Abstract
In October 1936 the Stakhanovite Kondrasheva spoke at a conference on the latest exhibition of children’s consumer goods in Moscow. She complained:
Displayed here are children’s strollers. I’m interested in the question — who had so little conscience as to put them on display? Look at the crude work. How can I put a well-dressed child in such a stroller? It is completely incomprehensible. …If a child is not a freak, a hunchback, then he will have a hump after he is ambled about in this stroller. The question is how does such a product come to be sold in a store?1
Kondrasheva’s criticism was articulated at one of an expanding number of officially sanctioned forums for consumers’ voices in the 1930s. Her comments joined a litany of public consumer complaints. Instead of repressing consumer grievances about retail trade and consumption, authorities explicitly supported such negative feedback.
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Notes
Literature on this topic is too extensive to cite in full. In addition to sources cited in this chapter, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Signals from Below: Soviet Letters of Denunciation of the 1930s,” The Journal of Modern History 68 (December 1996): 831–66
Robert Thurston, “Reassessing the History of Soviet Workers: Opportunities to Criticize and Participate in Decision-Making, 1935–1941,” in New Directions in Soviet History (Cambridge, 1992), 160–88
Golfo Alexopoulis, “Exposing Illegality and Oneself: Complaint and Risk in Stalin’s Russia,” in Reforming Justice in Russia, 1864–1996 (Armonk and London, 1997): 168–89
Youngok Kang-Bohr, “Appeals and Complaints: Popular Reactions to the Party Purges and the Great Terror in the Voronezh Region, 1935–1939,” Europe-Asia Studies 57: 1 (2005): 135–54.
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), 263.
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: 1999), 165; idem, “Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s,” Slavic Review 55: 1 (1996): 85–7; Fainsod, 378.
There is an extensive literature that talks about these efforts. For an over-view of many efforts, see David Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca, 2003).
Z. Bolotin, “Kul’turno torgovat’ i zabotit’sia o potrebitele,” Bol’shevik 3 (1935): 36.
“Uroki vystavki,” Igrushka 2 (1937): 26. For more exhibits see “Vystavka ‘Mosbel’e’,” VM, 9 March 1934, 2; I. Tsitron, “Obraztsovye raiunivermagi potrebkooperatsii,” ST 10–11 (1935): 96.
Rosalind Williams discusses the role of the commodity exhibition in fostering this dream world in the capitalist West. See Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1982), especially 58–66.
G. A. Zhukovskii, “Sdvigi potrebitel’skom sprose gorodskogo naseleniia SSSR,” in Potreblenie i spros v SSSR, ed., A. I. Malkis (Leningrad, 1935), 121; TsGARUz 91/8/27: 66. For other examples of supposed influence, see “Odevat’sia krasivo,” 4; Tsitron, 96; “Modeli idut v proizvodstvo,” ST, February 18 1936, 3.
Some stores had complaint books in the 1920s. The origin of complaint books is not clear. As best as I can tell, complaint books appear to have originated in the late nineteenth century in the Russian railroad system, and then spread to other service industries. In 1884 Anton Chekhov published a short story entitled “Complaint Book” in a literary journal. A. P. Chekhov, Sobranie Sochineneii, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1960), 199–200, 566.
Ia. Volevich, “O chem govoriat zhalobnye knigi,” SKT 104 (1933), 3. For other articles critical of responses, see “Obmanivaiut pokupatelia,” Trud, July 4 1934, 4; “Za deistvennost’ zhalob potrebitelia,” and “Zhaloby ’neobosnovannye’ i’sluchainye’,” Rabotnik prilavka, July 22 1934.
K. Grichik and V. Pirkovskii, Organizatsiia i pravila roznichnoi torgovli (Moscow, 1936), 228–9.
V. Vinogradov, “Konferentsii pokupatelei,” ST 10 (1936): 63; “Konferentsii pokupatelei,” ST, February 5 1936, 1; Shinkarevskii, 3; “Veskoe slovo,” 1.
David Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941 (Ithaca, 1994), 201.
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (Oxford, 1994), 269.
For more on the regime’s pronatalist policies see Wendy Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution — Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (Cambridge, 1993)
David Hoffmann, “Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in Its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Social History 34: 1 (2000): 35–54.
James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1987).
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© 2008 Amy E. Randall
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Randall, A.E. (2008). The Making of the New Soviet Consumer. In: The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the 1930s. Consumption and Public Life. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584327_7
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