Dressing the Shop Window of Socialism: Gender and Consumption in the Soviet Union in the Era of ‘Cultured Trade’, 1934-53
2015; Wiley; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1468-0424.12132
ISSN1468-0424
Autores Tópico(s)French Historical and Cultural Studies
Resumo‘Respected Consumer’ (‘Uvazhaemyi potrebitel’’), a 1950 article from the Soviet women's magazine Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker), describes in intricate detail the author's recent shopping trip to a Moscow department store.1 Lavishly praising the refinement of the store's decoration and the ‘culturedness’ of the shop assistants standing behind shining counters, the author devotes a number of paragraphs to an interaction between the male manager of the fabric department and three well-heeled female shoppers. The three women – a grandmother, her daughter and her young granddaughter – are dressed in furs, velvet hats and red polka-dotted shoes. The grandmother is described as a rabotnitsa, a female worker, while her daughter is of unknown profession. As they approach the department manager to order some silk, he recognises them from an earlier sale, and impresses them with his flawless memory of what they had bought and where they live. Pleased with the immaculate service and knowledgeable staff, the three are whirled away to be fitted for dresses. One of them is presumably the dark-haired woman in the picture accompanying the article, adorned with a silk robe and attended by three smiling and be-suited female shop assistants in front of a rack of brightly patterned ready-made clothes. This two-page article, situated between a story celebrating the outstanding productivity of the Soviet female worker and recipes for jam and sour cherry cake, exhibits many of the most consistent traits of postwar consumption discourse in the Soviet press. The characters include the paradigmatic postwar consumers of ‘luxury’ – women – and the article captures three substrata of this paradigm in the retired rabotnitsa, the mother of no known profession and the little girl. Importantly, they shop together rather than individually and rely on one another's opinions before making purchases. The male appears in this story as a manager of a department, and it is significant that he is not one of the less prestigious fitters who help the pictured woman in the silk robe. The store is immaculate, the quality of the goods superlative, and the entire experience of shopping painless and edifying. In many ways, this article constitutes a paradigmatic manifestation of late-Stalinist consumption discourse. However, while many of these features were present from the beginning of the ‘cultured trade’ campaigns that rehabilitated consumption in the mid-1930s, others (such as the overwhelming emphasis on women as primary consumers) were specific to the postwar era. Prior to the war years men had often been featured as consumers in journalistic accounts of buying and selling. Like the women in this story, they sought attractive clothes or furniture to beautify their homes. In the years after 1941, however, this paradigm of the male consumer gradually disappeared. Recently, historians have explored the ‘Stalinist turn toward consumerism’ that occurred after the end of rationing in the mid-1930s, during which period the previous ambivalence toward retail trade was replaced with the injunction to buy and sell in a ‘cultured’ and refined manner.2 An examination of the partial excision of men from the Soviet construction of cultured consumption in the postwar period can help us to reconsider the cultural dynamics at work in the various manifestations of this cultured trade discourse, and the ways in which the dissemination of the ideal of correct socialist consumption may have re-inscribed or disrupted existing social structures. Such norms include the reconfigured (and increasingly dichotomous) ideals of male and female, public and private, and the rehabilitation of the family as the ideal social unit in the period of high Stalinism. As a result, an exegesis of the gendered discourse and practice of consumption in the Stalin period helps us to rethink what has been called the period of ‘Great Retreat’ in Soviet history, and the extent to which this ‘retreat’ constituted a return to pre-revolutionary ideas or the invention of a new tradition.3 The period 1934–53 is a central one for this history of consumption in the Soviet Union, as it was a time in which a traditional Bolshevik denigration of trade was eschewed for the ideological propagation of a certain, restricted mode of consumption. This mode, according to official pronouncements, was to be cultured and socialist.4 The ways in which such a mode of consuming was discussed in the pages of newspapers and disseminated through advertisements, novels, films and magazines can tell us much about the assumptions implicit in what ‘cultured’ and ‘socialist’ meant as paradigms for correct Soviet behaviour. At the same time, the Soviet Union was undergoing a broad ideological shift that historians have come to term the ‘Great Retreat’, in which a pro-natalist conceptualisation of motherhood as the primary goal of women, and of patriarchal oversight as the natural task of men, played an important role. These two phenomena – the development of ‘cultured trade’ and the re-inscribing of traditional gender norms – were not unrelated. Indeed, through the promulgation of specific ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ modes of consumption, the discourse of trade interacted with the reconfiguration and renewed pertinence of the gender binary after the Second World War. The paradigms of masculine and feminine consumption that developed in this period were not static, however, nor were they isolated from contemporaneous social and political changes in the USSR. While the 1930s saw a significant shift away from the discourse that had proposed the equality of men and women in the 1920s, the separation between male and female consumer spheres was not fully delineated. Furthermore, the Second World War, which had a direct and tangible effect on gender relations through the massive loss of male life, engagement of women in heavy industry and postwar exhortation for women to ‘replace the dead’ through childbirth at the end of the war, also had a deep influence on gendered discourses of consumption.5 After the war, male and female spheres of consumption became increasingly polarised, and whereas before they were not always clearly delineated, now consumption discourse produced highly differentiated understandings of male and female behaviour in the postwar world, as well as of an imagined ‘male’ realm of the public and the ‘female’ realm of the private.6 Thus if there was a ‘Great Retreat’ towards more conservative gender relations in the Stalin period, it was an unstable process whose iconography changed over time rather than staying the same from 1934–53, and in which the production of femininity and masculinity through such everyday practices as consumption was in constant flux. The seeming conservative shift in Soviet culture, law and society with regard to gender (including the recriminalisation of abortion and narrowing of opportunity for legal divorce in 1936) has been one of the chief foci of the literature emphasising a Stalinist recoil from the radical social agenda of 1920s Bolshevism since Nikolai Timasheff first identified his Great Retreat in 1946.7 However, David Hoffman has recently argued that, rather than a return to earlier conservative norms, the period of high Stalinism should be seen as one of revolutionary mobilisation, in which the Soviet Union, like other contemporaneous European regimes, ‘utilized the emotional power of traditional appeals and symbols, themselves removed from their original context and recast for political purposes’.8 With regards to family policy more specifically, Hoffman argues that rather than a re-inscription of the norms of tsarist patriarchal society, ‘Stalinist pro-natalism and efforts to buttress the family reflected a new type of population politics practised in the modern era’.9 In this reading, the Soviet idealisation of the family called not so much for the subordination of women and children to patriarchal heads of household but the subordination of all family members, male and female, to the need to reproduce for the state. Similarly Anna Krylova has challenged the notion of a silencing of 1920s radicalism in 1930s discourse by emphasising the multivalent and often contradictory nature of Stalinist ideas about both male and female social roles. She argues that the radical undoing of social structures that accompanied the massive economic and geographic upheavals of the 1930s allowed for, among other things, ‘more sharing and overlapping versions of male and female being’ than has previously been acknowledged.10 This is not, as Krylova hastens to add, to deny the symbolic power of dichotomous notions of male and female in this period (as I argue, such binaries played an important, albeit shifting, role in consumption discourse), but rather to question their monolithic and apparently unchanging nature and hence the idea of a categorical ‘retreat’ to some ideal-type of gender conservatism. While scholarship on a possible ‘retreat’ from family and gender radicalism in the 1930s has a long tradition in the literature on Stalinism, it is only very recently that historians have begun to consider the economic history of the Soviet Union from the angle of consumption rather than focusing entirely on production. As scholars such as Julie Hessler, Amy Randall and Randi Cox have recently argued, the lack of attention to consumption in earlier Soviet historiography produced a major lacuna in our understanding of the social and economic history of everyday life in the USSR.11 This led to a relative blindness to the often highly charged public discourse of consumption emanating from the Soviet leadership and bureaucracy in the Stalin period, predicated as it was on the Soviet state's promise to provide materially for its population, and problematised by its subsequent failure to deliver. Fortunately, a new generation of scholars focusing on the social history of the Soviet economy has not only revived the study of Stalinist consumption but has also explored the ramifications of consumption discourse and practice, both pre- and post-1917, for ideas about gendered and sexual difference. Threaded through work by Randall, Cox and Marjorie Hilton on the late imperial and Soviet retail systems are analyses of the ways in which both buying and selling were gendered through advertisements, pro-trade propaganda campaigns and hiring practices. All of these authors see the 1930s as a watershed period for these processes. In her work on the retail trade in the 1930s, Amy Randall argues that women became synonymous with retail in this period not only through shopping but also through selling; that is, after the push for full female employment in the early 1930s brought women pouring into the retail labour force.12 At the same time, women retail workers were cast in the role of ‘helpmates’ (a dynamic we see clearly in the opening anecdote of this article) who were to reverse the negative connotations associated with trade in the 1920s through their cultured and refined influence on male bosses.13 Randi Cox and Marjorie Hilton trace the shifts in representations of men and women shopping in the early Soviet period, both arguing that in the 1920s it was men who were framed as the primary consumers as part of the effort to ‘overcome the association of female consumption with frivolity and self-indulgence’ in the new state. By the early 1930s, they argue, this had given way to a dominant consumption discourse that targeted women as ‘sentimentalized mothers’ and ‘glamorous urbanites’ who were required to buy goods in order to exert their cultured influence in the home, just as they were supposed to in the retail workplace.14 This narrative of the feminisation of both retail labour and advertising in the 1930s can be nuanced when we combine it with visual analyses such as those of art historian Susan Reid. Reid has argued that a complex interplay of competing images of women as workers and mothers (both construed as public rather than private roles) continued through the 1930s, albeit with a visual hierarchy that used female images to stand in for the subordination of the Soviet people to the state.15 As I argue in this article, it can be nuanced even further when we take the analysis past 1945 and compare pre- and postwar Stalinist consumption discourse through a gendered lens. By comparing the 1930s and the period after 1945, we can see that in fact the early Stalinist era maintained a multivalent discourse on the place of women and men in the new mode of ‘cultured trade’ followed by an excision of the male consumer only after the war, a finding that supports Krylova's call to recognise the existence of contradictory narratives of male and female in the 1930s. This article will reconsider many of the conclusions of historians of gender and consumption in a Soviet framework, and in doing so rethink both the history of gender in the Soviet Union, and the broader history of consumption in a global perspective. In the process, it will draw specifically on three major insights of the literature on gender and consumption outside the Soviet Union. The first is the observation that, with the development of Western modernity, commodities have increasingly played a central role in shaping social identity and forging cultural meaning.16 As a result, the processes by which people acquire commodities, and the products they are exhorted to consume, become deeply entwined with the formation of ideas about gender, race, class, nation and sexuality among myriad other forms of social identification. Secondly, and of particular resonance to this article, historians of nineteenth-century Europe have argued that in the ‘specularized urban culture of arcades, boulevards, and department stores, woman was inscribed as both consumer and commodity, purchaser and purchase, buyer and bought’.17 This notion speaks to the frequent re-appearance of the woman-as-consumer paradigm in recent history, something that, this article will argue, was considerably more marked in the Soviet Union after the Second World War than before it, for historically specific and contingent reasons. This is not to argue that women have always been cast as the ideal consumers, but rather to recognise the particularly strong connection that has been drawn between consumption and the ‘feminine’ roles of mother and homemaker at particular times. Finally, this article will engage with the conclusions of those historians who have highlighted ideas about sexuality and the erotic in practices fundamental to commodity culture, such as advertising and commodity branding. As social practices that engage with the operation of desire and the thin line between needs and wants, marketing practices have long used sexualised images of women and men as a ‘supplementary emblem of the commodity itself’.18 Examining Stalinist ‘cultured trade’ gives us the opportunity to test such insights in the context of a non-capitalist consumer culture, in which the state arguably had as much control as the market over the ways in which commodities were regarded and consumed. A major argument of this article is that the incitement to desire products operated dialectically with an injunction to remain silent about all forms of sexuality that were not heterosexual and reproductive, directing the libidinal urges of Soviet citizens to both ‘correct’ people and ‘correct’ commodities. The early 1930s saw a deliberate attempt by government agencies and the Soviet leadership to enact a wide-ranging rehabilitation of retail trade, which had for years been denigrated as the practice of capitalists and an agent of corruption. In the ideal Bolshevik world, life's necessities and indeed luxuries would be acquired by the proletariat through, at first, distribution by the state and second, the achievement of communism at which point they would be shared equitably among all.19 The introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921, which brought back private retail trade after the experiment with a money-free economy in the years of War Communism, was seen by many as a capitulation to a nefarious capitalist threat.20 Despite this apparent ideological backflip, Bolshevik propaganda and rhetoric continued to attack those who engaged in private trade as ‘speculators’, and represented the practice as a distasteful expedient that threatened to topple the whole socialist project.21 Thus during the period of New Economic Policy (NEP), which lasted until approximately 1928, an uneasy tension existed between official government policy allowing private trade and hegemonic anti-trade discourse.22 As Eric Naiman has demonstrated, the antipathy towards retail trade emanated not only from official state organs, but was echoed through the popular press, fiction, theatre and film of the period.23 Amidst this discussion of trade, influential archetypes of good and bad Communists emerged. The former was represented by the revolutionary ascetic who denied himself (or occasionally herself) anything but the very basic necessities of life.24 The opposite of this revolutionary figure was the Nepman, the speculator who made money from the loosening of restrictions on private trade. The Nepman was rapacious, indolent and greedy, and represented in human form the nebulous threat of corruption many saw hidden behind the practice of retail trade.25 If the Nepman was usually figured as male, the revolutionary ascetic was also often imagined as a man. The position of women in this framework was more ambiguous. On the one hand, the emancipated woman was often held up as a great success of early Communism. On the other, the fear that women remained irrational, less educated, less devoted to the cause than men was prevalent.26 This fear often manifested itself in the notion that women may corrupt their husbands with the desire for material goods and may pull their husbands into an ‘utterly unenlightened, petty-bourgeois life’.27 Their husbands could be fine upstanding revolutionaries but women, it was suggested, continued to lust after luxurious possessions. Furthermore, if the archetypal internal enemy of the 1920s was the Nepman, his female equivalent was the prostitute: the public woman who defied the ban on private trade by trading in her body.28 One of the ways in which Soviet advertisers sought to overcome this association of consumption with rapacious self-indulgence in the 1920s was to attempt to re-code the acceptable form of retail as male, a script that served to underline rather than undermine the association of women with frivolous spending and materialism.29 This early attempt at the rehabilitation of consumption was incomplete, however, as the revolutionary ascetic, refined male shopper, sensual woman and sentimental mother continued to jostle for space in the multi-directional discourse of NEP trade.30 The equation of women and rampant consumerism was not one unique to the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Scholars of Western Europe and North America have traced the image of women as particularly covetous and excessive consumers back to at least the eighteenth century, if not earlier.31 Nonetheless, the NEP-era discourse had some Soviet-specific origins. One source of this anxiety was the fact that after the revolution, many prominent revolutionaries and party members married women who had belonged to the pre-revolutionary middle class. Commentators feared that they would taint their husbands with their petty bourgeois (meshchanstvo) ways.32 Also present, however, was a more general fear that NEP could lead to the unbridled stimulation of consumer desires in both men and women, and a lust for possessions that was connected to sexual depravity and gluttony in general.33 In this context, the uneducated, unenlightened female, who had long been framed as more sexually demanding and corrupt than the male in the Russian intellectual tradition, intersected uneasily with the figure of the prostitute. The prostitute's place in Soviet society was itself highly contested in the light of Bolshevik ideologues’ promises to both protect prostitutes as victims of capitalism and Soviet attempts to repress prostitution through ‘no-tolerance’ policies in urban areas.34 In this context, women often seemed more in danger of capitulating to the desire for excessive consumption and the purchasing of unnecessary material goods than their husbands, brothers, fathers or male friends. By the time Joseph Stalin had consolidated his hold on power in the late 1920s, and the USSR had embarked on the industrialisation and collectivisation drive often referred to as the ‘Cultural Revolution’, NEP was supplanted by a return to restrictions on trade and re-centralisation of the system of goods distribution.35 An economic recovery mode typified by looser restrictions on retail trade reappeared in the early 1930s, with the end of rationing in 1935 heralding a shift in the ideological formulation of trade rhetoric emanating from Soviet economic and propaganda agencies.36 At the Seventeenth Party Congress in early 1934, the Premier of the Soviet Union Viacheslav Molotov gave a lengthy speech about the ‘Tasks of the Second Five Year Plan’, which had been inaugurated two years before in 1932. Retroactively framing three main goals for the Plan (piatiletka), Molotov declared that along with eradicating class and developing heavy industry, the second piatiletka was set to ‘further improve the well-being of the masses of workers and collective farmers and to increase the level of consumption of the toilers by two to three times’.37 Molotov announced that the production of ‘retail articles of general use’ would leap by over 200 per cent, and that this increase would be accompanied by a rapid augmentation of variety in goods available.38 To underscore the party's supposed commitment to reaching this goal, he quoted Comrade Stalin himself, stating that the Leader was ‘annihilating in his flagellation of the aristocratically supercilious attitude towards Soviet trade, and of the nonsensical “left” petit-bourgeois advocacy of an immediate adoption of direct exchange of goods’.39 The toiling masses, Molotov argued, had a right to expect increased access to consumer goods, and any hint that such access would besmirch the armour of revolutionary asceticism was an ultra-left heresy. It's time you knew that I am also a contemporary man I am a man of the Moskvoshvei epoch Look how my jacket bulges on me. Enthusiastic claims of ‘great leaps forward’ in Soviet trade did not remain the preserve of political speeches, as they required campaigns to mobilise the public to engage in enlightened consumption practices, practices that were in turn supposed to revolutionise Soviet private life.41 The Soviet press quickly took up the celebration of a new, more abundant consumer culture. An early example of enthusiasm for the new ‘Soviet Trade’ can be found in the July 1934 issue of Maxim Gorky's journal Nashi Dostizheniia (Our Achievements). Our Achievements had been founded at the height of the First Five Year Plan in 1929 in order, in Gorky's words, to celebrate ‘our victories over ourselves’; that is, the Soviet citizen's emergence from backwardness and full realisation as an enlightened socialist individual.42 Whereas the first half of the 1934 issue was devoted to arctic explorations, the second half concerned the apparent appearance of the ‘new consumer’ (‘novyi pokupatel’’) in Soviet society. Among the articles espousing the dawn of a new era of consuming, there were descriptions of the new ‘more decorative’ furniture available to young Soviet couples (‘Pokupatel’ mebeli’), hagiographic descriptions of workers constructing miniature goods to go on sale in the toyshop Detskii Mir (Children's World) and descriptions of the new design aesthetic at work in the building of Soviet apartments and even pharmacies (‘Krasivaia Veshch’’).43 Most interesting from the perspective of the still inchoate discourse of gendered consumption was the eight-page illustrated article ‘New Consumer’ (‘Novyi Pokupatel’’) which described, and showed ample photographic evidence of new shops opening in Moscow and eponymous ‘new consumers’ visiting them.44 Among the multiple images of cheerful Soviet shoppers there are distinct differences, but also potentially surprising similarities, between the concerns of male and female shoppers presented by the article's author. Women, for example, are pictured shopping communally with other women, while men always appear shopping alone. Similarly, pictures of children shopping in the Detskii Mir show mothers holding eager toddlers’ hands, rather than fathers. Nonetheless, this early formulation of the ‘new consumer’ paradigm was clearly intended to encompass both men and women in its scope. Both appear often, dotted across the eight pages of illustrations. On a page featuring new goods that can be bought for the house, a couple are shown sitting in their apartment among new furniture and crockery. The caption declares, ‘This family lives in a new house. Already they have acquired curtains for the window, a table, and a buffet with glass doors. But still there are bare spaces on the floor, disturbing both husband and wife. The husband wants to buy a writing desk, as their son is growing older and needs to study at a table’.45 As Randi Cox has argued, consumer advertising in the 1930s frequently endorsed the ‘transformation of private space’ as a means to turn the Soviet self into a more cultured, enlightened being.46 Cox argues that this had the unintended side effect of ‘placing the private, consumer sphere over the productive sphere and redefining public space as sentimentalised leisure space’.47 Whether or not this elevation of private space over public space was as common as Cox suggests, the idealisation of domesticity and gendered leisure in 1930s advertisements certainly undermines the common misconception that the private was entirely eschewed for the public under high Stalinism. Furthermore, in the articulation of a new socialist domesticity in the early 1930s, men were to be involved in this private life as well as women.48 Taking the celebration of trade one step further was the official trade journal of the retail industry, Sovetskaia Torgovlia (Soviet Trade). Founded in 1927 under the name Voprosy Torgovli (Questions of Trade) it took the name Soviet Trade throughout the height of the first push for cultured trade from 1931–37.49 Sovetskaia Torgovlia served both as a reference for those working in the retail trade industry and as a celebration of the abundance of goods apparently now available to the Soviet consumer. Articles ranged from ‘How to correctly arrange sales people and cash registers’, to ‘How the market became cultured’ and ‘How does this fashion please you?’.50 Directed not only at the consumer but also at the retail worker and director, Sovetskaia Torgovlia served as an early weathervane indicating the emphases of the new trade policy. Reading through the first years of the journal, it is quickly apparent that while the availability of bread and the end of rationing were the major themes of the first few issues, focus soon shifted to manufactured goods and particularly to clothing and fashion. This was true in terms of production as well as consumption, as evidenced by the many articles on the textile industry interspersed between those discussing new department stores and fashion ateliers. Articles about the sale of clothes focused on both the reputed improvement in the quality of clothes being produced in the Soviet Union, and in particular on the newly refined spaces in which clothes were being sold. Thus, a 1935 article praised the cultured environments in which consumers could shop for clothes by describing a women's fashion atelier in Moscow. The article was dominated by a large picture of five women sitting around a grand wooden table, in a richly furnished room, decorated with multiple vases of flowers. As the caption below explained, these women were leafing through fashion magazines from the fashion trust Moskvoshvei, and snacking on sweets while they pondered the important decision of their next clothing purchase.51 As it had been in the July 1934 issue of Nashi Dostezheniia, female consumption was represented here as a communal activity, in which advice, contemplation and rational well-thought-out choices were presented as hallmarks of ‘cultured’ female shopping. 1930s publications such as Sovetskaia Torgovlia and the popular evening newspaper Vecherniaia Moskva (Evening Moscow) included stories about men shopping for clothes as well as women, albeit this paradigm of the clothing consumer was markedly less frequent. In addition, when men were pictured or described shopping for clothes, they never did so in such lavish surroundings as women. A picture from a 1935 issue of Vecherniaia Moskva, for example, shows two images side by side; one of a man being measured for a greatcoat by a male tailor, who is standing back to admire his handiwork, and the other of two women sitting under a large tasselled lamp, leafing through a fashion magazine. The women are shopping for clothing in the refined and cultivated surroundings of a special fashion room or hall, just like that described on the pages of Sovetskaia Torgovlia, consulting a female friend or relative on their possible purchases. The man's time seems more precious; he is shown with his (rather simple looking) new coat almost finished, and he stands resolutely looking ahead as the tailor tweaks some final measurements.52 Indeed, although a number of articles and images from the press in this period showed women sitting and reading fashion magazines in the atelier, none represent men buying new clothes in the same way. In this way, the Soviet press produced clearly demarcated spaces of consumption in the new discours
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