“From the late 1950s onwards, Eastern Europe and the USSR witnessed a consumer boom. Focused on the boom’s main beneficiaries, Party functionaries, and combining inside knowledge with dispassionate analysis, György Péteri’s exemplary case study of the Hungarian political elite brings to life policy debates, commentaries by experts, changing social practices, and the modulations of material culture to produce an authoritative and engaging socio-economic history of late socialist everyday life.”

Catriona Kelly, Trinity College Cambridge

“This book makes a signal contribution to our understanding of political elites in Hungary and under communism in general. Anyone interested in socialist consumerism, the “new class,” and its irony-filled role in entrenching a more individualized, acquisitive, and modern lifestyle should read György Péteri’s bracing analysis of ‘greed and creed.’”

Michael David-Fox, University of Georgetown

“In this unique mix of memoir and scholarly engagement, Péteri makes sense of the banal, absurd, and outrageous, telling how socialist citizens proudly owned private cars and washing machines, while their leaders developed addictions to chauffeured limousines and the hunting of wild boars, while otherwise living modestly. Ideology existed for everyone in Hungary's everyday modernity, but at a great remove, giving moral license for unlimited acquisition, but within the austerity of state socialism. Péteri reveals more about the inner life of that project than any work I know, showing it to be aligned to the unequal world we know, but still fascinatingly peculiar.”

John Connelly, University of California-Berkeley

This important, path-breaking and meticulously researched book is about socialist consumerism or, more accurately, the consumerism of “actually existing” or “real” socialism, which had very little socialist about it, being a “pathetic imitation” of western consumer society, a phrase coined by the Hungarian historian Iván T. Berend which Péteri frequently cites. Communist modernization could have been different. Péteri uses the example of Khrushchev’s (never-achieved) automobilism policy based on collective pools of rental cars and taxis. The thrust of Péteri’s book is to show both how and, more importantly, why this socialist alternative was a non-starter: the decision in favor of individualized consumption became inevitable as members of the party apparatus, “acquisitive functionaries”, overcame the spirit of the “new sobriety” to achieve their group interests.

CEU Review of Books