American consumerism and Russian markets
Isserman, Maurice
Moscow's mayor Yury Luzhkov decreed this past spring that the city's retail outlets would no longer be able to call themselves by such western-inspired names as "supermarket," "drug store," or...
...Another brand of cigarettes locally marketed is the unambiguously named "West"—"Test the West" the advertising billboards proclaim, in English...
...On May 1, I came across a group of Russian teenagers wearing in-line skates and practicing their jump shots by tossing a basketball into Lenin and Krupskaya's laps...
...Consider three samples to be found in the elevator that creakily serviced the fourteen-story Brezhnev-era apartment house where I lived...
...As the old Simon and Garfunkel song put it, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls...
...Russians have their own well-established ethnic prejudices: against Jews, Chechens, Gypsies, Uzbeks, and even their fellow Slays from Ukraine...
...We are almost exclusively exporting images of private gain and material satisfactions rather than collective bonds and democratic responsibilities...
...Still, I imagine some young Russians reasoning that if "nigger" is a good enough epithet for surly American teenagers to use, it's good enough for them...
...It is the Marlboro Man, not Martin Luther King, Jr., who speaks to young Russians as the best the West has to offer...
...But it is worth considering how selective our influence has been thus far in the reshaping of Russian FALL • 1997 • 23 Politics Abroad society...
...Unlike eastern Europe and many of the non-Russian Soviet republics, where the events of 1989-1991 brought in their wake the rapid de-Leninization of public spaces, in postcommunist Russia no one (not even the image-conscious Mayor Luzhkov) seems to be in any particular rush to do the same...
...q 24 • DISSENT...
...It's time to pay attention to the handwriting on the elevator wall...
...We may succeed in playing a prophetic role in shaping the Russia of the twentyfirst century—and then not find ourselves very happy with the results...
...Moscow's mayor Yury Luzhkov decreed this past spring that the city's retail outlets would no longer be able to call themselves by such western-inspired names as "supermarket," "drug store," or "shop...
...The consumer bounty of the new market economy, along with its imported iconography, coexists uneasily alongside the surviving symbols of the previous regime...
...One of the first sights greeting new arrivals driving in from Sheremetevo II, Moscow's international airport, is a three-story-tall representation of the "Marlboro Man," advertising his wares in English with a self-confidence longsince missing in the United States...
...What is to be done...
...As of June 1, businesses in the city were required to abandon English language or Anglicized names in Cyrillic script for more traditional Russian versions...
...In the streetcorner newspaper kiosks one can purchase the latest editions of Playboy, Penthouse, and Cosmopolitan magazines, while in the videocassette stalls Demi Moore peeps in demure sexuality over her artfully arranged knees from the cover of dubbed copies of Striptease...
...All were in Latin script—and in English...
...But blacks have never been found in large enough numbers to qualify as a despised minority...
...Foreign customers fill their carts with the kinds of spices, dry goods, dairy products, and fresh produce still scarce or unavailable in local markets...
...When I left Moscow in mid-May, few businesses seemed to have responded to the new requirements, no doubt reasoning that a well-placed bribe or two would ward off over-zealous official enforcement...
...Every morning my seven-year-old daughter, Ruth, and I boarded the trolley on Leninsky Prospekt to ride the five stops to her elementary school...
...There is a little park at the intersection of the two streets containing a bronze statue of Lenin and Krupskaya seated side by side in apparent domestic bliss...
...Luzhkov's defense of Russian linguistic purity is clearly doomed, unless the mayor can think of some way to impose similar restrictions on the city's graffitti...
...For younger Russians, in contrast, communism stands discredited not only by its historical record of political repression and economic mismanagement, but because the revolutionary images associated with it have become, by a perverse twist of historical irony, those of the status quo...
...Well, dear, if you aren't too busy, could you put some more water in the samovar...
...We got off at Ulitza Krupskaya, a street named for Lenin's wife...
...What makes the third example stand out, apart from its offensiveness, is that there were no black residents in our building or in the immediate neighborhood...
...In those perhaps-soon-to-be-renamed supermarkets, shelves are lined with American brands of breakfast cereals, instant coffee, and disposable diapers...
...the contents provide a generally reliable guide to national identity...
...The first read "Kurt Cobain," the second, "Born to Lose," and the third "Die Nigger, die...
...It's instructive to watch the shopping carts being unloaded at the cash register...
...thus supermarkets will become gastronom, or in the case of larger establishments, torgovy dom...
...For young Russians, Americanized English is decidedly cool...
...The dowdiness of such Soviet-era relics is their salvation—at least temporarily...
...New Russian" customers, winners in the local struggle for what Karl Marx (in reference to eighteenth-century Britain) described as "primitive capitalist accumulation," are more likely to purchase exorbitantly priced tokens of westernized affluence, such as Sara Lee frozen cakes...
...We have always thought of ourselves as a "City on a Hill," a nation whose political institutions and social order were by providential design an inspiration to less fortunate lands...
...It's not hard to imagine the combination of 22 • DISSENT Politics Abroad adolescent angst, schoolboy nihilism, and uncritical admiration for all things American that inspired the writings...
...American marketing logos are the common currency of conspicuous consumption in the New Russia...
...to be able to speak it, or simply know it well enough to record its tag phrases and insults on the wall, betokens personal stylishness, desirability, independence, toughness...
...I imagine the placid-looking Lenin affectionately asking his mate...
...We in the United States may welcome any sign of expanding "western" influence among this first post-Soviet generation of Russians...
...Any sudden attempt to topple Grandpa and Grandma Lenin from their pedestal would likely be regarded— at least by the older generation—as pointless desecration...
Vol. 44 • September 1997 • No. 4
