The Fundamentals of Style: An Illustrated Guide to Dressing by James Gallichio, Rachel Shi

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Leisure without labor was like dessert without savory; a fully human, rounded life consisted of both, not least because unalienated labor, quite unlike alienated drudgery under capitalism, was a path to self-realization. 103 The utopia of full communism was only loosely sketched in Soviet futurology, despite its hallowed position as the target of history’s arrow. 104 The Third Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, promulgated in 1961 as a modern-day Communist Manifesto, announced that incremental reductions in the working week would take place over the next two decades, made possible by increased labor productivity.

On Plzeň, see Kevin McDermott, “Popular Resistance in Czechoslovakia: The Plzeň Uprising: June 1953,” forthcoming; and Samuel H. : Stanford University Press, 2001). On Łódż, see Padraic Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland,” American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999): 399–425. 31. The paradoxical overproduction of luxuries at the expense of necessities was identified as a key problem of the Soviet planned economy under Khrushchev. Stockpiles of unwanted goods allegedly accumulating in the early 1960s included silk dresses, and jam and jelly.

A glance into any Soviet refrigerator from the 1960s to the 1990s would reveal that it was filled not with the products of an advanced food-processing industry but with jars of home-preserved fruits grown at the dacha or gathered in the forest, holdovers of a preindustrial subsistence economy. In assessing the impact of refrigerated domesticity on Soviet society, it is important to stress that it began to exercise social effects in advance of actually entering mass consumption. 93 The domestication and “demotion” of such erstwhile luxuries was due not only to their mass production but also to their reproduction as images in Soviet public culture.