Trust in the West or «West-Pakete» from the GDR?!Consumption of East German Clothing by Soviet Women in the Brezhnev Era

Abstract

Trust in the West or «West-Pakete» from the GDR?! Consumption of East German Clothing by Soviet Women in the Brezhnev Era

The article aims to challenge the widespread assumption in the historiography that, in the Brezhnev era, the «trickle-down» of Western fashion into the USSR undermined not only consumers’ trust in Soviet goods, but also trust in the «Soviet» itself. However, the overwhelming majority of studies explicitly consider only capitalist countries the «West». These studies fail to take into account the mediated «trickling down» of the West into the Soviet Union through consumer goods imported from socialist states such as the GDR. In my article, I argue that this phenomenon can be seen as one of the stabilising mechanisms that allowed Soviet civilisation to function. Drawing primarily on oral history interviews that I conducted and memoirs written by Soviet women of the «last Soviet generation» (A. Yurchak), I identify channels, dimensions, levels and functions of trust-building in the everyday practices of both imaginary and actual consumption of East German goods. One of the key symbolic connotations of Soviet consumers’ trust in fashion made in the GDR was «trust in the West». This trust also comprised «trust in the typical German virtues» and «trust in proper socialism». The latter type of trust indicates that the political dimension of trust in commodities made in the GDR cannot be reduced to distrust in the actual Soviet state; instead, this distrust coexisted with trust in the ideal-theoretical version of a socialist society.