A Russian Point of View

“I think that Russians, we want all the options so that we can be proud that we bought the best thing,” says Maria, a woman about my age and one of my most advanced students. “When you see a Russian on the metro, maybe, we are always wearing the best of everything we have everyday, to prove to everyone that we are good enough for the best.”
What had started as a discussion of consumer demand in the workplace has evolved into her pondering the differences between materialism in the West versus materialism in her homeland. She lived in the United States for a year and has had the experience to reflect on the issue firsthand. Only having been her two months, I myself had never really considered that there could even be a difference. Consumer-obsessed society is consumer-obsessed society, right? Sure, there is a distinctly different feeling to Russian luxury and must-have items; they seem a little showier, a little more logo-intensive, a little more in the taste of visible wealth. But until now, I had naively chalked this difference up to a divergence in taste and style. But Maria insists that this is not the case--that the entire intention behind Russian consumerism is completely different.
I tell her that consumer pressure is a real social issue back home. I tell her a story about being 12, and begging my parents for a starter jacket (remember those?!) under the intense belief that it would automatically make me cool. It would obviously not have, and I did not get one, but I firmly held the belief all winter that if I could just get my hands on one, my life would be that much better. Even then, I was already succumbing to the power of the logo, and it’s happening even younger a decade and a half later. Style over substance, I assure her, is an issue in Canada.
“Ah, but you see why you did that?” She asks me. “To be like other kids. To fit in. Here, is not the same. We want to stand out. After the collapse of the Soviet regime, where everybody drove the same car, everybody had the same clothes, same apartments, same everything, we very much wanted things that were not all the same. Nobody could stand out before, nobody could feel special. Now we all can, and we buy many things because we can.
I agree that the rampant desire in Moscow for top-of-the-line everything is likely a backlash to the Soviet era, but is it really any different than the mood in the West, I ask sceptically.
“Okay,” she says, preparing an anecdote, “I have a friend from Portugal, and he says that everywhere else in the world, men acquire clothes, cars, these things to impress women, to make themselves seem important in this way. But Russian men, he says, they do it only to impress themselves. So they can look at it and feel that they are worth something.” She pauses, “maybe to prove as well to other men, sometimes. Even the women they date, they buy them expensive gifts of jewellery and clothes so that they will also seem more…important. This sounds horrible I know, but perhaps it is just hard for me to explain in English. Maybe it is not very good.”
But I suddenly understand the unselfconscious flaunting of furs, and diamonds, and iphones that cover the shoulders, and fingers and ears of Muscovites from all walks of life. They are, to the owner, like a pat on the back, a shout of congratulations, a hit of a drug. They provide the self-esteem needed to put on the thick armour in this tough world. They are a (false) form of self-validation. I insist to Maria that this is actually well-explained, and that it is really no better or worse than the validation we seek from others with these same items in the West. But it does explain the unselfconsciousness of Russian displays of wealth. They genuinely don’t seem to care if you notice their stuff.
Do you think this will settle down? I ask her. Maybe that it will stop once the Soviet era is merely a distant memory of the eldest generation.
“No,” she answers firmly. But perhaps it will…how to say…”
“Level off?” I offer.
“Yes, yes,” she says. “There cannot always be so many new products. We want always what is new, but this can’t last forever. Not with economic recession. Recession is like Darwinism, natural selection for products. Only the strong and the necessary will survive.”

And THAT, my friends is the greatest quote I have heard about the economic crisis so far. The most astute and unique observation of the effect on consumer spending habits that I have heard since the market went to Hell. Courtesy of a 25-year-old receptionist at a sports-facility construction company. Fantastic.