Comrade Consumer: Shopping, Style, and Desire on Socialist Screens

To many casual viewers, socialist cinema from Central Europe and the Soviet Union rarely evokes images of beauty parlors, leisurely shopping, or browsing exotic groceries—let alone consumer abundance and hired domestic help. Yet throughout the relatively “liberal” 1960s, the murky 1970s, and the tentative promise of the 1980s, nationalized film and television studios in the Polish People’s Republic, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR frequently returned to shopping as pastime, leisure, and aspiration, constructing surprisingly layered images of consumption under socialism.