The material promised land: Advertising's modern agenda in late imperial Russia

Russian Review

Volumn 57, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 345-363

  West, Sally ^a  

^a TRUMAN STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 34249855571     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9434.00028     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. For more information on advertising agencies in Russia see Sally West, "Constructing Consumer Culture: Advertising in Imperial Russia to 1914" (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1995), 43-53
2. Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1982), 9-10
3. On the rise of Russia's domestic market see Peter I. Lyashchenko, History of the National Economy of Russia to the 1917 Revolution (New York, 1970)
4. and Paul R. Gregory, Russian National Income, 1885-1913 (Cambridge, England, 1982)
5. As an example, the tobacco industry Empire-wide almost doubled total production (from 31 million rubles in 1897 to 58 million in 1908) even before the economic upswing of 1909. For cigarettes alone, the numbers sold increased from 6 billion to 10.4 billion from 1897 to 1908 (West, "Constructing Consumer Culture," 219-20)
6. For example, Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, 1991)
7. Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia's Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton, 1991)
8. Daniel R. Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850-1900 (Berkeley, 1990)
9. and Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge, England, 1992)
10. In the pre-World War I period most merchants and manufacturers produced their own advertisements, sometimes in close cooperation with hired writers, artists and agents (West, "Constructing Consumer Culture," 53-55; 121-28). Advertising agencies did little independent creative work. Thus the term "advertisers" here refers to sponsors and creators collectively
11. The subject here is the advertisers' intentions and perceptions rather than their actual influence. Even late twentieth-century market research cannot positively prove advertising's effectiveness despite the multimillion dollar industry at its disposal. See Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York, 1984). In early twentieth-century Russia, there was no market research, and little evidence to show one way or another how people responded to commercial publicity
12. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley, 1985), 1
13. Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising (New York, 1983), 8
14. Neil Harris, "Iconography and Intellectual History: The Half-Tone Effect," in New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. John Higham and Paul K. Conkin (Baltimore, 1979), 199
15. On this tendency in Victorian British advertising see Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York, 1994)
16. Gazeta kopeika, 6 August 1911
17. Moskovskii listok, 9 May 1897
18. Russkoe slovo, 28 September 1913
19. Judith Pallot, "Women's Domestic Industries in Moscow Province, 1880-1900," in Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, ed. Barbara Evans Clement, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec (Berkeley, 1991), 175
20. Russkoe slovo, 16 May 1909
21. Zolotei iubilei parfiumernago proizvodstva tovarishchestva Brokar i Ko. v Moskve, 1864-1914 (Moscow, 1915), 15
22. See, for example, Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill, 1982)
23. Jo Ann Ruckman, The Moscow Business Elite: A Social and Cultural Portrait of Two Generations, 1840-1905 (DeKalb, 1984)
24. and Mark D. Steinberg, Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867-1907 (Berkeley, 1992)
25. Russkoe slovo, 10 September and 2 October 1911
26. Gramophones did catch on in Russia; half a million were sold between 1900 and 1907 (Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 15)
27. Russkoe slovo, 8 April 1912
28. Gazeta kopeika, 17 October 1909
29. Russkoe slovo, 17 January 1910
30. For beautiful reproductions of Russian shop signs see Alla Povelikhina and Yevgeny Kovtun, Russian Painted Shop Signs and Avant-garde Artists (Leningrad, 1991)
31. Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (New York, 1982), 173
32. Gazeta kopeika, 10 June 1912