Podoby socialistického konzumu
The Forms of Socialist Consumption

Summary/Abstract: Bren, Paulina, and Mary Neuburger (eds). Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, xvi + 413 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-982767-1. The book under review is an edited volume of essays by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and geographers, discussing diverse aspects of everyday life in the countries of the Soviet bloc, which were related to the phenomenon of consumption, mostly from the 1960s through the 1980s. They consider, for example, the life of the economic elites, the standards and qualities of the various items produced in the Socialist countries, gastronomy, the black market, and barter, as well as the official critiques of consumer society. According to the reviewer, behind the volume is an effort to show life in the socialist regimes as a mosaic of varicoloured shards, in order to contribute to changing its currently general, uniformly bland, grey image.

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