David Crowley

Susan E. Reid

Much has been written about the workings of communist governments in the USSR and the Soviet bloc, yet there is still a great deal to explore regarding their relationship to the everyday lives of the citizens living under them. This third volume builds on the editors’ Style and Socialism and Socialist Spaces, showing how the rise of consumer culture took a unique form in these countries. Essays from top scholars address topics ranging from fashion and game shows to smoking and camping. The authors of the essays in this collection investigate the ways in which pleasurable activities, like many other facets of daily life, were both a space in which these communist governments tried to insinuate themselves and thereby further expand the reach of their authority, and also an opportunity for people to assert their individuality.

Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc

Pleasures in Socialism

This fascinating book takes as its premise the notion that material culture can help explain the experience of state socialism as lived by ordinary people in Eastern Europe. It provides a revealing window through which to examine the interaction between official state rhetoric and state command on the one hand, and the popular applications of the state's material products on the other. From street fashion to modern art, from the design of state buildings to wallpaper, interconnections between politics and ideology, cultural policy formation and consumption are shown to be a matter of complex negotiation.

Susan E. Reid

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