Keeping alive the “Imaginary West” in post-Soviet countries

Abstract

Although since de-Stalinization in the 1950s, Soviet citizens have witnessed a noticeable influx of elements of western culture in their lives, their imagination of the living standards in the continuum of countries situated behind the western border was based on a usually distorted understanding of certain values and images of that region. Such an imagination encouraged people to engage with practices that, non-existing or marginal in the west, came to be associated with an allegedly better life existent there. The material evidence of such a form of imagination was visible in simple everyday practices, like home decoration, listening to music, and procurement of clothing. Regular imitation of Western life, also known as practicing Imaginary West, defined some markers of a late Soviet generation’s identity. The analysis of such a cultural construct became crucial for the better understanding of identity processes in the Soviet and then post-Soviet region. Scholars, who analysed how the space of the Imaginary West was developed in Soviet times, believed that practices and discourses that originated from this cultural construct were doomed to disappear with the fall of the Iron curtain. This article first of all questions whether the transformation from imaginary to real takes place and how did ordinary people experience this change? This work tries to answer these questions through the exploration of the phenomenon of Evroremont, which is a type of renovating practice, based on different interpretations of western interior designs, which started to become mainstream across the territory of the former Soviet Union in the beginning of the 1990s. An analysis of 38 semi-structured interviews conducted in L’viv presents a myriad of symbolic meanings of this phenomenon and indicates why and how Evroremont could be considered a further materialization of the Imaginary West.

Keywords:

• Post-Soviet identity
• imaginary space
• home production
• Evroremont

Notes

1. For this article the term “the West” is used as a generic category for countries situated in the Western part of the world, taking the perspective of people living on the territory of the former Soviet Union. This categorisation originates from the period of isolation of the Soviet Union, when other countries situated beyond the Western borders of the Soviet Union were grouped into one “Other” and were imagined by ordinary people as a homogenous continuum of countries with higher living standards, a higher level of culture and better conditions for work and leisure.

2. The selection of online sources was made on the basis of the completeness of websites’ content and their popularity, defined by informants of this study and my experience as a native Ukrainian.

3. For example very often a stamp saying “Made in Italy” would be sufficient for everyone to consider an item as prestigious and “Western”, even though its owner might acknowledge that it was probably originally produced in China or Turkey.

4. Under technical reasons, I consider things like the poor condition of the apartment – leaking ceilings, broken pipes or old electricity wires; the need to extend the apartment’s territory with the help of a common corridor or balcony; or the need to “refresh” walls, bathrooms etc. for hygienic purposes.

5. Home ownership offered some significant benefits: for some it became a way to earn money (by selling the apartment in the centre, or renting it out); for others, it became a way to solve family issues (changing one big apartment for several smaller ones in more remote locations).

6. Last accessed on 25.07.2015 https://libk.com.ua/remont-domov-i-kvartir/evroremont-kvartir