Fighting Western Fasion in the Soviet Union: The Komsomol, Westernized Youth, and the Cultural Cold War in the Mid 1950s

This paper proposes that the mid-1950s drive to combat extreme devotion to western fashion constituted part of the endeavor to build a broadly appealing socialist version of modernity in the “Thaw,” the decade and a half following I. V. Stalin’s death in 1953 and the rise of N. S. Khrushchev to power. This Thaw-era drive for a socialist modernity involved forging a society, culture, and a way of life widely perceived at home and abroad as progressive and advanced, and as offering a viable alternative to the predominant western paradigm. The end goals of this post-Stalin endeavor to construct an appealing socialist alternative involved reaching the utopia of communism, a drive that stagnated under Stalin, while also winning the Cold War and in the process spreading the Soviet model of socialist modernity across the globe.