Paper abstract:

The history of late Soviet Union under Brezhnev, often referred to as the period of ‘stagnation’, remains an understudied area of academic research, with scholarship on the Soviet periphery being even more scarce. The present study aims to fill in this gap by analyzing consumer culture in late Soviet Kazakhstan and using this framework in order to gain insights into the history of everyday life at the Soviet periphery during the late 1960s – mid 1980s. As Natalya Chernyshova (2013) points out, despite the common narrative of Soviet consumer being the victim of ‘shortage’ economy, the consumption scene by the time of Brezhnev’s rule demonstrated a more complex picture of consumer agency. In this research I use the lens of consumer culture analysis, and in particular, the culture of acquiring and using jeans in late Soviet Kazakhstan to explore the social and cultural implications of this ‘meeting’ with the 'West' - how the presence of this product of Western culture can inform our understanding of local society in relation to ‘national’, ‘Soviet’ and ‘global’ culture frameworks. This research, hence, adds benefit not only in the sphere of scholarship on Soviet Kazakhstan’s history, but also in the methodological way of approaching the study of Kazakhstan’s Soviet past through the lens of socio-cultural history.