Acknowledging that Eastern European and Russian consumerism not only adopted and aligned Western attitudes, but also developed own ways of negotiating consumption and through that their own lifestyle in modernity, the chapter launches the conceptual framework of Consuming and Advertising by deconstructing prevalent images of nearly non-existent consumerism there. By the turn to twentieth century, different consumption patterns were negotiated differently across these societies, even if products were similar. The establishment of Soviet power can be outlined as an anti-consumerism project, but particular socialist forms of consumption and advertisements emerged, spreading the image of the “socialist world” and socialist ideas of consuming and advertising. These forms deeply shaped everyday life, since consumer goods were considered by the people as the most important part of the promised “good life”, consumption and advertisement were instrumentalized to proof that promise. Hence, the chapter considers consumption as a cultural practice that reflects values and norms, but also political attitudes, and tool of soft power, while advertisements want to trigger the desires of the consumers. Both consumption and advertisement represent and trigger habitus and self-perception in a society and were used to mobilize the population in favor of the state and nation.

This book explores Eastern European consumer cultures in the twentieth century, taking a comparative perspective and conceptualizing the peculiarities of consumption in the region. Contributions cover lifestyles and marketing strategies in imperial contexts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; urban consumer cultures in the Interwar Period; and consumer and advertising cultures in the Soviet Union and its satellite republics. It traces the development of marketing throughout the century, and the changes in society brought about by democratization and the 'Americanization' of consumption. Taken together, the essays gathered here make a valuable contribution to our understanding of consumption and advertising in the region.  

Svarta havets norra kust var under en lång tid ett område där europeiska och asiatiska civilisationer möttes – i både krig och fred. Området koloniserades av Ryssland först på 1700-talet. Denna process har stor betydelse för dagens situation, skriver historikern Julia Malitska, som är verksam vid Södertörns högskola.

In this special section, the histories of dietary reform have been approached and explored from different perspectives. The essays weave together threads of the history of dietary advice and nutritional standards with social history, women’s history and food history, covering the elements of life reform and women’s movements, the establishment of communist food ideology, the development of modern food safety and food security, etc. Three peer-reviewed articles focusing on the case studies of Estonia, Bulgaria and the Russian empire are built on previously untapped sources and offer original perspectives on the topic. As the contributions suggest, the entangled histories of dietary reform efforts proved to be a valuable and novel prism through which to study the region and the history of Europe in general. 

This article examines how The Vegetarian Review, the monthly periodical founded in Kishinev and published in Kiev from 1910-1915, and the emerging vegetarian activism, enabled, re-affirmed and empowered each other. The focus of the article is on the periodical’s emergence, logistical aspects of its production, ideological settings, form, content, rationale, (re)presentational strategies, as well as the imaginaries constructed and articulated on its pages. By bridging the fields of periodical studies with the history of social activism in Eastern Europe, the role of the advocacy journal in promoting reform agenda and its potential for forging a community of values and a shared identity formation are discovered. Vegetarianism, as the study showcases, had been defined, debated, advocated, invented and negotiated on the pages of The Vegetarian Review through interaction between scribes, editors, readers, practitioners and activists; and its genre fostered, staged and empowered these exposures. 

In this article, I tackle and reflect on the vegetarian movement of the Russian empire in its making, branding, and imagining by examining the All-Russian Vegetarian Congress in Moscow in 1913. By scrutinizing its organization, agenda and resolutions, the study brings to the surface and explores the ideological imaginaries and the dynamics of vegetarian collective action. I discuss the organization and convening of the congress, analyze the discursive activity around it, as well as hint at its implications for the fledgling vegetarian activism. I also contextualize the event within a broad reform-oriented social movement space, as well as spotlight the diversity of understandings of vegetarianism. The case study hints at the manifestations of movement making and branding, as well as unfolds the ideological foundations that were given preferences and why this was so. The congress apparently favored the ethical strand of vegetarianism and aimed at life reform in a broader sense. However, it did not really succeed in bringing about the long-awaited consolidation and unification of the vegetarians in the country.

Corinna Treitel, Department Chair and Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis, in conversation with Julia Malitska on dreams about and attempts at dietary reform in the 19th and 20th centuries, and on German life reformers and their long lasting, but forgotten, impacts on the ways we think today about eating naturally and environmentally consciously.