Urban Lifestyle as an Element of Consumption Ideal and Economic Wellbeing: Meaning-changing Transformation from Soviet Period to Modernity

Abstract

A consumer society and consumption ideal had been developing in the USSR since the 1970s. The special features of this process were illustrated by the famous triad: “a car, an apartment and a country-house”. However, this model of Soviet consumer ideal was obviously not universal. The villagers had no need to build a summer cottage or reserve a place in an accommodation waiting list. The Soviet rural consumer ideal, which include a wide range of material, social and cultural requirements, is underexplored in historical science. The objective of the research was to examine interdependence of urbanization processes and the formation of the Soviet consumer society. In addition, the author‘s task was to determine the main elements of Soviet rural consumer ideal. The study proved that the migration from rural to urban area was caused not only by objective differences between city and countryside infrastructure and provision of amenities. First and foremost, kolkhozniks’ consumption ideal was concerned primarily with living and working in the city because of the subjective perceptions of the stigma attached to plough-tail and rural way of life, urban high wages, a jests about littleness of mind, primitive habits of peasants. The results of the study show that the attitude of Russian villagers to the urban lifestyle were significantly transformed in the 1990s: socio-cultural components of consumer ideal were replaced by purely economic needs, which could be realized only by living in a city.