Gronow, Jukka. Caviar with Champagne

Gronow, Jukka. Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia. Oxford: Berg, 2003.

Agenda: to examine how the Stalinist consumption culture was formed and why, while commodities for everyday use were in shortage, there was a centralized encouragement of ‘luxurious’ consumption. Starts in 1934, when “the Party leadership condemned all kinds of asceticism… and libertarianism…” (9)

Strange arguments from time to time: “It was as if the history of literature, music and art had stopped sometime in the mid-eighteenth century” – really? What about works by ‘fellow travellers’ who were translated and published in millions of copies, like Theodore Dreiser?

Curiously, there’s a form of argumentation – another thing borrowed from Sovietology – which haunts contemporary Soviet studies, including this book. Gronow builds his argument as if all cultural production and official enunciations emanated from one source, from one group (hence the temptation to use Stalin to symbolize it) – although he himself mentions of certain ‘dissent voices’ (10), but it is not reflected in his overall argument. As if there were no groups that fought for different versions of cultural production.

“In Sheila Fitzpatrick’s opinion, this new Soviet middle class or intelligentsia [of which Vera Dunham says, the Big Deal], ideally of proletarian origin and schooled in Soviet educational institutions, became the new reference group of Stalin’s politics by 1939, replacing the working class.” (11) – reference to Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, 179.

Makes references to the way society was reshaped on the basis of its ‘loyalty’ and ‘contribution’ to the socialist project through material stimulation: “[Stalin] vigorously demanded that individual skills and efforts be rewarded with higher wages and other material rewards.” (12) Кстати – отличный пример (целый абзац), как все изменения в официальном отношении к материальной культуре «останавливаются» на Сталине:

“In the middle of the food crisis in the summer of 1931, Stalin publicly announced his new six-point programme. In addition to some administrative measures, he vigorously demanded that individual skills and efforts be rewarded with higher wages and other material rewards. In his opinion, it had now become necessary to encourage workers to get personally interested in the results of their own work. With the help of and after many experiments the system started to reward industriousness, talent and skills that were deemed especially useful in building the socialist society. The wage system was amended in 1931. Previously, pay had been based on time alone, but the new system allowed for piece rate pay. As a result, income differences started to grow. This policy culminated in the official condemnation of the ‘equal wages policy’ in 1934.” (12)

Also speaks of ‘the New Soviet Middle Class’. His book is a development of arguments that Dunham and Fitzpatrick put forward.

By the way – it is curious that all other social groups were awarded material rewards only for their loyalty to the regime, and only party officials were awarded per se, even without any service or even when they sabotaged the socialist progress (as long as nobody knew about it). In their case, rewards came in a default manner, in all other cases – only for self-sacrificing work or for ass-licking (writers, artists, etc.).

Speaking of cheap Soviet imitations of luxurious Western goods: “Now, thanks to the Communist Party and its great leader, Comrade Stalin, every worker could live like an aristocrat.” (14)

Uses the idea of carnival to contextualize ‘kitsch’ products—cheap imitations of Western luxurious commodities. P. 33-34 – Gronow describes the rise of privileges for Soviet bureaucracy in the early 1930s. “From the mid-1930s some of the genuine luxury goods and services gradually became accessible not only of the rather narrow political elite, but also to a rapidly growing group of privileged people.” (34)

Mentions an important thing – a redistribution of luxurious goods (like watches or jewelry) from disenfranchised groups “into the hands of the new Sovie elite or well-to-do ‘non-party Bolsheviks’.” (65) – this can be regarded as a first step ‘from below’, on behalf of Communist bureaucracy, to legitimate ‘luxury’ through the figure of Stalin.

79 – 86: Soviet advertising as a means to educate consumers’ tastes.

Gronow, curiously, writes about the ‘political struggle’ over new Soviet restaurants

And the book is structured in a very strange way: he writes in the end of the historical background to events that occurred in the beginning of his book – which doesn’t let him use the narrative possibilities that this context could give to interpretation of his material. He discusses, drawing on Osokina, of ‘special provisioning’ that existed in the early 1930s for nomenclatura (126ff).

!!!!! “An examination of the development of the Soviet culture of consumption in the 1930s largely supports the totalitarian thesis. The government and the Party directed and initiated everything from above. Virtually nothing could be done independently or without the knowledge of state authorities except on the periphery or on the outskirts of the system.” (142)