![](https://brewminate.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/042323-14-History-Fashion.jpg)
The State and the ruling Party promised to satisfy the needs of its citizens, a promise they could not possibly keep.
![](https://brewminate.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/JukkaGronow100.jpg)
By Dr. Jukka Gronow
Professor of Sociology
Uppsala University
![](https://brewminate.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/SergeiZhuravlev100.jpg)
By Dr. Sergei Zhuravlev
Senior Researcher
Institute of Russian History
Russian Academy of Sciences
Economic Growth and Consumption
The foundations of the Soviet centrally planned economy were laid in the late 1920s and 1930s during the two first five year plans with their programs of agricultural collectivization and general industrialization. The basic principles remained intact until the fall of the Soviet Union. Despite some minor changes of emphasis in the economic policy, most notably in the 1950s and early 1960s after Stalin’s death, investments in heavy industry, in the production of energy, and in metallurgy and machine building, enjoyed a high priority compared with light or consumer goods industries. Heavy industry was further favored in that its workers were better paid than the workers in light industry, trade or services. It was also prioritized when, for instance, new machines and technology were imported from the West. The textile and garment industry as well as the food industry, both of which made up a large share of the consumer goods (light) industry, suffered from all these systematic weaknesses. Soviet politicians and planners tried to compensate for this chronic lack of resources through rationalization and standardization. By producing highly standardized items in huge production units and in great quantities the authorities hoped to cope with the shortages and to gradually satisfy the population’s basic needs. Such economic conditions and rules severely limited the fashion industry. On the other hand, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its government promised its loyal citizens increasing well-being and they were encouraged to expect their standard of living to rise rapidly in the future. Soviet consumers therefore had a legitimate right to expect the production and distribution of better quality and more varied clothes in the future. The garment factories as well as the various trade organizations had to take demand more seriously and try to better satisfy their customers. Expectations were understandably particularly high after the victorious war, during which the population had been deprived of almost all the comforts of everyday life.
A large share of the production capacity of the USSR was destroyed in the war and an overwhelming proportion of its industrial production had been targeted for military purposes. A large portion of industrial capacity had also been lost, left behind in occupied territories. For instance, in 1942 agricultural production fell to 40 percent of the 1940 level and the population of the Soviet-controlled areas had fallen by only one third.99 Many buildings and villages as well as industrial sites and factories were in ruins. People were living in dugouts and saunas. This was the context in which the Soviet Government and the Communist Party started planning the opening of new fashion houses.
![](https://brewminate.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/042323-19-History-Fashion.jpg)
Despite these heavy losses, the recovery of the Soviet economy after the war was rapid in some sectors. By the early 1950s pre-war levels of production had been reached in most areas of industry. The growth in the consumer durables sector was particularly speedy partly because many of the factories which had produced armaments and munitions now turned to peacetime production. As Davies concluded,
“by the end of the fourth five-year-plan (1946–1950) industrial production considerably exceeded, and agricultural production slightly exceeded, the pre-war level.”100
Agricultural production in particular suffered heavily from a reduced workforce as a result of war casualties and men not returning to the villages after demobilization. Once again the heavy industry received the highest priority in investments just as it had in the 1930s. However, the last years of Stalin’s reign witnessed a gradual increase in the relative share of investments in the consumer goods sector.
The pre-war levels of consumption had been low in part as Davies claims, the “real income per wage earner outside agriculture may have fallen by nearly 50 percent between 1928 and 1940.” However, since more people now lived in the cities and other urban settlements and had become wage earners they earned more and often lived better than the kolkhoz peasants in the countryside. A move from the kolkhoz to the city often increased the incomes of these families and thus raised the general living standards of the population. Due to rapid urbanization and also to the fact that very little new housing was built at all before the war, urban provision fell from 8.3 square meters per head in 1926 to 6.7 square meters in 1940. At the beginning of the war many people were living in rapidly deteriorating houses in the Soviet countryside. On the other hand, state expenditure on health and education increased rapidly during these pre-war years. Investment in the defense industry grew most rapidly in the 1930s.101
Despite the very modest-and at many times and in many areas, such as housing, practically non-existent increase in general living standards of the Soviet people the basic elements of the Soviet infrastructure of trade was created during the relatively short period in the second half of the 1930s and in the immediate post-war years.102 This included “commercial” food and other stores, department stores, restaurants, canteens and cafés. Alongside the “commercial” shops, in which people could buy food and other consumer goods at fixed prices with their own money earned as wages and salaries, consumer items were delivered and distributed to the population through various systems of closed outlets and rationing. This system of closed distribution and rationing reached its peak during the war years (such measures were typical in all the European nations engaged in the war) and varied in importance and extension in different periods of Soviet power.103 At least locally and for shorter periods of time, rationing of basic food items continued through almost the whole Soviet period. The importance of various closed outlets and distribution systems including fashion ateliers (access to which was often experienced as a special privilege among Soviet citizens) also varied across the period.104 Exact figures or estimates for their increase are not available, but many observers state that their number grew rapidly during the 1970s and reached its peak in the last of the Brezhnev years. Paradoxically increasing production and availability of consumer goods and food items did not necessarily lead to the saturation of demand or to shorter queues in the shops. However well the Soviet economy seemed to function and the more it produced, the greater the discrepancy between supply and demand seemed to become. This was true in particular of the fashion and clothing industry.
ere were two main reasons for this extraordinary phenomenon, which was a perpetual problem for the Soviet government and the Communist Party. The centrally fuxed prices were one of the reasons. The state regulated prices of all consumer goods sold through the centralized trade system, food and clothes included: these were fixed and usually not allowed to rise. The products that the peasants sold on the kolkhoz markets were the only exception. The state strongly subsidized many products and services, like housing, basic food items, and children’s wear as well as fashion ateliers producing custom-made clothes. When the wages and salaries increased at the same time as prices and the production figures remained constant or grew only moderately, demand tended to exceed supply. The Soviet economy suffered from hidden inationary pressures which officially should not have existed at all in a centrally planned economy. Demand and supply should theoretically be in perfect balance in such an economy. The hidden ination was among other reasons due to the lack of qualified labor and competition in the workforce. Wages tended to increase more rapidly than officially planned.
![](https://brewminate.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/042323-15-History-Fashion.jpg)
Another reason was the rising expectations among the population of higher living standards which were, in fact, strongly encouraged by state propaganda, which liked to compare all kinds of economic indicators with those of the most advanced countries in the West. This peaceful competition reached almost epidemic proportions during Khrushchev’s last years in the early 1960’s: everything was compared against the measuring stick of the USA, the most advanced capitalist country in the world, which the USSR was supposed to reach and overcome in the near future. The scientific institutes of e State Planning Committee, GOSPLAN, were ordered to study the secrets of American productivity and experience in order to help make the Soviet economy more competitive. (Cf. Khrushchev’s most notorious promise of reaching the American production figures of beef in only a couple of years-with the help of, among other things, his forced program of cultivating maize and increasing chemical fertilization of farmed land.105) (Fig. 1)
Every Soviet citizen thus had the right to expect an improvement in his or her standard of living and in particular the improving availability of better and more varied consumer goods. They could complain to the authorities if they did or could not deliver what they promised. Complaining was in fact a legally guaranteed right of every Soviet citizen.106
The people’s voice was an essential part of the Soviet democracy as a weapon against the bureaucracy that threatened the Soviet system of government. The authorities had the obligation to register and investigate all complaints, even anonymous ones, which were addressed to them in people’s letters and reports. They encouraged people to submit their complaints not only in order to find scapegoats but also to correct wrongdoings and avoid negligence in the future. Consumer complaints could be addressed to several authorities using various means. Every shop and service center, like a fashion salon, shoe store, bank office or restaurant, had to have a notebook (kniga zhalob i predlozhenii) always at their customers’ disposal in which they could write down their complaints and suggestions. They could suggest how to improve the situation either in a particular case or in the whole consumer market, for instance by changing opening hours, improving the qualification of the personnel, or sewing more fashionable clothes from modern fabrics with bright colors.
During the annual or seasonal inspections the state inspectors were obliged to get thoroughly acquainted with these books. The director of the establishment had to answer for the complaints and, if the complaints proved to be legitimate and well founded, explain in detail how his or her organization intended to improve the situation and correct their mistakes. A Soviet consumer who was dissatised either with the services or consumer goods available could also complain directly to higher authorities in the central administration of the industry, service or trade concerned. Such instances equally had an obligation to take all these complaints seriously and demand an explanation from their subordinates who were the targets of these complaints. Furthermore, the local Communist Party organizations and cells in the organization of trade and industry were another important address for such complaints. Finally, consumers could always write complaints to the Soviet press. The newspapers were legally required to inspect, in every case, the cause of the complaint, demand an explanation from those concerned and give an answer to the person or persons who had submitted it, within a strictly limited period of time. Soviet newspapers often published their reader’s letters and, if they thought that the problem had wider resonance, they might send an investigative journalist to the site to find out what it was all about. Readers’ letters could address very concrete matters from the lack of the right size or color of summer shoes in the local shops to more general issues like the notoriously bad quality and limited variety of textile dyes produced in the whole country. Such complaints and reports were often one of the main topics in local evening newspapers. They were quite popular among readers and could fill up most of the columns of any single issue.107
The most common focuses of complaints were transport, housing and all kinds of consumer goods, clothing naturally included. The individual complaints could address the limited availability or total non-existence of certain goods, their bad quality, rude service and the long time needed to queue for them. Many complaints targeted the misuse of favors and corruption common in the delivery of scarce goods, as the main villain.108 Queues and queuing were particularly interesting topics since they were such an essential part of the Soviet culture of consumption. Queues had an informal ethical code of their own which in people’s minds regulated the moral righteousness of the social relations among those queuing. Breaking these rules was an offence which gave rise to many indignant comments and laments addressed to the authorities and the press.
![](https://brewminate.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/042323-20-History-Fashion.jpg)
The social institutions of complaint had an important role as a safety valve to citizens’ dissatisfaction, but complaining could give concrete results too. Individual consumers could in fact receive some goods or services to which they considered to have a legitimate right. They could get back the money they had paid for their new boots which had not lasted more than a couple of days, get a right to order a new suite from the tailor, or receive a better apartment or even a private car for which they had queued for years. Consumers’ complaints, if collected and systematically analyzed, also acted as a substitute for market research since, in spite of their somewhat ritualized form, they included important information about citizens’ genuine needs and wants.109 There are good reasons to think that complaints became more ritualistic over time, and many common people lost faith in their effectiveness in reaching the hoped for results.
The authorities tried to cope with the discrepancy between their promises and the real achievements in several ways: by propagating the value of more modest and decent ways of life less concentrated on the acquisition of material goods, by promoting higher “spiritual” values, and through the education of taste and introduction of various models and standards of rational consumption. The education of popular taste in which the fashion organizations were all involved in the Soviet Union was an integral part in these efforts to restrain the demand for extravagant or exclusive clothes. At the same time, the Soviet authorities promised almost unlimited growth and universal gratification of all the needs and demands of every consumer. As a matter of fact, this promise only concerned the so-called rational needs of man.
The concept of rational needs became an object of intense scientic research in the 1960s, after the approval of the third Program of the Communist party of the USSR in 1961. Philosophers, psychologists, social scientists and economists joined forces to study the biological and social genesis of human nature.110 They also studied Western theories, such as Maslow’s theory of the hierarchy of needs, with great interest. They all started from the presumption that human needs are not determined only biologically but always include important historical and cultural elements as well. Therefore, human needs are not stable and given once and for all but develop gradually alongside the general progress of society. An important conclusion for the economic planning followed from these considerations. The standards and goals used in planning the living standards of the Soviet citizens were not stable but had to be adjusted from time to time.
As a practical result of these studies the Soviet planners set concrete standards of rational needs for all fields of light industry. Such measures were, for instance, determined for the number of shoes and stockings each individual needed each year. The discussion of rational needs had direct implications for the politics of fashion as well. It was difficult to legitimate the change of fashion as answering any rational need. For instance, in 1969 the Soviet newspaper Ekonomicheskaya gazeta informed its readers that socialism had no real need for the rapid change of fashion:
“Research has proved that in our country as well as in the other socialist countries the demand for approximately 30 percent of all fashion styles of clothes and shoes remains the same for the period of three to five years. They make up 60 to 70 percent of the whole amount of production.”111
The All-Union scientific congress “Fashion and clothes design at the enterprises” which was held in Moscow in 1979 took up two actual topics: how to make the Soviet consumers’ needs more rational and how to react to the changing international fashion trends.112
It is understandable that the standards of rational needs could not be purely objective but always included a strong element of political consideration too. Even though it was easy to admit that all human beings needed shoes and stockings to keep their feet warm, it was another matter to determine how many and what kind of shoes they in fact needed every year. In any case, these standards had an important practical and propagandistic role in Soviet economic planning.113 The standards used as targets in various fields of light industry were usually set somewhat higher than the prevailing standard of living but not too high. The behavior and the expectations of the Soviet youth were of special interest to the researchers of rational needs since they were thought to represent the future and could also be more easily molded with the help of education and propaganda.114
Stalin’s death in 1953 and, in particular, Khrushchev’s first years of power witnessed a remarkable reorientation in the economic policies of the country even though some tentative shifts had been noticed even before then. The most important change concerned the politics of agriculture:
“Investment in agriculture was sharply increased, and by 1958 reached 250 percent of the 1953 level.”115
![](https://brewminate.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/042323-21-History-Fashion.jpg)
These major investments in agriculture, together with improvements in the economic and social position of the rural population and peasants, were probably the most far reaching reforms. They proved to be irreversible. No political leader or regime after Khrushchev changed this basic orientation. Due to the “Virgin Lands” program, under which huge areas of previously uncultivated land were taken into agricultural use, mainly in Kazakhstan in Central Asia and the Altay region of the Russian Federation, the total area of land sown rose by 17 percent during the period 1953–1957. The monetary incomes of collective farmers more than doubled between 1953 and 1958. These reforms had the desired effect, increasing agricultural output by 55 percent between 1950 and 1960.116 Khrushchev’s historical initiative to buy and import, for the first time in Soviet history, major amounts of grain from the West to combat the effects of a bad harvest in 1963 proved to be decisive. Due to these measures general famine did not plague the Soviet population after the 1950s-even though occasionally and locally the Government still had to take resort to food rationing even later. Due to the same measures the standard of living of the bulk of the population increased substantially for the first time since the 1920s. Income differentials, which had been very high even according to international (capitalist) standards, also leveled out during Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s early years in power, only to increase again in Brezhnev’s later period.117
One can agree with Davies’ conclusion that the “1950s and the early 1960s were the golden years of the Soviet administrative economy.”118 These coincided with the establishment of the Soviet system of fashion design and industry. According to Soviet statistics the real income of the population increased 2.5 times between 1940 and 1960 and 4 times between 1940 and 1970.119 The future of the Soviet economy looked bright. This was not only due to the rapid and promising economic growth and increase in the general standard of living-admittedly from a very low start-but also to the general optimism which permeated the society and its ruling circles. These were also the times when the Soviet economy could quite reasonably be thought to be in an orbit that would, not too far in the future, cross the trajectory of economic growth of the most advanced capitalist country, the USA. The Soviet citizens could also have faith in the fact that Soviet society was now really approaching its officially expressed ideals of socialism.120 The authorities were fighting against corruption, income differences decreased, collective services and goods were promoted, housing stock increased rapidly, daily working hours were reduced, investments in education and health care increased, minimum wages and pension schemes were introduced, and so on. The acceleration of new housing construction had a direct impact on the general standard of living (the stock of urban housing more than doubled between 1950 and 1965).121 The gap between the production of capital goods and consumer goods was much narrower now than in the 1930s.
The rapid growth rates of the 1950s were, however, achieved at a high cost. The rate of investment was very high. As economic historians rather unanimously explain, the rapid economic growth that created great hopes among the Soviet ruling circles as well as among the common people was based on the increase in the three main production factors, capital, labor and land, and much less, compared to the capitalist West, on the increase in productivity of these factors. In the 1950s, labor was available in excess through immigration from the countryside. When economic growth slowed down in the 1960s, only to become even slower in later Soviet times, it demanded even more investments to keep it going.122 In addition to natural factors like bad harvests, the main reasons for this slow-down seemed to be the following: the low productivity of labor in agriculture which demanded increasing investments in order to perform better or even as well as before, and the slowness to generate and introduce technical innovation which would have increased the productivity of labor and capital. In 1955 the State Committee on New Technology was created to promote the introduction of new technology into the Soviet economy. Khrushchev, and in particular Brezhnev, tried to combat the low rate of inventiveness and technological progress in Soviet industry by importing foreign technology and know-how. The buying of whole industrial complexes on a turnkey basis started with Khrushchev, who bought huge chemical plants from abroad in order to modernize the production of chemical fertilizers. The Togliatti car construction factory – bought from Fiat in Italy in the late 1960s – was the most spectacular and most advertised of these industrial mega-import projects.123 This, as well as the increase-even though quite modest-foreign imports, food, clothes and textile included, tourism and other kinds of cultural exchange, opened the country in many ways to more direct foreign influences and Western models of consumption. In the beginning of the 1970s, after the oil crises and the rapid rise in the price of oil, the USSR income from its oil exports increased remarkably, which again allowed it to import more machinery and consumer goods, grain included.
In general the introduction of novelties was a bottleneck in the Soviet economy. It was not encouraged enough economically. On the contrary, it could often be economically quite disadvantageous to an enterprise. As Hanson put it, “the Soviet economy was particularly weak in two areas: agricultural production and the introduction and diffusion of new products and processes.”124 It is understandable that fashion in particular, with its seasonally changing styles and repeated introduction of novelties, wasa major problem in the centrally planned economy.
![](https://brewminate.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/042323-22-History-Fashion.jpg)
The Soviet authorities and experts tried to combat these problems. They talked about the necessity of changing from extensive economic growth to intensive growth by various measures and reforms and put great hopes in the capacity of science to generate technical innovations of a new kind and at a totally new level, or the scientific technical revolution as the Soviets called it. Systems theory and new big computers were expected to soon solve many of the technical problems of central planning. Some economists were convinced that with the help of systems theory they could learn to better plan and control even the fashion cycles by learning to better forecast and control trends in fashion.
Despite these economic problems generally recognized by the Soviet leadership and economic experts in the 1970s, no new major economic reforms were suggested or tried after 1965 until Gorbachev’s perestroika in the mid-1980s. (In practice and informally economic enterprises were nevertheless allowed more flexibility in their operations.) Hanson emphasized, however, the importance of another non-economic factor: the slackening of the control of the authoritarian state, which Khrushchev started and which was never seriously questioned by any of his successors.
“He weakened the social control on which an authority-intensive economic system depended.”125
It is of course pure speculation to wonder whether the tightening of this social control – ideologically or by force – would have made the use of resources in the economy any more effective, in particular taking into account the multiplication of the economic units and the increasing complexity reached by the whole economic system in the 1960s. For instance, the authorities tried to cope with the problems plaguing the fashion industry by opening several parallel and partly competing fashion organizations, not by tightening their central control. The new demands of a more qualified, specialized workforce also made the old direct methods of command and control more problematic. As the permanent tensions between the tendencies of increased central control and the increasing independence of the economic units showed, detailed control from above of their all movements had become increasingly difficult, costly and oen counter-productive.
Despite the gradual slowdown of economic growth aer the second half of the 1960s, the general standard of living did improve even during those years, even though more slowly than before. According to Hanson126 consumption increased quite rapidly even between 1963 and 1973, 3.9 percent per annum per capita: “It was not, by West European or North American standards, a time of plenty, but it was unquestionably a time of real improvement.”127 The figures in some particular fields of consumer goods production prove that by the 1960s – and even more so during the 1970s-the major problems were no longer the quantities produced but their distribution, availability and quality. According to statistics collected by the CIA, hosiery and knitwear production increased from 17.74 million pieces and pairs in 1950s to 103.77 million in 1970.128 The production of socks and stockings increased from about 500 million pairs in 1950 to 1,338 million pairs in 1970.129 The amount of leather footwear increased from 272 million pairs in 1955 to 456 million pairs in 1962.130 The share of import in the sales of these consumer goods was always quite modest. For instance only 8 percent of all leather shoes were imported to the USSR as late as 1980.131 The Soviet Union exported only 2–3 percent of the consumer goods it produced to other countries and imported – in different years in the 1960–1980s – from 12 to 18 percent.132
In some areas of consumer goods production the state provisioning was, however, rather successful, at least in quantitative terms, and did not lag much behind the capitalist West. In the late 1960s and 1970s some consumer durables and items of home technology that belonged to any standard household in the West, like sewing machines, TV sets, radio receivers, refrigerators and washing machines, had also become quite common in Soviet households. In 1973 the USSR had, per thousand people, 216 radios, 295 TV sets, 142 refrigerators and 173 washing machines.133 Moreover,a large assortment of TV sets of various models and price classes, produced by a great number of factories, were available on the market – whether they really were available in practice at the same time and place to most of the customers is another question. Despite these achievements the Soviet Union clearly lagged behind leading Western countries in all these fields of consumer goods. In the USA almost every household owned one or even more TV sets, radio receivers and refrigerators and the most advanced Western European countries were following rapidly. The discrepancy in favor of the capitalist West was even more drastic in the number of private cars as well as in the general standard of housing. Compared to the average level of wages these durable goods, the possession of which the great majority of American households took for granted, were also much more expensive in the USSR.
![](https://brewminate.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/042323-23-History-Fashion.jpg)
The rapidly increasing production figures of textiles and clothing, as well as many other consumer goods, tell only part of the story. Due to the low quality of the consumer goods produced by Soviet industry and distributed to citizens a large percentage of the annual production was returned to the shops after purchase. According to a study of household budgets in 1986, citizens had made complaints about the quality of the things they had bought in about 20 percent of the cases as far as knitwear was concerned, over 15 percent in other clothes and as much as 35 percent in shoes.134 Boots and shoes were a particular problem since, unlike clothes, people could not make or repair them at home.
It was a generally known fact among the population and to a great extent acknowledged even by the authorities that the service sector remained underdeveloped all through Soviet times. There was a rapid increase in the post-war years but it did not grow much after 1965. For instance, the number of shoe shops increased from 295 in 1940 to 2583 in 1965 but remained almost the same after that. The same was true of clothing shops: their amount increased from a meager 173 in 1940 to 2701 in 1965 but had not reached even three thousand by 1980. The chain of shops selling knitwear, underwear, accessories and cosmetics grew more rapidly.135 The share of workers in trade and public catering is even more telling of the low emphasis on services in the USSR. Only 6.6 percent of all those employed in the national economy worked in these sectors in the USSR in 1988. In the USA the corresponding figure was 16.7 and in Japan 16.2 percent.136 269 workers per ten thousand people worked in trade and public catering in the USSR, compared to 772 in the USA and 785 in Japan in the same year.137 It was quite obvious that Soviet citizens were served by remarkably fewer (2–3 times fewer) personnel in trade and the service sector than was the case in the capitalist West. The salaries in the trade and service sectors were also lower than in most other branches of the Soviet economy, a sign of their low official status in the USSR.
At the same time, at the end of the 1980s, according to the official statistics, the Soviet Union had one barber’s shop or hairdresser per 5.5, one photo studio per 18.4 and one dry cleaner’s shop per 141.9 thousand inhabitants.138 In the 1970s these services were increasingly concentrated in bigger cities and local centers in the houses of everyday services (Doma byta) under the Ministries of Everyday Services. These units were quite large, with many employees. In many ways they followed the model well known from Western shopping centers or malls which combined several service and trade units of various kinds under the same roof. Soviet service centers also had, as a rule, a fashion atelier where the local customers could order custom made clothes. Just like many other enterprises of the service sector and trade, their number increased rapidly in the 1960s, from 24.000 in 1959 to 40.000 in 1970. After that their numbers hardly grew at all. The amount of shoemakers’ shops in the whole country remained more or less the same, at about 30.000, during this whole period.139
![](https://brewminate.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/042323-16-History-Fashion.png)
Despite these improvements the GNP per capita never exceeded much over 35 percent of that of the USA. The best years in this respect were from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s. At the end of the 1970s and in particular in the 1980s the Soviet economy slowed down remarkably. Despite the slowing of its growth rates, the general material well-being of the Soviet population was highest in the 1980s. The Soviet consumer goods industry produced at that time three pairs of shoes, 27 square meters of cotton textiles, 2.4–2.7 square meters of woolen textiles and 7 square meters of silk per capita per year.140 (Fig. 2)
Economic-Administrative Reforms
In 1957, Khrushchev started a general administrative reform by creating Sovnarkhozy (Councils of the People’s Economy), new kinds of regional organs of economic administration which replaced the previous ministries responsible for the administration of the various fields of industry on the All-Union level. This reform was motivated by the need for coordinating economic management in the regions and directed against the excessive centralization of economic decision making in Moscow. The Sovnarkhozy had total economic jurisdiction within their region. The ministries of light, food and local industry were closed down and their enterprises converted to these new Sovnarkhozy. Under these circumstances Gosplan became more important as almost the only coordinating organ on the All-Union level. The whole territory of the USSR was divided into big economic-administrative regions on the basis of the former regions (oblast’) or Soviet republics. In 1957, 70 such regional Sovnarkhozy were established in the RSFSR, 11 in Ukraine, 9 in Kazakhstan, 4 in Uzbekistan and one for all the other, smaller republics. The three Baltic republics, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, formed one Sovnarkhoz each. Soon their overall number was reduced to 47. The purpose of this reform was to make the economy more effective by creating bigger economic production units and encouraging cooperation at the regional level. This was done by combining a large number of previously independent production units into a new, bigger complex enterprise that could better utilize the local resources and assets. In 1960, the third administrative system in the Soviet production of consumer goods, the cooperatives, was closed down. Thus the new Sovnarkhozy were, in the beginning of the 1960s, expected to administer all the enterprises of consumer goods industry in their own region of three previously separate administrative economic systems: the Ministry of Light Industry, the Ministry of Local Industry and the cooperatives. In practice, they were responsible for the future of tens of thousands of production units, which they centralized with a heavy hand into locally and regionally integrated big industrial conglomerates. The system of cooperative enterprises was now closed down. It contained 54.700 enterprises in 1956 which, according to different sources, employed together between 1.2 million and 1.8 million workers.141
The result of these administrative reforms was the creation of big “Soviet firms” or industrial conglomerates usually uniting one main big enterprise with several smaller or medium sized production units that fulfilled complementary functions and produced some smaller parts for the needs of the main firm. This could help the main enterprise to produce, for instance, more fine clothes with various accessories and details. The results were controversial. After Khrushchev resigned from power in 1965 the whole system was shut down and the old ministries, working in their functionally divided fields, were re-established. Everything was not restored, however. The structure of economic administration had changed for good. For instance, in Leningrad alone the total number of 400 enterprises of local industry had been reduced to less than half, 163.142
When the old system of economic ministries was re-established in 1966 these big enterprises were mostly not dispersed. The enterprises of light industry were preserved in full state ownership and placed under two separate administrative systems, those of the Light and Local Industries. The decision to close down the system of the production cooperatives remained in effect and neither were many of the previous production units of local industry returned under the newly re-established Ministry of Local Industry. They had either been totally liquidated or become an integral part of their new, large mother enterprises. The productivity of labor in the enterprises of local industry and the cooperatives was undoubtedly much lower than in the bigger enterprises of the Ministry of Light Industry.143 This was not only the result of their smaller size but also the fact that they were, compared to the bigger “real industrial” units, as a rule underfinanced and did not receive modern machinery or technology from the state. Often they simply inherited old machines from bigger industrial enterprises. On the other hand, they often made use of the local raw materials and could produce consumer goods, clothes, dresses and accessories that were better adapted to the needs and habits of the various localities. By producing smaller amounts of each of their products they also acted as a welcome alternative to the highly standardized mass production of big industry.
![](https://brewminate.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/042323-17-History-Fashion.jpg)
However, the Soviet policy of consumption all through Soviet times prioritized the satisfaction of the basic needs of the population by producing in as great a number as possible a few standardized items. (Fig. 3) The closing of many parallel, smaller units of local industry and cooperatives often totally stopped the production of many necessary and popular items of consumption – not to speak of their diminishing assortment – which the authorities regarded as less important or prestigious. It was not at all uncommon that, at the same time as new TV sets and refrigerators were on sale in the Soviet shops one often had to search for such “trivial” or “low-tech” goods as needles, threads, colorful ribbons. According to the established division of labor, local industry was mainly responsible for producing all such small and technically simple consumer goods since they were not regarded as profitable enough for bigger industry. Therefore it was difficult to guarantee their regular availability in shops all over the Soviet Union.
The reforms of 1965, often referred to as Kosygin’s144 reforms because the Soviet Prime Minister Aleksei Nikolaevich Kosygin was their main advocate, aimed at an increase in the productivity of labor in Soviet enterprises, this time by decentralizing economic decision making and by various kinds of economic stimuli attractive to both directors and workers alike. Kosygin had a background in the textile industry. Industrial enterprises could now earn bonuses for exceeding their sales and profitability targets, which produced higher payments into the bonus funds.145 To make the planning more effective and flexible, the indicators of economic performance were limited to basics. The enterprises could also use their own production-development funds for decentralized investments. One of the purposes of the reform was to promote (direct, that is not authorized and controlled via Moscow planning offices) inter-enterprise trade.
This major economic reform experienced a destiny similar to the previous ones. It met a lot of resistance from various quarters. Its implementation took a long time and was at best only half-hearted; only part of the economy ever adopted it; the ministries neglected it and simply went on using the same indicators as before. Gradually, after a few years it was more or less forgotten-even though some parts of it prevailed, like the bonus systems.
As Hanson argued, the main reason for its at least partial failure despite many good intentions and ideas was that there was, after all, not much that an enterprise could decide on independently outside of the central plans and administration:
“If nearly all the output of nearly all enterprises was covered by production and allocation plans, enterprises had next to nothing in which they could trade with one another … all (or almost all) tools and building materials were pre-empted by existing allocation plans, they already had an address to go to.”146
In his opinion, “Only if enterprise output targets were done away altogether, and centralized supply allocations along with them, would it really have been possible to decentralize economic decision making.”147
These well-meant reforms stopped half way because their introduction brought to light problems and discrepancies that could not be handled as long as the main directives of the system, and in particular its totally centralized mechanism of price formation and allocation of financial and other resources, remained intact. To take orders for new, higher quality goods from the trade organizations, for instance, often proved unprofitable to industry. The strictly centralized system of determining prices was one of the cornerstones of Soviet planning which the authorities were not at all willing to abandon. As Hanson claimed such economic reforms, even if on the one hand badly needed and recognized as necessary both by the majority of the economic experts and the political leaders, often proved to be counterproductive and therefore did not reach their goals. In consequence, they were often totally abandoned or modified to a great extent. After all, “…the traditional Soviet economic system was a coherent whole; modifications to it that devolved decision making, bringing internal inconsistencies, were likely to worsen economic performance…”148
The trade exhibitions organized annually from the early 1970s in the consumer goods industry are a good example of later and more limited efforts to improve market relations between the Soviet firms. Instead of any large scale economic reforms, a more extensive and unofficial decentralization of economic control took place gradually in the USSR in the 1960s and increasingly during Brezhnev’s later years in power in the 1970s and early 1980s. Western Sovietologists referred to it as Brezhnev’s “Little Deal” (introduced by James Millar in 1985 following Vera Dunham’s already classical label for Stalin’s “perestroika” in the early 1950s as Stalin’s own “Big Deal”149). The rapid growth and proliferation of unofficial economic activities, legal, half-legal and illegal, during Brezhnev’s times are all evidence of this “Little Deal.” As Millar argued,150
Brezhnev leadership struck a new but tacit bargain with the urban population: to tolerate the expansion of a whole range of petty private economic activities, some legal, some in the penumbra of the legal, and some clearly and obviously illegal, the primary aim of which was their allocation by private means of a significant fraction of Soviet national income according to private preferences.
![](https://brewminate.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/042323-24-History-Fashion.jpg)
It is important to note that this reallocation did not concern only consumer goods and services but also trade and exchange between economic enterprises. An extensive network of tolkachi, commissioned middle-men or contactors employed directly by the factories and trade organizations, were active in helping the firms to find the right exchange partners to get their necessary production materials and machines. To a great extent they acted completely legally, but in the Soviet economic system the borders between legal, semi-legal and illegal were negotiable and changed from time to time. Informal rules and practices, tolerated and even encouraged by the higher authorities, were often more important. They were tolerated particularly if they were regarded to be beneficial to the functioning and stability of the system. Millar’s main point is that during Brezhnev’s reign these unofficial practices became more numerous and more flexible. This did not mean that directors or vice directors of economic enterprises could no longer be put on trial and severely punished for their illegal activities. On the contrary, such widely publicized show trials served as important examples in drawing the lines between what was politically tolerated and what was not.
Millar’s original claim was, after all, rather hypothetical and rested more on theoretical reasoning about the functional needs of the system for more flexibility. It has also received empirical evidence in its support from, for instance, the analyses and comparison of the court cases publicized in the press and the publicly announced punishments in Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s times respectively151 as well as by the estimates of the rapid increase in income from the “shadow economy.” According to Bokarev’s estimates,152 illegal income increased more rapidly than the legal income of the population during the two post-war periods, the late 1950s and from the late 1960s onwards (his calculations end in 1974). Even though such calculations include many uncertainties, together with other similar evidence they make Millar’s thesis of Brezhnev’s Little Deal quite plausible.
According to Millar, as well as in the opinion of many other observers, semi-legal or illegal dealings involving private consumers were especially common in many service activities, for example hairdressing, auto services, electric appliance repair and medical care, as well as in the fashion ateliers and other Soviet units of domestic services. According to some unofficial calculations, the share of the second economy was, in many fields of services like home renovation, house or car repair huge covering 80–70 percent of the whole market in the 1970s.153 The share of the second economy must have been equally large in the clothing industry. At the same time it is a good example of the principal difficulty in determining exact limits to the second economy, which could include everything from asking a favor from a neighbor or a friend known to be good at sewing clothes to the private services of the workers of the state owned fashion ateliers and workshops using the facilities and raw materials available at their workplace. All the private persons operated illegally if they received any compensation for their work simply because they did not pay any taxes for their income. In this way the state lost huge amounts of potential income. e new service centers that the Soviet Government started opening in the 1960s regularly had a state owned fashion atelier. These were expected to gradually compete the private, small scale entrepreneurs out of business. Because of rapidly increasing demand they never seriously succeeded in threatening the status of the illegal or semi-legal business.
Almost everyone, including many prominent party members, KGB, and police officers, had obtained some goods this way, through relations or acquaintances, po blatu. From the point of view of formal legality, almost everyone was involved in illegal or at least semi-legal activities and could, if the authorities pressed the issue, be accused of breaking the rules. These “offenses” could certainly vary a great deal, from help and presents received from close relatives and family members, colleagues or friends who were in a position to have access to some-as such not very valuable and quite ordinary-goods and services, to small bribes and presents given to people who had the power to deliver valuable or scarce goods or services, such as apartments, cars, summer cottages, books, better cuts of beef, caviar or imported shoes and suits and to more serious and large scale bribing of one’s superiors and the representatives of the controlling organizations (“real,” large-scale economic criminality). As already mentioned these dealings could often go on for a long time and develop into permanent blat relations, of mutual giving and taking of “presents” and favors. In later Soviet times only some serious cases-or some warning examples-were publicly prosecuted. High-ranking Party members were often not put on trial. They were handled, if at all, by the responsible party organs which reprimanded them. Small offenses were often dealt only in a “heart to heart talk” between the offender and the representatives of his own Party organ. As Clark argued, the KGB collected evidence of such dealings that could incriminate party members, economic directors and civil servants but kept such evidence to itself. Thus it could, when needed, be used in internal power struggles among the nomenclature. (This was obviously the case when the Soviet leader Jury Andropov started the campaign against corruption in Moscow in 1983.154)
![](https://brewminate.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/042323-25-History-Fashion.jpg)
At times private economic activities could assume large proportions. For instance, some entrepreneurial local directors could organize wide networks between all kinds of industrial and trade enterprises which produced and sold, for instance, leather clothes and fur coats or shoes, privately alongside the official plans and budgets. The quite common practice of producing small series of fashionable clothes and selling them in the small boutiques adjoined to the fashion houses (firmennye magaziny) were a good example of Soviet entrepreneurship on the margins of the illegal and legal. It was at times tolerated but never authorized by the central authorities. The directors and leading designers of many fashion houses and ateliers were eager to start producing small series of their own designs, which gave much more freedom to their artistic creativity than the industrially mass produced clothes but was not as exclusive as the design of unique clothes for the ateliers. These experiments remained short-lived and were not allowed to grow remarkably. After all they did not really fit into the planned economy, which always favored highly standardized large scale production.
At the same time, “special access stores,” “closed” ateliers or medical clinics, as well as other special systems of distribution of goods and services prospered during Brezhnev’s later years.155 Due to the widespread permanent shortages of consumer goods, practically all important state institutions, like the ministries, Academy of Sciences and party and trade union divisions had their own shops, ateliers, medical centers, children’s summer camps and summer resorts, housing establishments, etc. which provided their own employees with highly-valued goods. One of the functions of these privileges was to act as incentives to labor. The employees had access to these privileges according to their official rank. For instance an academician, a full member of the academy, had access to better and more varied services than an ordinary researcher or doctor of science. The same was true of the employees of the Communist Party. All enjoyed privileges but the members of the Central Committee had more privileges than others and the members of the Politburo even more. There is no available general data about the various units of “closed” service, open only to the employees of a specific organization.156 Moscow had in the 1980s about 800 “closed” ateliers of individual sewing, open to a restricted clientele only, which was about as many as the number of all other, ordinary ateliers which were open to all customers without restrictions.
The Main Peculiarities of the Soviet Consumer Society
By the beginning of the 1960s the standard of living of most of the population, both urban and rural, had reached such levels that access to daily necessities, basic food items and clothing included, was more or less certain. The improvement was most rapid among the rural population since the starting conditions had been the lowest. The immigration of the rural population to the cities and the increasing monetary compensation of labor in the countryside (previously peasants were often paid in natural products and not in currency), the introduction of a general state pension system, and other similar measures led to the rapidly growing monetary demand for better food items and other consumer goods. An increasing share of such transactions and acquisitions took place on the market (either in state shops or in the kolkhoz peasant’s market). When, during Brezhnev’s later years, the income differentials were allowed to increase and the shadow economy and the illegal income from it increased remarkably, many people came to have money at their disposal. In addition, some groups of the population had a lot of money, legally and illegally earned, at their disposal. The percentage of the urban and educated population increased rapidly too. One could therefore claim that sometime during the late 1960s and early 1970s the basic elements and preconditions of the Soviet consumer society were created. There were people around who had money at their disposal, who were eager to consume new, more varied and better consumer goods of all kinds (“commodity hunger”) and whose level of aspiration was increasing and becoming more individualized.157 This had an impact on the Soviet fashion industry above all.
The relationship of the Communist Party and the Soviet authorities to all kinds of expressions of consumerism, or individual acquisitiveness, was highly ambivalent in practice. They both condemned it as a harmful remnant of the petit bourgeois mentality158 and at the same time expressed as their desired goal to reach or even overcome the material standard of living of Western Europe or the US – even if they did not unquestioningly buy into its whole “consumerist” lifestyle. The capitalist West was worth copying but only selectively. Even though Soviet society thus developed or copied with a short delay many features of the modern Western consumer society, it also radically differed from the latter in many important respects.
![](https://brewminate.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/042323-26-History-Fashion.jpg)
Due to the price policy which kept the prices of many ordinary consumer goods artificially low and stable as well as the hidden inflationary pressure caused by increasing wages, many goods, even the most ordinary ones, were in defitsit, in shortage. The demand for defitsit consumer goods exceeded their supply. While short-term shortages exist even in a market economy, under socialism many products could be in permanent short supply because their demand outgrew their supply more or less permanently due to their relatively low prices and limited volume of production. Private cars were among the best known examples of such defitsits but even many more mundane and less expensive consumer goods, like various garments and shoes, were often more or less in permanent short supply – or defitsits. Access to them demanded either long queuing, trips to the bigger cities, and a lot of effort, if they were at all available in ordinary shops. Despite rapid and even forceful increases in production, shortages and queues did not disappear. As the country became gradually richer, increasing amounts of the produced goods could not find buyers and languished on shop selves and in warehouses. They were either of bad quality, too expensive (compared to other, similar products) or simply not fashionable and stylish enough.
Since the import of foreign consumer goods was always quite limited, many foreign goods enjoyed a special aura of prestige and luxury. If available at all, there was a great shortage of them in the state shops and therefore they could be sold on the black market for exorbitant prices. This was particularly true of Western clothing and shoes, gramophone discs, cigarettes, cosmetics, and so on.159
In addition to the state-owned channels of distribution, consumer goods could be acquired in legal and illegal private markets where the prices were usually much higher. The kolkhoz market probably came closest to the “real market” with market prices in the USSR even though its price structure also depended on the prices and availability of food items in the state shops. An official secondhand market existed too and, even more importantly, a large informal black market. It is difficult to name any other piece of clothing that enjoyed as important a symbolic position in the consumer goods market of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s as the “American” jeans. Real American jeans, like Levis or Wrangler, were highly cherished and difficult to acquire trousers which could be sold on the black market for huge amounts of money. They could be compared to nylon shirts and stockings, legally or illegally imported from the West, which had a similar position in the 1950s. The reasons for their high value among the more fashion conscious Soviet population are easy to explain. They symbolized the modern Western and American style of life and were hard to get. The Soviet Union did import many consumer goods from the West, like nylon shirts and men’s suits from Finland, but the amounts were always small compared to the total size of the market. Even if clothes imported from the West were more expensive than their domestic counterparts there was no lack of Soviet customers ready to pay these higher prices. Lee Cooper jeans were, for instance, imported to the Soviet Union from Finland but never in great numbers.160 Instead, the Soviets produced their own jeans, a solution which was quite common in many other fields of light industry. Despite their obvious ideological connotations the Soviet textile industry made several efforts to start producing them in the 1970s. It faced serious technical problems in trying to produce good denim clothes made solely out of cotton. The first Soviet-made jeans saw day-light in 1973 and in 1975 Soviet industry produced 16.8 million jeans.161 In 1978 the denim fabric Orbita made wholly out of cotton went into production. According to Bartlett, this was the fifty-sixth attempt to produce real denim fabric in the Soviet Union.162 Earlier in the 1970s the Soviet industrialists had made efforts to buy denim fabric machines on license from the States but for some reason these attempts came to nothing.
By the end of the 1970s, Soviet-made jeans were, however, finally available to the Soviet youth in great quantities. They never succeeded in truly challenging the status of “real” American jeans which continued to be sold for high prices on the black market until the nal opening of the Russian consumer goods market to import from the West in the 1990s.
Since the state gave some important goods and services, like housing, medical care, public transport and basic education, more or less free of charge to customers, they did not have to use their money for these purposes, which often formed the greatest part of the household budgets in the advanced capitalist countries of the West. Again, access and availability were the main problems, not the price (that is, access to better medical services, apartments, summer cottages, better schools, sidestepping long queues, etc.).
The infrastructure of trade and services was underdeveloped in the Soviet Union compared with the developed capitalist countries, Japan included. Many better quality and more specialized services and goods were available only in a few big cities, Moscow in particular. This is certainly true in all countries to an extent – every village cannot have special shops and ateliers – but by all standards the Soviet system of distribution was much more centralized and concentrated in big cities and urban centers than was the case in the developed capitalist countries.
Regional differences in the provisioning of consumer goods and food items remained quite large all through Soviet times, both between big cities and smaller towns, between the town and countryside and between the Western Russian parts of the USSR and its more distant regions, like Central Asia. To take an example, in the 1980s and 1990s in Soviet Uzbekistan the share of clothing in the family budgets of workers and civil servants was only 17.4 percent, resp. 16.4 percent. Among the Uzbek kolkhoz peasants expenses for food were very high, over 40 percent.163 Taken into account that in Uzbekistan families had more members than in the European parts of Russia, one can draw the conclusion that an Uzbek family had much less money to use on the clothing of individual members than a family in Moscow or some other Russian town had. Under the circumstances of the serious shortages of many consumer goods, the state chose to pay less attention to the provisioning of the periphery than the center. The difference in the quality of life, standards of consumption and cultural possibilities between the town and the countryside, between the center and the periphery did not narrow but tended to become wider – which caused much dissatisfaction among the population.
![](https://brewminate.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/042323-18-History-Fashion.jpg)
Even though advertising and other types of commercial promotion of brands and specific commodities and services (an important feature of the Western consumer society) was limited in the USSR, news about new goods and services reached the populace quite widely via other channels. News and information about novelties was regularly publicized in the Soviet press. Special trade journals like the fashion journals were printed and circulated in large editions. The monthly journal Novye tovary (New Commodities) started in the mid- 1950s. It was quite popular and wholly dedicated to the presentation of the novelties of the Soviet consumer goods industry and trade, shoes, clothes and all kinds of accessories included. Among the many efforts to improve the consumer goods situation and to overcome the economy of shortages, one solution was to emphasize and invest in certain particular luxurious items of consumption, as spearheads of the Soviet trade and consumer goods industry, which were then advertised widely as the great achievements of the Soviet economy. They did not necessarily contribute much to the general quality of life of ordinary Soviet citizens. The numerous fashion houses and institutions are a good example of this kind of policy. Even though they certainly, despite many problems and shortcomings, did make a big difference in the mass production of clothing in the USSR, they acted as much as propagandists and role models of a better life to come with their exquisite fashion shows, luxurious fashion journals and fashion ateliers, which despite their relatively great numbers could naturally service only a very limited part of the urban population. These flagships of Soviet trade existed alongside an ever more centralized and standardized mass consumption. They gave inspiration and offered new designs to millions of Soviet women who sewed their own clothes at home or had them sewn in small ateliers. At the same time, they helped to preserve and even strengthen the role of traditional housework and female labor which officially should have been abolished from Soviet society, presumed to be living under the conditions of advanced, victorious socialism. For most women, the only way to dress themselves better and more fashionably was to sew their own clothes or to ask a colleague, neighbor or friend, well known for their sewing skills, to sew them following some new patterns published in a fashion journal or album. (Fig. 4)
The discrepancy between what the fashion houses propagated and presented in their shows and fashion journals and what was in fact for sale in the ordinary clothing shops kept up the dissatisfaction of the consumers and encouraged them to complain about the shortages, bad quality and meager assortment of clothes and accessories. As Zygmunt Bauman argued164, under socialism the State and the ruling Party promised to satisfy the needs of its citizens, a promise they could not possibly keep under the conditions of increasing diversification and individualization of consumers’ demand.
See endnotes and bibliography at source.
Chapter 3 (57-77) from Fashion Meets Socialism: Fashion Industry in the Soviet Union after the Second World War, by Jukka Gronow and Sergey Zhuravlev (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 03.06.2018), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.