Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization ... on both sides of the Iron Curtain...

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

Susan E. Reid

Slavic Review, Vol. 61, No. 2. (Summer, 2002), pp. 211-252.

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ARTICLES

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

Susan E. Reid

It seems appropriate to begin an article on consumption with an artifact, the avos'ka. An essential item in a Soviet woman's survival kit, the avos'ka (from avos', "perhaps"), was a string shopping bag, infinitely expandable "just in case" she came across toilet paper, bananas, or some other scarce commodity. Such spontaneous purchasing was not the same as impulse buying in the western sense, a notorious aspect of consumer capitalism's invidious appeals to women's "irrational" desires. Rather, it was a strategy for dealing with the specificity of Soviet shopping: shortages and poor dis- tribution. Apart from its elasticity, the avos'ka is also distinguished by its transparency, its openness to inspection: bulging out through its holes, the fruits of the woman's resourcefulness and persistence as procurer on behalf of her family can be seen by all. The avos'ka, empty, waiting to be filled, and monitored by others, is a useful synecdoche for the Soviet consumer as, I want to argue, she was constructed in the thaw.l

"Thoughts of shopping," Alix Holt has observed, "intrude[d] into every corner of a [Soviet] woman's existence," so all-consuming was the planning, ingenuity, and scheming involved in procuring basic goods and services2 Consumption has increasingly been recognized as a serious object of historical investigation in regard to identity formation and the experience of modernity in the west.3 It has also figured prominently in

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, Hedrick Smith, The Russians (New York, 1976), 61- 62.

2. Alix Holt, "Domestic Labour and Soviet Society," in Jenny Brine, Maureen Perrie, and l l d r e w Sutton, eds., Home, School and Leisure in the Soviet Union (London, 1980), 33.

3. See, for example, Erica Carter, "Alice in the Consumer Wonderland," in Angela McRobbie and Mica Nava, eds., Gender and Generation (Houndmills, Eng., 1984), 185-214; Erica Carter, How German Is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (Ann Arbor, 1997); Jennifer A. Loehlin, From Rugs to Riches: Housework, Consump- tion and Modernity in Germany (Oxford, 1999) ;Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, 1996) ;and the review article by Mary Louise Roberts, "Gender, Consumption, and Commodity Cult~lre," American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (June 1998): 817-44. See also the special issue on "Rkgimes of Consumer Culture," German History 19, no. 2 (2001), guest edited by Alon Confino and Rudy Koshar. The guest editors' introduction provides a useful review of recent studies of consumer culture: Alon Confino and R~ldy Koshar, "Rkgimes of Consumer Cult~lre:New Narratives in Twentieth-Century German History," 135-61.

Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (Summer 2002)

212 Slavic Review

explanations of the collapse of Soviet-type systems since 1989, according to which the yawning gap between popular expectations for improved living standards and the party-state's ability to fulfill them-represented by queues, Trabants, lack of bananas, and frumpy women-led to the collapse of popular support for the socialist p r ~ j e c t . ~ Thereby, western pre- dictions dating from the first Cold War period were seen to have been fulfilled, capitalist strategy vindicated, and the Cold War won. Yet the management of consumption was as significant for the Soviet system's long survival as for its ultimate collapse. And the discourses of Soviet consumption on both sides of the Iron Curtain attributed a particular importance- even power- to women.

Consumption is clearly a central issue in the study of post-Soviet cul- t ~ r e . ~But the tastes, desires, and expectations of the new Russian consumer did not emerge on a tabula rasa. Consumption, and living standards more generally, came to the forefront of party rhetoric and state policy during the 1950s, under the conditions of "peaceful competition" that marked a new, somewhat more relaxed phase of the Cold War. A central concern in the discourses and practices of the Khrushchev era, both international and domestic, it was at once a stick with which the west beat its Cold War adversary, and an issue on which the Khrushchev regime staked its legitimacy at home and its credibility abroad. Not for nothing were the nick- names consumer, refrigerator, or goulash communism given to the new order promised by the Khrushchev leadership and its counterparts in the bloc. Soviet economic claims were taken seriously by western scholars at the time. Many even assumed that if living standards continued to rise, the Soviet Union would follow the path already trod by the United States and enter a "mass-consumption" phase.6 However, consumer culture in this

4. Consumer desire, specifically the widening gulf between the rhetoric of the Sozial- istische 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 Jonathan R. Zatlin, "The Vehicle of Desire: The Trabant, the Wartburg, and the End of the GDR," German History 15, no. 3 (1997): 360-61; Loehlin, From Rugs to Riches, 4; and B. Ciesla and P. G. Poutrus, "Food Supply in a Planned Economy: SED Nutrition Policy between Crisis Response and Popular Needs," in Konrad H.Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History ofthe GDR, trans. Eve DuEy (Oxford, 1999), 157. See also Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton, 1996).

5. Katherine Verdery predicted in a 1993 lecture, "The secondary but highly politi- cized role of consumption in socialism's political economy will surely make consumption an especially intriguing topic to follo\v." Verdery, What Was Socialism, 13. Studies include: Caroline Humphrey, "Creating a Cult~lre of Disillusionment: Consumption in Mosco~v, a Chronicle of Changing Times," in Daniel Miller, ed., Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local (London, 1995) ;Adele Marie Barker, ed., Consuming Russia: Popular Cul- ture, Sex and Society since Gorbacheu (Durham, 1999); Nancy Condke and Vladimir Padunov, "The ABC of R~lssian Consumer Cult~lre," in Nancy Condke, ed., Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture i n Late Twentieth-Century Russia (Bloomington, 1995), 130-72; Jennifer Patico, "Consumption and Logics of Social Difference in Post-Soviet Russia" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2001); and Catriona Kelly, "Creating a Consumer: Advertising and Com- mercialization," in Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, eds., Russian Cultural Studies (Ox-ford, 1998), 223-46.

6. For a presentation and critique of this position, see William N. Turpin, "The Out- look for the Soviet Consumer," Problems of Communism 9, no. 6 (1960): 30-37. For an early

213 Cold War in the Kitchen

period has yet to receive the retrospective, historical analysis it deserves7 This neglect is part of the general fate of this period, which, having received extensive contemporary analysis, is only now beginning to be re- assessed. It may also be explained by a tacit assumption that being communist, eastern bloc countries-and the Soviet Union, above all-could not, by definition, be consumer societie~.~ Thus the regime's ideological and economic emphasis on production determined the focus of western as well as Soviet historians on production rather than consumption.

This article is a preliminary attempt to consider the symbiosis of gender and consumption under Nikita Khrushchev and to make a case that

study on "goulash communism" in Hungary, see G. Gomori, '"Consumerism' in Hungary," Problems of Communism 12, no. 1 (1963) : 64.

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 William Taubman, Sergei Khrushchev, and Abbott Glea- son, eds., Nikita Khmshcheu (New Haven, 2000), chap. by Vladimir Naumov (102, l l I ) 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 l l n e E. Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington, 2000) ;and Nataliia Lebina, Pousednevnaia zhizn' sovetskogo goroda: Normy i anomalii. 1920/1930 gody (St. Petersburg 1999). An account of Mosco~v in 1928 opens with a chapter on Moscow shops: Alexander Wicksteed, Life under the Soviets (London, 1928), 1-20. There is an increasingly rich literature on consumption and living standards in the Stalin period, beginning with Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin's Time; iMiddleclass Values in SovietFiction (Cambridge, Eng., 1976); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism (New York, 1999), chap. 4; Amy E. Randall, "'Revolu- tionary Bolshevik Work': Stakhanovism in Retail Trade," Russian Reuiew 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 Elena Osokina, Ierarkhiia potre- bleniia: 0 zhizni liudei u uslouiiakh stalinskogo snabzheniia, 1928-1935 gg. (Mosco~v, 1993). Consumption is a central theme of Susan E. Reid and David Cro~vley, eds., Style and Social- ism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post- WarEastern Europe (Oxford, 2000).

8. Similar reasons are offered by Katherine Pence for the neglect hitherto 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 17 June 1953," German His- tory 19, no. 2 (2001): 218-52. See Ferenc Fehkr, Agnes Heller, and Gyorgy Mdrk~~s, Dicta-torship ouer Needs (Oxford, 1983). The GDR has fared better than other parts of eastern Eu- rope, being the subject of some compelling recent research on consumer culture, including, in addition to Pence, Ina Merkel, "Consumer Cult~lre in the GDR, or How the Struggle for lltimodernity was Lost on the Battleground of Consumer Culture," and Andrk Steiner, "Dissolution of the 'Dictatorship over Needs'? Consumer Behavior and Eco- nomic Reform in East Germany in the 1960s," both in Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt, eds., Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), 281-99 and 167-85; Milena Veenis, "Con- sumption in East Germany: The Seduction and Betrayal of Things," Journal ofiMaterial Cul- ture 4, no. 1 (1999) : 79 -1 12; Ute Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and Ameri- can Culture in a Diuided Germany (Berkeley, 2000) ; Paul Betts, "The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory and Material Culture," Journal of Modern History 72, no. 3 (Septem- ber 2000): 731-65. Craig Clunas notes that the concept of consumption-and by exten- sion, 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 Reuiew 104, no. 5 (December 1999): 1497-1511.

214 Slavic Review

consumption, particularly by women, was a crucial concern in the Soviet response to the Cold War. The period is framed by two potentially regime- shattering popular revolts, both of which were triggered by issues of consumption: the uprising by workers in the German Democratic Republic in June 1953 against the leadership of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED);g and a protest by workers in the southern Russian city of Novocherkassk in June 1962 over high prices and low wages, which, escalating into mass disorder, was brutally suppressed. In order to establish the significance of consumption issues in the context of de-stalinization and the Cold War, and their centrality to the way women and their relationship to the regime were constructed, I focus on visual and textual representations of consumption and the ideal Soviet consumer, both in- digenous and as viewed through the "Iron Curtain." The limitations of the present research should be confessed at the outset. This is a cultural rather than an economic investigation. At the same time it can only raise, without yet answering, important questions about the shopping experience of the Soviet consumer and her (for, as I shall argue, the consumer was predominantly constructed as female) actual desires and behavior, whether rational or "irrational." Much work has to be done to discover the Soviet consumer, not only as apassive object of central planning, market research, representation, and discipline, but as an active agent who, through her consumption choices, or refusal to consume, may or may not have had an impact on the way policy and ideology were shaped, and who made her own meanings of government-issue consumables in the process of active appropriation and bricolage.1° Research of this sort will no doubt become an important agenda in the reassessment of the Khrushchev and Brezh- nev eras, making use of newly available sources including-alongside archives-memoirs, diaries, and oral history, and applying new method- ologies derived from cultural studies, material culture studies, historical anthropology, and gender studies.

The present, far more modest, essay analyzes the representation of women and consumption in both the specialist and popular press, including domestic advice manuals and Ogonek, a popular illustrated news magazine along the lines of the British Picture Post or the American LiJe and Look. Ogonek is a particularly useful source for a study of this sort. Ad- dressed to a mass audience of both men and women, it appears to have re- sponded to Khrushchev's declared aim of drawing women more actively into public life, paradoxically (but significantly) by introducing more cov- erage of conventionally feminine concerns thought to appeal to the female members of its readership, who would, at the same time, also imbibe some of its current affairs reporting.ll It was also unusually well illustrated, which

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 Di\lded Germany, 1953-1964," in Taubman, Khrushchev, and Gleason, eds., Nikita Khrushchev, 280.

10. Compare Adele Marie Barker, "The Culture Factory," in Barker, ed., Consuming Russia, 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

Cold War in the Kitchen 215

makes it of interest to a historian of visual culture: possibly emulating American magazines-whose success was a source of fascination throughout Europe in the postwar period-it was at the forefront of efforts in the late 1950s (along with Komsomolkkaia pravda and Izvestiia) to enliven current affairs reporting through the generous use of photojournalism.12 This research also dusts off a somewhat despised form of contemporary document that is often dismissed as trivial, anecdotal, and lacking aca- demic interest, in much the same way as the topic of consumption has been: eyewitness accounts by western visitors to the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including journalists and members of specialist delegations. Of course, such accounts must be read critically, often against the grain, as documents that are ideologically overdetermined, genre-bound, and framed in the terms of the Cold War construction of the Soviet Union as the communist "other," as well as being unapologeti- cally patriarchal. Such accounts were not guilty, however, of the sin of ne- glecting Soviet society imputed to studies made under the almost ubiquitous sway of the Cold War totalitarian paradigm. They are particularly relevant to the study of consumer culture because they present a rich source of contemporary observation of Soviet society, popular attitudes, living standards, material culture, and everyday life.

The Management of Consumption

To refer to the "consumer" or "consumerism" in the Soviet context may seem incongruous. As Basile Kerblay has noted, the Soviet Union should not be confused with a consumer society if this implies "a regime in which the dominant class manipulates the symbols of community life, with the intention of encouraging the population to consume or to amuse itself."l:' Indeed, the regime continued to privilege production over consumption;

this period include newspapers such as Izvestiia, Literaturnaia gazeta, Sovetskaia kul'tura, and Komsomol4kaia 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 z shkola, in addition to the specifically women's magazines Sovetskaia zhenshchina, 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 n a Zarechnoi ulitse (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 Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 141; and Josephine Woll, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (London, 2000), 45-50.

12. See Susan E. Reid, "Photography in the Thaw," Art Journal (Summer 1994). Ogo-nek 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 '0 ser'eznykh ne- dostatkakh v soderzhanii zhurnala Ogonek,'" 9 September 1958, in E. S. Afanas'eva, V Iu. Afiani, et al., comps., Ideologicheskie komissii T sK KPSS 1958-1964. Dokumenty (Moscow, 1998), 87-88. 1 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 De- cember 1962.

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

216 Slavic Review

and despite increased attention to living standards in the 1950s, this remained a culture of shortages-requiring of the consumer strategies for procuring, hoarding, and making do-rather than one of boundless and conspicuous consumption. I do want to argue, however, adapting Kerblay, that even as it continued to prioritize production, "the dominant class ma- nipulated the symbols of community life with the aim of encouraging the population to consume" in particular ways.

The important role played by the management of consumption in maintaining Soviet-type systems after Iosif Stalin's death and the repudiation of terror was recognized by Vgclav Havel. "The post-totalitarian system," he declared in 1978, "has been built on foundations laid by the historical encounter between dictatorship and the consumer society."14 Havel's essay The Power of the Powerless, referring to Czechoslovakia, alerts us to the importance of studying the micro-level of power if we are to reach a closer understanding of the ways post-Stalinist regimes exercised and maintained authority. We must not underestimate the Khrushchev regime's achievements, including the renunciation of terror, relative liberalization of public discourse, and commitment to broadening participation and improving the material conditions of ordinary people. But, for all its populism, it did not relinquish power. Rather than rely on coercion, it sought to maintain public compliance by different means, to mobilize and control through a dispersal of authority to a range of discourses, institutions, and regimes of daily life and personal conduct.l"s Peter Hauslohner has put it, "the political order evolving under Khrushchev and [Leonid] Brezhnev was not Stalinism redux but something quite different."16 Highly paternalistic, the regime and its specialist agents inter-

14. Viiclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless (1978) (London, 1987), 37-40. 1 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 the new man is influenced not onlv bv the educational work of the Dartv. the Soviet state. the , , I i '

trade unions and the Young Communist League, but by the entire pattern of society's iife." Cited by George W. Breslauer, "Khrushchev Reconsidered," in Stephen Cohen, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Robert Sharlet, eds., The Soviet Union since Stalin (Bloomington, 1980), 59. 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 co- ercing' in place of one 'applying legal norms ensured by the coercive force of the state."' Herbert Ritvo, "Totalitarianism without Coercion?" Problems of Communism 9, no. 6 (1960) : 26; 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. Peter Hauslohner, "Politics before Gorbachev: De-Stalinization and the Roots of Reform," in Alexander Dallin and Gail W. Lapidus, eds., The Soviet System in Crisis (Boul-der, Colo., 1991), 39. 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 assess- ments of the nature of the Soviet system? Alec Nove, "Toward a Communist Welfare State?" in Abraham Brumberg, ed., Russia under Khrushchev: An Antholoal from Problems of Com- munism (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 of

Cold War in the Kitchen

vened even in such seemingly mundane and intimate matters as form the subject of this paper: dress, housekeeping, taste, and consumption." The importance of this project was enshrined in the Third Party Program adopted in 1961, which made both the creation of abundance for all and the formation of the fully rounded, socially integrated, and self-disciplined person essential preconditions for the imminent transition to communism. Having internalized "communist morality," the future citizens of communism would voluntarily regulate themselves, at which point the state could wither away.18 Correct attitudes toward the aesthetics of daily life and consumption were one aspect of the new Soviet person's self- discipline.

Efforts to intervene in people's everyday habits and relations were nothing new, of course, but their relative importance increased as coercion declined. The radical attempts during the 1920s to bring about a revolution in the culture of daily life are well known.lg Even under Stalin, terror was not a sufficient instrument of power but coexisted with this kind of intervention. As Catriona Kelly and Vadim Volkov have put it, in the 1930s, "the evolution of Soviet commercial culture was as much to do with the manipulation of desires as with their satisfa~tion."~~ Khrushchevist dis-

social and political institutions within which society's members become subject to 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; Terry Johnson, "Expertise and the State," in Mike Gane and Terry Johnson, eds., Fozccazcltk New Domains (London, 1993), 140-44. As Hauslohner notes, the post-Stalin regimes gave professionals greatly increased opportunities to participate in policy making, whereby they gained a stake in the political order. Hauslohner, "Politics before Gor- bachev," 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 organization of domestic life." Elizabeth Wilson, Women and the Welfare State (London, 1977), 9, 29, 36; 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 Ger- man Is She? 82-88.

17. The period saw a proliferation of advice literature defining what attitudes and be- haviors constituted a correct communist private life, allegedly in response to readers' re- quests. 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 James Scanlan, Marxism in the USSR: A Critical Survey of Czcrrent Soviet Thought (Ithaca, 1985). For the Third Party Program, see Grey Hodnett, ed., Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Volume 4, The Khrushchev Ears 1953-1964 (Toronto, 1974), 167-264.

19. See, for example, Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), Art into Life: Russian Constructivism, 1914-1932 (Seattle, 1990); Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn: Gorsuch, Yozcth i n Revolutionary Russia; Karen Kettering, "'Ever More Cosy and Comfortable': Stalinism and the Soviet Do- mestic Interior, 1928-1938," Jozcrnal ofDesig-rz History 10, no. 2 (1997): 119-36; Svetlana Boym, Common Places: iMythologies of Everyday Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1994); and Olga Matich, "Remaking the Bed: Utopia in Daily Life," in John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich, eds., Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultzcral Experiment (Stanford, 1996), 59-78.

20. Catriona Kelly and Vadim Volkov, "Directed Desires," in Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, eds., Constructing Russian Cultzcre i n the Age of Revolzction, 1881-1940 (Oxford, 1998), 293.

218 Slavic Review

courses, likewise, aimed to manipulate and regulate. The shape they tried to impose on popular desires differed radically, however, from that of the Stalin period. In accordance with the proclaimed "return to Leninist norms," they revived the austere, modernist aesthetics of the 1920s but now on the basis of the Soviet Union's postwar industrial capacity. The new tone was already set a year after Stalin's death, in December 1954, when Khrushchev railed against the excesses and superfluous embellishment of recent architecture, signaled a partial rehabilitation of constructivism, and demanded the rational use of modern materials and construction tech- nol~gy.~lThe new erawas to be one of stripped-down, functional forms and sober, rational taste appropriate to a modern, industrial, workers' state.

Soviet attitudes were not formed in isolation from other countries in the bloc. Indeed, an awareness that consumption issues, in conjunction with work norms, had triggered the uprising in Germany in June 1953 must have struck terror into the Soviet collective leadership lest such unrest spread to the Soviet Union. It may well have convinced Georgii Malenkov and Khrushchev of the urgency of improving living standards, especially in the knowledge that even in defeated Germany they were higher than in the victorious leading country of the socialist camp.22 Al-beit with differing emphasis, the effort to define the nature and limits of socialist consumption was a shared concern among leaders and ideologues in the bloc. A conference of Advertising Workers of Socialist Countries was convened in Prague in 1957 to define the purpose of advertising in a socialist economy. It was to inform about rational modes of consumption, to raise the culture of trade, and, most important, to educate consumers' taste and shape their requirement~.~The role of domestic advertising in a command economy, then, was not to generate inauthentic and insatiable consumer demand, as in the capitalist west. On the contrary, it was to promote "rational consumption" and to predict and manage popular desires.

To regulate and control demand required knowledge about the consumer. Sociology, relegitimated during the thaw, provided that knowledge. Taking the place, to some extent, of the rather haphazard gathering of information through surveillance and denunciations, the analysis and categorization of the population rendered it visible to the regime and thereby, seemingly, manageable.24 Data began to be gathered about public opinion, consumer demands, and household budgets. The Komsomol,

21. Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie stroitelei: Sokrashchennyi stenogra$cheskii 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. Phillip Hanson, Advertising and Socialism: The Natzcre and Extent of Conszcmer Adver- tising i n the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia (London, 1974), 29; and Irving R. Levine, The Real Russia (London,1959), 177.

24. Compare James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven, 1998). 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.


charged with preventing the spread of disaffection and westernized youth culture among young people, took an active interest in such matters. An "Institute of Public Opinion" set up under the auspices of its newspaper, Komsomol'skaia pravda, conducted surveys of youth consumption prefer- ences and attitudes regarding relations between the sexes and family life in 1961.2Wn a more informal level, it also undertook market research in department stores.26 Interest in family budgets was prompted by the party's new emphasis on consumption needs and, specifically, by its attempts to introduce a minimum wage, adequate for a modest standard of living for a typical (that is, normative) urban family. This was not only a matter of reflecting existing consumption patterns, but of prescribing a "normative consumption budget." Continued through the 1960s, the normative consumption budget they set was very modest: it included allowances for certain consumer durables such as refrigerators and televisions, but no other electrical appliances, carpets, or car.27 As one ideologue put it: "Under Communism the attitude of people toward material things will change. They will acquire for personal use only enough to wear. No one will col- lect suits and dresses, boots and shoes, aimlessly accumulating them in his wardrobe. Reasonable needs for clothing and footwear are determined by climatic conditions, time ofyear, age and sex, type of occupation and social activitie~."~~Rational needs were those that rendered the self-development of the individual compatible with the development of society as a whole. Rational consumption was an aspect of communist morality, which in general entailed self-discipline and voluntary submission of the individual to the collective will. If individual desires came into conflict with the best in- terests of the collective, they were, by definition, i rrat i~nal .~Women and young people were most prone to succumb to ostentatious consumption

25. Results of an opinion poll on "The Young Generation" were published in Komso-mol'skaia prauda, 26 January 1961. Responses to the questionnaire 'Your Ideas about the Young Family" were published in Komsomol'skaia prauda, 19 December 1961. The cluestions and responses were judged of sufficient interest to western observers to be translated in CzcrrentDigest of theSovietpress 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 SouietReview 2, nos. 11-12 (No- vember-December 1961) and 3, no. 8 (August 1962): 21-40. Under Khrushchev, the Komsomol intervened consistently in youth leisure and dress. See, for example, Izuestiia, 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 univer- maga k rabotnikam torgovykh predpriiatii Sovetskogo soiuza," Komsomol'skaia pravda, 21 January 1959,2.

27. Mervyn Matthews, Class and Society in Soviet Russia (London, 1972), 81-83. 28. M. P. Sakov, Osnounoi printsip kommunizma (Moscow, 1961), 34. Cited here from

Jerome M. Gilison, The Soviet Image of Utopia (Baltimore, 1975), 176. 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 Khmshcheu, 304, 306. Gilison cites him: "Communism excludes those narrow- minded people for whom the highest goal is to acquire every possible luxurious object" (173, from G. Shakhnazarov, Kommunizm i svoboda lichnosti [Moscow, 19601, 48).

220 Slavic Review

and irrational desires that, if unchecked, would be detrimental to the common weal.30

It is hardly controversial to assert, although it must still be demonstrated, that disciplining discourses of daily life were addressed primarily to women. Consumption and household labor continued residually to be naturalized as female concerns.31 Despite the party's commitment to sexual equality, anumber of studies have shown that it or its agents maintained stereotypical notions of gender difference, assuming women to be most heavily imbricated in mundane matters of byt and to have a lower level of political consciousness and ra t i~nal i ty .~~ Khrushchevist discourses and policies continued to presume that women were less likely to be persuaded by abstract political reasoning than by appeals to emotion and by material benefits. The party-state differentiated its claims to legitimacy along gendered lines. Offering to men the political promise of socialist democracy and self-government, to women it held out the prospect of better opportunities for consumption and comfort.33 Thus, while attributing to women an ideologically inferior role, it simultaneously ascribed to them, in their

30. The stereotype of women as naturally avaricious was propagated in satire. A car-toon in Souetskaia 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: Hilary Pilkington, 'Young Women and Subcultural Lifestyles: A Case of 'Irrational Needs'?" in Rosalind Marsh, ed., Women in Russia and Ukraine (Cam-bridge, Eng., 1996), 173-74. Stiliagz 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." Ed- ward Crankshaw, Russia without Stalin (New York, 1956), 242- 43. See Field, "Communist Morality," 69; and N. Kolchinskaia, "Odevaisia prosto i krasivo," in R. Saltanova and N. Kolchinskaia, eds., Podruga (Moscow, 1959), 344.

31. Magazines such as Ogonek and Sem'ia i shkola consistently 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, A. A. Demezer and M. L. Dziuba, Domouodstuo (Moscow, 1957), 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 disag- gregate the ideal Soviet consumer, not only in terms of gender, but of generation, geog- raphy, ethnicity, and social stratum.

32. Female communists were cast as "housekeepers of the revolution" who were to extend their housewifely practices of thrift and vigilance to the service of the state. See Eliz- abeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade (Bloomington, 1997); and Gorsuch, Youth in Reuo- lutionary Russia, chap. 5. For the prerevolutionary history of such gender stereotypes, see Linda Edmondson, 'Women's Emancipation and Theories of Sexual Difference in Russia, 1850-1917," in M. Liljestrom, E. Mantysaari, and A. Rosenholm, eds., Gender Restructuring in Russian Studies (Tampere, 1993), 39-52. 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. RoR, "The Socialist Glass Ceiling: Limits to Fe- male Careers," both in Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience, 163-76 and 177-94.

33. See Susan E. Reid, "Masters of the Earth: Gender and Destalinisation in Soviet Re- formist Painting of the Khrushchev Thaw," Gender & History 11, no. 2 (1999): 276-312.


capacity as consumers and retailers, a particular kind of power and expertise as the state's agents in reforming the material culture of everyday life.34

Promises of increased consumption played a central part in the post- Stalinist regime's search to renew and maintain its popular legitimacywith- out surrendering its exclusive hold on power. Although Khrushchev's position in the collective leadership was too tenuous for him to abandon the Soviet economy's traditional emphasis on heavy industry and defense, he made a strong commitment to improving mass living standards, attempt- ing to solve the problems of agriculture, pledging to conquer the housing problem, and repeatedly promising that per capita consumption would soon overtake that of the United States.35 This was an ambitious target. Lard, rather than goulash, would be a more apt metonym for the new polity: Khrushchev declared, "It is not bad if in improving the theory of Marxism one throws in also a piece of bacon and a piece of butter."36 Sig- nificantly, in the context of efforts to define reasonable consumption, contemporary Soviet jokes-often seen as a means to access society's un- spoken and unspeakable "subconscious"-often turned on Khrushchev's "grotesque" body (in the Rabelaisian sense), its excessive, uncontainable girth: "Says one student to another, "Do you know we've already beaten America in the production of meat?" "How do you make that out?" asks the other. "Well, doesn't Khrushchev weigh twenty kilos more than Eisen- h ~ w e r ? " ~ ?Another joke envisaged the leader bursting his breeches: "Go ahead, Nikita, catch up with America, ifyou can, but for heaven's sake don't run ahead. If you do, people will see your bare behind."38

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 civiliz- ing 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 Con- gress 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. Alec Nove, Stalinism and Aftm (London, 1975), 124-28; and Julie Hessler, "A Postwar Perestroika? Towards a History of Private Enterprise in the USSR," Slavic Review 57, no. 3 (Fall 1998) :516-41. 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: "0vospitanii vkusa," Novyi mir, 1955, no. 2: 247-54; A. Saltykov, "0khudozhestvennom kachestve promyshlennykh tovarov," Sovetskaia torgovlia, 1954, no. 9: 22-31.

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

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

38. Ibid., 21.

- -

222 Slavic Review

Other jokes in the 1950s also encapsulated the causal link between promises of consumer goods and the Cold War and revealed that the em- peror had no clothes. One Russian brags to another: the Soviet authorities have perfected an intricate atomic bomb that will fit into a suitcase, which will one day be delivered to a target like New York. "Impossible," his mate replies. "Where would anybody get a suitcase?"39

As early as 1951, American sociologist David Riesman imagined an alternative to the arms race, "Operation Abundance," alias the "Nylon War." This was "an idea of disarming simplicity: that if allowed to sample the riches of America, the Russian people would not long tolerate masters who gave them tanks and spies instead of vacuum cleaners and beauty parlors. The Russian rulers would thereupon be forced to turn out consumers' goods, or face mass discontent on an increasing scale." By bombarding the USSRwith Toni wave kits, nylon hose, stoves, and refrigerators, the United States would force Moscow to abandon weaponry for consumer goods.40 Significantly, items considered to appeal to the traditional concerns of women figured prominently among the most effective missiles in Ries- man's scenario. Both sides in the Cold War assumed that the subjects of the socialist camp shared the same innate, gender-specific desires as those of the capitalist camp and treated women's will to consume as a potent political force.

It was a commonplace of western journalism that the demand and dis- cernment of Soviet consumers was growing and would eventually force the Kremlin to respond, which, given the continued ideological and economic investment in defense industries, would create intolerable tensions within the system and its leadership. The "Nylon War" formed the con- ceptual framework with which American and west European reporters, visiting the Soviet Union for the first time since the austerity of the war, approached the analysis of daily life under Khrushchev and beyond.41

Western commentators paid particular attention to Russian women, seeking signs that behind their dour, workhorse facade, they hid a "uni-

39. Retold after Gunther, Inside Russia Today, 95. 40. David Riesman, Abundance for What? And Other Essays (Garden City, N.E, 1964),

65-77. See also Stephen J.Whitfield, The Culture ofthe Cold War (Baltimore, 1991), 72; and Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture ofEveryday Lfe in the 1950s (Cam-bridge, Mass., 1994), 252.

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 um- brellas, but for prettier things, 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." Klaus Mehnert, Soviet Man and His World, (New York, 1962), cited by John Keep, The Last of the Empires (Oxford, 1995), 101. By the mid-1970s it was axiomatic that "Russian consumers are becoming fussier shoppers." Smith, The Rus- sians, 61; and Kerblay, Modern Soviet Society, 284.


versa1 feminine" desire to adorn themselve~.~~ The changing spectacle of Soviet women-their dress, cosmetics, and hairstyles-served as an indi- cator that the Soviet Union had, willy-nilly, joined battle on the west's terms. Accounts of "The Russians'" consumption patterns also reflected western fascination with this newly rediscovered human species and rendered them less threatening. Assuming that she, in particular, was moti- vated by fundamentally the same needs and desires as American women, reporters predicted that once Russian women's consumerist instincts were aroused their demands would spiral out of control. As Riesman hypothe- sized, the increasingly unbearable pressure this placed on the Soviet system would culminate in its implosion and the triumph of capitalism.

The "Kitchen Debate": The American National Exhibition, 1959

Riesman's Nylon War scenario, conceived as satire, not only structured western representations of contemporary Soviet life but became U.S. strategy. One of the Cold War's pitched battles took place at the American National Exhibition held in Moscow in the summer of 1959. Conflating democracy with consumerism, the American authorities' declared aim for this display of U.S. productivity and prosperity was to "encourage the progressive evolution of Soviet society" by promoting the demand for products available only to western consumers. This would "lower the possibility of production for either heavj~ industry or, and more particularly, for war purposes."43

The exhibition's main attractions included a fully automated "miracle kitchen" with an electronic "brain" operated by a domestic scientist; and a "typical" American home, also featuring a modern, fitted kitchen.44 It was there, in the kitchen, that Khrushchev and Richard Nixon jousted over the relative capacity of the socialist and capitalist systems to satisfy the needs of their citizens. The domestic and conventionally feminine setting for this confrontation between the superpowers was not as incongruous as it might appear; in the context of "peaceful economic competition" the kitchen and consumption had become a site for power plays on a world scale. As Darra Goldstein has put it: "How could Khrushchev be a major player in the world if he could not even provide his country's women with their own kitchens?" 45

Khrushchev's preferred battleground would have been the cosmos. There the superiority of socialist science was beyond dispute.46 The

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

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

44. G. Zimmerman and B. Lerner, 'What the Russians Will See," Look, 21 July 1959, 52-54.

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

46. Khmshchev bragged in 1964, "Remember the time when our country was eco- nomically backward, how many capitalist figures of the west scoffed at us. . . . And suddenly

224 Slavic Review

kitchen-and the conditions of women's work more generally-had, meanwhile, become the locus of the Soviet system's humiliation and the symbol of its backwardness. In his election address to the Supreme Soviet in March 1958, Khrushchev publicly admitted embarrassment that western perceptions of Soviet life were dominated by the image of downtrod- den women engaged in manual labor and that visitors took home the im- pression of a backward and uncivilized ~ountry.~ ' Resentment of the west's historical superiority was not solely a matter of bruised patriotic pride, especially in light of the increased knowledge about life abroad, including in other parts of the socialist bloc. It was an article of faith that central planning would guarantee the best possible conditions of life for the largest number of people. Khrushchev repeatedly indexed the transition to communism to the achievement of superabundance and unprecedented prosperity.** At the same time, the Soviet Union's new global position required it to be a convincing model of the superiority of the socialist system over capitalism. Seeing the bold, happy citizens of the Soviet Union and their high living standards, people abroad-not only in developing countries recently liberated from capitalism, but even in capitalist countries-would voluntarily adopt socialism without any need for the Soviet Union to force it upon them.49

Meanwhile, at the American Exhibition, the crowds were large and enthusiastic. This seemed to prove the success of the American consumer goods offensive: "There is evidence," an American magazine crowed, "that the curiosity about the American way of life as depicted at the fair is giving Soviet leaders concern that the Russian viewer will become discon- tented with their own lot."50 Soviet published responses, in contrast, were churlish, representing it as a tacky display of excess and bourgeois trivia. They lamented the preponderance of consumer goods at the expense of science, technology, and space exploration. Clearly, the fully mechanized kitchen, being in the domestic and traditionally feminine domain, did not count as a display of advanced technology. 'You know, this exhibition is intended more for women's eyes than for men's!" the popular news magazine Ogonek quoted the complaint of a "typical" Soviet (male) visitor.51

those who were considered clodhoppers, about whom it was said that they slurped up cab- bage 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, So-viet Image, 8.

47. "Rech' tovarishcha N. S. Khrushcheva," Pravda, 15 March 1958. 48. As Turpin points out, it was orthodox doctrine that the attainment of commu-

nism 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. (Mos- cow, 1952), 373.

49. Gilison, Soviet Image, 8-9. 50. "'Ivan' Takes a Look at American Life: Photo Report from Moscow," U S . News and

World 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 Confer- ence, Tampere, July 2000.

51. Marta Dodd, "Pod pozolochennym kupolom," Ogonek, no. 32 (2 August 1959): 5.


Izvestiia queried, was this the national exhibition of a great country or a branch department store? 52

The challenge of the American Exhibition had been preempted in the 1958-65 economic plan, which pledged to improve living standards including housing and consumer goods and to catch up with the United States. Khrushchev, however, tried to shift the discursive ground of "peaceful competition" away from consumer goods towards the more auspicious territory of public services, education, daycare centers, new flats, health- care, and the right to work.53 Admitting that quality and choice of goods and services were not yet up to scratch, Ogonek invited readers to report on such matters under a new rubric "Are You Served Well?" implying that it was the public's role and even duty to press for improvement^.^^

In a cartoon from Ogonek in 1959 (figure I ) , a woman abandons the struggle to cook in the Soviet kitchen and takes her family to the public canteen. Improved public services such as communal dining facilities were not only to raise living standards in general. They were intended, quite specifically, "to alleviate women's domestic burden," as Khrushchev put it, to enable them to participate more fully in public and productive life.55 But until public services were sufficiently developed, it was necessary to facilitate domestic labor while maintaining its base in the individual family and women's unpaid second shift. A 1959 "housekeeper's manual," which was clearly addressed to women, quoted Khrushchev: "Our communal and housing construction is radically transforming the everyday life of many millions of people who receive in their new, beautiful,

52. Izvestiia quoted in "'Ivan' Takes a Look," 42; and Marling, As Seen on TC: 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 Alexander Werth, Rus-sia under Khrushchev (New York, 1962; reprint, Westport, Conn., 1975), 230-31.

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 William J. Tompson, Khmshchev: A Political Life (Houndmills, 1995), 201.

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 or- dering 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 livas obsluzhivaiut?" O,qonek,no. 11 (8 March 1959): 4. Western commentators largely deny that Soviet consumershad any effective lobby over important matters of production and pricing but only over the more superficial aspects, such as hygiene of shops. Keep, Last oj the Empires, 100-101; and Alex Inkeles, Social Change in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 406. On the formal mechanisms designed in theory to enable the customer to af-fect 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.


contemporary dwelling central heating, a well-equipped kitchen, a gas stove, garbage chute, and hot water supply, bathroom, fitted cupboards, . . . and other conveniences."" As envisaged by Khrushchev, the "mod cons" of the new Soviet home were, admittedly, more modest than modern, especially if compared to the fully mechanized kitchen presented at the American Exhibition the same year. Yet, to the majority of women bumping behinds in a communal kitchen, this was undreamt-of luxury. Even a relatively comfortable household might have only a cold tap and kitchen equipment consisting only of an iron and an electric samovar.j7

But Khrushchev and his first deputy premier, Anastas Mikoian, were willing to learn from western example. A 1955 American fitted kitchen was shipped to Moscow for study. On his visit to the United States in 1958, Mikoian took a keen interest in domestic appliances and declared (the American press reported), 'We have to free our housewives like you Americans! The Russian housewife needs help."58

For the Soviet housewife, struggling under her double burden, relief was at hand! As early as 1954, the magazine Sovetskaia zhenshchina (Soviet

56. L. Abramenko and L. Tormozova, eds., Besedy o domashnem khoziaistve (Moscow, 1959), 3-4. The text slips seamlessly from referring to its readers as "young people" to specificallyidentifying them as girls and "young women."

57. Such a kitchen is depicted in Charles W. Thayer, Russza (London, 1961), 97. 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, there was a refrigerator in the hall." David and Vera Mace, The Soviet Family (London, 1964), 162. Even in the wake of the American exhibition, Sem'ia i shkola still conceived the kitchen in low-tech terms. See Z. Krasnova, 'liasha kukhnia," Sem'ia i shkola, 1959, no. 11 :46-47.

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 Merri- weather 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 MacIlvaine 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 Alla 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?" G. Kulikovskaia, "Pronikaiushchaia v zvezdy," Ogonek, no. 11 (8 March 1959): 11. Hindus reports an exception: a letter from four working women cornplaining about their husbands' refusal to help in the home, published in Sovetskaia Rossiia, 16 March 1960. Hin- dus, House without a Roof; 282.

228 Slavic Review

woman) proclaimed the increasing range and availability of time-saving devices and machines to help with "women's domestic labor" (although the "compact and beautiful" washing machine it advertised looked more like a glorified tin pail) .59 In public addresses of 1958 and 1959, Khrushchev promised women that mechanization would come to their aid, not only in the workplace but in the home, through increased production of domestic appliances.'jO On Vladimir Lenin's authority, women were to be freed from domestic slavery by means of the electrification of housework. If the miracle of space travel had been made possible by the EVM (computer), the "UKM" or universal food processor (universal'naia kukhonnaia mashina) brought scientific-technological revolution into the kitchen.'jl As presented in Sem'ia i shkola, machines in the home would not only make housework more efficient, liberating the housewife for active participation in political and economic life; regular use of new technology would also modernize its users, transforming them into fit citizens of the modern age.'j2 Soviet magazines and domestic encyclopaedias offered guidance on how to use the new vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and sewing machines (see figure 2). Their illustrations left no doubt that these were gendered objects of desire.'j3

Selling Synthetics to Women

The Khrushchev regime recognized that it was not enough to improve services but it must also increase the quantity, quality, and range of consumer goods.'j4 New shopping opportunities appeared in the 1950s. The old tsarist arcades on the site of Moscow's former central market, Red Square, had been used as an office building under Stalin but after his death they were re-opened as one of the biggest department stores in the world,

59. R. Chaikovskaia, "Dlia domashnego khoziaistva," Sovetskaia zhenshchina, 1954, no. ll: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 Ccentral 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!" Izvestiia, 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 i n 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. R. Podol'nyi, "Tekhnika nastupaet," Sem'ia i shkola, 1959, no. 12: 10. 62. Ibid., 11; A.Vullf, "Protivnedootsenki domovodstva," Sem'ia ishkola, 1961, no. 8: 47. 63. Podol'nyi, "Tekhnika nastupaet," 11; Kratkaia entsiklopediia domashnego khozzaistva

(Moscow, 1959), 2:508-9. For further discussion see Reid, "Masters of the Earth," 297. 64. S. Kuvykin, "Kachestvo, eshche raz kachestvo," Izvestiia, 23 October 1959.


GUM (State Universal Store) .65 Improvements were perceptible even in the provinces, for instance in supplies of footwear-or so Ogrmek claimed.

65. Richard Edmonds, Russian Vtttas: The R e d of a Springtime Journey MOSCOW, Leningrad, h, Stalingrad, the Blouk Sca, and the Caucasus (London, 1958). 1 1 1; Gunther, In- side Russia 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

230 Slavic Review

Textual assertions concerning the successful "struggle for quality" and variety in shoe production in L'viv since 1955 were seemingly corroborated by a photograph displaying a whole range of footwear from "sensible" to elegant, all allegedly manufactured by a single factory (figure 3) . Foreign commentators, measuring the achievements against a different bench- mark, were somewhat undenvhelmed by Soviet abundance, although Brit- ish visitors, with their experience of austerity and rationing at home, were more readily impressed than Americans. Richard Edmonds, touring Rus- sia in 1958 with a British town planning delegation, reported on shopping in Stalingrad: "the Government is clearly bent on raising standards, and has, indeed given a series of target dates for the complete elimination of some of the shortages. . . .The shoe shortage is probably not as obvious as once it was, but the foreign visitor is still likely to be accosted outside his hotel and offered a generous price for his shoes."G6

Footwear was a barometer of urbanity and well-being. John Gunther found that the lack of stylish or good quality clothing made Russians "acutely conscious of the clothes foreigners wear, particularly their shoes. . . . The whole country has a fixation on shoes. Moscow is the city where, if Anita Ekberg should walk down the street with nothing on but shoes, people would stare at her feet first."67 Maurice Hindus, taking an ex- cursion around the new Soviet woman's body in 1958, lowered his eyes to observe that "women were better shod than at any time since the coming of the Soviets: round toes, heavy soles, thick flat heels, were visibly out of favor with the younger generation; even spiked heels had come to Leningrad."68

Western reporters brought with them the stereotype of Soviet women as drab, dowdy, and devoid of "femininity." John Gunther grumbled in 1958: "Clothes have no shape; but then neither have most Russian women." He conceded that clothes had improved in recent years, "but they are still revolting. Their positive shabby manginess, as well as cheap quality and lack of colour, is beyond de sc r i p t i~n . "~~

At last, however, Gunther noted with evident relief, b'Women, within the circumscriptions of Soviet puritanism, are being encouraged to pret- tify themselves; a good many beauty shops exist in Moscow, and courses have even been set up to teach women how to use mild cosmetics, clean up their skin, and so forth. The quality and style of clothes are becoming more Western every year; high-heels and bouffant hair-dos are quite com- m ~ n . " ~ ~The western journalist-flaneur, strolling the streets of Moscow,

common practice to "throw" goods into the shops when leaders were expected to visit. See, for example, Werth, Russia under H~rushchev, 33.

66. Edmonds, Russian Vistas, 104. 67. Gunther, Inside Russia Today, 63. 68. Hindus, House without a RooJ 15. 69. Gunther, Inside Russia Today, 63. 70. Ibid., 380. David and Vera Mace commented, "Westerners have shown tremen-

dous interest in the possibility that the new Soviet woman will in time abandon her sever- ity in the matter of dress and personal adornment." Mace, SovietFamily, 111.The novelty of concerns with cosmetics and personal hygiene should not be overstated: it is partly 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.

F i 3. Only the First Qdity, from OgoneR, no. 9 (22 February 1959). Photo by M. Savin.

232 Slavic Review

Figure 4. Soppingin Szmdbmk Zbj%me Cinmter, from Qpek, no. 11 (8 March 1959). Photo by I. Tiufanov.

reinserted woman in her traditional role as passive object of the male gaze. He was not alone, however; Soviet specialists and the popular press also called for women to recover their lost femininity and reconstructed women as a spectacle. A 1956 publication on the "Solution of the Woman Question in the USSRn protested that labor and equality had not made So- viet women "grow ugly and lose their femininity. Having ceased to be the 'weaker sex' they continue to belong to the fair sex."" The press began to discuss fashionable dress and hairstyles, cosmetics, perfume, jewelry, and other attributes of femininity and to encourage women to "cultivate physical attractiveness."'? It must be emphasized that this was not instead of, but in addition to the requirement that women play an active role in production and public life. The issue of Ogonek for International Women's Day 1959 ran a photo feature celebrating women working in a range of jobs, which elided any conflict between the role of active worker and passive spectacle. It included a photograph captioned with a statement about the importance of a good dressmaker: "a new, beautiful dress is always a joy for a woman (just as it is by the way for a man) ." Another depicted women shoppers buying perfume in a Sverdlovsk department store (figure 4)' with the caption: "Doesn't a shop assistant behind the counter remind you

71. Vera Bil'shai, Reshmie zhenskogo voprosa v S R (Moscow. 1956), 208. 72. Gunther reports that many perfumery and cosmetics shops in the 1950s also sold

cheap beads and ornaments. Gunther, Inside Russia, 67.


a bit of an actress on the stage? All the time before the eyes of the people, all the time displaying her art."?Vndeed, shop assistants were to be not merely purveyors of material goods but of communist values and behav- ioral norms, whereby the corrupting potential of consumption might be mitigated. In their public role as educators they had a responsibility to dress with exemplary taste.74

It may seem contradictory that under a rather austere regime of rational consumption, what the exemplary shop assistant in Ogonek's feature was selling was perfume. Soviet perfume production had already become a matter for central state planning in the Stalinist 1930s, although output was not high. With the rationalization of needs under Khrushchev, however, the status of this luxury attribute of bourgeois and aristocratic lifestyles of the past required some rhetorical investment to reconstruct it as a democratic luxury whose availability signified the achievement of gra- cious living and abundance for all. The 1960 Women's Day issue of Ogonek included an article on the history and production of perfume, occasioned by the New Dawn perfume factory's launch of a new range of fragrances. Where, in the past, perfume was a luxury available only to kings and queens, it had now become an everyday item of contemporary, socialist life, the magazine emphasized. Nevertheless, it was to be seen strictly as a gift, such as might be typically given to women on International Women's Day by men who thereby expressed, on behalf of the state, the gratitude and respect due to women for their continued contribution as both workers and mothers. The democratization of this luxury was made possible by modern science and industry; chemistry had freed the art of perfumery from a reliance on precious oils and essences by synthesizing natural aro- m a ~ . ? ~A photograph illustrating the article represented the parfumier sil- houetted against rows of phials like a conductor or operator before com- plex space control panels, thus synthesizing the magic of musical harmony

73. Ogonek, no. 11 ( 8 March 1959) : 7.The issue of Ogonek for International Women's Day, 8 March 1960, also dealt ~ 4 t h traditionally feminine concerns-fashion, housekeep-ing, 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 Lynne Athvood, Creating the New Soviet tVoman: WomenS Magazines as Engineers ofFernale Identity, 1922-53 (New Yorlz, 1999).

74. Female retail workers were recast as paragons of kul'turnost' and educators of taste beginning in the mid-1930s. See Randall, '"Revolutionary Bolshevik Work,'" 426-27; and Hessler, "Cult~~re of Shortages," chap. 6. The Koinsomol was actively involved in raising the c u l t ~ ~ r e of trade: "My za kul'turnuiu torgovliu!" 2. Similarly, in the GDR and Poland in the early 1950s, efforts here 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 Cro~vley, 'Warsaw's Shops, Stalinism and the Thaw," in Reid and Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism, 33-34.

75. T. Trotskaia, "Kompository aroinatov," Ogonek, no. 10 (6 March 1960): 25. In the 1930s the insufficient supply of suitable oils and fats was identified by Polina Zhem- chuzhina, Molotov's wife and head of TeZhe (the trust respoilsible for produciilg women's toiletries), as the main obstacle to the development of Soviet cosmetics and perfume industry on a mass scale. Anastas Mikoian, Tnk bylo: Rnzrnyshleniia o minuushem (hIosco\v, 1999), 297-99.

234 Slavic Revieu

Figure 5. Perjimder KA. Gribwurvvr Craates N e w R w p n a s , from Qpd, no. 10 (6 March 1960).

and the alchemist's art with that of modem science (figure 5). The moral was that Soviet women should accept modem, synthetic scents such as "Sputnikn or "Krasnaia Moskva" (Red Moscow); they might not be as potent or enduring as those of the past, but they were cheaper and available to the masses.76 Ridiculing Soviet women who craved French perfume, the press claimed that Soviet perfumes were at least as good: even foreigners bought "Krasnaia M~skva"!~~ This agenda would suggest that the promotion of Soviet perfumes was aimed, at least in part, at curbing black- market trade in foreign perfumes.

The expansion of the Soviet chemical industry, especially synthetics, was a central commitment of the Seven-Year Plan. The increase in perfume production was just one of the ways even investment in heavy industry could be promoted to women as a gift from the paternal (or, rather, uxorial) state that benefited them in their traditionally female roles. Here, too, there was an element of peaceful competition. As Nixon proudly explained in the "Kitchen Debate," the American system was designed to place the latest scientific inventions and techniques-often developed for defense purposes-at the benefit of the consumer. Indeed, the symbiosis of defense and consumer industries was fundamental to the Amer- ican economy.78 While such felicitous economic symbiosis could not exist

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 Elecuic, Westinghouse, Chrysler were all major


on any scale in the Soviet Union-where consumer manufacturing and heavy industry competed for the same state resources-nevertheless, pro-motion of spin-offs for the consumer could domesticate the scientific- technological revolution and legitimate continued investment in defense and space exploration.

Chemicals were the housewife's new friend, Ogonek sang, an aid in her domestic chores.7g On a trip to Siberia, where the chemical industry was rapidly developing, Khrushchev advocated mass production of disposable paper diapers "to save women's labour."80 Synthetic fibers and leather sub- stitutes also enabled increased production of furnishings, clothing, and footwear, while plastics could be used for kitchenware and tableware. A feature on the Moscow Exhibition of Economic Achievements in Komso-molkkaia pravda, 13 June 1959, was illustrated with a photograph of two women in the Chemical Industry pavilion viewing a stand set out like a long shop window displaying synthetic fabrics, garments, and simulated fur coats. Plastics could even be used to extend the benefits of modernity to nomadic herdsmen in the mountains of Kirgizia by the development of a synthetic yurt! *l Just as it was necessary to convince Kirgiz nomads that plastics were better than felt, it was essential to persuade women that synthetic materials, like synthetic scents, were not a vulgar ersatz but practi- cal, contemporary, and even, in their own way, beautiful.82

The Management of Fashion

One of the most visible innovations the chemical industry offered Soviet women was the chemical perm. Like many consumer items, however, So- viet perms left much to be desired. Maurice Hindus was struck by changes in women's comportment during his fourteen-year absence, and by their newly fashionable dress and hair styles. All along Nevskii Prospekt he encountered

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. TVhitfield, 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 popu- larization of developments in the chemical industry and their benefits in b t , especially in the form of plastics, see V Ishimov, "Khimik-sil'nee prirody," Sem'za z shkola, 1958, no. 3:38-40. They were also aestheticized, for example in Sovetskoe foto. See Reid, "Pho- tography in the Thaw."

80. Werth, Russza under Khrmshchev, 34. 81. "New Y L I ~ ~ for the Shepherd," Current Dzgest of the Sovzet Press 13, no. 24 (1961) :

29-30 (Pravda, 12 June 1961); M. Lavrik, 'Vtoroe rozhdenie" Ogo~zelt,no. 52 (23 Decein- ber 1962): 24-25.

82. The classical and modernist precept "truth to materials" guided the de-Staliniza- tion of the material environment. Simulation and "disrespect for plastic" was petit bourgeois and in poor taste. Aleksandr Saltykov, 0khudozhestvennom vkuse v b t e (Moscow, 1959) ; 0 . Aizenshtat, "Neuvazhenie k plastmasse," Deltoratzunoe ~skusstvo SSSR (henceforth DI SSSR) , 1962, no. 1 :46-47; and M. Chereiskaia, "Zainetki o khoroshem vkuse," in Saltanova and Kolchinskaia, eds., Podruga, 228.

236 Slavic Review

a parade of permanent waves such as Ihad never seen before in Leningrad or in any other city. But even to my uncritical masculine eyes, there was something wrong about these permanents: naturally lustrous tresses had been baked to a frizzled stiffness, demonstrating the ineptitude of the new beauty parlors that have mushroomed all over the Soviet Union. The home permanents that can be bought cheaply in any American drug- store have not yet crossed the Soviet frontier. What a happy day it will be for Russian women when they are put on the market, not in driblets but on a mass scale.83

Whether the arrival of the home perm was to mark the advent of communism or its end Hindus did not sayaS4

As consumer goods became more readily available-including, along-side Soviet production, a trickle of imported clothes and cosmetics-New York Times reporter Harrison E. Salisbury also noted that women had begun to dress more fashionably, even sexily, and that public attitudes had grown less p r ~ d i s h . ~ H i n d u s , likewise, reported: "The most sensational thing I encountered on the Nevskywas a display in the window of a women's dress shop: two manikins draped in strapless evening dresses, one green, the other rose-colored. I almost gasped. In all the years I had been going to the theater, . . . I had never known a Russian woman, however highly placed, to appear in such daring dress, with arms and shoulders bared and

83. Hindus, House without a Roo5 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 artf~~lly 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 ~Tith Russian women's hairdos not only was prompted by their home audience's fascination with the newly discovered species of hu- manity 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" (koninochlta-presumably a mistranslation of the "beehive"). Anatolii Rubinov, Intimnaia zhizn' itlosltvj (Moscow, 1995), 217-20. A casual Italian haircut caught on after the World Youth Festival in the summer of 1957. A short haircut for women was lampooned as menin- ptlta, 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 without a Roo5 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. Harrison E. Salisbury, To itloscow-and Rejjond (London, 1960), 15, 46-49. 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, 71n1, and 380-81. A member of a 1958 British town planiliilg delegation found that female university studeilts "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 sur- prise in this direction, and it will be trousers and pony tails for all." Edmonds, Russian Vis- tas, 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'," Ogonelz, no. 10 (4 March 1962): 31.

237 Cold War in the Kitchen

quite a bit of bust revealed."8Vf ideological objections had been moder- ated, the centrally controlled pricing system remained a major deterrent against excessive adherence to fashion. Prices constituted a form of rationing. Better clothing, footwear, and consumer durables, if they could be found, were prohibitively expensive. Nor were such glamorous dresses widely available at any price; the display on the Nevskii was the only one Hindus came across. "I could only assume that the state was making a promise that it was not yet in a position to fulfil."s7 Similarly, a 1961 Sunday Times album on Russia included a photograph of window shoppers gazing at the latest fashions shown by GUM, with the caption: "Few can afford these clothes, but the increased availability of goods gives the Russian people a special incentive to continue s t r i~ ing . "~~ According to Gunther, "The government knows perfectly well that the rank and file of people are yearning not merely for ordinary consumer goods-pots and pans-but for luxuries like cameras, electric refrigerators, bicycles, sporting guns, and, a curious item, chandeliers. Because it will not, in the present phase, release enough productive power to manufacture such articles in quantity, the government deliberately prices them out of reach."89 Khrushchev allegedly gave a somewhat different reason: "We are producing an ever- growing quantity of all kinds of consumer goods; all the same, we must not force the pace unreasonably as regards the lowering of prices. We don't want to lower prices to such an extent that there will be queues and a black market.

The Soviet, or at least the Moscow, public was increasingly exposed to western fashions in the late 1950s. Foreign collections were shown in Mos- cow by official invitation, including, most spectacularly, Christian Dior in 1959. In accordance with the Nylon War scenario, Harrison Salisbury surmised that pressure from below, and specifically from women, had com- pelled the Soviet government to mollify its former unqualified condem- nation of foreign fashion: "Dior was brought in because the government wants to take the Russian woman out of her flowered print and give her a chance to look like her Western sisters. Why? Because, I would guess, the Russian woman wants to look like her Western sisters and the present Rus- sian government can see no reason of policy why she should not. Neither puritanism nor emphasis on heavy industry is going to divert the Russian woman much longer from the heritage of her sex, the right and opportu- nity to look just as pretty as she wants

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 conclusioil is corroborated by responses to a 1961 exhibition of new models of furniture in the austere, functio~lalist contemporary style. While visitors received the designs favorably, they colnplaiiled that the models were not available to buy, or only at prohibitively high prices. Rossiiskii gosudarstvenilyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI), f. 2329, op. 4, ed. khr. 1391 (visitors' book for exhibition Art and Lqe, Mosco~v, April-June 1961).

88. Thayer, Russia, 99. 89. Gunther, Inszde Russia Todajl, 66- 67. 90. Cited by Werth, Russia u n d o K h m s h c h e v , 34. 91. Salisbury, To n/loscow, 47- 48.

238 Slavic Review

Dior made no concessions to the potential conservatism of the Soviet public or its representatives, bringing the same extravagant collection he had shown in Paris. As the American journalist reported to his home readership, the Moscow audience received Dior fashions either with "bulging eyes and dropped jaws" or with a hostility that, he assumed, only thinly masked envy. "They're pretty but they're not for Moscow," he recorded the response of a young woman he describes sniffily as "a saucy-looking blond in a cheap blue print dress and cheap red sandals." But even as this Moscow floozy called the designs "terrible" and "too extreme," Salisbury could "almost see her comparing her sleazy dress, probably her best, with the gorgeous creation on the model." Their protestations aside, Salisbury found proof of their real desire for such fashion: "Within a week or two you began to see girls on Gorky Street wearing imitations of the more simple Dior styles. Spike heels appeared, dreadfully expensive, in the new House of Shoe Styles. The demand for sheer Western nylons became greater than ever. On the bathing beaches Russian girls began to wear suits of good quality, form-fitting, rubberised silk."g2

Other western commentators, likewise, assumed that Soviet women yearned to wear Dior-type fashions and that the arrival of Dior connoted the long-awaited end of austerity and new possibilities of femininity just as it did in postwar Britain.g3 Yet Dior was not universally embraced throughout Europe. In Germany, readers' letters to the women's magazine Con-stanze expressed revulsion at Dior's extravagant New Look: "Do we have to dance to this tune, we in our poor, defeated country with its millions of unemployed and displaced people, must we try to imitate this monstrous extravagance, which is not based on any real need?"g4 The possibility that Soviet women, too, might resent such displays of extravagance merits serious consideration, whether it is seen as false consciousness or as an "au- thentic" expression of self-identity. British observer Wright Miller maintained that only an exhibitionist minority of Russian women would imitate the extremes of western fashion.g5 Gunther, too, contradicted himself by admitting: "Russians may be jealous of the clothes western visitors wear, but seldom admit it. This is a thoroughly indoctrinated country. . . . Some dedicated Russians are, I would say, actually proud of their plainness, even of their poverty. They like hardship. That mildewed suit is a badge of ho- nour, because it proves virtue and ~acr i f i ce . "~~

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." John Brown, Rus-sia Explored (New York, 1959), 126; Mace, SouietFamiZy, 11 1. Compare Anne Summers, "On Begging to Be a Bridesmaid in a Ballerina Dress: Some Meanings of British Fashioil in the 1950s,"History Workshop Journal 44 (Autumn 1997): 227-32.

94. Loehlin, From Rugs to Riches, 14, citing Constanze, 1950, no. 7: 5. 95. Wright Miller, Russians as People (London, 1960), 162-64. The question whether

Russians, especially women, were naturally "puritanical" preoccupied some western male reporters including Miller (156-57) and Guilther (Inside Russia, 95).

96. Gunther, Inside Russia, 63.

Cold War i n the Kitchen

Dior had come to Moscow by official invitation. However, the Soviet government could not be seen to be licensing Soviet women and the clothing trade to conclude that Dior's exaggerated and extravagant styles were an appropriate model that should be adopted uncritically for Soviet fashion. Like the American Exhibition, the Dior show had to be mediated and positioned as an extreme to be avoided, and responses to it directed and contained. The effects of the Soviet public's new exposure even to less extreme western styles, and of the cautious legitimation of the very idea of fashion, were tempered by advice on how to tame it (figure 6).

Articles on fashion began to appear regularly in the press. This confirmed that fashion was not unconditionally a bourgeois perversion but a legitimate phenomenon of contemporary socialist life. At the same time, however, such articles set limits on its acceptable parameter^.^' The newspaper of the predominantly female teaching profession Uchitelkkaia gazeta, distinguished Soviet fashion from the capitalist phenomenon; where fashion in the west was an elitist excess, dictated by profit-hungry couture houses, here it was defined by democratic consensus. To be fashionable meant to be "contemporary," that is: "to have a line and proportions that are pleasing to the majority of people today." The newspaper advised teachers on whether they should dress fashionably in school, an important issue because, like the shop assistant discussed above, the teacher was constantly on display: "Scores of children's eyes study the teacher's appearance every day," and this "exercises an influence on their aesthetic education." Therefore, the teacher had a professional obligation to dress tastefully in order to inculcate good taste. Yet her appearance need not lack feminine charm nor be unfashionable. On the contrary, taste demanded a measured use of fashion.g8

Fashion, simplicity, convenience, practicality, good taste, and moderation: the rules set out in Uchitel'skaia gazeta were reiterated in numerous publications, with only small variations of emphasis according to their r e ade r~h ip .~~The imperatives of reason and moderation applied also to

97. N. Makarova, "Iskussts~o riadom s modoi: Ne ia dlia mody, a inoda dlia menia," DI SSSR, 1961, no. 1 :39-42. The new availability of choice in ready-to-wear fashioils was deemed to create a need for consumer advice on how to make a wise purchase. See, for example, Kolchinskaia, "Odevaisia prosto i krasivo," 335-51; and M. Orlova, "0skrolnnosti i devich'ei gordosti," Uchitel'skaia gazeta, 16 June 1959. A reader of the recently founded decorative artsjournal queried: surely distinctions in the material base must engender cor- responding differences in such superstructural forins as style? Why then had people in socialist societies coiltiilued to dress similarly to people in capitalist countries? "0poilimanii mody: Pis'mo s kommentarii," DI SSSR, 1961, no. 1:40-42. Other less extreme foreign fashion shows were one ineails to counter Dior, including a show of 120 Viennese firins 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 lessoils go." L. Efremova, "Ob odezhde uchitel'nitsy," Uchr-tel'skaia gazeta, 26 September 1959; and L. Efi-emova, "Moda, vkus, prostota," Uchitel'skaia gazeta, 3 January 1961.

99. According to the 1959 housewife's mailual cited above, moderation, restraint, strictness, and simplicity were imperative: excess and fussy trimmings were vulgar and philistine (meshchanskii). Abrameilko and Tormozova, eds., Besedy o domashnem khoziaistve,

Slavic Review

the use of cosmetics; Uchitelkkaia gazeta allowed that these might be applied with restraint, but "overly bright lipstick, bits of color on the eyelids and red nail varnish make any woman look vulgar."100 Women should also use perfumes with moderation, lest they smell like a hairdressing salon (men should only use a dab of cologne as after shave) .lOl

The Yawning Avos'ka

In the Soviet authorities' bad dream of consumption, the avos'ka trans- formed itself into a yawning abyss that would swallow up whatever was thrown into its unfathomable depths and-like a parodic inversion of that ubiquitous Stalinist symbol, the cornucopia-would demand ever more. They feared Soviet citizens', and especially women's, potential for excessive, unwarranted consumerism. Once unleashed, women's "natural" acquisitiveness and potentially insatiable desire for glamor and comfort might prove the Achilles' heel of socialism. Western eyewitnesses in the late 1950s confirmed the "reckless mood" of shoppers in GUM.lo2 The or- ganizers of the American Exhibition welcomed, even incited, their Soviet visitors to disorderly behavior and petty theft as an expression of their un- controllable excitement and desire: "Curiosity is getting the better of some of the spectators. American toys proved so fascinating that some dis- appeared in the crowds. One man cut a pillow open to see what was inside. Another opened and sampled a package of frozen pastry to find out how it tasted."lo3 Such American reports of the demeaning spectacle of nor- mally disciplined Soviet citizens, unable to contain their curiosity and desire, scrambling for American gewgaws, were inflected by a premature colonialist triumphalism and should be read with skepticism. Neverthe- less, Soviet agitators at the exhibition also recorded with distaste "a ridicu- lous commotion" near the fashion show and a pathetic eagerness to take home used Pepsi-Cola cups as souvenirs.lo4

Had the agitators been as concerned about male consumers they might have noted with equal distaste the enthusiasm of the crowd admir-

228. "Don't overload your dress with triinmings," Ogonek also warned: N. Khrabrova, 'V poiskakh krasivogo, udobnogo," Ogonek, no. 10 (6 March 1960): 15-16. The teenage girls' mailual Podrz~gaadvised 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: Kolchin- skaia, "Odevaisia prosto i krasivo," 345. Similar advice was given by E. Nikol'skaia, "Ume- ilie odevat'sia," in Sem'ia i shkola, 1958, no. 2: 44-46.

100. Efreinova, "Moda." Overly bright lipstick made a wolnail look older and de- stroyed her individuality. "Umenie odevat'sia," in Abrainenko and Tormozova, eds., Besedy o domashnem khoziaistve, 262-63. Hindus reported that educated Russian men fouild it "disgusting to kiss painted lips." Hindus, House zoithout a RooJ 14.

101. Vulgar substailce 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." Gun- ther, Inside Russia, 66.

102. Edmonds, Russian Vistas, 11 1. 103. '"Ivan' Takes a Look," 40. 104. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 193.

F-6. W h e n w d r e f l z b l e Z t I s - t o CoverYcncrDraswithaSmaR Apron, from Ogaek, no. 10 (4 March 1962).

242 Slavic Reviezu

ing General Motors' cars, consisting of both men and women. But Soviet anxieties focused on American plans to distribute free samples of consumer products specifically designed to appeal to, and inflate, the desires and expectations of Soviet women-in particular cosmetics and children's toys. The authorities vetoed the handout on the grounds that it would cause a life-threatening stampede on the pavilion.lO"

A specter haunted the regime: the nightmare vision of marauding women spilling into the streets armed with infinitely expanding avos'ki. Historical precedents corroborated such fears, warning that if provisions or property were at risk, women could erupt in violent civil disorder with regime-threatening effect. It was the introduction of bread rationing and the threat of shortages that had brought women textile workers out on the streets on International Women's Day 1917, and, with this, the February Revolution had begun.lOVears of an angry female mob were also founded in the trauma of the bab'i buntj , the violent, spontaneous, and, from the party's perspective, irrational riots by women resisting collectivization's disruption of traditional rural property relations.lo7 Most recently, the 1953 mass uprising in East Germany had been precipitated by material concerns, and it was women, above all, who had articulated such concerns.lo8

Rationalizing Domesticity

The Khrushchev regime had promised abundance to secure its legitimacy. But it could not afford to leave "abundance" undefined without radically reducing defense expenditure; and this, in the end, was out of the question. There was also continued ideological antipathy towards consumerism, which was still regarded as inherently bourgeois and potentially corrosive of the collectivist, activist spirit that Khrushchevist ideologues were concerned, above all, to mobilize. As Komsomol chief Vladimir Semichastnyi worried at the Twenty-first Party Congress, "We still instill in children the idea of 'my toy' instead of 'our toy."' The potentially corrupting effect of the increased availability of consumer goods and housing-especially of the single-family flat that Khrushchev had promised for all-had to be

105. Ibid., 189, 202-3. 106. Ronald Suny and Arthur Adams, eds., The Russian Revolution and Bolshevik Vic-

tory: Visions and Revisions, 3d ed. (Lexington, Mass. 1990), 59. 107. Lyrine Viola, "Bab'i Bunty and Peasant Women's Protest during Collectivization,"

in Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynne Viola, eds., Russian Peasant Women, (Oxford, 1992), 189-205.

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 ga17e 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 "life- threatening 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.


counteracted through ideological work to forestall any tendency toward acquisitiveness or complacency.10g

The greatest positive effort was invested in inculcating correct (or "rational") attitudes towards consumption in regard to the home. To provide homes for all was the most urgent improvement in living standards in the 1950s, and Khrushchev made this a priority.l1° But if every family was to have its own apartment, as Khrushchev promised, the new flats had to be small and cheaply built, with no frills.ll1 The relative austerity of the new housing reflected not only economic constraints but continuing ideological opposition to the nuclear family and domesticity. Since the material milieu of daily life was held to determine consciousness, a secluded domestic environment, encumbered with the trappings of a petit bourgeois lifestyle would ensnare its occupants in petit bourgeois values and fetish- ism, and this would inhibit progress toward a fully collectivist, communist mindset.l12 The one-family flat was a necessary interim measure until the new way of life could be fully implemented, by which time communal services would provide an irresistibly attractive alternative. As a 29-year old woman architect-engineer, wrote in response to one of Komsomollskaia pravda's public opinion surveys:

A separate, isolated apartment which opens only onto a stair landing en- courages an individualistic, bourgeois attitude in families-"my house!" But soon it will be possible to walk out of an apartment straight into a pleasant throughway with flowers and paths leading to the house cafi., the library, the movie hall, the children's playrooms. This new kind of housing will have an effect on the family spirit. The women will no longer re-

109. "Summary of XXI (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." Alec Nove, An Economic History of the U . S . S . 8 rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, 1982), 364; 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 0.Kharkhordin, "Reveal and Dissimulate: A Genealogy of Private Life in Soviet Russia," in Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar, eds., Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy (Chicago, 1996), 333-63.

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. T. Sosnovy, "The Soviet Housing Situation Today," Soviet Studies 11, no. 1 (July 1959): 6, 13.

11 1. 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 Iurii Gerchuk, "S tochki zreniia shestidesiatnika," DI SSSR, 1991, no. 7:9. Marguerite Higgins surmised: "Perhaps R~~ssia'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?" Marguerite Higgins, Red Plush and Black Bread (Garden City, N.Y., 1955).

244 Slavic Review

sist the idea of service installations and apartment house kitchens, saying: "I can do it faster myself at home!

Thus women were not to become overly attached to their new domestic realm: as in Ogonek's cartoon (figure 1)they were to lead the exodus from the home.

The housing program gave many the privacy of their own, one-family apartments for the first time, affording fewer opportunities for surveillance than the old communal living. But it was counterbalanced by con- certed efforts to intervene in the terms of domestic life, to counter the individualistic tendencies it might foster, to rationalize and discipline domesticity and propagate a new regime of austere "contemporary" taste in home furnishing. "It is necessary," Khrushchev asserted, "not only to provide people with good homes, but also to teach them . . . to live correctly, and to observe the rules of socialist communality. This will not come about of its own accord, but must be achieved through protracted, stubborn struggle for the triumph of the new communist way of life."l14 As architectural historian Vigdariia Khazanova has put it: the novostroiki, like other twentieth-century mass housing schemes, were "an instrument for regi- menting life."l15

Like many aspects of Khrushchevism, the didactic efforts to promul- gate austere, modern taste harked back to the utopian campaigns of the 1920s for the novyi byt. But while the aesthetic parameters of modernity embodied in the "contemporary style" derived in part from constructivism, this was less a matter of direct imitation (the actual production of the constructivists was not yet widely known) and more of a reengagement with the international Modern Movement that the Russian movement had informed. The stripped-down, modernist Soviet design aesthetic of the early 1960s owed as much to contemporary Czech and Scandinavian design as to Russian antecedents.'16 It also had much in common with the modernist conception of taste promoted in Britain by the Council of In- dustrial Design and by such self-appointed taste gurus as Eric Netvton.l17

Voluntary acceptance of new norms in domestic life was encouraged by a proliferation of articles and manuals on family and everyday life, taste, and etiquette, which publishing houses began to produce in in-

113. "Youth Has Its Say on Love andMarriage," SouietReuiew 3, no. 8 (August 1962) :32. 114. Abramenko and Tormozova, eds., Besedy o domashnem khoziaistue, 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." Victor Buchli, A n Archaeol- ogy of Socialism (Oxford, 1999), 138.

115. V. E. Khazanova, "Arkhitektura v poru 'Ottepeli,"' in V E. Lebedeva, ed., Ot shestidesiatykh k uos'midesiatykh: Voprosy souremennoi kul'tury (Mosco~v, 1991), 81.

116. See Gerchuk, "Aesthetics of Everyday Life in the KhrushchevTha~v," 81-100. Ex- hibitions 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 i shkola, 1960, no. 10, and numerous issues of DI SSSR in this period.

117. See Tag Gronberg, "Siting the Modern" (review article), Journal of Contemporary History 36, no. 4 (October 2001); Saltykov, 0 khudozhestuennom ukuse; Eric Newton, The Meaning of Beauty (London, 1962).

Cold War i n the Kitchen 245

creasing numbers in the late 1950s.lls Construed as housewives and consumers, women were ascribed the leading role in the production of aesthetic value and social meaning in the home.'lg Household advice was consistently addressed to the female khoziaika (housewife) and constituted an important rubric in manuals for adolescent girls. Such advice set about weaning Soviet women from acquisitiveness and the desire for cozy domesticity. Throughout the Soviet period, these had been consistently stereotyped as female traits, although their valency had oscillated between "philistine" and kul'turnyi. During the Cultural Revolution, women were regarded as the most deeply imbricated in the old way of life, its material culture, and the regressive ideology it reified. As Svetlana Boyrn puts it, "women were often derided as the preservers of coziness and collections of useless petit-bourgeois objects for the domestic hearth."120 Beginning in the mid-1930s, and intensifying in the postwar period, as Vera Dunham has shown so persuasively, the feminine arts of cozy homemaking- symbolized by bright cologne bottles, orange lampshades, and red, polka- dotted tea cups-acquired new ~espectabi1ity.l~~ In the Khrushchev era, the concept of coziness continued to be identified with "the idea of an at- tentive female hand." It was redefined, however, in austere, modern terms opposed to those of the bourgeois and Stalinist past: "We have no right to mercantile luxury!"122 Women were now made responsible for rationalizing domestic labor and the organization of domestic space and for introducing into the home a stripped-down, modern aesthetic, the "contemporary style," poles apart from the philistine penchant for padding and plush of the Stalin period (figure 7).Iz3

Female-oriented features in periodicals and advice manuals pre- scribed a normative conception of good taste in furnishing and home decorating, based, like those for dress, on modernist, rationalist impera-

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

119. Compare s t~~d ies of gender and domesticity in the west in this period: Carter, How German Is She? 59-75; Sherrie A. Inness, ed., Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Repre- sentations oflood, Gender, and Race (Philadelphia, 2000) ;and May, Homeward Bound, chap. 7.

120. Boyrn, 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 Stalink 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, "Zametki o khoroshem vkuse," 220; E. Nikol'skaia, "Uiut i obstanovkav dome," Sem'ia i shkola, 1958, no. 11:46- 47. On efforts to establish aregime of "contemporary" taste and its parameters, see Victor Buchli, "Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight against Pe- tit-Bourgeois Consciousness in the Soviet Home," and Susan E. Reid, "Destalinization and Taste," both in Journal ofDesign History 10, no. 2 (1997): 161-76 and 177-202; and Ger- chuk, "Aesthetics of Everyday Life in the Khrushchev Thaw," 81-99.

123. Women's responsibiliq 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 domashnem khoziaistue, 4.

246 Slavic Revtkw

F i e 7. Kitchen, from 0. Baiar and R N. Blashkevich, KYartim i ee ubmtlsluo (Moscow, 1962), 75.

tives of simplicity, functionality, and "no excesses!" (figure 8). A small, simply furnished room where everything went well together could more clearly manifest the housewife's contemporary good taste than any amount of expensive furniture, carpets, ornaments, and chandeliers. Pretentious, dust-catching chandeliers should be replaced by simple, cup-shaped opaque glass shades that reflected the light off the ceiling. In the interest of convenience, hygiene, aesthetics, and contemporaneity, the new, small apartment must not be overloaded with ornate, cumbersome furniture. Instead, low, light, simple, and multifunctional furniture was to be prefer~-ed. l~~ It is not coincidental that such furniture also lent itself to efficient, economical mass production.

124. Ol'ga Baiar, "Sdelaem kvartim udobnoi i uiutnoi," SouetskoM zhenshchina, 1956, no. 7:47-48; 0. Baiar and R N. Blashkevich, Kvartim i ee ubranstvo (Moscow, 1962); Mihi Kartna-Alas, "Iskusstvo i byt," Opek, no. 25 (19 June 1960): 20-22, summarizing a recently published almanac Iskussfvo i i h n i i byt; E. Nikol'skaia, "Blagoustroistvo zhilishcha," Sem'ia i shkola, 1958, no. 1 :42-44; Nikol'skaia, "Uiut i obstanovka v dome," 46-47; Z. Kras- nova, "Khoroshii vkus v ubranstve zhil'ia." Sem'ia i shkola, 1960. no. 1:44-45; and A. Briuno, %ha kvartira," Sem'ia i shkola, 1960, no. 10:46-47. The newspaper of the Mos- cow Artists' Union dedicated a whole issue to the artist's role in the formation of public taste: MoJkovskii klrudcrrhnik, nos. 10-1 1 (June 1959). The Soviet mass consumer could also consult such manuals of "contemporary" good taste as Saltykov, 0 khtdmhes~nom vkuse. Regarding women's new role as the conduit of modem taste into the home, compare Carter, How German Is She? 59-77.


F i 8. Model Conbemporc#y Indetior, h m 0. Baiar and R N. Blashkevich, Kimiim i ee thundvo (Moscow, 1962).

Even if new furniture could not be bought, the domestic space should be rationalized and purged of tasteless clutter. A 1959 manual for teenage girls, who lacked the means and authority in the parental home for more radical transformations, printed a makeover comparison (figure 9) with the recommendation to remove all superfluous embellish- ments; replace oil paintings in ornate, dust-catching frames-once a

248 Slavic Reuiew

Figure 9. Cood (conbemporery) d Bad ( rehpde , petit b o w p i s ) lbde in Home Fwnkhings, from M. Chereiskaia, "Zametki o khoroshem vkuse," Podtugu (MOSCOW, 1959), 220-91.

sign of ku1'turnost'-with flat print. and reproductions; and strip away the embroideries and draperies that cover every surface in the "beforen image.125

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


The presence or absence of embroidered cloths was a particularly charged symbol of the old and new domesticity. Draped over tables, do- mesticating and customizing such modern, standardized equipment as radios or televisions, in the form of antimacassars or luxuriant bed covers, the profusion of embroidered draperies was deeply imbricated in traditional notions of comfort, homecraft, and female worth. In old Russia, these cloths had been an essential part of a girl's trousseau.126 Under Stalin, as Victor Buchli has noted, given the dearth of consumer goods, embroi- dering and arranging such cloths constituted one of the only ways an individual could exercise any control over her physical environment, a means to appropriate and individualize standard-issue domestic space. These ar- tifacts represented the exercise of women's personal taste and skill in their design, production, and dep10yrnent.l~~ The requirement to purge the home of these signs of female diligence and individualization of the standard living space created a tension between women's traditional homemaking competencies and the new conception of good housekeeping that required of them a rationalizing, standardizing role.128

Consent and Civil Disobedience

The thaw, traditionally regarded as a period of liberalization, saw no liberalization of attitudes toward consumption and the domestic realm. On the contrary, intervention in the forms and practices of daily life was an essential aspect of the way the Khrushchev regime sought to maintain its authority and bring about the transition to communism. "Everyday lifen- as the title of a brochure for agitators proclaimed-"is not a private matter."129 The female domain of good housekeeping had become a public and even a state affair, one requiring codification, education, and profes- ~iona1ization.l~~As the party-state's agents, delegated to introduce its modern, "rational" norms of living into family life, women had an important public role to play in the transition to communist self-government.131 Yet, if this to some extent dismantled the gendered opposition of public

126. Mace, Soviet Family, 161. 127. Buchli, Archaeology ofSocialisrn, 92 -93. 128. For the standardization and rationalization of domestic space and labor, see

G. Liubimova, "Ratsional'noe oborudovanie kvartir," DI SSSK, 1964, no. 6 :15-18. 129. 0.Kuprin, Byt-ne chastnoe delo (Moscow, 1959), and see Field, "Communist

Morality." 130. Vul'f, "Protiv nedootsenki domovodstva," 47. Ogonek reported on a technical col-

lege in Lithuania where girls (boys were not mentioned) learned cookery, table service, needlework, horticulture, childcare, hygiene, preserving, and other aspects of domestic science. V. Borushko, "Khoroshie budut khoziaiki," Ogonek, no. 10 (6 March 1960): 24. Similarly in the west, reviving earlier twentieth-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.

250 Slavic Review

and private, personal and political realms, at the same time, it reproduced the traditional gender segregation of responsibilities. Men were conspic- uously absent from this discourse on consumption and domesticity. As Victor Buchli has observed: "It was the woman/housewife who was the pathologised object of reform."132

How successful was this pervasive effort to wean women from their "natural" acquisitiveness, to reform the aesthetics of daily life, and "modernize" women's conceptions of comfort, taste, and good housekeeping? In spite of their investment in discovering the consumerist heart beating beneath Soviet women's drab exterior, even western commentators such as Gunther, as we saw, acknowledged that some Soviet people, at least, were ambivalent towards consumerism. The same female respondent to Komsomolkkaia prauda's survey, regarding the use of communal services cited above, envisaged a future unburdened by personal possessions: "I know the time will come when a husband and wife moving into a new apartment will take along only a couple of suitcases of personal clothing, favorite books and t o o t h b r ~ s h e s . " ~ ~ ~ Meanwhile, a thirty-year-old "housewife" regretted having married for money: "Today I have everything-a TV set, a refrigerator, a radio, a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine, a Volga car-but not love; and all these material comforts about which so many other people dream merely weigh me down, ~hrottle me, don't let me breathe."134 Such statements may not be taken unconditionally as proof of a thoroughgoing internalization of rational consumption norms and "contemporary" aesthetics. They do, nonetheless, indicate a level of acquiescence insofar as the respondents consent to articulate themselves in terms of the values and persona expected of them.135 They also acqui- esce in the effort to make homelife and shopping habits matters of public discourse-to lay the avos'ka open to inspection. On the other hand, the extent to which rational norms of living were resisted, and atavistic, "petit-bourgeois" ideals of coziness prevailed, is suggested by contemporary observers' descriptions of Soviet homes around 1960, in which "the piice de risistance was the drapery, heavily and garishly e m b r ~ i d e r e d . " ~ ~ ~ Chil-dren, invited to draw pictures of their homes in 1962, even after regular instruction in aesthetics, horrified their teachers by producing images that epitomized philistine taste, replete with little elephants, kittens, and embroidered napkins.lU As Svetlana Boym concludes from an analysis of "Aunt Liuba's" commode, still cluttered with clashing ornaments at the end of the Soviet period: "The campaign against 'domestic trash' did not

132. Buchli,Archaeology of Socialism, 154. 133. "Youth Has Its Say," 32. 134. Ibid., 37. 135. The Soviet concept of the self or lichnost' 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, cush-

ioned from the need to hoard, could afford a lifestyle of "conspicuous austerity." Buchli, Archaeology ofSocialism, 129.

137. Rossiiskii gosudarstve~l~lyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii, f. M-1, op. 5 (Conference of Central Committee of VLKSM), d. 836a, 11. 51-53.

Cold War i n the Kitchen

triumph in the majority of the communal apartments. Instead . . . the so- called domestic trash rebelled against the ideological purges and remained as the secret residue of privacy that shielded people from imposed and internalized comm~na l i t y . "~~~

"Use Khrushchev for Sausage Meat!"

Khrushchev had promised to catch up with America in per capita consumption of meat and dairy products by 1960. It was a bitter irony, then, that it was the announcement of price increases on these basic food- stuffs in 1962 that precipitated precisely the kind of public disorder the regime had tried so energetically to forestall. It erupted most violently in No~ocherkassk.~~Woincidingwith a reduction in wages, the increase in prices triggered a spontaneous protest by workers that escalated into a violent mass demonstration. Workers' anger was exacerbated when the manager of the locomotive works at the center of the dispute declared that if they could not afford to eat meat pirozhki they should eat jam ones instead. The workers knew better what to put in their pies: the slogan "Use Khrushchev for sausage meat!" soon appeared on the works wall.

The ensuing riots were brutally repressed, contradicting the regime's repudiation of force. Further archival work, in combination with oral history, is required to establish the nature and extent of women's involvement in the Novocherkassk disorder. One woman, E. P. Levchenko, was among those arrested and charged with "banditry," and it was she who had allegedly delivered a "rabble-rousing speech" using emotionally manipu- lative rhetoric and incited an angry mob to attack the police station.140 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, drawing on eyewitness accounts, speaks of women and children in the ranks of the peaceful procession, and of women sit- ting on the railway tracks.141 But perhaps what was most frightening to the authorities was that the rioters appear to have been primarily male workers-according to orthodoxy, the most conscious and rational element of society.14*The disorder could not, therefore, be dismissed as an irrational bab'i bunt.

138. Boym, Common Places, 150. 139. N. Trubin, "How ItWas: Novocherkassk 1962," Soviet Lazu and Government 30, no. 4

(Spring 1992) : 21-27 (originally published as "Kak eto bylo," Pravda, 3 June 1991, 4). 140. Samuel Baron, Bloody Saturday i n the Soviet Union: hbvocherkassk, 1962 (Stanford,

2001), 59-60, 101. Baron does not explicitly address the nexus women-consumption- disorder.

141. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The CulagArchipelago (London, 1978), 3: 507-8. 142. Police and KGB reports retrospectivelyjustified their use of force in terms of the

dichotomies between control and disorder and between consciousness and spontaneity. Claiming that "the strength of the Sovietworking 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 stereotyp-ically associated with children and women. Yet the troublemakers and their followers were characterized as mainly young but not specified as female, and only one of those tried and

252 Slavic Review

If Khrushchev had staked his legitimacy on consumption, the potency of this issue-especially in the global context of the Cold War-and the potential price of failure to manage it correctly were vividly demonstrated at Novocherkassk. The gendering of consumption as a "feminine" issue in Cold War discourses on both sides of the Iron Curtain placed women at the center of the regime's efforts to negotiate its relations with the people over the crucial territory of living standards. The Brezhnev regime that followed took the lesson forward. Aided by an injection of petro-dollars, it sought stability and acquiescence in exchange for relative prosperity and comfort. In the end, its relative success in charting a path between the need to raise living standards on the one hand and to prevent the horizon of consumerist aspirations from receding infinitely beyond hope of satis- faction on the other is surely demonstrated by the fact that the Soviet Union survived a further thirty years.

sentenced was a woman. "Novocherkasskaia tragediia, 1962,"Istoricheskii arkhiv, 1993, no. 1:100-136, esp. 121,128:from speech by Fro1 Kozlov on Novocherkassk local radio, 3June 1962 (Arkhiv Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii, f. 3, op. 58, d. 211,ll. 101-7). See also Nau- mov, "Repression and Rehabilitation," 110-1 1; and Vladimir Kozlov, Massovjle besporiadki v SSSRpri Khmshcheve i Brezhneve (1953-nachalo 1980-kh gg.) (Novosibirsk, 1999), chap. 12.

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Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the SovietUnion under KhrushchevSusan E. ReidSlavic Review, Vol. 61, No. 2. (Summer, 2002), pp. 211-252.Stable URL:


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[Footnotes]

3 Gender, Consumption, and Commodity CultureMary Louise RobertsThe American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 3. (Jun., 1998), pp. 817-844.Stable URL:

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8762%28199806%29103%3A3%3C817%3AGCACC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F

7 "Revolutionary Bolshevik Work": Stakhanovism in Retail TradeAmy E. RandallRussian Review, Vol. 59, No. 3. (Jul., 2000), pp. 425-441.Stable URL:

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0036-0341%28200007%2959%3A3%3C425%3A%22BWSIR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D

8 The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory and Material CulturePaul BettsThe Journal of Modern History, Vol. 72, No. 3. (Sep., 2000), pp. 731-765.Stable URL:

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-2801%28200009%2972%3A3%3C731%3ATTOTIE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H

8 Modernity Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the WestCraig ClunasThe American Historical Review, Vol. 104, No. 5. (Dec., 1999), pp. 1497-1511.Stable URL:

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117 Review: Siting the ModernReviewed Work(s):

Architecture and Design for the Family in Britain, 1900-70 by David JeremiahForms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture by Norman JohnstonFrom Rugs to Riches: Housework, Consumption and Modernity in Germany by Jennifer A.LoehlinStyle and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe by Susan E.Reid; David CrowleyThe Houses of Parliament: History-Art-Architecture by Christine Riding; Jacqueline RidingWarped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture by Anthony Vidler

Tag GronbergJournal of Contemporary History, Vol. 36, No. 4. (Oct., 2001), pp. 681-689.Stable URL:

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Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization ... on both sides of the Iron Curtain...

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