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Everyday Life under Communism and After

Tibor Valuch
Title
Everyday Life under Communism and After
Subtitle
Lifestyle and Consumption in Hungary, 1945–2000
Author
Price
€ 171,00 excl. VAT
ISBN
9789633863763
Format
Hardback
Number of pages
508
Language
English
Publication date
Dimensions
15.2 x 22.9 cm
Categories
Discipline
History, Art History, and Archaeology
Imprint
Also available as
eBook ePub - € 0,00
eBook PDF - € 0,00
Table of Contents
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List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Acronyms

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Study of Hungarian Everyday Life: Historiography, Methods, and Concepts
About the sources used for this volume
The concept of daily life, correlations between lifestyle and changes in society

Chapter 2. Two Hundred Pengős a Month, Five Hundred Forints, Two Thousand Forints…: Financial Circumstances, Prices, Wages, and Income Inequalities in Everyday Life
National revenue, real wages, and changes in the standard of living
Wages, prices, inequalities
Unchanging and changing forms of poverty
Accumulating property and wealth

Chapter 3. From Plentiful Privation to a Consumer Society: The Changes and Characteristics of Consumer Consumption
Consumption and consumer attitudes
The corner store, the supermarket, and the shopping center: Changes in the locations of consumer consumption
Homes, home construction, furnishings, and durable goods
Clothing and the consumption of apparel
The consumption and supply of foodstuffs

Chapter 4. This Is How We Lived: Housing Conditions, Usage of Living Space, and Interior Decoration
The general characteristics determining housing and the state of urban housing
Village houses, village dwellings
For those without a home: apartments for rent, beds to let, and work dormitories
Living in dire straits—slums, shantytowns, and ghettos
The general characteristics of changes in home interiors
Working-class and middle-class homes
Rural and peasant interiors
The interior world of Soviet-type housing estates
Summer and weekend homes

Chapter 5. “Well-dressed and Fashionable”: Changes in Clothing Styles, Habits, and Fashion
Need and puritanism: rural and urban styles of dress in the mid-twentieth century
Fashion and dressing habits during the state socialist period: changes in norms for everyday and formal occasions
Up-to-date fashion and the re-differentiation of apparel at the end of the century

Chapter 6. “We Ate, We Drank, We Filled Our Stomachs”: Nutrition, Eating, and Dietary Habits
The general characteristics of eating habits
From starvation to “goulash communism”
The years of “feeling full”
Abundance and shortages after the fall of the Iron Curtain

Conclusions

Appendix
Bibliography
Index

Tibor Valuch

Everyday Life under Communism and After

Lifestyle and Consumption in Hungary, 1945–2000

By providing a survey of consumption and lifestyle in Hungary during the second half of the twentieth century, this book shows how common people lived during and after tumultuous regime changes. After an introduction covering the late 1930s, the study centers on the communist era, and goes on to describe changes in the post-communist period with its legacy of state socialism.

Tibor Valuch poses a series of questions. Who could be called rich or poor and how did they live in the various periods? How did living, furnishings, clothing, income, and consumption mirror the structure of the society and its transformations? How could people accommodate their lifestyles to the political and social system? How specific to the regime was consumption after the communist takeover, and how did consumption habits change after the demise of state socialism? The answers, based on micro-histories, statistical data, population censuses and surveys help to understand the complexities of daily life, not only in Hungary, but also in other communist regimes in east-central Europe, with insights on their antecedents and afterlives.

Author

Tibor Valuch

Tibor Valuch is a social historian and research chair at the Center for Social Sciences, Institute of Political Science, Budapest. He is also professor at the Institute of History, Eszterházy Károly University, Eger.

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