ABSTRACT
The field of consumption and leisure includes topics such as tourism, nutrition, the development of mass- and pop culture, fashion and sport as a mass activity. The key hypothesis is that in the transformation of lifestyles shaped by these processes, Central and Eastern Europe was more connected to the West in the twentieth century than ever before. Special attention will be paid to youth culture, young people commonly being viewed as the protagonists of modernity. The three most important waves in the expansion of leisure occurred in the 1920s, the 1960s and the 1990s. The first of these was an almost exclusively urban phenomenon. Socialist leisure was characterized by a relatively high level of politicization until the 1960s, and afterwards, in the 1970s and 1980s, by a perception of leisure as refuge from the ‘grey’ reality of life. Travel to Western countries was a scarce commodity; and inasmuch as the encounter with a radically different and more developed modernity resulted in the realization of one’s own disadvantage, they effected, in various ways, a delegitimization of state socialist regimes. Leisure underwent important changes in the post-communist period; and it is here that we address the possibility of there being a specific post-communist form of leisure time.
