ABSTRACT
The significant shifts in Soviet foreign policy after Stalin's death, such as Khrushchev's declaration of ‘peaceful co-existence’ with the West and the Brezhnev-era détente in Soviet-American relations, had some important ramifications for Soviet consumer culture. However, these policy initiatives did not make the Soviet Union completely open to the capitalist world; as the painful example of Berlin demonstrated during the 1950s, people living in the Soviet bloc could not be trusted to have open borders with the West. The Party-state had committed the country to building a social order fundamentally different from capitalism, and it was necessary to restrict the population's encounters with the West to ensure the purity of the socialist way of life.
