Microsoft Word - AEER_Fall2006_ Final.doc Anthropology of East Europe Review Volume 24, No. 2 Page 91 IDEOLOGY OF CONSUMPTION IN SOVIET UNION: FROM ASCETICISM TO THE LEGITIMATING OF CONSUMER GOODS Olga Gurova European University at St. Petersburg, Russia This article explores mass discourse on consumption and official attitudes about consumer goods (mostly clothes) in the Soviet Union from 1917 up to the beginning of the 1980s. On the basis of media discourse analysis the historical epoch was split into four periods according to the changes of dominant frames in official ideology of consumption in Soviet culture. In the 1917-20s, the frame of everyday asceticism and critics of pre-Revolutionary patterns of consumption such as philistinism and conspicuous consumption dominated. In the second part of the 1930s the idea of "cultureness" ("kulturnost") was raised, and the possessing of material goods was rehabilitated. In the 1950-60s the imitation of western consumer patterns was critiqued by the Soviet authorities. In the 1970s the idea of de- materialization (“razveschestvlenie”) of everyday life became of current importance. In this article it is demonstrated that the ideology of consumption was not consistent and homogeneous during the whole Soviet Era, it was changing as a result of political, cultural, economics and everyday life transformations. The concept of ideology In this research the concept of ideology is defined according to tradition, begun by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their paper called "The German Ideology" (1956a). They consider ideology as a set of ideas, which aims to promote and to preserve the existing social order. According to these philosophers, individuals who comprise the ruling class define the particular historical epoch, and the thought of the ruling class becomes dominant at a certain time. Marx and Engels do not use the category of "ideology" itself, they rather discuss "false consciousness" or "illusions", and use these categories in the meaning similar to that of ideology. So, ideology according to them can be considered as a set of illusory thoughts of the ruling class, which relate to the existing social order and to the ways of its organization. Such illusions as a set of thoughts legitimize relations of domination/subordination in society, and those who are in a subordinate position usually passively accept them. The ideas of Marx and Engels inspired the other concepts of ideology, some of which were developed by scholars of the Frankfurt school. For example, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer examine ideology in the context of the critique of mass culture and the media (2002). They consider ideology as false consciousness and as a false view of social reality, which the Establishment imposes upon people via the media, with the aim of preserving the existing social order and power relations. Roland Barthes, who also analyzed the media and mass culture, points out the link between ideology and myth, and considers ideology to be meanings which are ascribed to different cultural objects (clothes, images, words) by the mass media (Barthes 2000). According to Barthes, ideology uses the bodies of "innocent" cultural objects to give them particular meaning. Similarly to Marx, Engels, Adorno and Horkheimer, Barthes considers ideology to be a negative phenomenon, or a phenomenon with negative functions such as the representation of reality in a false way according to the will of the ruling class with the purpose of promoting the existing social order of domination and subordination. Some concepts of ideology in sociology refuse to treat ideology as a false picture of social reality and understand it as a reality in itself. They also refuse to understand ideology as a part of public consciousness, considering it rather to be a collective unconsciousness. For example, Louis Althusser considers ideology in that manner, and defines it as a set of representations of social and cultural reality, a set of concepts, ideas, myths and images of reality, which form people’s understanding, estimating and experiencing the real conditions of their existence (Althusser 2000). In this article, ideology will be treated as a set of dominant discourses, which contains ideas about consumerism, attitudes toward consumption and consumer practices represented in the Soviet media. These discourses circulate through various forms of cultural production, or cultural artifacts (magazines, newspapers, TV, cinema, material objects), which promote particular ideas, values, beliefs and everyday practices. This paper focuses on the ideas and concepts which contain information about attitudes toward clothes, fashion, and everyday consumer practices in the Soviet Union from Anthropology of East Europe Review Volume 24, No. 2 Page 92 1917 to the 1980s. These ideas and concepts are part of official discourse: on the one hand, they construct social reality, and, on the other hand, they represent it. Four main periods in the ideology of consumption were defined on the basis of media discourse analysis. Revolutionary doctrine of taste and everyday asceticism, the 1920s The Revolution of 1917 brought essential political, social and cultural changes, and stimulated the reconstruction of everyday life. Clothing and appearance were under the special care of the new authorities, and this attention can be considered as a component of a nation-building policy. The reconstruction of everyday life according to the revolutionary doctrine of taste was called "life-building" (zhiznestroenie). The revolutionary doctrine of taste was in many respects based on the theory of commodity fetishism offered by Karl Marx, and particularly on his statement that under capitalism the cult of consumer goods transforms the relationships between people into the relationships of things (Marx & Engels 1956b:593). Marx critically mentions that material goods function as symbols of social status and prestige in capitalist society, and, hence, the social importance of a person is replaced with the social meaning of things. Socialism, as compared to capitalism, is also aimed at the abundance of goods; however, in opposite to capitalism, the person should be free from the oppression of consumer goods. It means that s/he has to avoid estimating people on the basis of the material objects they possess (Zhilina & Frolova 1969:40). Objects should be treated as friends to the person that allows overcoming the obsession with them (Marx & Engels 1956b:593). In post-revolutionary times, clothes, their quantity, qualities and attitudes toward them were paid special attention in the context of the reconstruction of everyday life. Svetlana Boym mentions that the category "thing" (vesch’) had negative connotations in revolutionary discourse (Boym 1994). Ideologists criticized things as a source of consumerism-like obsession. They actively condemned the individual desire to obtain more things than is necessary in the functional sense. To have a lot of things, especially those produced and obtained before the Revolution, meant to be loyal to the reactionary past, and to the values of the old world. According to the Revolutionary doctrine of taste, clothes had to be functional and rational, that is why the ideology of consumption in the 1920s can be called the ideology of everyday asceticism. Material goods were not to be consumed for the sake of goods themselves. Considering the use of things, if coziness was created for the sake of coziness itself, it was regarded as a sign of narrow- mindedness and philistinism (Zhilina & Frolova 1969:41). After the Revolution, attitudes toward material things assumed criticism of conspicuous consumption, of false beauty and their function to symbolize the social status. As one article in the journal Rabotnitsa put it, "Have you ever been in the Bolshoy theatre? In the first row you can see ladies with make-up wearing furs. Chinchilla, arctic fox and other expensive furs. This competition by furs, jewelries stems from pre- Revolutionary times. To show the richness and profits! Before, in pre-revolutionary times people were regarded in this way" (Lyn 1926:15). Here, the author clearly communicates a critical attitude toward clothes and their function as a symbol of social status. According to revolutionary ideology, clothes were not supposed to differentiate between people, they were supposed to provide a person with warmth, protect them from the cold, but they were not supposed to represent wealth. This last fact was very important in a state where "everybody is equal" according to ideology. It was declared that “ the Revolution had destroyed the privileges of chinchillas” (Lyn 1926:15), therefore the competition by means of clothes was very much criticized. Such idealistic attitudes supposed that in socialist society, the prices of clothes should be reasonable enough to make them accessible to everyone. It was mentioned that Soviet fashion should be simple, convenient, easily made, cheap, available to working class women, and it was emphasized that clothes should meet the requirements of a primarily functional device (Ob odezhdah 1924:30-31). This citation shows one more time all the mentioned requirements for clothes: they had to be functional; they were not supposed to differentiate between people. Furthermore, it clearly shows a key distinction between "our" fashion and the fashion of others, in this case, those who represent pre-Revolutionary bourgeois society: post-revolutionary discourse on fashion and taste was constructed around the opposition between revolutionary and pre-revolutionary bourgeois societies, where the latter was critiqued. One more noticeable thing is the use of the word fashion with quotation marks– "fashion" in media discourse of that time. This fact is important, because it helps to reconstruct the official view of fashion as something frivolous Anthropology of East Europe Review Volume 24, No. 2 Page 93 and even worthless. In 1923 women who followed fashion were described in very derogatory terms, for example as "wretches" (negodnitsy): "Ah, fashion addicted girls, you are wretches … Working women spit on you from the seventh floor" (Step. K-na 1927:30-31). According to the ideology, fashion addiction had to be excluded from the life style of working class women. The sarcastic tone of the statement above and the haughty attitude of working women toward fashion addicts, as well as the opposition between working women and fashion addicted girls shows the negative attitude to fashion, which was promoted in official culture of the 1920s. The functional attitude towards fashion and clothes was reflected in the experiments of Soviet fashion designers Aleksandra Ekster, Lubov’ Popova, and Varvara Stepanova. With the aim of achieving the aesthetic transformation of everyday life according to Soviet ideas, the designers put regime-friendly symbols such as sickles and hammers, tractors, screws, airplanes and pioneers on material objects such as fabrics or dishes. The quality of such prints and pictures, made on fabric (agittekstil’) was not very good; however, they were easily identified, and in this way they propagandized new social order in a simple way. Such practices concerned with material objects promoted the socialization of one’s taste as well as symbolic attribution of material culture by the new authorities. The beauty of the body was under the influence of the idea of functionality as well as fashion; otherwise, beauty was criticized and regarded as a bourgeois phenomenon, a «deceit» or a «scab» on one’s body. One article, entitled "Young working class girls build a new life" gives the following example of such attitudes: working class girls were asked whether they thought it was a good habit to use powder and other cosmetics. They provided the radical answer: "do not use any types of cosmetics. It spoils the face” (Yunye 1924:13). Finally, the girls decided: "when the cultural level of women increases, all cosmetics will be logically liquidated" (Ilyina 1927:15-16). However, at least one type of beauty was legitimate in Soviet culture, which is "natural beauty": as one author put it, "We, communists and komsomols, vote for a natural beauty, a graceful body. For the natural beauty, instead of an artificial one" (Lyn 1926:15). Natural beauty was opposed to artificial beauty, which was considered to be a form of cheating, because it hid the true essence of a person, or his or her inner personality. In contrast to the bourgeois artificial beauty, Soviet beauty was associated with ideas of "naturalness" and "health" and not with cosmetics and make- up. Thus, clothes and personal appearance came under special scrutiny between 1917-1920s. The main ideas which defined them were functionality and usefulness, instead of social differentiation or the demonstration of status. According to the Marxist idea of materiality determining human consciousness, the reconstruction of everyday life had a significant political value and nation-building meaning in the Soviet culture. The ideology of kulturnost’ and the legitimization of consumption in the 1930-50s By the middle of the 1930s, the ideology of consumption had significantly changed. Sociologists and historians found reasons for such a transformation in the so-called "Great Retreat", which referred to the changes in ideological orientation from Bolshevik era social experimentation to the conservative ideals of the Stalin epoch (Timasheff 1946). The reference to conservative ideals in this case is understood as the reassessment of Bolshevik ideology of 1920s, of the anti-consumer approach to material goods, clothes and fashion, and the transition from aesthetic puritanism to tolerance toward elements of ex-bourgeois lifestyle with its glamour, luxury, coziness and pleasures. Historian Vera Dunham offers an analytical explanation of such transformations (Dunham 1976). She speaks about the so-called "The Big Deal", which was made between the authorities and the Soviet middle class. During the Stalin period, even in the most difficult times, the official power was supported not only by the means of terror. Power was based on the secret contract between the Party and Soviet middle class. Dunham supposes that the middle class required a stable life filled with consumer goods, and luxury and leisure in exchange for their support of the state policy. Therefore, post- revolutionary vanguard experiments were stopped in the 1930s, and the life patterns and values of the Russian educated class of mid-nineteenth century replaced the ideas of the radical Bolshevists’ reconstruction of daily life (Gronow 1997, Timasheff 1946, Volkov 2000). The speech of Joseph Stalin was in a sense a discursive marker of this "conservative turn". In 1935 Stalin stated: "some people think that socialism can be strengthened by achieving the material equality of people on the basis of a poor life. It’s not true. This is the petty-bourgeois view of socialism. Actually, socialism can win only on the Anthropology of East Europe Review Volume 24, No. 2 Page 94 basis of the high efficiency of labor, which is higher than the one under capitalism, and on the basis of the abundance of products and consumer goods, and on the basis of rich cultural life of each member of our society” (Rech 1935:3-4). Soviet discourse on consumption and everyday life at that time was structured in accordance with the three key categories resulting from the logic of this statement. First of them was "equality", the second one was "abundance", and the third one was "cultural life". Stalin declared the orientation to the prosperous, cultural and cheerful life. This important structural 'turn" meant the ascendance of the ideology of "cultureness" (kulturnost’), or the orientation toward relatively high standards of individual consumption. In the context of this transformation of values, material goods were permitted to appear in the daily life of the Soviet people. They even became subject to consumer worship. The category of "consumer" more and more often accompanied the category "Soviet man" in mass media texts. Such expressions as "this good will have a success in consumer market" or "according to the consumers needs" became popular in official discourse. Negative connotations towards consumption started to disappear from the discourse during the second part of the 1930s. Attitudes toward consumption were changing; the media, mostly newspapers, in the 1930s became a source of so-called "consumer pornography" as historians have put it (Fitzpatrick 1999:90). Articles about fashion shows, exhibitions of fabrics, and the quality of consumer goods appeared again and again. They gave information about shops, which were overfilled with different types of consumer goods, capable of satisfying the most exacting consumer tastes. "Consumer pornography" was depicted as consumer goods, which expose themselves "for show" and, thus, construct the consumer as a fetishist. The following question can be raised: were all these consumer goods actually available for purchase in shops or was it just an illusion and discursive frame? Such a question is valid indeed, because historians have proven that the consumer market was poor (Osokina 1997). Thus, consumer pornography as well as consumer fetishism emerged on the pages of Soviet magazines and newspapers mostly, but not in real life. Despite shortages, the idea of the Soviet man as a consumer took its legitimate place in the mass discourse in the 1930s. In the context of the ideology of kulturnost’, a lot of consumer values such as coziness were rehabilitated. Pleasures of a cozy home came again to life and became an echo of pre-revolutionary bourgeois life (Buchli 2000). The rehabilitation of consumer goods in discourse called for the necessity of rethinking and rewriting the meanings ascribed to them before. Philistinism and its values, which, according to official point of view, had already been liquidated, now were recreated in "secondary" petty-bourgeois culture of Stalin’s times (Boym 1994). British anthropologist Victor Buchli in his book "An Archeology of socialism" gives an example on how the attitudes to sofa were changing according to Marxist doctrine from the 1920s to the 1930s (Buchli 2000:56-57). According to this doctrine, as it is known, material conditions define human consciousness. What is important, is not the object itself but the cultural interpretation of the material object. Thus, for example, the sofa as a thing itself did not represent petty-bourgeois values. The value of a sofa is determined by its use: if the Soviet worker uses a sofa to sleep on, this does not allow us to consider it to be a petty bourgeois object, as it was considered in the 1920s. Buchli explained such a shift in interpretation of things as a transition from a denotative model of understanding things, which was characteristic of Lenin’s culture, to the contextual model of Stalin’s culture. In the first case it was easy to manipulate the values attributed to things. The focus on denotative attributes, and the judgments made on the basis of the difference between proletarian and a petty-bourgeois attitude to consumer goods were peculiarities of the first post-revolutionary decade. The shift to the contextual model provided a justification for further increasing the quantity of material objects. Attitudes toward fashion were also changing: while in the 1920s, journals were filled with the critique of fashion, in the second half of the 1930s the ideology changed to a more positive way of talking about it: "Our requirement of beauty in clothes is growing. My style is simple, but it is beautiful in my point of view. We can look beautiful, because we have taste and follow fashion" (Rabonitsa 1937:15). These citations from the letters of girls from a village shows the emergence of such categories as "beauty", "style", "taste" or "fashion", and the positive way of talking about them became important, not only for city girls. The change in attitude toward fashion is also proven by the opening of Fashion Houses in cities with the aim Anthropology of East Europe Review Volume 24, No. 2 Page 95 "to create the style of Soviet costume" (Yakub 1936:18-19). Thus, in the 1930s, the discourse on consumption became more intensive than in the previous period, and what is more important, it gained a positive meaning. The reassessment of revolutionary values and the shift to "petty- bourgeois" values such as coziness, beauty and comfort accompanied with the re-evaluation of the anti-consumer approach to material goods, and the shift from aesthetic purism to the tolerance toward "bourgeois life" with its glamour, luxury and pleasures. The ideology of Soviet taste, 1950-60s Changes in ideology during the second half of the twentieth century concerned the political, economic and social spheres as well as the cultural domain. This period was characterized by the intensification of cultural contacts between Soviet Russia and the West. The "turn to the West" was related to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956. Beginning in the 1950s, economic and cultural networks between the Soviet Union and foreign countries started to be rebuilt. Due to the International festival of youth and students, the Moscow film festival and other international events such as international exhibitions, "crowds" of foreigners had the chance to come to Russia. International contacts promoted cultural and commodity exchange, which was carried out at the level of State institutions as well as in daily life. The idea "everything is for the person" can be considered a principal discursive frame of the 1960s. Thus, if in the 1930s, the lifestyle dominating the discourse was borrowed from the lifestyle of the pre-revolutionary educated class, the post-war period can be characterized by the domination of western values, at least, in relation to consumption. The Soviet middle class consumed life-style patterns taken from post-war American middle class. What were those patterns like? Those ideals included financial security, the "suburban dream" - a private house in the suburbs of a city. In the USSR, people did not dream of private houses; the dream was rather to have a separate apartment instead of rooms in communal apartments (kommunalka). With the separate apartment, a Soviet man could obtain not only a private space but also a place to keep their clothes. Consumer goods became more available in shops, and these changes became possible due to the transformations of structural conditions as well as those of values: the possession of consumer goods in general was no longer looked upon negatively. On the contrary, a person who lived as an ascetic, in an empty apartment without any domestic appliances was considered to be strange (Zhilina, Frolova 1969:42). The dominant discursive concept, which determined the attitude to things in the 1960s, was the concept of Soviet taste. To quote from some sources, "What is necessary today is taste" (Mertsalova 1964:30). "Making the taste is one of the most important forms of struggle for the rising of Soviet socialist culture, for cultural growth of all Soviet people" (Zhukov 1954:159). The actualization of the concept of taste had at least two meanings. On the one hand, the category of taste supposed the rise of individualization in choosing clothes, so a Soviet person was socialized to be conscious of their appearance. On the other hand, taste played an important role in regulating consumer behavior and choosing things to wear, no matter if they corresponded to Soviet style or not. Taste thus regulated the "irrational consumer behavior" of the Soviet man (Buchli 2000:139). Taste formed a common symbolic space for different social groups in Soviet culture. It functioned as a means for the symbolic design of the life style for such groups. It also functioned as a boundary for the whole nation, because those clothes Soviet people wore or the furniture they had in their apartments had to represent the values of socialist culture according to official ideology. In this sense fashion played a role in nation building in Soviet society. The question of how to recognize good taste and how to form it was arising regularly on the pages of newspapers and magazines: "What are the attributes of good taste?". The answer was: "Good taste represents a combination of simplicity and a sense of proportion". "Too much is bad" (Kantor 1963:26) – this was a quintessence of the idea of Soviet taste. The rise of the idea of Soviet taste can be explained as a reaction to ideological competition with America and other so-called "bourgeois" countries, to the penetration of patterns of Western culture and fashion, and to the distribution of consumer-type values in the daily life of Soviet people. If we consider Soviet discourse on fashion and clothes, it is possible to find out, that this discourse is built around the opposition of the Soviet lifestyle versus bourgeois or capitalist lifestyle at this time. Such discourse became more intense when Western fashion appeared on the streets of Soviet cities. The struggle to influence the taste of Soviet youth was manifest in the campaign against the youth subculture styliagi. The well-known Soviet writer Lev Anthropology of East Europe Review Volume 24, No. 2 Page 96 Kassil’ wrote in 1958: Why are our notorious 'styliagi' and so-called 'fify' so ridiculous? The problem is not that they strongly desire to follow western fashion, or that they are two years behind the times and look like Parisian dandies looked last year… The critical point is not only in the length of jacket, in the extreme narrowness of the trousers or skirts or, on the contrary, on the vast breadth of their bell-bottom trousers! God save them… The point is not with their style. The problem is that such lad or girl tries to look like a foreigner on our streets. They have a special manner of speech with some «imported glamour», which they have adopted from the movies, which were not duplicated into Russian language. They develop a special weakened gait as if they passed all the world around on the ribbed soles of their shoes, saw everything, that is why everything is boring for them, and they have got tired … Good taste is a true, truthful taste. It calls everyone to be oneself, to remain honest in words and deeds (Kassil’ 1958:25- 26). However, not everyone could take advantages of such opportunity to be in fashion: styliagi were declared “out of moral” and 'driven from the streets" as a result of the campaign against Western style appearance. Public opinion considered the desire to be different in clothes or appearance to be vulgar. In A.Golybina's tendentious book "The Art of Dressing Beautifully" which is really a discussion of the position of styliagi in Soviet culture, the author states: "Some Soviet young boys and girls create a ridiculous style when they uncritically follow the last achievements of Western fashions. Instead of wearing clothes which are recommended by Soviet Fashion houses, they copy Western style costumes, frequently exaggerating them" (Golybina 1974:242-243). In the context of the critique of the western life style, the concept of Soviet beauty in clothes was raised: The democracy of our public life does not leave any opportunity for tasteless luxury, senseless ornamentation, or the desire of making visible 'richness'. Our society rejects such an understanding of 'beauty' which was born during the development of capitalist attitudes, when the word 'beautiful' meant 'expensive'. Today it is necessary to distinguish between authentic beauty and artificial 'prettiness', and to struggle against petty-bourgeois worship for the expensive things that are often deprived of authentic beauty (Kantor 1963:15). Thus, in the official discourse of the 1950-60s, the concept of Soviet taste was dominating. This frame was developed in the context of an ideological competition with America and the Western life style as well as with vestiges of the previous Stalin era "secondary philistinism". These features of everyday life in the 1950-60s became preconditions for the "dematerialization' campaign in the late Soviet times. The ideology of de-materialization, 1970s According to many historians, from the end of the 1960s to the 1970s when Leonid Brezhnev was at the helm, the state made a so- called "Little Deal" with the Soviet middle class. This deal was called "little" in opposition to "The Big Deal", proposed by Vera Dunham in her book In Stalin’s Time. What is understood by "The Little Deal", is the agreement between the ruling Party and the middle class, which was made in the second part of the 1930s. According to Dunham, the social order, which existed in those times, was supported not only by means of terror. The Soviet middle class supported the authorities in exchange for financial security and a good life (Dunham 1976). The meaning of this deal was to maintain the stability of the existing social order. The deal assumed that the authorities provided differential wages, legitimated the Establishment and turned a blind eye toward the shadow economy and informal economic practices (Millar 1985; Buchli 2000). In the context of "The Little Deal" and the relative stabilization of life there were double standards in relation to consumer goods. On the one hand, the main frame in official discourse was the frame of "de-materialization". According to the idea of dematerialization, the individual in socialist society was free of commodity fetishism and not dependent on things. On the other hand, in his speech at the twenty-fifth party congress, Leonid Brezhnev spoke about the increased supply of consumer goods and the growth of the ideological, ethical and cultural consciousness of people in the Soviet Union. This statement allowed consumer goods to appear in the everyday life of Soviet people because the negative connotations associated with the volume of consumer goods on shops’ shelves, one’s apartment or wardrobe were officially removed from official discourse, and shifted to personal attitudes. It is important to emphasize Anthropology of East Europe Review Volume 24, No. 2 Page 97 that attention has been moved to the person's attitudes toward material objects: the person him/herself should be conscious about them. As a matter of fact, the aim of the Soviet state was to create a socialist post-materialistic world in which there would be plenty of consumer goods, but they would not have any excessive significance for the person. The Soviet person was not supposed to be obsessed with or adoring of things, rather, he should look upon them in a functional way. To use a semiotic interpretation, it was supposed that the material object as a signifier should be equal to the importance of the material object as signified. In the 1960s the motto "nothing superfluous" became popular; it corresponded to the ideology of dematerialization and was very actual in the context of the growth of materialistic attitudes, which was observed in those times. It resulted in a new wave of development of philistinism and consumerism. As a consequence of such trends, the state turned back to the promotion of the idea of dematerialization. However, the ideology of dematerialization started to disappear by the end of the 1970s, because of the visible contradiction between ideological statements and rising demand for consumer goods, especially those made outside the Soviet Union. Between 1970s- 1980s, official discourse was full of contemporary-sounding categories such as "the culture of consumption" and "consumerism", and until the middle of the 1980s it was reoriented from socialist values to the values of new materialism of post-socialist Russia. Conclusion In this paper the question of the ideological context of the history of consumption in Soviet culture was discussed. "Ideology" was understood as a system of concepts, ideas, myths and images by means of which people understand, estimate and experience real conditions of their existence. Such an approach to ideology allowed investigating a structural context of daily life of Soviet people and a context of their attitudes toward things. On the basis of discourse analysis, four main stages were defined. In the 1917-20s, the ideology of everyday asceticism and revolutionary reorganization of life dominated. In the 1930s, the idea of kulturnost’ prevailed, which promoted rehabilitation of coziness and consumer values. In the 1950-60s, ideological opposition between Soviet Union and the West got special attention, which resulted in the development of the idea of Soviet taste. The discourse of the 1970s was built around the frame of dematerialization. Thus, in this article it was shown, that the ideology of consumption, which regulated the attitudes toward consumer goods, was not monolithic during the whole period, and the official attitudes toward clothes and consumption were different in different periods of Soviet history. Such transformations were complex combinations of changes in politics, economics, culture and daily life. References Adorno T.W. and Horkheimer M. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 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