Suchergebnisse

Abstract: This article explores the phenomenon, causes and attempted solutions to the problem of poor restaurant service in the 1960s Soviet Union. It discusses the role of the restaurant in the dining options of the Soviet urban population, the organization of restaurants, the culture of service and the low status of the waitering trade and economic reforms. It also reconstructs the perspective of the Soviet waiters themselves to examine how they justified the behaviours decried by officials and customers. This exploration reveals a paradox between competing ideals of the 'good life': one of technologically driven satisfaction of biological needs, and the other of promotion of a psychologically rounded good life, in which the whole person merited respect. Lacking that respect and compensated with low wages, Soviet waiters responded with indifferent service.

Abstract
This article explores the role of sales assistants in Soviet retail trade in the 1960s, who were overwhelmingly female. It investigates the causes of and remedies for what was widely perceived to be rude and grudging service. Soviet customers and officials felt entitled to a positive consumer experience, and managers and trade union officials agonized over the ways to promote and incentivize "service with a smile." In addition to the poor performance of Soviet manufacturing, which produced goods that were difficult to sell, other factors included poor training and minimal education, low prestige, and low pay. This article also highlights the continuities in retail sales culture from the 1920s to the 1960s but emphasizes the increasing role assigned to "emotional labor" as important and necessary work by sales workers.

Looking at Soviet guidebooks from the 1920s to the 1960s, this essay argues that 1905 and 1917 revolutionary places as "tourist attractions" were mostly tangential to the tourist experience, although one could argue that the entire USSR was a monument to the "revolution." The revolution remained one destination of many possible tourist excursions, its memory one building block of many that made up the basis of Soviet citizenship. The revolution as tourist attraction did not celebrate 1917 as arupture, but rather a point of entry, the moment from which the many and not the few could share in a culture of world importance.

The idea of leisure and vacations in the Soviet Union at first glance suggests a paradox. As a system based on the labor theory of value, the USSR emphasized production as the foundation of wealth, personal worth, and the path to a society of abundance for all. Work—physical or mental—was the obligation of all citizens. But work took its toll on the human organism, and along with creating the necessary incentives and conditions for productive labor a socialist system would also include reproductive rest as an integral element of its economy. The eight-hour work day, a weekly day off from work, and an annual vacation constituted the triad of restorative and healthful rest opportunities in the emerging Soviet system of the 1920s and 1930s.

This essay offers approaches to reading worker autobiographies as a genre as well as source of historical "data". It focuses primarily on one example of worker narrative, the autobiographical notes of Eduard M. Dune, recounting his experiences in the Russian Revolution and civil war, and argues that such texts cannot be utilized even as "data" without also appreciating the ways in which they were shaped and constructed. The article proposes some ways to examine the cultural constructions of such documents, to offer a preliminary typology of lower-class autobiographical statements for Russia and the Soviet Union, and to offer some suggestions for bringing together the skills of literary scholars and historians to the task of reading workers' autobiographies.

In the introduction to this special issue, Diane P. Koenker discusses the interrelated categories of travel, tourism, and leisure, looking at contrasting definitions of the traveler and the tourist and situating Russian and Soviet experience in a broader literature. Among the themes raised in the issue's articles, she enumerates the quest for knowledge and the premium placed on knowledge-producing travel and leisure activities, the tension between normative values and the desire of tourists and travelers to create their own autonomous experiences, and the ways in which the socialist project revalorized the role of the collective touring experience. She also considers the ways in which travel created both national identities and cosmopolitan ones and discusses some of the implications of spatial and gender analysis for studies of travel, touring, and leisure away from home.