In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • I Shop in Moscow: Advertising and the Creation of Consumer Culture in Late Tsarist Russia by Sally West
  • Christine Ruane
I Shop in Moscow: Advertising and the Creation of Consumer Culture in Late Tsarist Russia. By Sally West (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011. xii plus 292 pp. $45.00).

The 1917 Revolution has cast a long shadow over the history of consumerism in Russia. The Bolshevik contempt for capitalism and its bourgeois culture operated on two levels: the literal destruction of the pre-revolutionary commercial world and a disinterest in studying it. With very few exceptions, Soviet scholars avoided analyses of consumerism in favor of production studies. Western scholars also eschewed consumerism in large part because of the lack of access to archival materials that would have facilitated such work, although there were some exceptions. This situation changed in the early 1990s. The fall of communism, the opening of the archives to both Russian and Western scholars, and the reemergence of capitalism in the Russian Federation have encouraged scholars to reexamine pre-revolutionary capitalism and its consumer culture. Sally West’s fascinating new book, I Shop in Moscow: Advertising and the Creation of Consumer Culture in Late Tsarist Russia constitutes a vital contribution to this new area of research.

West’s purpose is to analyze the creation of a consumer culture in the Russian Empire. To do this, she divides her story into two sections. The first describes the evolution of advertising from large shop signs that hung atop shop entrances to advertisements found in the mass-circulation press. Unfortunately, most of the records for advertising firms did not survive Russia’s revolutionary cataclysm, but West does a heroic job of reconstructing the history of these firms by marshalling the sources that remain. By focusing on toiletries, tobacco, and tea she is able to show how Russian businessmen grew to appreciate the advantages that advertising provided. West also discusses the role of the government. Here, she makes an important contribution to the history of consumerism by explaining how [End Page 537] advertising operated in a non-democratic environment by showing the peripatetic way in which the Russian government tried to control the advertising industry and the new consumer culture. On the one hand, the government gave out highly coveted awards to businesses that had won its approval, demonstrating its support for Russian capitalist development. On the other hand, government censorship tried to control advertising, but these regulatory instruments failed miserably. The sheer volume of advertising overwhelmed those officials charged with enforcement. Businessmen and publishers simply proceeded without prior government authorization, producing a vibrant consumer culture despite government rhetoric. West argues that Russian developments show clearly how businessmen, advertisers, and publishers learned to operate and flourish in this setting.

In the second part of her book, West explores the visual and textual messages that advertising created to see what they can tell us about late Imperial Russian consumer culture. One chapter deals with the attempts of advertisers and the businessmen who employed them to inculcate the values of a modern marketplace. West shows how Russian advertisers manipulated messages of class and classlessness, conformity and self-expression in their attempts to create modern consumers. Another chapter deals with issues of gender. By looking at the mass-circulation press whose primary audience was male, West finds messages directed toward the male consumer. These ads reveal some important aspects of modern masculinity—concerns about sexual impotence, baldness, and control over women. The final chapter analyzes how Russian advertisers helped to create a modern consumer culture by melding new commercial products and behaviors with traditional Russian culture. West deftly shows how these symbols that represented Russian traditions and values were incorporated into advertising to help Russians accept and grow accustomed to a different way of life. But, by using Russian symbols in this way, advertising and consumer culture became modern and Russian at the same time.

West stops her story in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I. In doing so, she misses an opportunity to demonstrate the success of advertising and the consumer culture it helped create. The radical Right, which included a number of prominent manufacturers, had been complaining...

pdf

Share