In my talk I explore late Soviet views on specificities of socialist commodity and commodity context, moving beyond the powerful paradigms of “the culture of shortage” and “the economy of scarcity” that defined the studies of socialist consumption for the last few decades. My goal is to show that by displacing “scarcity” as the primary explanatory lens on Soviet consumption, we can clear up some analytical and ethnographic room for processes, practices, concepts, or paradigms that have been routinely overshadowed by the politically charged emphasis on shortages. I am less concerned with the political management of shortages through which socialist bureaucracy increased its “allocative power.” Instead, I want to foreground the economy of storage by tracing the emergence of what Boris Arvatov, a Soviet theorist, called a thing-system (veshchnaia sistema)—that is, a historically specific constellation of tangible objects, institutional infrastructure, classification protocols, and ideological values which determined the parameters of the commodity context in late Soviet society.

The change of perspective, I hope, can modify the interpretative matrix: for instance, what is perceived now as the ill-conceived “overmanning” (hoarding of labor) might reemerge as a historically available mode of (working-) class production, or what seems as the irrational overstocking of commodities could reappear as a crucial material precondition for stimulating centripetal tendencies in an otherwise fragmented country. As I will demonstrate, the will to rationalize the production, accumulation, and redistribution of objects of consumption triangulated a particular emphasis on materiality of objects able to satisfy rational needs (use-value), a specific economic formation for integrating space, things, people, and classificatory models (Soviet storage economy), and a distinctive set of moral assumptions and rules aimed at regulating consumption in non-economic way (the doctrine of a Soviet mode of life).

Serguei Oushakine has conducted fieldwork in the Siberian part of Russia, as well as in Belarus and Kyrgyzstan. His research is concerned with transitional processes and situations: from the formation of newly independent national cultures after the collapse of the Soviet Union to post-traumatic identities and hybrid cultural forms. His first book The Patriotism of Despair: Loss, Nation, and War in Russia focused on communities of loss and exchanges of sacrifices in provincial post-communist Russia. His current project explores Eurasian postcoloniality as a means of affective reformatting of the past and as a form of retroactive victimhood. Oushakine’s Russian-language publications include edited volumes on trauma, family, gender and masculinity. Prof. Oushakine is director of the Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies at Princeton.

Part of the CREES-sponsored series, Buying and Selling, States and Markets, which focuses on various aspects of economies in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. How did socialist regimes theorize money, consumption, wages, and pricing? How did markets during state socialism actually work, and what is their legacy in contemporary times? What are the social roles of commodities and economic transactions today?