The Socialist Good Life: Desire, Development, and Standards of Living in Eastern Europe turns a critical lens on the way that the practices, policies, and promises of socialist economics shaped consumption and functioned to legitimize (and sometimes delegitimize) political power in the communist states of eastern Europe. The book opens with a chapter penned by the editors, “The Pleasures of Backwardness.” The title draws together two issues addressed in the book: first, the question of whether state socialism was able to fulfill its promise of “overcoming backwardness” and fostering the development of modern (and consumer) societies; second the question of whether state socialism could provide pleasure in the form of a “good life” measured in consumption. Significantly, consumption cannot be defined exclusively in individual terms, but encompasses “collective consumption” of the myriad goods and services that were free or nearly free for citizens, including healthcare, meals at schools and workplaces, childcare and education, and cultural opportunities. The authors recognize a paradox in the success of state socialism: the rise of a socialist middle class that embraced the material fruits of socialism but eschewed the ideological trappings of this “alternative modernity” (6).

The question of development is fraught, as the determination of backwardness may depend on whether it is measured using western indicators that privilege the consumption and production that characterize capitalist countries, and whether it accounts for the location of the region in the global economy or history. The label of backwardness cannot tell us how life in state socialism was experienced and the chapter authors explore aspects of what constituted a “good life” in eastern Europe, how governments constructed and pursued the means to provide that, and to what end.

Mary Neuberger's “Consuming Dialogues: Pleasure, Restraint, Backwardness, and Civilization in Eastern Europe” focuses largely on Bulgaria, but her most trenchant observations concern Iosif Stalin's USSR. She points out that “the politics of consumption was connected to the new regime of control,” which entailed stark limitations on consumption (in the form of deliberate famine), as well as the use of consumer goods to co-opt citizens into an ostensibly progressive and prosperous system that would eradicate backwardness and build socialism (38–39). Neuberger makes the observation that nostalgia for the socialist past has become a feature in postcommunism. On the one hand, as later chapters show, attempts to substitute needs for desires and to create socialist versions of “synonyms of modernity” (133) like VCRs often failed. On the other hand, citizens enjoyed security in access to at least basic healthcare, education, and employment that is unimaginable in postcommunism and, Neuberger notes, access to “simple pleasures” like a Black Sea holiday, unfettered permission to smoke in public, and foods unpolluted by artificial flavors that have been swept away by globalization and the free market (42).

In “Conceptualizing Consumption in the Polish People's Republic,” Brian Porter-Szűcs points out that, at least from the perspective of communist-era Polish economists, consumption functioned differently in capitalism and communism. He writes that, “East European economists were accustomed to planning for consumption for needs, but not for the ‘irrationality’ (as they saw it) of consumer demand” (84). Consumer desire did not drive production and need was centrally planned. Anne Dietrich's “Oranges and the New Black: Importing, Provisioning, and Consuming Tropical Fruits and Coffee in the GDR, 1971–1979,” provides an interesting look into the gray area between needs and demands. The promise of “modest consumerism,” of which fruits and coffee were a part, functioned as “an important metric measuring the successes and failures of socialism in East Germany” (105). Indeed, in an economic system that was virtually free of unemployment, the satisfaction of workers’ consumer desires acted, at least under the leadership of Erich Honecker in the 1970s, as an incentive for raising productivity. Dietrich refers to this as “consumer socialism” and points out that consumption, even under socialism, functioned as a status marker: that is, “drinking ‘good’ coffee and eating ‘proper’ oranges” distinguished consumers’ class position (109). As such, both individuals and the state developed strategies for dealing with scarcity of these goods. These two chapters effectively draw together theory with household and institutional practices in socialist-era consumption.

Patryk Wasiak's “VCRs, Modernity, and Consumer Culture in Late Socialist Poland” centers on a key object of late socialist desire, the VCR. Indeed, it was, like East German coffee and citrus fruit, “an expression of upward social mobility” (132). The VCR was also a symbol of the weakness of socialist high-tech industries: this embodiment of modernity would remain an imported rather than domestic commodity after the Polish electronics industry's failure to produce its own version. Significantly, the VCR market, which operated largely through the country's hard currency shops, also signaled an early “adoption of practices characteristic to a market economy” (149). Cristofer Scarboro's chapter, “The Late Socialist Good Life and Its Discontents,” takes a broader perspective, but recognizes a key aspect of earlier chapters: “…the goods themselves represented both the potentials and the malfunctions of socialism” (196). Indeed, the fulfillment of consumer desires with a cornucopia of modern goods was never intended to be the goal of socialism. They were to be a means for building the ideal socialist citizen who would reject covetous bourgeois culture.

Zsuzsa Gille and Diana Mincytė's chapter, “The Prosumerist Resonance Machine: Rethinking Political Subjectivity and Consumer Desire in State Socialism,” makes the observation that because the state controlled production and distribution of consumer goods, consumption was inevitably politicized. The party-state, after all, was singularly to blame (or perhaps credit?) for the shape of the consumer market. Interestingly, as Tania Bukakh points out in “The Enchantment of Imaginary Europe: Consumer Practices in Post-Soviet Ukraine,” postcommunism has not fully altered this equation: “…Ukrainians still consider consumer satisfaction as the state's responsibility,” an orientation that has functioned as a catalyst for political upheavals, including Euromaidan (164). These two discussions read well with the book's third chapter, Patrick Hyder Patterson's “Just Rewards: The Social Contract and Communism's Hard Bargain with the Citizen-Consumer,” which also recognizes the relationship between consumption and politics, and inquires into the relationship between “the economic activities of the market and the political work of citizenship” (53). Patterson points out that US policy in the Cold War theorized a relationship between growing economic freedom and political freedom, but posits that the “social contract” of socialism in the region may also have worked to the detriment of democracy (54).

The Socialist Good Life is well-conceived and thought-provoking. While the book is too advanced for most undergraduate students, it should be welcomed in graduate-level classrooms and on the shelves of scholars interested in the question of how consumer goods and culture functioned in socialist systems and how their legacy may continue to shape postcommunist society and politics.