Was a Soviet Man a Socialist? The Dichotomy of Consumerist Ideals and Socialist Values in Late Soviet Society (1945-1990)

Abstract

A number of British and American works of the 2000-2010s are devoted to the transformation of socialist ideas and crisis of collectivist values in the Soviet society after the Second World War. The objective of this article is to define the main trends of modern Anglophone historiography in studies of the dichotomy of consumerist ideals and socialist values in late Soviet society (1945-1990). The result of this study is an arrangement of general research approaches and an identifying of new thematic perspectives in Anglophone Russian Studies concerned with the Soviet period. Researchers consider the period from 1945 to 1990 as a comprehensive and logically complete period of Russian history. The internal unity of this period consists in the evolution of the Soviet way of life and socialist values. This process was incremental and hardly reflected by contemporaries (both within the Soviet state, and abroad). British and American works of the 2000-2010s filled a significant gap in world Russian Studies: the elements of capitalist culture, which coexisted in parallel with generally accepted Soviet way of life, were identified. A special contribution of modern Anglophone researches to Russian Studies is the analysis of socio-cultural processes, which were the evidence of the deformation of socialist norms and values. For instance, the occurrence of the sense of social injustice, greater recognition that a respected profession and a profitable occupation were divergent, is not sufficiently developed in Russian historical science.