Abstract
The dissertation explores the history of market research and consumer studies in the Soviet Union from the end of the Second World War to the country’s collapse in 1991. Drawing on previously unexplored files from thirteen archives in Estonia, Russia, Ukraine, and the U.S., the study provides the first comprehensive account of this new field within the socialist social sciences. The dissertation demonstrates that the Soviet state’s knowledge of consumers developed as a collaborative project between retailers, economists, statisticians, sociologists, and market researchers, as well as civic-minded consumers, particularly women. Far from being ignorant or indifferent to consumers’ personal needs, the Soviet state, however, cultivated market research and consumer studies as a response to the pressing problem of waste, excess, and overproduction in the consumer sector of the Soviet economy (or the economy of waste, as it is termed in the dissertation). These findings fundamentally revise the existing historiography, which overlooks economic excess and conceptualizes the socialist economy primarily as an economy of shortages. The dissertation thus sheds new light on the relations between the Soviet state and its citizens, on knowledge production under socialism, and on the ways the socialist economy operated.