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Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Susan E. Reid
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Abstract

Consumption, a key issue in the study of post-Soviet culture, was already a central concern during the Cold War. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Khrushchev regime staked its legitimacy at home, and its credibility abroad, on its ability to provide its population with consumer goods and a decent standard of living. Despite promising "abundance for all" as the precondition for the imminent transition to communism, the regime could not afford to leave abundance undefined. In this article, Susan E. Reid examines the way discourses of consumption, fashion, and the ideal Soviet home sought to remake consumers’ conceptions of culturedness, good taste, and comfort in rational, modern terms that took into account the regime’s ideological commitment and economic capacity. Such efforts to shape and regulate desire were directed above all at women. Reid proposes that the study of consumption provides insights into the ways in which post-Stalinist regimes manipulated and regulated people through regimes of personal conduct, taste, and consumption habits, as opposed to coercion. Indeed, the management of consumption was as significant for the Soviet system's longevity as for its ultimate collapse.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , Summer 2002 , pp. 211 - 252
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2002

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References

I would like to thank Diane P. Koenker and Slavic Review’s anonymous reviewers for their comments on this paper.

1 The masculine counterpart to the avos'ka was the briefcase, which, if it was used for chance purchases, hid and dissembled the fact. See, for example, Smith, Hedrick, The Russians (New York, 1976), 61–62 Google Scholar.

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4 Consumer desire, specifically the widening gulf between the rhetoric of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) and the actuality of material privation, has been widely identified as the force behind the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). See Zatlin, Jonathan R., “The Vehicle of Desire: The Trabant, the Wartburg, and the End of the GDR,” German History 15, no. 3 (1997): 360–61Google Scholar; Loehlin, From Rugs to Riches, 4; and Ciesla, B. and Poutrus, P. G., “Food Supply in a Planned Economy: SED Nutrition Policy between Crisis Response and Popular Needs,” in Jarausch, Konrad H., ed., Dictatorship asExperience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR, trans. Duffy, Eve (Oxford, 1999), 157 Google Scholar. See also Verdery, Katherine, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Katherine Verdery predicted in a 1993 lecture, “The secondary but highly politicized role of consumption in socialism's political economy will surely make consumption an especially intriguing topic to follow.” Verdery, What Was Socialism, 13. Studies include: Humphrey, Caroline, “Creating a Culture of Disillusionment: Consumption in Moscow, a Chronicle of Changing Times,” in Miller, Daniel, ed., Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local (London, 1995)Google Scholar; Adele Marie Barker, ed., Consuming Russia: Popular Culture,Sex and Society since Gorbachev (Durham, 1999); Condee, Nancy and Padunov, Vladimir, “The ABC of Russian Consumer Culture,” in Condee, Nancy, ed., Soviet Hieroglyphics: VisualCulture in Late Twentieth-Century Russia (Bloomington, 1995), 130–72Google Scholar; Jennifer Patico, “Consumption and Logics of Social Difference in Post-Soviet Russia” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2001); and Kelly, Catriona, “Creating a Consumer: Advertising and Commercialization,” in Kelly, Catriona and Shepherd, David, eds., Russian Cultural Studies (Oxford, 1998), 223–46Google Scholar.

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7 Even an important recent volume on Nikita Khrushchev has no index entries at all on “consumption” or “consumerism,” and although two contributors cite living standards as a source of dissatisfaction and loss of faith in the “radiant future,” the issue does not receive any sustained analysis. See Taubman, William, Khrushchev, Sergei, and Gleason, Abbott, eds., Nikita Khrushchev (New Haven, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap, by Vladimir Naumov (102, 111) and by Georgii Shakhnazarov (304, 306). The omission is particularly odd given that the importance of consumption is increasingly recognized in the study of other periods of Soviet history. For example, on the 1920s under the New Economic Policy, see Gorsuch, Anne E., Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington, 2000)Google Scholar; and Nataliia Lebina, Povsednevnaia thizn' sovetskogo goroda: Normy i anomalii. 1920/1930 gody (St. Petersburg 1999). An account of Moscow in 1928 opens with a chapter on Moscow shops: Wicksteed, Alexander, Life under the Soviets (London, 1928), 1–20 Google Scholar. There is an increasingly rich literature on consumption and living standards in the Stalin period, beginning with Dunham, Vera S., In Stalin’s Time; Middleclass Values in SovietFiction (Cambridge, Eng., 1976)Google Scholar; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism (New York, 1999), chap. 4; AmyE. Randall, “‘Revolutionary Bolshevik Work’: Stakhanovism in Retail Trade,” Russian Review 59, no. 3 (July 2000): 425- 41; Julie Hessler, “Culture of Shortages: A Social History of Soviet Trade, 1917-1953” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1996); and Osokina, Elena, Ierarkhiia potrebleniia:O zhizni liudei v usloviiakh stalinskogo snabzheniia, 1928-1935 gg. (Moscow, 1993)Google Scholar. Consumption is a central theme of Reid, Susan E. and Crowley, David, eds., Style and Socialism:Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar.

8 Similar reasons are offered by Katherine Pence for the neglect hidierto of consumption in the GDR, “‘You as a Woman Will Understand': Consumption, Gender and the Relationship between State and Citizenry in the GDr's Crisis of 17June 1953,” German History 19, no. 2 (2001): 218-52. See Fehér, Ferenc, Heller, Agnes, and Márkus, György, Dictatorshipover Needs (Oxford, 1983)Google Scholar. The GDR has fared better than other parts of eastern Europe, being the subject of some compelling recent research on consumer culture, including, in addition to Pence, Ina Merkel, “Consumer Culture in the GDR, or How the Struggle for Antimodernity was Lost on the Batdeground of Consumer Culture,” and Steiner, André, “Dissolution of the ‘Dictatorship over Needs’? Consumer Behavior and Economic Reform in East Germany in the 1960s,” both in Strasser, Susan, McGovern, Charles, and Judt, Matthias, eds., Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in theTwentieth Century (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), 281–99 and 167-85Google Scholar; Veenis, Milena, “Consumption in East Germany: The Seduction and Betrayal of Things,” Journal of Material CultureA, no. 1 (1999): 79–112 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ute Poiger,/azz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold WarPolitics and AmericanCulture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley, 2000); Betts, Paul, “The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory and Material Culture,” Journal of Modern History 72, no. 3 (September 2000): 731–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Craig Clunas notes that the concept of consumption—and by extension, modernity—has tended to be monopolized for the anglophone west, leaving, for example, China, and Asia in general, on the margins of its narratives. Clunas, , “Modernity Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the West,” American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (December 1999): 1497–1511 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Pence, “‘You as a Woman,’” 218-52. The German uprising, which was put down by the occupying Soviet troops, left a deep mark on Khrushchev and the collective leadership. Vladislav Zubok, “The Case of Divided Germany, 1953-1964,” in Taubman, Khrushchev, and Gleason, eds., Nikita Khrushchev, 280.

10 Compare Adele Marie Barker, “The Culture Factory,” in Barker, ed., ConsumingRussia, 29-31.

11 For example, Ogonek introduced a new women’s page: “Zhenshchiny, eto dlia vas!“ Ogonek, no. 24 (12 June 1960). Other useful publications for the study of consumption in this period include newspapers such as Izvestiia, Literaturnaia gazeta, Sovetskaia kul'tura, and Komsomol'skaia pravda; the specialized design, architectural, and trade press (including instruction manuals for retail trade workers); cookbooks; publications for teenage girls; and the magazine Sem'ia i shkola, in addition to the specifically women’s magazines Sovetskaiazhenshchina, Krest'ianka, and Rabotnitsa. The impact on popular taste, dress, and hairstyles of popular Soviet films such as Feliks Mironer and Marlen Khutsiev’s Vesna na Zarechnoiulitse (Spring on Riverside Street, 1956) and Mikhail Kalatozov’s Letiat zhuravli (The cranes are flying, 1957), as well as of foreign ones imported during and after the war, is an essential area for further investigation. See Stites, Richard, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainmentand Society since 1900 (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 141 Google Scholar; and Woll, Josephine, Real Images: SovietCinema and the Thaw (London, 2000), 45–50 Google Scholar.

12 See Susan E. Reid, “Photography in the Thaw,” Art Journal (Summer 1994). Ogonek was criticized in 1958 for excessive use of photographs on foreign themes and “lack of taste” in illustration of Soviet life. “Postanovlenie Komissii TsK KPSS ‘O ser'eznykh nedostatkakh v soderzhanii zhurnala Ogonek,’” 9 September 1958, in Afanas'eva, E. S., Afiani, V. Iu., et al., comps., Ideologicheskie komissii TsK KPSS 1958-1964. Dokumenty (Moscow, 1998), 87–88 Google Scholar. I am indebted to Stephen Lovell for alerting me to this document. Ogonek continued to include large numbers of photographs and photo-essays after its reprimand, but their selection is likely to have been subjected to closer scrutiny. For a Soviet response to the American illustrated Look, see “Priznaniia v reklamnom tsellofane,” Izvestiia, 9 December 1962.

13 Kerblay, Basile, Modern Soviet Society, trans. Swyer, Rupert (New York, 1983), 284 Google Scholar.

14 Havel, Vaclav, The Power of the Powerless (1978) (London, 1987), 37–40 Google Scholar. I am indebted to David Crowley for drawing my attention to Havel's formulation.

15 At the Twenty-second Party Congress Khrushchev declared: “The molding of die new man is influenced not only by the educational work of the party, the Soviet state, the trade unions and the Young Communist League, but by the entire pattern of society’s life.“ Cited by George W. Breslauer, “Khrushchev Reconsidered,” in Cohen, Stephen, Rabinowitch, Alexander, and Sharlet, Robert, eds., The Soviet Union since Stalin (Bloomington, 1980), 59 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Herbert Ritvo commented in 1960: “The transfer of certain functions from the coercive apparatus of the regime to public organizations in no way means a lessening of social controls in Soviet society; on the contrary, it constitutes an effort to penetrate more deeply than ever before into the private and personal spheres of people’s lives.” The aim, expressed in terms borrowed from Lenin, was “the development of a ‘machinery capable of coercing’ in place of one ‘applying legal norms ensured by the coercive force of the state.’” Ritvo, Herbert, “Totalitarianism without Coercion?” Problems of Communism 9, no. 6 (1960): 26 Google Scholar; Lenin’s emphasis. On the Khrushchev regime’s continued recourse to repression, however, see Vladimir Naumov, “Repression and Rehabilitation,” in Taubman, Khrushchev, and Gleason, eds., Nikita Khrushchev, 85-112.

16 Hauslohner, Peter, “Politics before Gorbachev: De-Stalinization and the Roots of Reform,” in Dallin, Alexander and Lapidus, Gail W., eds., The Soviet System in Crisis (Boulder, Colo., 1991), 39 Google Scholar. In Problems of Communism in 1960 Alec Nove posed the question: what did the Soviet regime’s commitment to improve welfare services imply for western assessments of the nature of the Soviet system? Alec Nove, “Toward a Communist Welfare State?“ in Abraham Brumberg, ed., Russia under Khrushchev: An Anthology from Problems of Communism (London, 1962), 571-90. A potentially helpful way to conceptualize this shift is Michel Foucault’s conception of the nature of modern “governmentality,” characterized by the displacement of sovereign power from the monarch or absolutist state to a range surveillance and discipline, as well as by increased reliance on rationality, information gathering, and professionals. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” Ideology and Consciousness 6 (1979): 5-21; Johnson, Terry, “Expertise and the State,” in Gane, Mike and Johnson, Terry, eds., Foucault’s NewDomains (London, 1993), 140–44Google Scholar. As Hauslohner notes, the post-Stalin Régimes gave professionals greatly increased opportunities to participate in policy making, whereby they gained a stake in the political order. Hauslohner, “Politics before Gorbachev,“ 47. Compare also Elizabeth Wilson’s assessment of the postwar British welfare state as a mechanism for controlling undesirable forms of behavior and for the “State organizationof domestic life.” Wilson, Elizabeth, Women and the Welfare State (London, 1977), 9, 29, 36Google Scholar; emphasis in the original. Modern systems of power, in Foucault’s analysis, are not simply apparatuses of repression but produce new social identities. Compare Carter, How GermanIs She?82-88.

17 The period saw a proliferation of advice literature defining what attitudes and behaviors constituted a correct communist private life, allegedly in response to readers’ requests. For example: E. Nikol'skaia, “Blagoustroistvo zhilishcha,” Sem'ia i shkola, 1958, no. 1:42. The standards were to be enforced by trade unions, the party, Komsomol, house committees and other quasi-voluntary organizations, as well as more informal neighborly surveillance. Deborah Ann Field, “Communist Morality and Meanings of Private Life in Post-Stalinist Russia, 1953-1964” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1996), 19, 99-101.

18 On the “Moral Code,” see Scanlan, James, Marxism in the USSR: A Critical Survey ofCurrent Soviet Thought (Ithaca, 1985)Google Scholar. For the Third Party Program, see Hodnett, Grey, ed., Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Volume 4, The KhrushchevYears 1953-1964 (Toronto, 1974), 167–264 Google Scholar.

19 See, for example, Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), Art into Life: Russian Constructivism,1914-1932 (Seattle, 1990); Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn'; Gorsuch, Youth in RevolutionaryRussia; Kettering, Karen, “’Ever More Cosy and Comfortable’: Stalinism and the Soviet Domestic Interior, 1928-1938,” Journal of Design History 10, no. 2 (1997): 119–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boym, Svedana, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1994)Google Scholar; and Matich, Olga, “Remaking the Bed: Utopia in Daily Life,” in Bowlt, John E. and Matich, Olga, eds., Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment (Stanford, 1996), 59–78 Google Scholar.

20 Kelly, Catriona and Volkov, Vadim, “Directed Desires,” in Kelly, Catriona and Shepherd, David, eds., Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1881-1940 (Oxford, 1998), 293 Google Scholar.

21 Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie stroitelei: Sokrashchennyi stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1955). On the introduction of a “contemporary style” into the everyday environment, see Iurii Gerchuk, “The Aesthetics of Everyday Life in the Khrushchev Thaw in the USSR (1954-64),” in Reid and Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism, 81-99.

22 Pence, “‘You as a Woman,’” 218-52; Naumov, “Repression and Rehabilitation,“ 102, and Zubok, “The Case of Divided Germany,” 280.

23 Hanson, Phillip, Advertising and Socialism: The Nature and Extent of Consumer Advertisingin the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia (London, 1974), 29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Levine, Irving R., The Real Russia (London,1959), 177 Google Scholar.

24 Compare Scott, James C., SeeingLike a State (New Haven, 1998)Google ScholarPubMed. For a useful consideration of demoscopy—that is, the collection of knowledge about consumers, as an aspect of modern governmentality, in terms of Foucault’s concept of knowledge-power—see Carter, How German Is She? 82-88.

25 Results of an opinion poll on “The Young Generation” were published in Komsomol'skaiapravda, 26 January 1961. Responses to the questionnaire “Your Ideas about the Young Family” were published in Komsomol'skaia pravda, 19 December 1961. The questions and responses were judged of sufficient interest to western observers to be translated in Current Digest of the Soviet Press 13, no. 2 (1961): 32-34; 13 no. 15 (1961): 15-25; 13, no. 24 (1961): 17-18 and 21; and 13, no. 34 (1961): 3-8; and in Soviet Review 2, nos. 11-12 (November- December 1961) and 3, no. 8 (August 1962): 21-40. Under Khrushchev, the Komsomol intervened consistently in youth leisure and dress. See, for example, hvestiia, 31 March 1961; and Hilary Pilkington, “‘The Future Is Ours’: Youth Culture in Russia, 1953 to the Present,” in Kelly and Shepherd, eds., Russian Cultural Studies, 369-71.

26 “My za kul'turnuiu torgovliu! Obrashchenie rabotnikov Cheliabinskogo univermaga k rabotnikam torgovykh predpriiatii Sovetskogo soiuza,” Komsomol'skaia pravda, 21 January 1959, 2.

27 Matthews, Mervyn, Class and Society in Soviet Russia (London, 1972), 81–83 Google Scholar.

28 M. P. Sakov, Osnovnoiprintsip kommunizma (Moscow, 1961), 34. Cited here from Gilison, Jerome M., The Soviet Image of Utopia (Baltimore, 1975), 176 Google Scholar.

29 Gilison, Soviet Image, 173. Mikhail Gorbachev’s advisor Georgii Shakhnazarov, who in the recent anthology on Khrushchev makes one of the few references to living standards, was actively involved during the Khrushchev era in defining communist consumption morality in terms of anti-acquisitiveness. See Taubman, Khrushchev, and Gleason, eds., Nikita Khrushchev, 304, 306. Gilison cites him: “Communism excludes those narrowminded people for whom the highest goal is to acquire every possible luxurious object“ (173, from Shakhnazarov, G., Kommunizm i svoboda lichnosti [Moscow, 1960], 48 Google Scholar).

30 The stereotype of women as naturally avaricious was propagated in satire. A cartoon in Sovetskaia Rossiia, 11 June 1960, represented a girl with a fashionable pony tail, caught in an impossible dilemma between two suitors: one has a Volga car to offer, the other a large dacha. On Soviet fears of young people’s, particularly young women’s, irrational desires compare: Pilkington, Hilary, “Young Women and Subcultural Lifestyles: A Case of ‘Irrational Needs’?” in Marsh, Rosalind, ed., Women in Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), 173–74Google Scholar. Stiliagi were characterized as deviant and potentially anti- Soviet on account of their “excessive” consumption and display, which, in female stiliagi, was seen to take the form of sexual licentiousness. The dominant Soviet view was reproduced by Edward Crankshaw: “The female of the species wears dresses which reveal her figure to the point of indecency. She wears slit skirts. Her lips are bright with lipstick.” Edward Crankshaw, Russia without Stalin (New York, 1956), 242-43. See Field, “Communist Morality,” 69; and Kolchinskaia, N., “Odevaisia prosto i krasivo,” in Saltanova, R. and Kolchinskaia, N., eds., Podruga (Moscow, 1959), 344 Google Scholar.

31 Magazines such as Ogonek and Sem'ia i shkola consistendy cast the readers of domestic advice articles as female. See, for example, A. Kargopolov, “Kolkhoznitsy obsuzhdaiut knigu ‘Domovodstvo,’” Sem'ia i shkola, 1958, no. 1. The purpose of the book under discussion, Demezer, A. A. and Dziuba, M. L., Domovodstvo (Moscow, 1957)Google Scholar, may have been to promote the convergence of city and country by introducing “modern” urban standards into the rural way of life. Peasant women were expected to buy the book when visiting the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow. Further research should disaggregate the ideal Soviet consumer, not only in terms of gender, but of generation, geography, ethnicity, and social stratum.

32 Female communists were cast as “housekeepers of the revolution” who were to extend dieir housewifely practices of thrift and vigilance to the service of the state. See Wood, Elizabeth, The Baba and the Comrade (Bloomington, 1997)Google Scholar; and Gorsuch, Youth in RevolutionaryRussia, chap. 5. For the prerevolutionary history of such gender stereotypes, see Edmondson, Linda, “Women’s Emancipation and Theories of Sexual Difference in Russia, 1850-1917,” in Liljestrom, M., Mantysaari, E., and Rosenholm, A., eds., Gender Restructuringin Russian Studies (Tampere, 1993), 39–52 Google Scholar. Compare Pence, “‘You as a Woman,’” 226; and L. Ansorg and R. Hiirtgen, “The Myth of Female Emancipation: Contradictions in Women’s Lives,” and D. Langenhan and S. Rofi, “The Socialist Glass Ceiling: Limits to Female Careers,” both injarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience, 163-76 and 177-94.

33 See Reid, Susan E., “Masters of the Earth: Gender and Destalinisation in Soviet Reformist Painting of the Khrushchev Thaw,” Gender & History 11, no. 2 (1999): 276–312 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 A similar conclusion is reached in studies of consumption in Germany. Compare Pence, “‘You as a Woman.’” Under Stalin, women were already regarded as consumption experts. See Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 91. Women were also, in their capacity as the majority of retail trade workers, charged with educating the customer in modern and cultured consumption habits. See Hessler, “Culture of Shortages,” chap. 6; and Randall, “‘Revolutionary Bolshevik Work,’” 425-441.

35 In rhetoric, if not in practice, the turn to consumerism and the promotion of cultured trade began under Stalin. In the second Five-Year Plan, abundance, and even democratic luxury, were declared a goal of socialism, and consumption was recast as a civilizing and modernizing force that would advance social integration and the building of socialism.The actual increase in consumer goods at the time was negligible, however. See Randall, “‘Revolutionary Bolshevik Work’”; Hessler, “Culture of Shortages.” After wartime deprivation, party policy shifted even before Stalin’s death. At the Nineteenth Party Congress in 1952 Malenkov and Khrushchev both made a pitch for housing and consumer goods and food production, although Malenkov’s alleged overemphasis on consumer goods was later cited as a reason for his fall. Nove, Alec, Stalinism and After (London, 1975), 124–28Google Scholar; and Hessler, Julie, “A Postwar Perestroika? Towards a History of Private Enterprise in the USSR,” Slavic Review 57, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 516–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The issue of the poor quality and lack of variety of consumer goods was raised for public discussion beginning in 1954: N. Zhukov, “Vospitanie vkusa,” Novyi mir, 1954, no. 10:159-76; and readers’ responses: “O vospitanii vkusa,” Novyi mir, 1955, no. 2:247-54; Saltykov, A., “O khudozhestvennom kachestve promyshlennykh tovarov,” Sovetskaia torgovlia, 1954, no. 9:22–31 Google Scholar.

36 Cited by John Gunther, Inside Russia Today, rev. ed. (first published 1958; Harmondsworth, 1964), 422.

37 Hindus, Maurice, House without a Roof: Russia after Forty-three Years of Revolution (London, 1962), 36 Google Scholar.

38 Ibid., 21.

39 Retold after Gunther, Inside Russia Today, 95.

40 Riesman, David, Abundance for What? And Other Essays (Garden City, N.Y., 1964), 65–77 Google Scholar. See also Whitfield, Stephen J., The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, 1991), 72 Google Scholar; and Marling, Karal Ann, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 252 Google Scholar.

41 According to John Gunther's account (written in 1958), “pressure from the people for more and better consumer goods, as well as food, grows more apparent all the time… . Not only do people yearn for motor-scooters, silk thread, casseroles, and umbrellas, but for prettier tilings, articles more gay… . Khrushchev wants above all to broaden the basis of his support, to bring people more closely into the family of government so to speak, but the only substantially effective way to do this is to increase vastly the amount of consumer goods available, which at the present moment cannot be done.“ Gunther, Inside Russia Today, 423. Klaus Mehnert reported that the Soviet consumer could now be heard to criticize high prices, poor quality, and service: “people are becoming more discriminating and exacting.” Mehnert, Klaus, Soviet Man and His World, (New York, 1962)Google Scholar, cited by Keep, John, The Last of the Empires (Oxford, 1995), 101 Google Scholar. By the mid-1970s it was axiomatic that “Russian consumers are becoming fussier shoppers.” Smith, The Russians, 61; and Kerblay, Modern Soviet Society, 284

42 Compare May, Elaine Tyler, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988), 19 Google Scholar.

43 Hixson, Walter L., Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (Basingstoke, 1997), 168 Google Scholar; Marling, As Seen on TV, 246.

44 Zimmerman, G. and Lerner, B., “What the Russians Will See,” Look, 21 July 1959, 52–54 Google Scholar.

45 Goldstein, Darra, “Domestic Porkbarreling in Nineteenth-Century Russia, or Who Holds the Keys to the Larder?” in Goscilo, Helena and Holmgren, Beth, eds., Russia. Women.Culture (Bloomington, 1996), 147 Google Scholar; and see May, Homeward Bound, 16-20, 162-68.

46 Khrushchev bragged in 1964, “Remember the time when our country was economically backward, how many capitalist figures of die west scoffed at u s … . And suddenly those who were considered clodhoppers, about whom it was said that they slurped up cabbage soup with their shoes, so developed the economy and science that they reached space before those who called themselves civilized!” Pravda, 16 April 1964; cited in Gilison, SovietImage, 8.

47 “Rech' tovarishcha N. S. Khrushcheva,” Pravda, 15 March 1958.

48 As Turpin points out, it was orthodox doctrine that the attainment of communism was linked to the prior achievement of a surplus of products. Turpin, “Outlook for the Soviet Consumer,” 36. See the doctrinal textbook Politicheskaia ekonomika, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1952), 373.

49 Gilison, Soviet Image, 8-9.

50 “‘Ivan’ Takes a Look at American Life: Photo Report from Moscow,” U.S. News andWorld Report, 10 August 1959, 42. My thanks to Jane Harris for sharing her recollections of the exhibition, where she worked as a guide, during a discussion of an earlier version of this paper, Sixth International Council for Central and East European Studies Conference, Tampere, July 2000.

51 Dodd, Marta, “Pod pozolochennym kupolom,” Ogonek, no. 32 (2 August 1959): 5 Google Scholar.

52 Izvestiia quoted in “‘Ivan’ Takes a Look,” 42; and Marling, As Seen on TV, 243. G. A. Zhukov, head of the State Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Nations, declared it a flop in Mezhdunarodnaia zhizn', November 1959; cited by Werth, Alexander, Russiaunder Khrushchev (New York, 1962; reprint, Westport, Conn., 1975), 230–31Google Scholar.

53 In his concluding remarks at the Twenty-first Party Congress in January 1959, Khrushchev challenged the west in its own terms: “To speak in the language of commerce, which is clearly more accessible to representatives of the capitalist world, let us lay out our ’wares’ … and let each order show … how many hours the working day lasts, how much material and spiritual benefit the working person receives, what kind of home he has, what kind of educational opportunities he is offered, what part he takes in state affairs, in the political life of the country, who is master of all the material and cultural wealth.” Cited as epigraph to a photo-essay by Dmitrii Bal'termants and V Viktorov that “set out the Soviet stall” in visual documents: “Davaite razlozhim svoi ‘tovary,’” Ogonek, no. 10 (1 March 1959): 4-7. See also Tompson, William J., Khrushchev: A Political Life (Houndmills, 1995), 201 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 The rubric was timely, the editors explained, in light of the pledge made at the Twenty-first Congress, to expand the production of prepared food and the system of ordering goods and home delivery, to develop other progressive service industries, and to raise the culture of trade in the course of the seven-year plan from 1959 to 1965. “Khorosho li vas obsluzhivaiut?” Ogonek, no. 11(8 March 1959): 4. Western commentators largely deny that Soviet consumers had any effective lobby over important matters of production and pricing but only over the more superficial aspects, such as hygiene of shops. Keep, Last ofthe Empires, 100-101; and Inkeles, Alex, Social Change in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 406 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the formal mechanisms designed in theory to enable the customer to affect the production of goods in the 1930s, see Randall, “‘Revolutionary Bolshevik Work,’” 433. Given the Khrushchev regime’s commitment to mobilizing mass participation, the role of a consumers’ lobby is an important area for further investigation.

55 “Rech' tovarishcha N. S. Khrushcheva,” Pravda, 15 March 1958.

56 Abramenko, L. and Tormozova, L., eds., Besedy o domashnem khoziaistve (Moscow, 1959), 3–4 Google Scholar. The text slips seamlessly from referring to its readers as “young people” to specifically identifying them as girls and “young women.“

57 Such a kitchen is depicted in Charles Thayer, W., Russia (London, 1961), 97 Google Scholar. Two British marriage guidance experts described kitchens around 1960: “Kitchens were generally quite small, with sink, old-style gas cooker, and a few cupboards. Sometimes there was room for a small table for eating. There was usually some tiling round the sink. All city flats we saw had running water. Most country homes drew their water from a well… . Household equipment seemed quite inadequate by our standards. There were usually a few cooking utensils, no china tea service, perhaps because Russians usually drink tea from glasses. Electric irons seemed in good supply. We saw one old-style sewing machine. In one flat, belonging to an important Party member, diere was a refrigerator in the hall.” David, and Mace, Vera, The Soviet Family (London, 1964), 162 Google Scholar. Even in the wake of the American exhibition, Sem'ia i shkola still conceived the kitchen in low-tech terms. See Krasnova, Z., “Vasha kukhnia,” Sem'ia i shkola, 1959, no. 11:46–47 Google Scholar.

58 Zimmerman and Lerner, “What the Russians Will See,” 52-54. Mikoian’s interest in food processing, as well as his involvement in the sale of art treasures in the 1930s, may have brought him into contact with collector of Russian decorative arts Marjorie Merriweather Post. Her house in Washington, D.C., now the Hillwood Museum, built in 1955 with the Post, General Foods, and Bird's Eye fortune, was equipped with a state-of-the-art kitchen designed by Alexander Macllvaine for serving frozen foods. Karen Kettering, personal communication, November 2001. The suggestion that part of the answer to women’s double burden was for men to share the domestic chores began to be raised in public at this time but was a seasonal issue, reserved for International Women’s Day and often presented in a flippant manner. Ogonek reported that prominent astronomer Alia Masevich, on a recent lecture tour of the United States, had created a sensation in the American press by declaring how much she liked the way American husbands helped their wives in the kitchen. The account renders this top female scientist unthreatening by characterizing her in terms of her girlish figure and her relationship with her daughter and makes light of her suggestion: “Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to transfer this custom to our husbands—isn’t it true, it's a good custom?“ Kulikovskaia, G., “Pronikaiushchaia v zvezdy,” Ogonek, no. 11 (8 March 1959): 11 Google Scholar. Hindus reports an exception: a letter from four working women complaining about their husbands’ refusal to help in the home, published in Sovetskaia Rossiia, 16 March 1960. Hindus, House without a Roof, 282.

59 R. Chaikovskaia, “Dlia domashnego khoziaistva,” Sovetskaia zhenshchina, 1954, no. 11:44-45.

60 “Rech' tovarishcha N. S. Khrushcheva,” Pravda, 15 March 1958; and Abramenko and Tormozova, eds., Besedy o domashnem khoziaistve, 3-4. Increased production of consumer goods including domestic appliances was confirmed by a decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a resolution of the Council of Ministers in October 1959: “On measures to increase production, broaden assortment, improve quality of goods of cultural-everyday purpose and domestic use.” Detailed figures were given for the production of refrigerators, sewing machines, washing machines, televisions and radios, motorbikes and mopeds, beds, enamel dishes, and so on. “Dobrotnye, krasivye veshchi—v nash byt!” hvestiia, 16 October 1959, 1. By 1968 there were 27 million television sets, 13.7 million refrigerators, and 5.9 million vacuum cleaners for some 60- 70 million homes. Given the paucity of spare parts and repair services, it can be assumed that not all were functioning. Matthews, Class and Society in Soviet Russia, 84. In practice ownership of a refrigerator or washing machine remained a status symbol unavailable to the majority until at least the 1970s. Holt, “Domestic Labour,” 29-31.

61 Podol'nyi, R., “Tekhnika nastupaet,” Sem'ia i shkola, 1959, no. 12:10 Google Scholar.

62 Ibid., ll;A.Vul'f, “Protivnedootsenkidomovodstva,“Sem'iaishkola, 1961,no.8:47.

63 Podol'nyi, , “Tekhnika nastupaet,” 11; Kratkaia entsiklopediia domashnego khoziaistva (Moscow, 1959), 2:508–9Google Scholar. For further discussion see Reid, “Masters of the Earth,” 297.

64 S. Kuvykin, “Kachestvo, eshche raz kachestvo,” Izvestiia, 23 October 1959.

65 Edmonds, Richard, Russian Vistas: The Record of a Springtime Journey to Moscow,Leningrad, Kiev, Stalingrad, the Black Sea, and the Caucasus (London, 1958) ,111 Google Scholar; Gundier, InsideRussia Today, 64. There was an element of the Potemkin village here: in light of concern for the Soviet image abroad, shops in the center of Moscow and Leningrad, where foreign visitors (and even Soviet leaders) were most likely to wander, were better supplied. It was common practice to “throw” goods into the shops when leaders were expected to visit. See, for example, Werth, Russia under Khrushchev, 33.

66 Edmonds, Russian Vistas, 104.

67 Gunther, Inside Russia Today, 63.

68 Hindus, House without a Roof, 15.

69 Gunther, Inside Russia Today, 63.

70 Ibid., 380. David and Vera Mace commented, “Westerners have shown tremendous interest in the possibility that the new Soviet woman will in time abandon her severity in the matter of dress and personal adornment.” Mace, Soviet Family, 111. The novelty of concerns with cosmetics and personal hygiene should not be overstated: it is partiy a matter of contrast with the war period and of stereotypes of Russian women western male observers brought with them. An Institute of Hygiene had already been established in 1936 and was being advertised in women’s magazines such as Rabotnitsa and Obshchestvennitsa.

71 Bil'shai, Vera, Reshenie zhenskogo voprosa v SSSR (Moscow, 1956), 208 Google Scholar.

72 Gunther reports that many perfumery and cosmetics shops in the 1950s also sold cheap beads and ornaments. Gunther, Inside Russia, 67.

73 Ogonek, no. 11 (8 March 1959): 7. The issue of Ogonek for International Women’s Day, 8 March 1960, also dealt with traditionally feminine concerns—fashion, housekeeping, and consumption—alongside a celebration of women’s contribution to public life in production, services, and science. Ogonek, no. 10 (6 March 1960). See also Attwood, Lynne, Creating the New Soviet Woman: Women’s Magazines as Engineers ofFemak Identity, 1922-53 (New York, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 Female retail workers were recast as paragons of kul'turnost' and educators of taste beginning in the mid-1980s. See Randall, “‘Revolutionary Bolshevik Work,’” 426-27; and Hessler, “Culture of Shortages,” chap. 6. The Komsomol was actively involved in raising the culture of trade: “My za kul'turnuiu torgovliu!” 2. Similarly, in the GDR and Poland in the early 1950s, efforts were made to turn shopping in state stores into a cultured experience that advanced the consumer's political and aesthetic education. See Pence, “‘You as a Woman,’” 224-25; and Crowley, “Warsaw’s Shops, Stalinism and the Thaw,” in Reid and Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism, 33-34.

75 Trotskaia, T., “Kompository aromatov,” Ogonek, no. 10 (6 March 1960): 25 Google Scholar. In the 1930s the insufficient supply of suitable oils and fats was identified by Polina Zhemchuzhina, Molotov’s wife and head of TeZhe (the trust responsible for producing women’s toiletries), as the main obstacle to the development of Soviet cosmetics and perfume industry on a mass scale. Anastas Mikoian, Tak bylo: Razmyshleniia o minuvshem (Moscow, 1999), 297-99.

76 Trotskaia, “Kompository aromatov,” 25.

77 Werth, Russia under Khrushchev, 52.

78 May, Homeward Bound, 164. As Stephen Whitfield puts it, “The same pushbuttons that were designed to make housework easier came from the same laboratories as the pushbuttons for guided missiles.” General Electric, Westinghouse, Chrysler were all major Pentagon contractors, while General Motors was the nation’s leading defense contractor by 1952. Meanwhile, defense contracts were a major source of the economic growth on which increased consumption was based. Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 74-75. In the Soviet Union, the symbiosis existed only to a limited extent: for example, the best refrigerators and other appliances were those put out by the military sector.

79 “Oblegchaet trud, sberegaet vremia,” Ogonek, no. 27 (3 July 1960). For the popularization of developments in the chemical industry and their benefits in byt, especially in the form of plastics, see V Ishimov, “Khimik—sil'nee prirody,” Sem'ia i shkola, 1958, no. 3:38-40. They were also aestheticized, for example in Sovetskoe foto. See Reid, “Photography in the Thaw.“

80 Werth, Russia under Khrushchev, 34.

81 “New Yurt for the Shepherd,” Current Digest of the Soviet Press 13, no. 24 (1961): 29-30 (Pravda, 12June 1961); Lavrik, M., “Vtoroe rozhdenie” Ogonek, no. 52 (23 December 1962): 24–25 Google Scholar.

82 The classical and modernist precept “truth to materials” guided the de-Stalinization of the material environment. Simulation and “disrespect for plastic” was petit bourgeois and in poor taste. Saltykov, Aleksandr, O khudozhestvennom vkuse v byte (Moscow, 1959)Google Scholar; Aizenshtat, O., “Neuvazhenie k plastmasse,” Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR (henceforth DISSSR), 1962, no. 1:46–47 Google Scholar; and M. Chereiskaia, “Zametki o khoroshem vkuse,” in Saltanova and Kolchinskaia, eds., Podruga, 228.

83 Hindus, House without a Roof, 14. The chemical permanent and hair dye became popular in 1959 and the early 1960s, respectively, but were not cheap: a perm cost 2 - 4 rubles plus tip. For Hindus, Brigitte Bardot hairdos—piles of artfully tousled hair— marked the difference in cultural climate between Warsaw, where they were ubiquitous, and Moscow where Bardot films were taboo because of their frank sexuality. Ibid., 510.

84 Western journalists’ preoccupation with Russian women’s hairdos not only was prompted by their home audience’s fascination with the newly discovered species of humanity behind the Iron Curtain but reflected current issues in the Soviet media, such as young people’s “excessive“desire for anything from the west. Journalist Anatolii Rubinov, describing Moscow beauty salons and hairdressers in the 1950s, reports how, in the decade following Stalin’s death, women’s hairstyles suddenly became a topic of discussion and debate in the press. New short hairstyles arrived from abroad such as the “little basket“ (korzinochka—presumably a mistranslation of the “beehive“). Anatolii Rubinov, Intimnaiazhizn’ Moskvy (Moscow, 1995), 21*7-20. A casual Italian haircut caught on after the World Youth Festival in the summer of 1957. A short haircut for women was lampooned as meningitka, associating it with the shaven heads of hospital patients, and was also known as “the little boy without a mamma” because of its tousled, wind-blown effect. Hindus, House withouta Roof, 14. See also Nadezhda Azhgikhina and Helena Goscilo, “Getting under Their Skin: The Beauty Salon in Russian Women’s Lives,” in Goscilo and Holmgren, eds., Russia.Women. Culture, 101.

85 Salisbury, Harrison E., To Moscow—and Beyond (London, 1960), 15, 46–49 Google Scholar. Even Gunther conceded in a footnote: “Recently, however, Russian women have become more style conscious, and crowd into fashion shows, especially those that come from France and the U.S.A.” Gunther, Inside Russia Today, 7lnl, and 380-81. A member of a 1958 British town planning delegation found that female university students “are not wholly lacking in dress sense in a student kind of way. It may well be that in a year or two we shall get a surprise in this direction, and it will be trousers and pony tails for all.” Edmonds, Russian Vistas, 22. Female trouser wearing remained contentious: in 1962 Ogonek allowed that young, tall, and slender women might wear slacks in the home, although others should not. “Vykhodnoi den',” Ogonek, no. 10 (4 March 1962): 31.

86 Hindus, House without a Roof, 15-16. See also About Town 2, no. 5 (May 1961): 37, 28; and Mace, Soviet Family, 108-13.

87 Hindus, House without a Roof, 21. This conclusion is corroborated by responses to a 1961 exhibition of new models of furniture in the austere, functionalist contemporary style. While visitors received the designs favorably, they complained that the models were not available to buy, or only at prohibitively high prices. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI), f. 2329, op. 4, ed. khr. 1391 (visitors’ book for exhibition Artand Life, Moscow, April-June 1961).

88 Thayer, Russia, 99.

89 Gunther, Inside Russia Today, 66-67.

90 Cited by Werth, Russia under Khrushchev, 34.

91 Salisbury, To Moscow, 47-48.

92 Ibid., 47.

93 “The Russian woman,” wrote John Brown, “is denied much of the fun that she could get in the West. Her natural longing to decorate herself, to make herself beautiful so that she is ajoy to herself and to the world, is frustrated at every turn.“ Brown, John, RussiaExplored (New York, 1959), 126 Google Scholar; Mace, Soviet Family, 111. Compare Summers, Anne, “On Begging to Be a Bridesmaid in a Ballerina Dress: Some Meanings of British Fashion in the 1950s,” History Workshop Journal 44 (Autumn 1997): 227–32Google Scholar.

94 Loehlin,From Rugs toRiches, 14, citing Constanze, 1950, no. 7:5.

95 Miller, Wright, Russians as People (London, 1960), 162–64Google Scholar. The question whether Russians, especially women, were naturally “puritanical” preoccupied some western male reporters including Miller (156-57) and Gunther (InsideRussia, 95).

96 Gunther, Inside Russia, 63.

97 Makarova, N., “Iskusstvo riadom s modoi: Ne ia dlia mody, a moda dlia menia,” DISSSR, 1961, no. 1:39–42 Google Scholar. The new availability of choice in ready-to-wear fashions was deemed to create a need for consumer advice on how to make a wise purchase. See, for example, Kolchinskaia, “Odevaisiaprosto i krasivo,” 335-51; and M. Orlova, “O skromnosti i devich'ei gordosti,” Uchitel'skaia gazeta, 16 June 1959. A reader of the recently founded decorative arts journal queried: surely distinctions in the material base must engender corresponding differences in such superstructural forms as style? Why then had people in socialist societies continued to dress similarly to people in capitalist countries? “O ponimanii mody: Pis’mo s kommentarii,” DI SSSR, 1961, no. 1:40-42. Other less extreme foreign fashion shows were one means to counter Dior, including a show of 120 Viennese firms in Moscow. See Ogonek, no. 27 (3 July 1960).

98 “The slightest change in her dress is discussed by the whole class and this can sometimes affect the way the lessons go.” L. Efremova, “Ob odezhde uchitel'nitsy,” Uchitel'skaiagazeta, 26 September 1959; and L. Efremova, “Moda, vkus, prostata,” Uchitel'skaiagazeta, 3 January 1961.

99 According to the 1959 housewife’s manual cited above, moderation, restraint, strictness, and simplicity were imperative: excess and fussy trimmings were vulgar and philistine (meshchanskii). Abramenko and Tormozova, eds., Besedy o domashnem khoziaistve, 228. “Don’t overload your dress with trimmings,” Ogonek also warned: Khrabrova, N., “V poiskakh krasivogo, udobnogo,” Ogonek, no. 10 (6 March 1960): 15–16 Google Scholar. The teenage girls’ manual Podruga advised that true elegance was to be attained neither by complete neglect of fashion nor by excessive slavery to it, but through a sense of measure: Kolchinskaia, “Odevaisia prosto i krasivo,” 345. Similar advice was given by Nikol'skaia, E., “Umenie odevat'sia,” in Sem'ia i shkola, 1958, no. 2:44–46 Google Scholar.

100 Efremova, “Moda.” Overly bright lipstick made a woman look older and destroyed her individuality. “Umenie odevat'sia,” in Abramenko and Tormozova, eds., Besedyo domashnem khoziaistve, 262-63. Hindus reported that educated Russian men found it “disgusting to kiss painted lips.” Hindus, House without a Roof, 14.

101 Vulgar substance abuse such as John Gunther reports in 1958 was definitely not approved, whether as a substitute for alcohol or for personal hygiene: GUM had a slot machine which, for ten kopeks, would squirt you with perfume. “Sometimes peasants came in, took their hats off, and put in one coin after another until their hair was doused.” Gunther, Inside Russia, 66.

102 Edmonds, Russian Vistas, 111.

103 “‘Ivan’ Takes a Look,” 40.

104 Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 193.

105 Ibid., 189, 202-3.

106 Suny, Ronald and Adams, Arthur, eds., The Russian Revolution and Bolshevik Victory:Visions and Revisions, 3d ed. (Lexington, Mass. 1990), 59 Google Scholar.

107 Viola, Lynne, “ Bab'i Bunty and Peasant Women’s Protest during Collectivization,“ in Farnsworth, Beatrice and Viola, Lynne, eds., Russian Peasant Women, (Oxford, 1992), 189–205 Google Scholar.

108 See Pence, “‘You as a Woman,’” 218-52. The international context provides further precedents. For example, in Germany in World War I, severe food shortages gave rise to “butter riots” and demonstrations against trading practices in 1915. The crowds were described by police as consisting mostly of women, while merchants complained about the “irrationality” of “excited and feeble-minded old female persons” and about the “lifethreatening press of women.” See Belinda Davis, “Food Scarcity and the Empowerment of the Female Consumer in World War I Berlin,” in De Grazia and Furlough, eds., Sex of Things, 287-310.

109 “SummaryofXXI (Extraordinary) Party Congress,” Soviet Studies 11, no. 1 (1959): 90. In the later years of his administration, Khrushchev pursued a campaign against “bourgeois acquisitiveness” and dacha proprietors, suspecting the latter of harboring a “bourgeois desire for private ownership.” Nove, Alec, An Economic History of the U.S.S.R, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, 1982), 364 Google Scholar; and Keep, Last of the Empires, 98. A crucial distinction between lichnaia zhizn’ (personal life) and chastnaia zhizn’ (private life, with implications of property) is drawn by Kharkhordin, O., “Reveal and Dissimulate: A Genealogy of Private Life in Soviet Russia,” in Weintraub, Jeff and Kumar, Krishan, eds., Public and Private inThought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy (Chicago, 1996), 333–63Google Scholar.

110 The 1958-65 Seven-Year Plan envisaged construction of 15 million apartments— as much as all the urban housing built since the revolution. Intolerable housing conditions had to be ameliorated, not only out of concern for the health and happiness of the people and to dispel rising discontent among urban residents, but, as Timothy Sosnovy pointed out, for economic reasons: poor housing affected workers above all, resulting in a large labor turnover and endangering the fulfillment of the plan. Sosnovy, T., “The Soviet Housing Situation Today,” Soviet Studies 11, no. 1 (July 1959): 6,13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

111 By 1965 the Soviet city dweller would have only 40 percent of the living space available to someone living in western Europe or the United States. Ibid., 19.

112 Philosopher Karl Kantor warned that the “hypertrophy of interest in the individual dwelling is inclined to engender an antisocial and anticommunist mindset.” Cited by lurii Gerchuk, “S tochki zreniia shestidesiatnika,” DISSSR, 1991, no. 7:9. Marguerite Higgins surmised: “Perhaps Russia’s leadership was deliberately holding back some of the good things of life … [because] if Russians got decent homes, TV sets and excellent food wouldn’t they, being human, begin to develop a petit bourgeois philosophy? Wouldn’t they want to stay home before the fire instead of attending the political rally at the local palace of culture?” Higgins, Marguerite, Red Plush and Black Bread (Garden City, N.Y, 1955)Google Scholar.

113 ‘Youth Has Its Say on Love and Marriage,” Soviet Review 3, no. 8 (August 1962): 32.

114 Abramenko and Tormozova, eds., Besedy o domashnem khoziaistve, 3-4. Victor Buchli asserts: “If the Stalinist state was poised at the threshold of the ‘hearth,’ the Khrushchevist state walked straight in and began to do battle.” Buchli, Victor, An Archaeologyof Socialism (Oxford, 1999), 138 Google Scholar.

115 Khazanova, V. E., “Arkhitektura v poru ‘Ottepeli,’” in Lebedeva, V. E., ed., Otshestidesiatykh k vos’midesiatykh: Voprosy sovremennoi kul'tury (Moscow, 1991), 81 Google Scholar.

116 See Gerchuk, “Aesthetics of Everyday Life in the Khrushchev Thaw,” 81-100. Exhibitions of new designs from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland held in Moscow were promoted in terms of contemporary good taste. See “Vengerskaia promyshlenniaia vystavka,“ Sem'ia i shkola, 1960, no. 12; L. Vikent'ev, “Vystavka Chekhoslovakiia 1960,” Sem'ia ishkola, 1960, no. 10, and numerous issues oiDISSSR in this period.

117 See Gronberg, Tag, “Siting the Modern” (review article),Journal of ContemporaryHistory 36, no. 4 (October 2001)Google Scholar; Saltykov, , O khudozhestvennom vkuse; Eric Newton, TheMeaning of Beauty (London, 1962)Google Scholar.

118 A new subject heading “family and everyday life” was introduced into the catalogue of books in print in 1954. The number of such publications rose sharply, peaking in 1961. Field, “Communist Morality,” 41.

119 Compare studies of gender and domesticity in the west in this period: Carter, How German Is She? 59-75; Inness, Sherrie A., ed., Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representationsof Food, Gender, and Race (Philadelphia, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and May, Homeward Bound, chap. 7.

120 Boym, Common Places, 16. Karen Kettering argues, however, that in this period such discourses attempted to draw men, too, into the formation of the new byt. Kettering, “‘Ever More Cosy,’” 119-36.

121 Dunham, In Stalin’s Time, chap. 3.

122 RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 2979 (Discussion in MOSKh [Moscow Regional Artists’ Union], 27 May 1959, “Problemy formirovaniia sovremennogo stilia“), 1. 54; Chereiskaia, “Zametkiokhoroshemvkuse,“220; E. Nikol'skaia, “Uiutiobstanovkavdome,“ Sem'ia i shkola, 1958, no. 11:46 - 47. On efforts to establish a regime of “contemporary” taste and its parameters, see Victor Buchli, “Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight against Petit- Bourgeois Consciousness in the Soviet Home,” and Reid, Susan E., “Destalinization and Taste,” both in Journal of Design History 10, no. 2 (1997): 161–76 and 177-202Google Scholar; and Gerchuk, “Aesthetics of Everyday Life in die Khrushchev Thaw,” 81-99.

123 Women’s responsibility for the home did not mean that family members should not help them, but it was the woman’s role to organize, delegate, and direct: “The sooner a girl or young woman comes to grips with keeping her small household, the more actively members of her family will help her.” Abramenko and Tormozova, eds., Besedy o domashnemkhoziaistve, 4.

124 Ol'ga Baiar, “Sdelaem kvartiru udobnoi i uiutnoi,” Sovetskaia zhenshchina, 1956, no. 7:47- 48; Baiar, O. and Blashkevich, R. N., Kvartira i ee ubranstvo (Moscow, 1962)Google Scholar; Kartna-AIas, Mil'vi, “Iskusstvo i byt,” Ogonek, no. 25 (19June 1960): 20–22 Google Scholar, summarizing a recently published almanac Iskusstvo i domashnii byt; Nikol'skaia, E., “Blagoustroistvo zhilishcha,“ Sem'ia ishkola, 1958, no. 1:42–44 Google Scholar; Nikol'skaia, “Uiutiobstanovkavdome,“46-47; Krasnova, Z., “Khoroshii vkus v ubranstve zhil'ia,” Sem'ia i shkola, 1960, no. 1:44–45 Google Scholar; and A. Briuno, “Vasha kvartira,” Sem'ia i shkola, 1960, no. 10:46-47. The newspaper of the Moscow Artists’ Union dedicated a whole issue to the artist's role in the formation of public taste: Moskovskii khudozhnik, nos. 10-11 (June 1959). The Soviet mass consumer could also consult such manuals of “contemporary” good taste as Saltykov, O khudozhestvennom vkuse. Regarding women’s new role as die conduit of modern taste into the home, compare Carter, How German Is She? 59-77.

125 Chereiskaia, “Zametki o khoroshem vkuse,” 220-34. On the tasteful and modern use of prints in the home, see also V. Nekrasov, “Estamp v kvartire,” and Iurii Gerchuk, “Dekorativnaia grafika,” both in DISSSR, 1962, no. 3. For further analysis of ways to modernize domestic space and its furnishings, see Buchli, “Khrushchev, Modernism,” 170-72.

126 Mace, Soviet Family, 161.

127 Buchli, Archaeology of Socialism, 92-93.

128 For the standardization and rationalization of domestic space and labor, see G. Liubimova, “Ratsional'noe oborudovanie kvartir,“Z)/SSSi?, 1964, no. 6:15-18.

129 Kuprin, O., Byt—ne chastnoe deb (Moscow, 1959)Google Scholar, and see Field, “Communist Morality.“

130 Vul'f, “Protiv nedootsenki domovodstva,” 47. Ogonek reported on a technical college in Lithuania where girls (boys were not mentioned) learned cookery, table service, needlework, horticulture, childcare, hygiene, preserving, and other aspects of domestic science. Borushko, V., “Khoroshie budut khoziaiki,” Ogonek, no. 10 (6 March 1960): 24 Google Scholar. Similarly in the west, reviving earlier twentiedr-century demands for the recognition of housewifery as a profession and for wages for housework, proposals were made in the late 1940s for research institutes in housewifery, home economics training for women, and professional codification of housework in a recognized qualification, the “housewife’s diploma” and in constitutional law. Carter, How German Is She? 50.

131 Here I take issue with the hypothesis Darra Goldstein presents in her excellent article: that, in the Soviet period, “the site of women’s power was severely diminished, and in many cases entirely lost.” Goldstein, “Domestic Porkbarreling,” 145-47.

132 Buchli, Archaeology of Socialism, 154.

133 ‘Youth Has Its Say,” 32.

134 Ibid., 37.

135 The Soviet concept of the self or lichnosf as constituted in and by the public gaze, is analyzed by Kharkhordin, “Reveal and Dissimulate,” 337-43.

136 Mace, SovietFamily, 160-62. Buchli notes that, paradoxically, only the elite, cushioned from the need to hoard, could afford a lifestyle of “conspicuous austerity.” Buchli, Archaeology of Socialism, 129.

137 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii, f. M-l, op. 5 (Conference of Central Committee ofVLKSM), d. 836a, 11. 51-53.

138 Boym, Common Places, 150.

139 Trubin, N., “How It Was: Novocherkassk 1962,” Soviet Law and Government?Q, no. 4 (Spring 1992): 21–27 Google Scholar (originally published as “Kak eto bylo,” Pravda, 3 June 1991, 4).

140 Baron, Samuel, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk, 1962 (Stanford, 2001), 59–60, 101Google Scholar. Baron does not explicitly address the nexus women-consumptiondisorder.

141 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, The Gulag Archipelago (London, 1978), 3:507–8Google Scholar.

142 Police and KGB reports retrospectively justified their use of force in terms of the dichotomies between control and disorder and between consciousness and spontaneity. Claiming that “the strength of the Soviet working class is in its organization and discipline,“ they opposed a rational, conscious majority, who “understood” the reasons for the price increases and tried to maintain order, to a criminal, anti-Soviet minority, along with those susceptible members of the public they incited, who were characterized as being of diminished responsibility and “not in control of their behavior“—characteristics stereotypically associated with children and women. Yet the troublemakers and dieir followers were characterized as mainly young but not specified as female, and only one of those tried and sentenced was a woman. “Novocherkasskaia tragediia, 1962,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, 1993, no. 1:100-136, esp. 121,128: from speech by Frol Kozlovon Novocherkassk local radio, 3June 1962 (Arkhiv Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii, f. 3, op. 58, d. 211,11. 101-7). See also Naumov, “Repression and Rehabilitation,” 110-11; and Vladimir Kozlov, Massovye besporiadki vSSSRpri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve (1953-nachalo 1980-kh gg.) (Novosibirsk, 1999), chap. 12.