For the interior? Why people in the USSR bought books en masse but did not read them

Looking at old photographs or watching movies from the Soviet era, one might think that Soviet people were real intellectuals. Many people had shelves full of books, often even complete collections of recognized classics such as Dumas, Zola, Jules Verne, or Conan Doyle.

In the postwar years, there was a real reading boom. Reading became so fashionable that the famous phrase that "the USSR is the most read country in the world" arose. OBOZ.UA has analyzed why almost everyone in the USSR could have their own library in their apartment, but books were an attribute of the interior, and they were rarely read.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the majority of the population of the empire could not read. Then the so-called "universal education" was organized, and everyone was taught to read and write. In the postwar 1950s, books began to be published in huge, unprecedented numbers.

Of course, the publishing plans prioritized ideologically correct works, but they also published what readers were really interested in. This is how even the works of world classics such as Dumas, Dreiser, Hemingway, Faulkner, Jules Verne, Dickens, and Remarque came to the USSR.

There was an interesting phenomenon: to appear well-read, people would get scarce volumes wherever they could and put them in a prominent place, mostly behind glass doors of sideboards.

But everything that was scarce was valued three times as much, which is how the prejudice that "books deteriorate from reading" emerged, so people did not read themselves and did not allow their children to touch rare editions. This created a paradox: there were masterpieces of world literature on the shelves at home, but access to them was often denied.

There was also a practice of collecting waste paper to get books in exchange. People stood in line to get rare editions, and the lucky ones who had the blat could afford to choose books to match the color of their wallpaper and furniture.

The boom in book publishing waned by the end of the 1970s: really high-quality books (not party-ideological junk) became a luxury, a scarcity, and a subject of speculation.

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