The dependency of consumers on the performance of state industry as the sole producer of household electrical goods and on state policies meant that consumer agency had its limits. Insufficient output and frustrations of the retail network meant that shopping for desired gadgets, whether a washing machine, a mixer, or a television set, never really became as simple or straightforward in the USSR as it was in the West. Unlike Western market economies, in the Soviet Union finances were not the main obstacle to acquisition.70 While goods varied in availability, the majority of purchases involved queuing, which ranged in length from several hours to several years; often they required physical endurance and just sheer luck. The case of refrigerators is particularly telling: they were sold through the system of waiting lists and postal notifications, which had been designed to make trade in high-demand goods more efficient, but, coupled with the absurdities of Soviet retail practices, turned out to be downright Kafkaesque. One shop in L’viv gave customers only a one-hour slot between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m., during which they could sign up to buy a refrigerator, despite the fact that the store was virtually empty for the rest of the day. During that special hour, one assistant had the task of taking down names of about a hundred clients, which resulted in mayhem.71 The narrowly designated time slot was likely a method of restricting the number of people signing up for a refrigerator; the demand exceeded supply, despite the waiting time of one year. But lapses in organization, which accompanied the process, were unlikely to have been intentional. The L’vov shop failed to inform its patrons that in order to sign up they had to bring along a blank postcard to be used to notify them when their refrigerator arrived in the shop. Having reached the counter, customers had to drop their place in the queue and rush about the neighboring streets in search of a place to buy a postcard, making the entire endeavor even more stressful.
Successful registration got one only halfway to the desired refrigerator. After months and even years of waiting, when the long-awaited postcard arrived, the lucky buyer had to rush to the store to pick up the item in person. The rules concerning collection were rigid. Trud reported the case of an old man from the town of Ivanovsk, who had been waiting for his refrigerator for two years but had the misfortune to fall ill when the notification arrived. This was a mistake. When his children took his postcard to the shop to collect the refrigerator in his stead, the shop refused to deal with anyone but the person who had filled out the postcard two years ago. Insensitive to the pleas of the relatives, the shop personnel kept demanding that the old man show up “dead or alive” or they would sell his refrigerator to the next in line. It took the interference of no less powerful a figure than the head of the Ivanovsk Municipal Department of Trade to allow collection by the relatives.73 This incident is a useful reminder of serious limitations on Soviet consumers’ agency and autonomy. The intervention of a high-ranking official required for the purchase to take place highlights consumers’ dependence on the state not only as the sole producer and distributor of goods but also as the ultimate arbiter in overcoming the red tape and inefficiency of its own retail system. [...]
It was no accident that Soviet consumers came to insist on specific brands: quality of technology, although improved, could vary widely, and on the whole electric items tended to be faulty more often than other types of consumer goods, while repair services were notoriously poor and overworked. Pensioner K. Mukhina from Kostroma told the editors of the newspaper Sovetskaia torgovlia (Soviet Trade) that problems with her newly acquired Biryusa-2 refrigerator, which had quickly broken down, turned her into “such a nervous wreck that eventually I will either chop up this fridge with an axe or hang myself on its handle.”78 It turned out that fixing a refrigerator was no easier than obtaining it: Mukhina had been told her device would be repaired within one year. When she explained in her letter why this seemed like a “woe” (gore), she emphasized her consumer rights and a sense of entitlement to honest treatment, which she explicitly linked to the Soviet regime: “I had been saving money for five years, waited in the queue for a year, and what now? I am looking at this refrigerator with horror. I spent so much money on it (yes, for me it is a lot of money, because my pension is only 49 rubles). Never did I think that in our Soviet Union it is possible to get swindled like that.” [...]
The Soviet Union did not have a market economy, of course, but it, too, had to compete as a producer of electrical goods. Its arch-competitor was the West, a fact that the American Exhibition in Moscow served to highlight as early as 1959. The competition had ideological purposes, but it also had a tangible economic dimension. **Western goods were highly prized in the Soviet Union, because imports were limited and because their quality was likely to be superior. As the isolation of the USSR diminished, this superiority gradually became an open secret.**82 This did not mean that some Soviet brands did not enjoy a reputation for being reliable, as we have seen earlier, but losing consumers’ faith could be more than embarrassing: it cost both money and ideological face. The deputy minister for education Liubov’ Baliasnaia aptly summarized the problem at a public roundtable on youth problems in 1973, when she explained young people’s infatuation with all things Western: “We produce sputniks but we don’t have pretty underwear for women.
82 A 1986 collection of articles on “rational consumption,” for instance, stated bluntly that “many [Soviet-made] products are inferior to the best of their foreign counterparts in terms of key technical and consumer characteristics.”
One could assume that at least with electrical appliances the situation might be better, and arguably it was. After all, as mentioned above, the same enterprises involved with production of space and defense technologies were charged with making washing machines and refrigerators. But this approach did not always yield the desired results. These enterprises were reluctant to digress from working on their prime specialties in order to engage in consumer goods production and haggled with state planners in attempts to lower their targets.84 For them, the production of domestic appliances had secondary priority, so even here it did not receive sufficient resources and technological attention. Consequently, the quality of these “stepchildren” of heavy industry suffered. Electrical durables were among the goods that caused the most trouble to their owners and most often broke down. 85 **The implementation of innovation was often slow due to the cumbersome planning system, which became particularly noticeable as consumer demand and standards rose, prompting the newspaper Moskovskaia pravda to complain in 1975 that by the time a new device entered the market it was already thoroughly outdated and “failed to satisfy the contemporary requirements of technical aesthetics.”**86 This did not bode well for the competition with the West in providing modern home technology
85 Obzory pisem radioslushatelei, 1971 // GARF. Fond 6903. Opis’ 42. Delo 2. The analysis of letters from radio listeners conducted by the USSR State Committee for Radio and Television in 1971 showed that most of the (numerous) letters complaining about the poor quality of consumer goods referred to refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, transistor radios, TV sets, and record players. That this had been a problem for many years is also stated in the 1985 VNIIKS report.
More than two decades since the ushering in of the Soviet technological revolution, the situation with housework had hardly changed. It had been anticipated that various devices would help free up approximately 1,000 hours per year per family; instead, the time spent on domestic chores remained the same in 1980. Literaturnaia gazeta saw Soviet underachievement in the transition to comprehensively mechanized housework as a cause for embarrassment, stating it was “paradoxical … [that] today, in the age of the atom, computers, and universal electrification, our domestic life is extremely conservative.”109 Statistics-favored goods such as TV sets, refrigerators, and washing machines aside, the presence of other kinds of domestic gadgets in the home was obstructed by a host of difficulties, and it was not just about shortages. Food processors or microwave ovens were costly and often bulky. Even smaller appliances such as juicers occupied too much space in tiny Soviet kitchens and could not be left standing permanently on a kitchen table, but had to be completely disassembled and put away after every use. There were other inconveniences, according to the press. Even in large kitchens, several appliances could not be used simultaneously because there were only one or two outlets in the kitchen, and the voltage in the electrical circuit was too low to sustain all of the machines working together