ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the professional discourses associated with socialist consumption. It illustrates how the ideology and theory of consumption and of material culture more broadly were constructed during the last two decades of Soviet power. The first part of this chapter sets as its primary axis of interest the relationship between the consumer and the specialist, represented by producers and professional ‘tastemakers’. It argues that the Brezhnev period accorded more authority and agency to the Soviet consumer than she had enjoyed during the preceding two decades. The second part of this chapter deals with material culture more broadly, illustrating how theoretical and political discourses diverged in their treatment of the object world: while Party rhetoric continued to disparage consumerism as ignoble, a large contingent of specialists reacted to the asceticism of Khrushchev byt reforms by adopting a more favourable attitude towards the object world. This rehabilitation of the object inaugurated a new perspective on socialist consumption during the period of developed socialism – one in which the individual and her subjective experience were of primary importance in defining acceptable modes of consumption.
