Polar exploration too was hit hard by the purges. Even the polar stations at the end of the known world were caught up in the hunt for wreckers, spies and saboteurs. Internationally known figures were condemned to forced labour. Otto Schmidt came under suspicion of being a wrecker. There is a certain logic in the fact that the most important institution for the opening up of the polar regions – Glavsevmorput, the chief directorate of the Northern Sea Route – should have been succeeded by Dal'stroi, the administration of the Gulag system in the Siberian north-east.55
Newspaper reports of new flying records and the proclamation of death sentences in the show trials appeared next to one another; ticker-tape parades for heroes alternated with mass rallies which in reality were nothing more than death-sentence plebiscites. ‘Did the Arctic myth help to build popular support for Stalin?’ asks John McCannon. ‘The reply is a guarded yes.’56 Without Chkalov and Vodop'ianov, without Papanin and Schmidt, the events of 1937 would not have happened.
The departure into the unknown, the existence of mortal dangers and the scope for utter failure at any moment was combined with the excitement attendant on any hazardous venture whose outcome is uncertain. Expeditions associated with mortal dangers become a symbolic locus of freedom in a country in which freedom had been abolished. The tension, nervousness and feverish excitement that were displayed in the media-inspired rescues expressed more than simple anxiety about the fate of the crews who had to be fished out of the ice or the sea. While the records and triumphs were being celebrated, the murder machinery was running at full throttle. The mania for flying and polar expeditions was the cement that held together things that could not be unified by force. Power had taken possession of the ultimate refuge of freedom and adventure – the skies and the eternal ice; it had transformed man’s vital qualities – his love of adventure, his willingness to sacrifice his all and his intelligence in the struggle for survival – into the shackles of servitude.
20
Moscow as Shop-Window: The Abundance of the World, Hungryfor Goods and Dizzy with Hunger
The official Moscow guide of 1937, published by the Cooperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers for the benefit of foreign tourists, was brimful of advertisements. They look like luxury still lifes or shop window displays. The People’s Commissariat for Domestic Trade had put in an advertisement for the railway restaurant car service. It showed a waiter in a white uniform against a yellow background, carrying wines from the Caucasus and the Crimea, together with grapes, mocha coffee and tea. A publisher’s advertisement for the works of Marxism–Leninism and books dealing with socialist construction and classical Russian literature was followed by a two-page spread advertising Aeroflot: it showed a twin-engine aircraft with an enormous wingspan preparing to land, above airport buildings constructed in the Bauhaus style – in blue, white and turquoise. Glavkonditer had an advertisement featuring its chocolate and cocoa, while Gastronom, the recently established food chain, presented its thirty-plus branches, some of them open round the clock. Gastronom displayed a multicoloured selection of high-class delicatessen, fine wines, cigarettes, seafood and fresh caviar. The two-page spread was filled with tins of caviar, hams, fish displays, conserves, cakes, pastries and confectionery. The antiquities and art shop in Stoleshnikov pereulok 14 in Moscow, likewise run by the Soiuziuvelirtorg division of the People’s Commissariat for Domestic Trade, advertised a huge selection of jewellery, diamonds, precious and semi-precious stones, gold and silver objects, enamel and filigree work, folk art from Palekh, porcelain dinner and tea services, crystal ware and antique furniture, as well as paintings by Russian and foreign artists. Café Artica (Petrovka 3) displayed its huge selection of ice creams in fruit, chocolate, nut, coffee and almond flavours, crème brûlée, Eskimo slices, ice cream gateaux and frozen strawberries, apricots and plums. You could also have telephone orders delivered (Tel. K-1-56-88). The food shop on Kuznetskii most 7/9 advertised ready-cooked meals – cutlets, shashliks, escalopes, roast beef, marinated fish, cakes and salads; it also offered home deliveries if desired (Tel. K-2-57-28). The shoe shop at Stoleshnikov pereulok 7, run by the People’s Commissariat for Domestic Trade’s Central Office for the Shoe and Leather Industry, presented an image of elegance, with a glass frontage and the very latest shop fittings. The Central Office of the Fish Industry (Glavryba) was painted a deep ocean blue; it advertised crab salad and ‘Chatka – Fancy Crabmeat’. Raznoexport sold all sorts of animal products as well as textiles, rugs, tobacco, matches, minerals and building materials. The Meat Division (Glavmyaso) offered tins of meat and advertised beef cubes, ‘especially recommended for tourists and mountaineers’. A few pages later there were advertisements for cruises on the Volga and the Kama. A two-page advert for the Central Universal Department Store (TSUM) – the pre-revolutionary department store Muir and Mirrielees – sought to impress with its record statistics: 180,000 customers daily, 2 million sales per day, 50 million per month and 600 million annually. The Stalin automobile plant (ZIS) put the emphasis on trucks, buses and private cars, including its luxury model, the ZIS 101. This last was a 7-litre limousine which was praised as ‘the most elegant, comfortable and powerful private car in the world’. Exportkhleb, responsible for the export of high-quality foods, ran a brightly coloured advertisement featuring a sturgeon, filling an entire page, together with garlands of apples and pears, Borjomi mineral water from the Caucasus, tins of ‘caviar made in the USSR’, Kamchatka crab, salmon, sturgeon and ham. Toys were also advertised and of course furs. Wedged between two adverts for the Mikoian Meat Combine, a veritable cascade of meat and sausage products threatened to overwhelm whoever gazed at the poster.1
Such advertisements were not aimed exclusively at foreigners. They can also be found in the local and national press, such as Vecherniaia Moskva or Pravda, which often reserved a page for advertising (out of six or eight pages in all). A striking prominence was given to perfumery products, and in particular those produced by TEZHE. TEZHE, which made use of French-language labels in the presentation of their products, had branches throughout the city. It sold perfumes, a wide selection of cosmetics, toilet articles, hygiene products, eau de Cologne, toothpastes and mouthwashes in specially designed packaging. Top-quality lipsticks had just been put on the market. The Bolshevik confectionery factory, located at 13 Leningrad Highway, likewise traced its roots back to pre-revolutionary times. It was famous for its biscuits, its cream gateaux and fruit flans, its waffles, its petits fours and its pastries; it was known too for its branded products, such as Mignon, Krasnaia Moskva, Romashka and others. The rival producer was the Babayev confectionery factory in Malaia Krasnoselskaia 7, renowned for its caramels and sweets with real fruit and cream fillings. Much space was taken up by advertisements for insurance companies such as Mosgosstrakh, which offered household contents, property and life insurance.2 Another service was also on offer: entertainment. Mosgosestrada had taken over the organization of conferences, events and cultural and film evenings. Contact points were available for such indispensable services as pest control and the elimination of infestations by moths, bugs, lice and cockroaches. There were eye-catching adverts for prominent hotels, restaurants and cafés. Many offered lunch and dinner with background music provided by orchestras or jazz in the evenings and a taxi service. The orchestras continued to play right through to 2 a.m. Among hotels, pride of place went to the newly built Hotel Moskva, which offered ‘a maximum of comfort’, deluxe rooms, telephone, bathrooms, showers and hire cars. Moscow was connected up to the world, as could be read in the advertisement placed by the Moscow Telegraph and Telephone Centre. Telegrams and radiograms were transmitted to New York, Tokyo, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vienna, Berne, Ankara, Shanghai and Ulan Bator.3
Figure 20.1 Advertisement for sausages in the Guide to the City of Moscow
‘None of this would be worth mentioning were it not for the fact that these advertising images came from a country that had just witnessed the most terrible famine in its ent
ire history.’
Advertising had become an independent branch of commerce; its forms were highly diversified: illuminated signs, running captions, designer lighting for window displays, showcases and posters. Between 1935 and 1941 a special state agency, Torgreklama, had responsibility for advertising.4 In spring 1936 the benefits of neon advertisements were debated in the People’s Commissariat for Internal Trade. The officials were still utterly transfixed by what they had seen on their travels in New York and Paris.5 None of this would be worth mentioning were it not for the fact that these advertising images came from a country that had just witnessed the most terrible famine in its entire history and from a city where in early 1937 hundreds of thousands of people were forced daily to go in search of the most basic necessities of life.
André Gide: on luxury and shortages
The profusion of consumer goods combined with scarcity in the summer of 1936 did not fail to attract the attention of foreign visitors such as André Gide. ‘Quantities of new shops have been opened recently, and it was not one of my least surprises in the U.S.S.R. to see the numbers of manicures and the quantities of painted women with red nails to be met with everywhere, chiefly, of course on the Crimean Riviera.’6 Gide observes the throngs everywhere and is baffled by them.
What are those people doing in front of that shop? They are lined up in a queue – a queue that stretches as far as the next street. There are two or three hundred of them waiting very calmly and patiently. It is still very early. The shop has not yet opened. Three-quarters of an hour later I pass by again; the same crowd is still there. I enquire with astonishment what is the use of their coming so long beforehand. What do they gain by it?
Gide conjectures that the never-ending queues are the consequence of a demand that no supply, however great, could satisfy. Finding himself in a large department store, he wonders whether there might not be a complete breakdown of order, ending in panic and chaos.
Inside the crush is unbelievable. The servers, however, do not lose their heads for no one about them shows the least sign of impatience; everybody awaits his or her turn, seated or standing, sometimes carrying a child. There is no device for taking them in order and yet there is no confusion. The whole morning and, if necessary, the whole day will be spent there, in an atmosphere which to a person coming from the outside seems asphyxiating; then one gets accustomed to it, as one gets accustomed to everything. I was going to say, one becomes resigned. But the Russians are much more than resigned; they seem to enjoy waiting – and keep you waiting with enjoyment.
Gide was equally perplexed by the tasteless presentation of the goods on sale. ‘The goods are really repulsive. You might almost think that the stuffs, objects, etc., were deliberately made as unattractive as possible in order to put people off, so that they shall only buy out of extreme necessity and never because they are tempted.’ Gide knew full well that taste becomes refined if comparisons are possible. But here ‘no choice was possible. No “X’s beer is best.” Here you are obliged to choose what is offered you. Take it or leave it. From the moment that the State is at once the maker, buyer, and seller of everything, improvement of quality can only come with the improvement of culture.’7 Remarks such as these attracted ironic comments and ridicule from another visitor to Moscow: Lion Feuchtwanger. Nevertheless, Gide was an acute observer, and he pointed out, first, that the luxury and profusion characteristic of the advertisements in Moscow always appeared against a backdrop of shortages and poverty and, second, that the destruction of the marketplace meant that an ‘aesthetic of consumption’ no longer existed but only the ‘cultural presentation of items of practical use’.
Advertisements, window displays: objects of desire and how to present them
The advertisements of 1937 were very different from those of the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP), but also from those of the First Five-Year Plan. There was still something surprising, anarchic and seductive about the NEP advertisements because, to some extent, they reflected the return of the market; in many respects they re-established continuity with the design and publicity of the pre-war and pre-revolutionary period. In contrast to the world of the NEP men, advertisements produced by Soviet institutions had a certain polemical edge, an element of class struggle, as could be seen in the lettering, photos and posters of Rodchenko and Mayakovsky.8 The publicity of the late 1930s differed from that of the First Five-Year Plan in that the desire to present an ascetic, proletarian model was superseded by an image of prosperity and luxury that could be earned, and by the values and symbols of a world that hitherto had been regarded as bourgeois or petty bourgeois: beauty care, cultivation, taste and good manners. Perfumes, elegant and comfortable furniture, indoor plants, good clothing – things that had previously been scorned as bourgeois – had now become models of a richer, more fulfilled life.9
The end of rationing and ration cards and the new approval of trade meant abandoning the notion that goods could be supplied only by a centralized, state-organized distribution system. The hierarchically based rationing system was shown to have failed. That system had put members of the nomenklatura at the apex of the pyramid, along with specialists, managers and members of the working class performing physical tasks, while at the lower end were to be found the ‘former people’, those deprived of their rights and those denied any say (lishentsy), and above all the peasantry. In 1935 the rigid rationing and distribution system was abolished, to be replaced by a ‘market within the framework of the plan’, but, since demand always outstripped supply many times over, severe shortages kept developing, with the result that voices ‘from below’ kept calling for the reintroduction of rationing and central distribution. This was the case in the winter of 1936–7. After an extremely poor harvest and the continued expropriation of the collective farmers by the state, the spectre of the famine of 1932 reappeared once again. Hence the goods on display in department stores in 1937 did not represent a civilized return of the market, as in the NEP, but rather a ‘quasi-market’ within a larger context of rigid state expropriation and redistribution. It benefited merely a specific market segment that addressed the more sophisticated needs of an emergent ‘middle social stratum’. The new department stores were supposed to show that the age of the old bazaars, markets and black markets was gone for ever and that they would be superseded by a new consumer culture. Shops and department stores now became the training grounds where people would learn to acquire good taste and more sophisticated needs. In contrast to the ‘lack of culture’ and ‘lack of civilization’ characteristic of the markets and bazaars, where the exchange of goods had taken place in pre-Stalinist Moscow, trade now was based – or so it was claimed – on transparency, calculability, reliability, quality and the expansion of the range of available goods. Advertising was less a matter of enticing customers than of educating them, a pedagogic rather than a commercial task. Soviet retail trade, the Soviet ‘department store’, Univermag, was supposed to demonstrate its superiority to capitalist stores, which were interested exclusively in turnover. Advertising was factual information about product quality – ‘use-value’ rather than ‘exchange-value’. Its aim was to inform Soviet customers where they could make the best and cheapest purchases. It was intended to help customers find their way around the new world of Soviet consumer goods without being overwhelmed by them. Thus the Moscow daily Vecherniaia Moskva printed a floor plan of the TSUM so as to overcome the ‘chaos of the bazaar’ and enable customers to find their bearings with the aid of the plan, which had been produced in deliberate emulation of the one published by Macy’s in New York.10 Lest we allow our ideas about the beginnings of Soviet ‘consumer society’ run away with us, we should keep the relevant figures in mind. At the end of the Third Five-Year Plan in 1940, the per capita production of cotton amounted to 16 metres, of wool 40 centimetres, and of silk 40 centimetres; it came to three pairs of socks, one pair of leather shoes and less than one set of underwear per person. In 1937 there were two watches per 100 inhab
itants, four gramophones, three bicycles, two cameras and one radio per 1,000 people, and six motorcycles for every 100,000 people. ‘In 1940 the state food industry produced only thirteen kilograms of sugar, eight to nine kilograms of meat and fish, about forty kilograms of dairy products, five kilograms of vegetable oil, seven cans of canned food, five kilograms of confectionery products and four kilograms of soap per person.’11 Most of these goods never reached the shops but passed directly to the end-consumers via the factories and other institutions.
Moscow, 1937 Page 46
