Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc

Chapter Five: Playing for Cultural Authority: Soviet TV Professionals and the Game Show in the 1950s and 1960s

 jukka gronow and sergei zhuravlev ing their legitimate demands.60 At the same time,the system was open both to corruption as well as to the emergence of pervasive and corrosive doubts about existing entitlements and privileges.What if,the Soviet citizen might wonder, these were not measures of real social and moral worth on the part of those who enjoyed them, but signs of corruption? Notes 1. For a more detailed analysis, see J. Gronow, Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003). 2. See N. S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York: E. P.Dutton,1946); S.Fitzpatrick,Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in ExtraordinaryTimes. Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); R. Stites, Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 3. For the use of luxury in the discourse on consumption in the German Democratic Republic in the 1950s and 1960s, see M. Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand: The Politics of Consumerism in East Germany (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2005), 78. 4. See P. Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy (London: Longman, 2003), 118. 5. Two comprehensive histories of Soviet car production and distribution have been published recently, marking a new interest in Soviet material culture among historians. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, in his pathbreaking study Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), paints an overall picture of the history of Soviet car production and the place of the car in Soviet society. S. V. Zhuravlev et al., AvtoVAZ mezhdu proshlym i budushchim: Istoriia volzhskogo avtozavoda, 1966–2005 (AvtoVAZ Between the Past and the Future: The History of the Volzhskii Car-Building Factory, 1966–2005) (Moscow: RAGS, 2006), is the first comprehensive history of AvtoVAZ, the largest car producer in the U.S.S.R. (and still operating today), which produced Ladas. 6. See Gronow, Caviar with Champagne, 88. Rationing of basic consumer goods and food was once again adopted in the U.S.S.R., like in many other European countries , at the outbreak of the Second World War. The rationing of food ended first in December 1947. The Soviet government had, however, to ration food at later times: as late as 1982, for instance, food rationing was introduced in a number of provincial towns of the U.S.S.R. (see Hanson, Rise and Fall, 135). 7.Hanson,Rise and Fall, 89.Sales were not entirely unknown in the U.S.S.R.,even though they were not advertised and promoted as such. Shoes and clothes for which there was inadequate demand could, at times, be sold at lower prices.To draw a contrast with capitalist marketing and sales, this was explained as the government’s wish to make these consumer goods available for the people as cheaply as possible. 8. Compiled by V. M. Iamashev from various editions of Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR. See V. M. Iamashev, “Volzhkii avtozavod: Prervannyi ryvok za mirovoi modernizatsiei ,” in Istoriia OAO AvtoVAZ: Uroki, problemy, sovremennost’. Sbornik trudov soviet luxuries from champagne to private cars  I-i Vserossiiskoi nauchnoi konferentsii po istorii OAO AvtoVAZ (Tol’iatti: AvtoVAZ, 2003), 234. 9. A plan for a promotional movie about GUM in the mid-1950s illustrates the picture the authorities wanted to present about increasing demand for more valuable and modern consumer goods due to higher general standards of culture and living. One scene was to present a picture of a long queue in the store’s home electronics department of people eagerly wanting to buy new TV sets at the huge price of two thousand rubles each, a sum that was the equivalent of one and a half year’s wages for an average worker.TV sets were in the 1950s a luxury item, but a luxury which everyone “needed” and to which everyone would, sooner or later, be entitled. (See RGAE [Russian State Archive of the Economy], f. 7971, op. 1, d. 2384, l. 231.) 10. Timasheff, Great Retreat; and A. K. Sokolov, ed., Obshchestvo i vlast’: 1930–e gody: Povestvovaniie v dokumentakh (Moscow: Rosspen, 1998), 162–229. 11. Gronow, Caviar with Champagne, 17–28. 12. Ibid., 68–69. Chewing gum was a later example of such “small things” which had the character of luxuries because they were not produced and sold in the U...