Colleen Lucey. Love for Sale: Representing Prostitution in Imperial Russia

Abstract

Whites and Reds. Before and after 1917, the West provided the ideal paradigm for consumption. In the late tsarist period, this led to the establishment of a wine industry that sought to transform popular taste and put Russia on the map as an upstart wine powerhouse. It also fuelled peculiar events, such as Kovalevskii’s fight against grafting with American rootstock in order to keep Russia’s wines more European than their European counterparts (though this was and remains the only worthwhile treatment for phylloxera). Later, Soviet officials took up the charge of providing Western-style luxury to socialist consumers, promising ample meat and dairy, chocolate, sparkling wine, and exotic luxuries. Just as the tsarist and Soviet wine industries tended, in Bittner’s terms, to be ‘imitative’, so did the aspirations of related spheres from food packing to fine dining. Yet the key here is to keep in mind the ways in which Soviet officialdom, in particular, sought to put its own mark on this ideal world of consumption. While imitating the West in terms of variety, quantity, and quality, Soviet standards would rise above them morally: Soviet citizens would be able to enjoy their sausages and champagne unfettered by the degradation and inequality embedded in the capitalist system. We might hear eerie echoes of this in our current moment, as Russian officials inveigh against Western immorality while Russian business hastily patches holes in the consumer landscape created by the flight of companies such as McDonald’s. Smith and Bittner thus do more than invite readers into the past worlds of Russian and Soviet comestibles; they work to sharpen our view of the current strange and troubling moment.