PHJ No 1 (37) 2023 – Elena D.Tverdyukova. Westernization of consumer values in the USSR in the first postwar years (1945–1949)
The article analyzes the trends of Westernization of consumption in Soviet urban society at the end of the Great Patriotic War (1945–1949). The author argues that the campaign against bourgeois values began even before the official announcement of the policy of isolation from foreign culture and opposition to cosmopolitanism. The fight against Western consumerism was waged in an environment of total scarcity and the low quality of domestic production, so that the media themselves largely formed an aura of prestige around foreign consumer goods. This led to the formation of a new culture of consumption, with a characteristic Soviet citizens’ desire to buy goods of foreign rather than domestic production.