Word: moscow
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Moscow has reached a level of Westernization that would make even Peter the Great squirm. It seems as though for every Lenin statue hauled down after the fall of the Soviet Union, a dozen Western products have muscled their way into the lucrative Muscovite market. The "McLenin's" T-shirts sold to tourists around Red Square are a telling souvenir...
Despite these immense changes, however, many Americans still think of the Gorbachev era when they think of today's Russian market. They still bring their extra blue jeans and Beatles tapes here to sell on the street. Not only are products like these readily available, but many stores in Moscow carry products I have never even seen in America. Virtualny Mir (Virtual World), an electronics store, boasts products like a fifty-inch high-definition television with DVD players and a strobe-lit dishwasher with a transparent front. After six years of Western companies cultivating the idea of conspicuous consumption here...
Jean MacKenzie, a columnist for the Moscow Times (one of two English-language dailies in the city) wrote after a year's leave of absence that "in just one year, Moscow has moved from the grimy, chaotic, Kafkaesque city to a slick, sleek, world-class business capital." As an example of this drastic difference, one study-abroad program's information booklet--published only a year ago--tells its American students that they can avoid being "pegged quickly as an American" by wearing inconspicuous non-brand name American clothing. However, Karen Bradbury, a coordinator of the program, said that this information...
...Moscow's stores and advertisements, consumer culture has an in-your-face showmanship. In America, we seem to have moved away from glitziness to an age of smug, oblique advertising. American advertisements do not even bother to show the product anymore. Rather, Madison Avenue delivers an inexplicable barrage of post-MTV cuts and images. In Moscow, the advertising is every bit as conspicuous as the consumption. Opulence is in. The endless parade of television ads for health products, from Head & Shoulders to Centrum to Trojans to breast enlargements, shows in painstakingly detailed diagrams exactly how beautiful and healthy these products...
These products pack Moscow's several malls and posh stores. Products that do not make it into these classy establishments spill onto the streets. Around every metro stop and in every underground crossing are makeshift kiosks and tables, called, lapki, that sell newspapers, fruit, books, CDs, videos, clothing, hats, groceries and whatever else the market will bear. This is capitalism at its rawest. Muscovites no longer need to wait in line for stale bread, and they know longer need to trade kitschy revolutionary pins for American blue jeans...