Resumen de Imported Goods and the Spirit of Consumerism: Consumption in Soviet Tourism Abroad
In the post-Stalin period, in the USSR, there was a permanent increase in the amount of Soviet tourists who traveled abroad. These trips acquired a great popularity and a prestige among Soviet citizens, and became a channel for the illegal, or semi-legal, infiltration of foreign goods into the USSR. Despite financial, customs, administrative, and psychological barriers, as well as ideological pressure, Soviet tourists abroad acted within the concept of an “economic man” seeking to import as many things as possible. To fulfill this consumer mission, in the 1960s-1980s, Soviet tourists created a set of “shadow” consumption practices which this article examines in detail, as well as the Soviet government’s responses to combat them. The imported goods and the resulting non-Soviet consumer culture ("spirit of consumerism” or “virus of consumerism”), the article concludes, undermined the concept of Soviet superiority central to the Soviet propaganda during the Cold War era.
