Private World of Soviet Scientists from Stalin to Gorbachev PDF Author: Maria Rogacheva
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107196361
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
A major new contribution to understanding the transition of Soviet society from Stalinism to a more humane model of socialism.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism PDF Author: S. A. Smith
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191667528
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 834

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Book Description
The impact of Communism on the twentieth century was massive, equal to that of the two world wars. Until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, historians knew relatively little about the secretive world of communist states and parties. Since then, the opening of state, party, and diplomatic archives of the former Eastern Bloc has released a flood of new documentation. The thirty-five essays in this Handbook, written by an international team of scholars, draw on this new material to offer a global history of communism in the twentieth century. In contrast to many histories that concentrate on the Soviet Union, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism is genuinely global in its coverage, paying particular attention to the Chinese Revolution. It is 'global', too, in the sense that the essays seek to integrate history 'from above' and 'from below', to trace the complex mediations between state and society, and to explore the social and cultural as well as the political and economic realities that shaped the lives of citizens fated to live under communist rule. The essays reflect on the similarities and differences between communist states in order to situate them in their socio-political and cultural contexts and to capture their changing nature over time. Where appropriate, they also reflect on how the fortunes of international communism were shaped by the wider economic, political, and cultural forces of the capitalist world. The Handbook provides an informative introduction for those new to the field and a comprehensive overview of the current state of scholarship for those seeking to deepen their understanding.