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Chapter One: Luxury in Socialism: An Absurd Proposition?
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david crowley and susan e. reid mass production of refrigerators. By 1968 there were 27 million TV sets, 25 million washing machines, 13.7 million refrigerators, and 5.9 million vacuum cleaners for some 60–70 million homes, but as Matthews notes, we do not know how many of these appliances were working. Mervyn Matthews, Class and Society in Soviet Russia (London: Allen Lane, 1972), 84. See also Zavisca,“Consumer Inequalities”; Shapiro, “Soviet Consumer Policy.” 89. According to official statistics, the number of refrigerators produced (or “guaranteed to”) per 1,000 population rose from 29 in 1965 to 210 in 1977. Equivalent figures for washing machines were 59 and 200, and for television sets 68 and 229. Shapiro,“Soviet Consumer Policy,”116, table 5.2, based on Tsentral’noe statisticheskoe upravlenie, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1975 g. (Moscow: Statistika, 1976), 595; Tsentral’noe statisticheskoe upravleniia, SSSR v tsifrakh v 1977 g. (Moscow: Statistika , 1978), 204. 90.Bogdan Mieczkowski,Personal and Social Consumption in Eastern Europe (New York: Praeger, 1975), 287. 91. Sandy Isenstadt, “Visions of Plenty: Refrigerators in America Around 1950,” Journal of Design History (Winter 1998): 311–21. 92. Parsadan, “Istoriia s kholodil’nikom,” Krokodil, no. 7 (March 10, 1958): 3. 93.What to do when the notoriously unreliable refrigerator breaks down became a common subject of humor,for example,a cartoon by S.Kuz’min,“Kogda kholodil’nik ‘Oka’ ne rabotaet,” Krokodil, no. 35 (December 20, 1959). 94. For example, Russian State Archive of the Economy (RGAE), f. 4372, op. 65, d. 177 (Initsiativnye predlozheniia po proizvodstvu predmetov potrebleniia, 28.12.1962–27.12.1963), l. 10; Skovoroda,“Zadachi,”43–53; and see the luxury edition of Tovarnyi slovar’ for articles on dishwashers (vol. 9, 1961) and “universal domestic electric machines” (vol. 8, 1960), 1135–44. 95.Jean Baudrillard characterizes the refrigerator as an emblematic object of capitalism in these terms.He argues that the function of this piece of domestic equipment is less important than its capacity to symbolize modern consumer lifestyles. See Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Things,” in Design After Modernism: Beyond the Objects, ed.J.Thackara (London:Thames and Hudson,1988); Daniel Miller,ed.,Acknowledging Consumption (London: Routledge, 1995). 96. Kristin Roth-Ey, “Mass Media and the Remaking of Soviet Culture, 1950s– 1960s”(Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2003), chap. 4,“Finding a Soviet Home for Television,”247–313; Kristin Roth-Ey,“Finding a Home for Television in the USSR, 1950–1970,” Slavic Review 66, no. 2 (2007): 278–306. 97. The faster take-up of television sets than other appliances is corroborated repeatedly in many of the more than seventy interviews conducted for Susan Reid’s project “Everyday Aesthetics in the Modern Soviet Flat,” supported by the Leverhulme Trust. 98. N. I. Andreeva, “Gigienicheskaia otsenka novogo zhilishchnogo stroitel’stva v Moskve (period 1947–1951 gg.),” Gigiena i sanitariia, no. 6 (1956): 22. In this survey of Moscow residents in 1955, some expressed the desire for a refrigerator in the kitchen or, if too expensive, to be provided with a space to install one in the future. 99. See, for example, Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades. 100. Appliances that took more labor to make them work than they saved were a common comic theme in the popular Soviet press in the Khrushchev era,for example, in the illustrated magazines Ogonek and Krokodil. See also Matthews,Class and Society, introduction 84. For problems of washing machines that stood useless, see A. Holt,“Domestic Labour and Soviet Society,” in Home, School and Leisure in the Soviet Union, ed. J. Brine, M. Perrie, and A. Sutton (London: Allen and Unwin, 1980), 26–54. Khrushchev, during the notorious kitchen debate at the outset of the drive to modernize the home with white goods in the late 1950s,had challenged America’s endorsement of product obsolescence by asserting the long durability of Soviet products. This feature, he argued ,was valued by Soviet civilization and designed into its products.Today,many old Soviet-era refrigerators continue to work, not because of the quality of their manufacture , but because of the care and repairs of their owners. On the labor demanded by Soviet durables and on their longevity, see Ol’ga Gurova, “Prodolzhitel’nost’ zhizni veshchei v sovetskom obshchestve: Zametki po sotsiologii nizhnego bel’ia,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas (2004), no. 2. http://magazines.russ.ru/n2/2004/34/gurov9 .html; Galina Orlova, “Apologiia strannoi veshchi: ‘Malen’kie khitrosti’ sovetskogo cheloveka,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas (2004), no. 2. http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2004/ 34...