The Material Promised Land: Advertising's Modern Agenda in LateImperial Russia

G iven the widely reported and often scorned explosion of advertising in post-Soviet Russia, few people realize the extent to which Russian cities were similarly inundated with commercial publicity before the 1917 Revolution. Advertising was as inescapable a fact of daily life for the city dwellers of 1900 as it is for their descendants in the 1990s. Shop signs covered many of the grand architectural fagades, posters filled columns, walls, windows, and public transport, pedestrians had thrust at them flyers offering discounted prices or free trinkets in this or that shop. The home, too, was commercial terrain: brand packaging for staples as well as luxury products sat on household shelves, direct-mail advertising solicited the patronage of wealthier residents, and mass-circulation newspapers devoted up to half their pages to advertisements (which in many cases brought in as much income as subscriptions and street sales combined). The advertising industry was booming in the last decade of Imperial rule. In Moscow and St. Petersburg alone the number of advertising agencies rose from thirteen and seven respectively in 1896, to thirty-one and thirty-six in 1914.1 Advertising was at once the messenger of commerce, the financial linchpin of the mass-circulation press, and a new avenue of enterprise in a society that had traditionally offered few outlets for initiative. The onslaught of commercial publicity testifies to Imperial Russia's participation in the emergence of a consumer revolution more commonly associated with Western Europe and the United States. This revolution, an integral if secondary facet of the industrial revolution, expanded the boundaries and pleasures of discretionary consumption beyond the