The Socialist Good Life

Desire, Development, and Standards of Living in Eastern Europe

Cristofer Scarboro, Diana Mincyte, Zsuzsu Gille, Cristofer Scarboro, Diana Mincyte, Zsuzsa Gille

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780253047809
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Osteuropäische Geschichte

"First-class, rigorously researched, richly documented, and thought-provoking" essays on the consumer experience in socialist Eastern Europe (Graham H. Roberts, author of Material Culture in Russia and the USSR ). As communist regimes denigrated Western countries for widespread unemployment and consumer excess, socialist Eastern European states simultaneously legitimized their power through their apparent ability to satisfy consumers' needs. Moving beyond binaries of production and consumption, the essays collected here examine the lessons consumption studies can offer about ethnic and national identity and the role of economic expertise in shaping consumer behavior. From Polish VCRs to Ukrainian fashion boutiques, tropical fruits in the GDR to cinemas in Belgrade, The Socialist Good Life explores what consumption means in a worker state where communist ideology emphasizes collective needs over individual pleasures.

ONE

THE PLEASURES OF BACKWARDNESS

ZSUZSA GILLE CRISTOFER SCARBORO DIANA MINCYTĖ

Socialism in Eastern Europe was designed to do two things: overcome backwardness and, in so doing, fulfill human needs at ever higher levels. From the beginning, communist readings of political economy were tied to the promise that industrial production would generate plenty and, if properly organized, bring human happiness in its train. This understanding served as the master plot of communism, holding together the Soviet Union and the socialist societies of Eastern Europe from beginning to end. In this reading—a reading shared by Communist Party planners and those writing in the West—Eastern Europe lagged behind the developed states of the industrial heartland. Communism was designed as a means to allow these societies to catch up to and eventually surpass the West in providing a good life increasingly measured in goods.

WHAT KIND OF PLEASURE? WHAT KIND OF BACKWARDNESS?

By both of these measures—pleasure and backwardness—the socialist experiment has generally been found wanting.¹ Collapse and the lingering shadow of the Cold War have served to indict the socialist systems on both counts: in this story, state socialism was neither able to overcome backwardness nor produce pleasure. Our volume asks us to rethink these metrics.

To begin with, it is worth remembering the relatively impressive records of the Eastern European systems in overcoming backwardness and developing modern industrial societies. If socialism was, in large part, a means to replicate the productive capacity of the capitalist West, if not its social structure, much progress was made in the postwar years. Amid great privation and no small amount of terror and coercion, the first decades of the postwar years produced societies in Eastern Europe that echoed their cousins in the West by most measures of development—no small feat considering where East and West stood during the interwar years and the level of destruction wrought by the war itself. Across Eastern Europe, from the early 1960s until the slowdown of the late 1970s, people continued to see their purchasing power, social provisions, and opportunities for leisure advance. All of Europe participated in the “miracle years” that saw a postwar economic boom and resulting social transformation.²

As our anthology demonstrates, these transformations were felt and lived differently across the region. In Bulgaria, where industrialization began from a low base, the gap between backwardness and development seemed to close at breakneck speed, ushering in new worlds seemingly overnight. This process was not uncritically experienced, as Mary Neuburger’s chapter demonstrates. Development meant worlds gained and lost. It also posed the question of what socialism was developing into. To many, “developed socialism” seemed like wishful thinking, and, as an idea, it obscured more than it clarified. It is worth rereading literature emerging from and about what came to be called the late socialist period to recapture the spirit of the age: that of rapid growth (albeit with inflated numbers and suspect reporting). Official growth rates in Bulgaria during the 1960s and 1970s ranged between 7.5 percent and 9 percent annually. The seventh Bulgarian Five-Year Plan (1976–80) called for growth rates of 9.1 percent.³ This had real results on the ground. From 1965 through 1981, per capita meat consumption rose from 48 to 61 kilograms annually; consumption of milk rose from 148 to 198 liters; eggs from 167 to 203.⁴ By 1984, 70,000 apartments were built each year in Bulgaria.⁵ In contrast to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia had a much higher level of industrialization prior to the Second World War—there the question of development and developmental models was much less clear. Even in the more advanced (or less backward) regions of Eastern Europe, however, the development of a socialist middle class was borne out in these statistics and in the lived experience of those in the region.

By the 1960s, the line between first and second worlds was becoming much thinner. Per capita consumption of meat in East and West was comparable between 1950 and 1978. During that period, Greece’s meat consumption grew fastest, increasing by a multiple of 6, but Austria’s increased by a multiple of 2.8, Belgium and Luxembourg’s by 2, and France’s by 1.9, while Hungary’s increased by 2.09, Yugoslavia’s by 3.19, and Czechoslovakia’s by 2.5. Lest one thinks this is because their consumption levels were still low in comparison to Westerners’, Czechoslovakia’s meat consumption level was at 83.4 kilograms, East Germany’s (GDR) at 86.2 kilograms, and Hungary’s at 71.2 kilograms, while Austria’s and Switzerland’s was 83 kilograms.⁶ The comparison of per capita dairy consumption shows greater growth in the former socialist countries: while between 1950 and 1978 many capitalist countries barely increased or even decreased their dairy intake, Yugoslavia and many other socialist countries more than doubled their dairy consumption. The growth rate of radio and television subscribers per one thousand people between 1960 and 1978 was the largest in the socialist countries.⁷

Fig. 1.1. Visit to the pediatrician. Hungary, 1982. Source: Fortepan.

While it is important to relate these data to how much individuals had to work for them, such comparisons must take into consideration the broader context of collective consumption that was free or heavily subsidized, such as health care, education at all levels, public transportation, meals provided at schools and workplaces, vacation, cultural consumption (movies, theaters, concerts), and other free leisure activities for children and adults alike (see figs. 1.1–1.2). It is telling that Cold War–era American studies on the comparison of living standards between the USSR and the United States came to the conclusion that “everything was cheaper [measured in work time] in the West, except for rent,” only by excluding health care costs, vacation, transportation, childcare, and schooling expenses in their consumer basket.⁸

Fig. 1.2. College dorm, collective leisure activities. Hungary, 1949. Source: Fortepan.

We have data on collective consumption in Hungary in the 1970s, during which time the share of one’s income coming from social welfare (in cash and in kind—such as health care, day care, education, vacation and cultural goods, meal plans, and medication subsidies) increased from 22.6 percent to 30.8 percent.⁹ While data such as these are selective and come from Communist Party sources, the overall trend was clearly one of continuous elevation of consumption levels—individual and collective—at least until the 1980s, and as such, these data raise questions about the common backwardness narrative.

As Anne Dietrich’s chapter notes, the East German experience was complicated by the existence of an alternative Germany emerging to the West. This Western example—a means of assessing success and failure in the East—shadowed the socialist experiment everywhere. This was particularly true in questions of consumption, which increasingly became a space where people in the East and West came to terms with conceptions of the life well lived. By this metric, we have long assumed that Eastern Europeans lived less well than their Western neighbors. Long lines for underpowered cars served as both a marker of progress made and distances yet to be traveled.¹⁰ During the Cold War, levels of consumption were considered the primary measure of levels of development, the relative merits of communism and capitalism, and whether one could be considered to belong to “Europe.” (As Tetiana Bulakh’s chapter makes clear, this is still very much the case in postsocialist Eastern Europe.)

Until recently, scholarship has focused on socialist Eastern Europe as a space of dearth and boredom. In both East and West, pleasure is generally understood materially: standards of living helpfully quantified through gross domestic products. If pleasure existed in Eastern Europe, it was bought cheaply through shoddy goods insufficiently distributed. People found pleasure by making do in a world less shiny and compelling than the West. The failure and ultimately the collapse of communism were the results of this lag in development—as Eastern European states abandoned state socialism, they rejoined Europe. History derailed became history confirmed.¹¹ The years 1989 and 1991 proved that there were no alternatives to the liberal democratic capitalist model, a story that found a welcome audience in the West.

We should take these perspectives seriously but should read them with the understanding that the socialist middle class that developed in Eastern Europe was a socialist middle class. Throughout the late socialist period, party leaders and their would-be subjects worked to develop a socialist model of a consumer society. Programs to raise the standard of living (in Bulgaria adopted by the December Plenum of the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1972) became a central plank in what Patrick Hyder Patterson understands as a “hard bargain” between the party and its increasingly demanding citizenry. And the party thought creatively about how to best solve the question of consumption. As Brian Porter-Szűcs notes, party leaders sought to harness the “animal spirits” of consumer desire to create a socialist world rooted in personal consumption. Shortage was an unhappy and dangerous byproduct of state planning within a system that, by many measures, was a success.

If we understand this middle class not in Marxian terms, as defined by its relationship to the means of production, but rather, as it is done in American stratification studies, as a stratum with a comfortable lifestyle, leading a more or less petit bourgeois existence, we might see the irony: a society aimed at transcending, if not eradicating, capitalism ended up incubating a massive social group that was the ideological opposite of the Leninist concept of the working class—that is, collectively minded and whose class consciousness arose out of its productive and collective contribution to society rather than from its ability to achieve individual levels of material comfort.

It is undeniable that it was exactly such a new middle stratum that emerged under late socialism. This socialist middle class expressed and lived their own new visions about what the good life should look like.¹² Often, these visions coincided with the material pleasures of consumption under state socialism—a reduction of working hours, the increased emphasis on private life, and the gratifications of the domestic sphere. The socialist middle class also enjoyed high levels of economic certainty, much like its Western counterparts, but unlike them, this resulted primarily from full employment and from their free access to education, health care, cultural activities, retirement, and various social benefits. Yet experiences of real existing socialism often contradicted and complicated these visions. Old communists bemoaned the lack of voluntary and collective enthusiasm of the postrevolutionary generations;¹³ tourists complained about underfunded facilities; and audiences in art galleries fretted about the socialist content of paintings and the meaning and message of an increasingly mechanized world.¹⁴ The pleasures, expectations, and fears of the new socialist middle class emerged in settings familiar yet foreign to the world of liberal democratic capitalism.

Socialism was to be about more than satisfying the material requirements of a good society. It was, equally importantly, to free people from the tyranny of the “alienated, consumerist outlook of bourgeois consumer society,” allowing them to become “versatile, harmoniously developed, active, creative individuals.”¹⁵ Socialism was designed as an alternative modernity—an improvement on capitalist systems. Ultimately, the socialist projects in Eastern Europe were meant to transform the material base of the country in order to bring about new outlooks and capacities within those living in the new society.¹⁶ The goods were to be a means to an end. A new material culture and new social cosmologies were to emerge from the transformed political economy of the region.

Late socialism was centrally animated by discussions about the relationship between social needs, desires, and the question of pleasure. Baked into these conversations was real fear of social and cultural changes not only among the higher party echelons but also among citizens who loathed the loss of morality and values. In this sense, the proliferation of consumer goods played a central role in the developing social contract undergirding the state socialist system: consumption was a site of negotiating one’s place in the socialist state.

Marxist readings of history and development promised that the transformation of the material base in Eastern Europe would lead to new ways of living in the world.¹⁷ Unfortunately for the parties in the region, the gap between material reality and developed consciousness was understood to be both historically determined and resistant to centrally planned education and programs.¹⁸ This did not stop them from trying. States in the region poured tremendous resources into social and cultural programs to cultivate and promote an ideologically sound and profoundly meaningful—perhaps even pleasurable—good life in socialist Eastern Europe.¹⁹ State su...