Consumption in Postsocialist Societies: Eastern Europe

Consumption in postsocialist Eastern European societies comprises specific consumption practices, meanings, and symbols that are characteristic of countries whose social, political, economic, and cultural space has been rapidly transformed from a socialist planned economy to a capitalist market economy. This is often characterized by consumerism and a high prominence of consumption-related lifestyles and from totalitarian political regime to democracy. The beginning of the period of transformation is usually considered to be 1989, although the dismantling process of the socialist bloc started at different times in different countries.

This entry covers countries either formerly belonging to the Soviet Union (such as Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia) or its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe (such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland). Postsocialist consumer culture can also refer to various parts of the world that are in transition from socialism, such as China, but this is not covered in this entry. It must be noted that due to the sociocultural and economic variety of the former Soviet bloc and Eastern Europe, no uniform description can be given for the whole development of its consumer culture. However, several trends, phenomena, and key processes are common to this area. These can be outlined based on a synthesis of studies on postsocialist consumption conducted in various disciplines—anthropology, ethnology, sociology of consumption, cultural studies—since the beginning of the 1990s. The bulk of these studies use data from the former socialist bloc of Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, as well as Russia and Ukraine.

The understanding of postsocialist consumer culture primarily focuses on the contrast between consumer culture behind the so-called iron curtain and the West (primarily Western and North—European countries and the United States) as well as developments after the fall of the iron curtain, which are often understood as “re-Westernization,” a term launched in the middle of 1990s by a group of Scandinavian and Baltic researchers led by Marju Lauristin. One of the central notions here is “transition culture”—particularly influentially theorized by Michael Kennedy—as the movement from dictatorship to democracy and from planned economy to market economy. While transition tends to overemphasize the movement from one situation to another, transformation—another important concept in the previously mentioned approaches—focuses more on the complexity and unfinished, ever-changing character of the processes in these societies, which in turn influence how people consume goods and make meaning about them, that is, construct a particular consumer culture.