1. For instance, V. P. Kolomiets claims that in 1994 furniture and home goods were the third most advertised category of products on Russian television, while in 1995 the second place was occupied by domestic appliances. V. P. Kolomiets, “Televizionnaia reklama kak sredstvo konstruirovaniia smyslov,” Mir Rossii, no. 1 (1997): 34–35.

2. For example, see Pole chudes TV show (1990–present), an analogy of the Wheel of Fortune show, where players have to compete to receive prizes such as a car, a television set, a VHS player, or a microwave oven.

3. See Caroline Humphrey, The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 182–185.

4. Since a regular Soviet urbanite could not privately hire an architect or a designer to work on their home design (just like they could not legally hire any private specialist), the profession of a home interior designer simply did not exist until the late 1980s and the beginning of the remont era. Prior to that, the term was predominantly used for object and industrial design in publications such as Dizain v SSSR: 1981–1985 (Vserossiiskii nauchno-issledovatel’skii institut tekhnicheskoi estetiki (VNIITE), 1987).

5. Tatiana Butseva, Novye slova i znacheniia: Slovar’-spravochnik po materialam pressy i literatury 90-kh godov XX veka v dvukh tomakh (Saint Petersburg: Institut lingvisticheskikh issledovanii, 2009), 563.

6. Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 36.

7. Archie Brown, Seven Years That Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5.

8. The argument of Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More is exactly about the system feeling eternal in the late 1980s, even though in retrospect we know that it was no more than a couple of years away from ending. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

9. Philip Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy: An Economic History of the USSR 1945–1991 (London: Routledge, 2014).

10. Brown, Seven Years, 5.

11. This book specifically looks at remodelings that took place before the financial crisis of 2008. While this is a somewhat arbitrary stopping point historically, this financial crisis slowed down construction and remodeling pace in the post-Soviet states for a while, therefore making it an appropriate date to limit this investigation.

12. Madina Tlostanova, What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of Post-Soviet Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 9.

13. Early Soviet public discourse and art scene was concerned with the upbringing of the New Man: capable of communist selflessness and ruthless to the enemies of the revolution but also possessing certain everyday qualities, such a sense of one’s belonging to the state rather than individualist thinking. The old personality type of the pre-Soviet times, such as a kulak or a bourgeois, on the contrary had to be uprooted. See Mikhail Geller, Mashyna i vintiki: Istoriia formirovaniia sovetskogo cheloveka (London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1985), 7–11.

14. For example, Ron Kerr and Sarah Robinson, “The Hysteresis Effect as Creative Adaptation of the Habitus: Dissent and Transition to the ‘Corporate’ in Post-Soviet Ukraine,” Organization 16, no. 6 (November 2009): 829–853; and Aleh Ivanou and Ruben Flores, “Routes into Activism in Post-Soviet Russia: Habitus, Homology, Hysteresis,” Movement Studies 17, no. 2 (December 2018): 159–174.

15. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 22.

16. Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 23.

17. The implications of there being relatively few public gathering places in the USSR and in the early post-Soviet years are described in chapter 5: Socializing.

18. There exist multiple theories on the emergence of the term sovok. Alexander Genis suggested that “sovok” was used to identify early post-Soviet Russian tourists in the New York City neighborhood Brighton Beach populated by earlier Soviet immigrants. Alexander Genis, “Sovok,” Russian Studies in Literature 31, no. 11 (1994): 5–11. However, considering the widespread use of this term in the post-Soviet 1990s, it is very likely that the term emerged earlier and inside of the Soviet Union.

19. Nikita Khrushchev, XXII S’ezd Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, 17–31 oktiabria 1961 goda: Otchet (Moscow: Gosudarstevnnoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1962), 153.

20. See Yurii Levada, ed., Sovetskii prostoi chelovek: opyt sotsial’nogo portreta na rubezhe 90-kh (Moskow: Mirovoi Okean, 1993), 8.

21. Okno v Parizh, directed by Iurii Mamin (Paris; Moscow: Films du Bouloi, Fontan, La Sept Cinema, Troitskii most, 1993).

22. For example, David Satter, It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 99, 269.

23. Anastasia Miari, “On the Menu in Moscow, Soviet-Era Nostalgia,” New York Times, December 13, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/travel/moscow-restaurants-nostalgia.html.

24. Krisztina Fehérváry, “American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a ‘Normal’ Life in Postsocialist Hungary,” Ethnos 67, no. 3 (2002): 370.

25. Fehérváry, “American Kitchens,” 370.

26. According to Fukuyama, the resentment of the West expressed by the Russian politicians and public in recent years is the result of the “humiliation” Russia is experiencing for not being treated as the world’s great power. Francis Fukuyama, Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition (London: Profile Books, 2019), 7.

27. Juliane Fürst, Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

28. Olga Shevchenko, Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

29. “The nostalgia of the late-’90s seems to be posthistorical, a longing for a life of peace and plenty, and an invention of a new tradition of eternal Russian grandeur.” Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia, Moscow Style,” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 13 (2001), http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/13/nostalgia-moscow-style.

30. For scholarship on the global housing crisis, see Ray Forrest and Ngai-Ming Yip, Housing Markets and the Global Financial Crisis: The Uneven Impact on Households (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2011). Powerful accounts of housing insecurity in the United States can be found in Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (London: Penguin Books, 2017).

31. For example, Graham Tipple, Extending Themselves: User-Initiated Extensions of Government-Built Housing in Developing Countries (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000); Christina Schwenkel, Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Roberto Castillo, “Appropriating Modern Architecture: Designers’ Strategies and Dweller’s Tactics in the Evolution of the 1950s Venezuelan Superbloques” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2015); Sandeep Kumar Agrawal, “Housing Adaptations: A Study of Asian Indian Immigrant Homes in Toronto,” Canadian Ethnic Studies/Etudes Ethniques au Canada 38, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 117–130; Kirsten Gram-Hanssen and Claus Bech-Danielsen, “Somali, Iraqi and Turkish Immigrants and Their Homes in Danish Social Housing,” Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 27, no. 1 (April 2012): 89–103.

32. Stefan Bouzarovski, Joseph Salukvadze, and Michael Gentile, “A Socially Resilient Urban Transition? The Contested Landscapes of Apartment Building Extensions in Two Post-Communist Cities,” Urban Studies 48, no. 13 (October 2011): 2689–2714.

33. Choi Chatterjee, David L. Ransel, Mary Cavender, and Karen Petrone, Everyday Life in Russia: Past and Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 2.

34. Jane Roj Zavisca, Housing the New Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 90.

35. Elizabeth Cromley, The Food Axis: Cooking, Eating and the Architecture of the American Houses (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 4.

36. Jeffrey Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4.

37. For instance, see Celine Rosselin’s study of the spatial practices of visiting a home in “Ins and Outs of the Hall: The Parisian Example,” in At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space, ed. Irene Cieraad (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 53–59. For an example of such studies in post-socialist cities, see Krisztina Fehérváry, Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

38. In Michel de Certeau’s terms, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xix.

39. In Henri Lefebvre’s terms, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (London: Continuum, 2005).

40. Dell Upton, “Architecture in Everyday Life,” New Literary History 33, no. 4 (Autumn 2002): 712.

41. Michel de Certeau, “Part III: Spatial Practices,” in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 91–130.

42. Elizabeth Shove, Mika Pantzar, and Matt Watson, The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and How It Changes (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2012), 14.

43. For instance, Jordan Sand speaks about the departure from “sleeping, working and playing” all at the same place—a tatami—and into different spatial modes of the table, chairs, and westernized kitchens, along the construction of modern Japan in the end of the 19th century. The description of spatial change is effectively conducted through the constant of common domestic spatial practices. Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space and Bourgeois Culture 1880–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), 91. While Sand focuses on a historic case of domestic change, another scholar, Sarah Pink, suggests the necessity of understanding the current-day challenge of sustainable living through the everyday life and domestic practices of environmental activists. Sarah Pink, Situating Everyday Life: Practices and Places (London: SAGE, 2012), 14–29.

44. Iaroslav D. (architect), interview by the author, May 11, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

45. Olga Shevchenko, “Resisting Resistance: Everyday Life, Practical Competence and Neoliberal Rhetoric in Post-Socialist Russia,” in Everyday Life in Russia Past and Present, ed. Choi Chatterjee, David L. Ransel, Mary Cavender, and Karen Petrone (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 53–54.

46. See Susan Reid, “The Meaning of Home: ‘The Only Bit of the World You Can Have to Yourself,’ ” in Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia, ed. Lewis Siegelbaum (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 145–170.

47. Florike Egmond and Peter Mason, The Mammoth and the Mouse: Microhistory and Morphology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1–2.

48. Charles Rice, “Rethinking Histories of Interior,” Journal of Architecture 9, no. 3 (2004): 282.

49. Thing-in-itself or noumenon—“(in Kantian philosophy) a thing as it is in itself, as distinct from a thing as it is knowable by the senses through phenomenal attributes.” Oxford English Living Dictionaries, s.v. “noumenon,” accessed July 5, 2018, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/noumenon.

50. Alexey Yurchak writes about the dangers of these binaries as reproducing “the master narratives” of the Cold War and the opposition between “the first world” and “the second world.” See Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 9.

51. Despite the common assumption that the absence of private property was among the most important characteristics of the Soviet Union, forms of private property existed throughout Soviet rule. Even more importantly, certain forms of urban housing property created a sense of ownership strikingly similar to the Western conception of private ownership. See Mark B. Smith, “Individual Forms of Ownership in the Urban Housing Fund of the USSR, 1944–64,” Slavonic and East European Review 86, no. 2 (2008): 283–305.

52. John Foot, “Micro-History of a House: Memory and Place in a Milanese Neighborhood, 1890–2000,” Urban History 34, no. 3 (2007): 435.

53. Foot, “Micro-History of a House,” 432.

54. Dolores Hayden, “Invisible Angelenos,” in The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 82–96.

55. Foot, “Micro-History of a House,” 450–452.

56. Nancy Stieber, Housing Design and Society in Amsterdam: Reconfiguring Urban Order and Identity, 1900–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

57. Stieber, Housing Design and Society in Amsterdam, 2.

58. Stieber, Housing Design and Society in Amsterdam, 3.

59. Nicole Rudolph, At Home in Postwar France: Modern Mass Housing and Right to Comfort (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 1.

60. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “May ‘68 Did Not Take Place,” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975–1995 (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), 233.

61. Deleuze and Guattari, “May ‘68 Did Not Take Place,” 234.

62. Deleuze and Guattari, “May ‘68 Did Not Take Place,” 234.

63. Rudolph, At Home in Postwar France, 1.

64. Historians Melanie Ilič and Dalia Leinarte claim that the inability of an interviewee to make sense of an event and clearly explain it to others is not necessarily a failed interview but rather an opportunity to observe the missing public discourse that would provide a narrative framework for the interviewee’s own story. The omnipresence of the indefinite pronoun “everything” in the post-Soviet discourse in no way means that change did not take place; on the contrary, it indicates the lacking framework to speak about the grandiose change in the life of the late-Soviet and post-Soviet population. Melanie Ilič and Dalia Leinarte, The Soviet Past in the Post-Socialist Present: Methodology and Ethics in Russian, Baltic and Central European Oral History and Memory Studies (New York; London: Routledge, 2016), 13–15.

65. Iaroslav D. (architect), interview.

66. For example, see an interview with the mayor of Moscow and other documents related to the Moscow administrative reform in regards to apartment replanning started in 2011. Sergei Sobianin (mayor of Moscow), interview by Mestnoe Vremia. Vesti-Moskva. Nedelia v gorode, September 24, 2011, https://www.mos.ru/mayor/interviews/95214/.

67. Timothy Sosnovy, “The Soviet Housing Situation Today,” Soviet Studies 11, no. 1 (1959): 21.

68. For instance, Wright mentions a concern with ventilation to show the problems with the early apartments, illustrated with a quote from American Architect praising modern (1879) tenement buildings over the Fifth Avenue apartments. This illustration indicates the shared concern with ventilation transcending building type boundaries and class boundaries. Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 142.

69. Paola Messana, Soviet Communal Living: An Oral History of the Kommunalka (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Steven Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

70. Victor Buchli, Materializing Culture: An Archeology of Socialism (Oxford: Berg, 2000).

71. Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home; Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street.

72. Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home; Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street.

73. Stephen Collier, Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

74. Philipp Meuser and Dimitrij Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing: Prefabrication in the USSR 1955–1991 (Berlin: DOM publishers, 2015), 267.

75. Anna Alekseyeva, “Constructing Soviet Domesticity and Managing Everyday Life from Khrushchev to Collapse,” in Material Culture in Russia and the USSR: Things, Values, Identities, ed. Graham H. Roberts (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 59.

76. Dacha—A Soviet summer house. See Stephen Lowell, Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710–2000 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). For the Soviet “consumer triad,” see Vera V. Ageeva, Ilya A. Ageev, Anastasia M. Nikolaeva, and Zoya N. Levashkinac, “Was a Soviet Man a Socialist? The Dichotomy of Consumerist Ideals and Socialist Values in Late Soviet Society (1945–1990),” European Proceedings of Social & Behavioural Sciences, II International Scientific Symposium on Lifelong Wellbeing in the World, May 18–22, 2015.

77. Dell Upton, “Vernacular Domestic Architecture in Eighteenth Century Virginia,” in Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, ed. Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 321.

78. Lizabeth Cohen, “Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material Culture of American Working-Class Homes 1885–1915,” Journal of American Culture 3, no. 4 (January 1980): 763–764.

79. Elizabeth Cromley, “Transforming the Food Axis: Houses, Tools, Modes of Analysis,” Material Culture Review/Revue de la culture matérielle 44, no. 1 (June 1996): 10.

80. Lindsay Asquith, “Lessons from the Vernacular,” in Vernacular Architecture in the 21st Century: Theory, Education and Practice (London; New York: Taylor & Francis, 2006), 133.

81. Olga Shevchenko argues that, in the early 1990s, there was a collective shared experience across class lines, despite the different effects the collapse of the USSR had for different social groups. Olga Shevchenko, “Resisting Resistance: Everyday Life, Practical Competence and Neoliberal Rhetoric in Post-Socialist Russia,” in Everyday Life in Russia Past and Present, ed. Choi Chatterjee, David L. Ransel, Mary Cavender, and Karen Petrone (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 55.

82. Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home; Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street, 208.

83. Natalya Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era (London: Routledge, 2013), 83; Steven Harris, “ ‘I Know All the Secrets of My Neighbors’: The Quest for Privacy in the Era of the Separate Apartment,” in Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia, ed. Lewis Siegelbaum (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 184; Olga Gurova, “Consumer Culture in Socialist Russia,” in The SAGE Handbook of Consumer Culture, ed. Olga Kravets, Pauline Maclaran, Steven Miles, and Alladi Venkatesh (London: SAGE Publications, 2018), 116–117.

84. Judy Attfield, Wild Things, 36.

85. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 147–148.

86. See Anya Von Bremzen, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing (New York: Crown Publishers, 2013).

87. Although this study concentrates on individual rather than communal apartments, the pre-1917 buildings that predominantly hosted communal apartments need to be mentioned for two reasons. First, many patterns of everyday life in the Soviet Union were found in both individual and communal apartments. Second, these same pre-1917 buildings were frequently converted into individual apartments, starting as early as the 1970s along the state capital reconstruction program, as well as both privately and under a state initiative after the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

88. For instance, some former Soviet republics had higher numbers of large families, resulting in more four- to six-room apartments and sometimes more than one sanitary block (bathroom) per apartment. Meuser and Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing, 419.

89. Daniel Baldwin Hess and Tiit Tammaru, eds., Housing Estates in the Baltic Countries: The Legacy of Central Planning in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (Cham, UK: Springer Open, 2019), 46, 82–84.

90. Joanna Szostek, “The Mass Media and Russia’s ‘Sphere of Interests’: Mechanisms of Regional Hegemony in Belarus and Ukraine,” Geopolitics 23, no. 2 (2018): 307–329.

91. Natalya Ryabinska, “The Media Market and Media Ownership in Post-Communist Ukraine: Impact on Media Independence and Pluralism,” Problems of Post-Communism 58, no. 6 (2011): 12.

92. For information on Russian-published media in Ukraine, see Stephen Velychenko, “Introduction,” in The EU and Russia: History, Culture and International Relations (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1–26.

93. It should be noted that there are several exclusions. Some of the post-Soviet urban populations, particularly those in Tajikistan and Chechnya, experienced extreme hardship that may have prevented them from concentrating their resources and efforts on individual home improvement in the first decade after the collapse of the USSR.

94. For example, Stefan Bouzarovski, Joseph Salukvadze, and Michael Gentile, “A Socially Resilient Urban Transition? The Contested Landscapes of Apartment Building Extensions in Two Post-communist Cities,” Urban Studies 48, no. 13 (October 2011): 2689–2714.

95. For a photographic library of Kyiv balconies, see Oleksandr Burlaka, Balcony Chic (Kyiv: Osnovy, 2019).

96. “Proshchai khrushchevka: kak v Moskve snosiat vetkhoe nasledie sovetskoi epokhi,” BBC News|Russkaia sluzhba, April 6, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-39505267.

97. “Renovatsiia p’iatypoverkhivok: De u Kyievi znosytymut’ Khrushchovky,” UA.NEWS, January 23, 2018, https://ua.news/ua/renovatsiya-p-yatipoverhivok-de-u-kiyevi-znositimut-hrushhovki.

98. See, for example, Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Fighting Fences vs Fighting Monuments: Politics of Memory and Protest Mobilization in Ukraine,” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 19, nos. 1–2 (2011): 375–380.

99. “Proshchai khrushchevka,” ibid.

100. “Piat’ let spustia: Zashitniki Khimkinskogo lesa—o skorostnoi trasse Moskva-Sankt Peterburg,” The Village, August 21, 2015, https://www.the-village.ru/city/city/220205-khimki.

101. Joseph Giovanni, “A Funny Thing Happened to Soviet Architecture,” New York Times, May 28, 1989, https://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/28/arts/architecture-design-funny-thing-happened-soviet-architecture-photo-ascencion.html.

102. For example, in Alekseyeva, “Constructing Soviet Domesticity,” 59; Buchli, An Archeology of Socialism, 142, 144–145.

103. See chapter 3.

104. For instance, this popular Russian idiom is used as a title of Anton Chekhov’s short story “Woman’s Kingdom.”

105. Natasha Tolstikova, “Rabotnitsa: The Paradoxical Success of a Soviet Women’s Magazine,” Journalism History 30, no. 3 (2004): 131.

106. Vera Zvereva, “Lifestyle Programs on Russian Television,” Russian Journal of Communication 3, nos. 3–4 (2010): 267.

107. For a detailed explanation of SNiP development see Philipp Meuser and Dmitrij Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing: Prefabrication in the USSR 1955–1991 (Berlin: Dom Publishers, 2015), 21–25.

108. For instance, this chapter on the Soviet home is written without a single blueprint: Alekseyeva, “Constructing Soviet Domesticity,” 55–70.

109. Such as Sanitary Norms and Regulations (Sanitarnye normy i pravila) and apartment series booklets.

110. These competitions were organized by Gosstroi (State Construction Committee) or other institutions and typically did not lead to actual construction. For more information on the Soviet “paper architecture” tradition, see Inez Weizman, “Interior Exile and Paper Architecture,” in Agency: Working with Uncertain Architectures, eds. Florian Kossak, Doina Petrescu, Tatjana Schneider, Renata Tyszczuk, and Stephen Walker (London: Routledge, 2010).

111. Josephine Mylan and Dale Southerton, “The Social Ordering of an Everyday Practice: The Case of Laundry,” Sociology 52, no. 6 (December 2018): 1136.

112. Jennifer Patico, Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 68.

113. Boym, Common Places, 132, 150–157.

114. Anastasiia Dubrovina, “Kak soedenit’ sovetskoe retro i sovremennyi inter’er,” Idei vashego doma, January 30, 2019, https://www.ivd.ru/dizajn-i-dekor/kvartira/kak-soedinit-sovetskoe-retro-i-sovremennyj-interer-36821.

115. Jeffrey M. Hornstein, A Nation of Realtors: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 202.

1. Vladimir Dal, “Remont,” in Tolkovyi slovar’ zhyvogo velikorusskogo iazyka (Moscow: Olma Press, 2001), t.3.

2. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 96.

3. Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diaries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 36.

4. For example, see Susan E. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (2002): 211–252.

5. V. Poluboiarinov, “Zona remonta,” Rabotnitsa 4 (April 1985): 28. This article specifically cites an eight-month wait and says that the state agencies offering remodeling services could only supply customers with one or two types of wallpaper.

6. Ekaterina Gerasimova and Sofia Chuikina, “The Repair Society,” Russian Studies in History 48, no. 1 (2009): 58–74; Catherine Alexander, “Remont: Works in Progress,” in Economies of Recycling: The Global Transformation of Materials, Values and Social Relations, ed. Catherine Alexander and Joshua Reno (London: ZED Books, 2012), 255–275.

7. For example, see Krisztina Fehérváry, “American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a ‘Normalʼ Life in Postsocialist Hungary,” Ethnos 67, no. 3 (2002): 369–400.

8. Michael Gentile, “The Post-Soviet Urban Poor and where They Live: Khrushchev-Era Blocks, ‘Bad’ Areas, and the Vertical Dimension in Luhansk, Ukraine,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105, no. 3 (2015): 583–603.

9. Lynne Attwood, “Privatization of Housing in Post-Soviet Russia: A New Understanding of Home?” Europe-Asia Studies 64, no. 5 (2012): 903–928.

10. Jane Roj Zavisca, Housing the New Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).

11. Stephen Collier, Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). See also Sasha Tsenkova, Housing Policy Reforms in Post-Socialist Europe: Lost in Transition (Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag, 2011); Stuart Lowe and Sasha Tsenkova, Housing Change in East and Central Europe: Integration or Fragmentation (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003); and many others.

12. Olga Shevchenko, Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

13. Obsession with apartment remont, the ineffective approaches to remont, and the social and gender patterns in relation to remont became a usual subject for satire. For instance, in 1996, the Ukrainian Shou dovgonosykiv premiered an episode (15) about evroremont; in 2001, the Russian comedy show Gorodok dedicated an entire episode (89) to remont; and in 2007, Russian ska-punk band Leningrad released a song titled “Remont.” Shou dovgonosykiv, episode 15, “Evroremont”; Gorodok, episode 89, “Gorodok na remonte”; and Leningrad (Russian ska-punk band), “Remont,” released November 20, 2007, track 10 on Avrora album.

14. In the last several decades of the Soviet Union, Stroibank (Construction Bank of the USSR) conducted quality surveys for new residential construction. The results of such surveys showed multiple quality and technology issues that Stroibank tried to regulate through a system of fines and changes in the payment mechanism. Fond R-337, Opis’ 26, Delo 667, Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv vyshchykh organiv vlady ta upravlinnia Ukrainy, Kyiv, Ukraine, 129–133.

15. Natasha Tolstikova, “Rabotnitsa: The Paradoxical Success of a Soviet Women’s Magazine,” Journalism History 30, no. 3 (2004): 131.

16. “Pod kryshey doma svoego,” Rabotnitsa 10 (October 1984): 28.

17. V. Poluboiarinov, “Zona remonta,” Rabotnitsa 4 (April 1985): 28.

18. “Tsena remonta,” Rabotnitsa 6 (June 1986): 21–22.

19. V. Stepanishev, “10 metrov na 100 chelovek,” Rabotnitsa 3 (March 1989): 8. Many individual apartment kitchens in the Soviet apartment block buildings were rather small and typically ranged from fifty-three to seventy-five square feet.

20. Burda Moden in Russian, Spring 1987.

21. “Interesnye idei oformleniia okon” and “Komnatnye rastenia,” Burda Moden, 1988, 60–63.

22. M. V. Bakiev, Domashaniaia academiia, vol. 1 (Ufa: Bashkirskoe oblastnoe pravlenie Soyza nauchnyh i inzhenernyh obshchestv SSSR, 1990), introduction.

23. Radmila Milosavlevich, Inter’er zhilogo doma (Moscow: Stroizdat, 1988), 4.

24. “Pereplanirovka dvukhkomnatnoi kvartiry v dome serii P-44,” Idei vashego doma, January 1999, https://www.ivd.ru/custom_category/custom_subcategory/pereplanirovka-dvuhkomnatnoj-kvartiry-v-dome-serii-p-44-4094.

25. Kitchens starting at eight square meters (86 square feet) and rooms starting at eleven square meters (118 square feet).

26. For the history and meaning of open plan, see Judy Attfield, “Bringing Modernity Home: Open Plan in the British Domestic Interior,” in At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space, ed. Irene Cieraad (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 72–83.

27. Gregory D. Andrusz, “A Note on the Financing of Housing in the Soviet Union,” Soviet Studies 42, no. 3 (July 1990): 555–570.

28. For instance, see Attwood, “Privatization of Housing in Post-Soviet Russia,” 903–928.

29. Alina E. (apartment dweller), interview by the author, June 24, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

30. Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch, Broad Is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia’s Twentieth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). The name of this book on the Russian and Soviet migration refers to the Soviet song “Broad is My Native Land,” which celebrates the vastness of the Soviet territory and the supposed freedom of the Soviet citizens.

31. Siegelbaum and Moch, Broad Is My Native Land, Russian Terms and Abbreviations.

32. Baikal–Amur Mainline (BAM) is a railroad traversing through most of the territory of the Russian Federation, from eastern Siberia to the Russian Far East. Active construction lasted from the 1930s to the 1980s. Prior to Stalin’s death in 1952, BAM and other Great Constructions were conducted by prisoners. See Christopher J. Ward, Brezhnev’s Folly: The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).

33. Petty trade practices at the Soviet-socialist camp borders increased significantly in 1989. See Krystyna Iglicka, “The Economics of Petty Trade on the Eastern Polish Border,” in The Challenge of East-West Migration for Poland, ed. Keith Sword and Krystyna Iglicka (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 120–144.

34. The Decree of the Cabinet of Ministers of the USSR, No. 261, “Ob uporiadochenii peresecheniia grazhdanami gosudarstvennoi granitsy SSSR i o dopolnitel’nykh merakh po regulirovaniiu vyvoza za granitsu tovarov narodnogo potrebleniia” [About the ordering of the state border crossing by the citizens of the USSR and the additional measures on export of the consumer goods], March 12, 1990.

35. William Moskoff, Hard Times: Impoverishment and Protest in the Perestroika Years: The Soviet Union 1985–1991 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993).

36. Moskoff, Hard Times.

37. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1.

38. Werner Rödiger, Herbert Schumacher, and Wilfried Demel, Rost i stanovlenie: Biographia sem’i predprinematelei Knauf (Iphofen: Knauf Gips KG, 2003), 372.

39. Oleksandr Startschenko, interview by the author, May 21, 2021, Kyiv, Ukraine.

40. Moskoff, Hard Times, 169–171, 183–186.

41. Moskoff, Hard Times, 169–171.

42. Coal miners played a crucial role in the dissolution of the USSR through their economic and political strikes in the late 1980s. The early economic reasoning for strikes came from the slowdown in the distribution of benefits and raise in salaries that coal miners (unlike other workers) regularly enjoyed earlier in late-Soviet history. More information on the subject can be found in Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and the Collapse of Perestroika: The Soviet Labour Process and Gorbachev’s Reforms, 1985–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), or Lewis Siegelbaum and Daniel Walkowitz, Workers of the Donbass Speak: Survival and Identity in the New Ukraine, 1989–1992 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).

43. Mykola N. (construction business owner), interview by the author, April 28, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

44. Ivan G. (construction brigade head), interview by the author, June 26, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

45. Mykola N. (construction business owner), interview.

46. Oleksii R. (architect), interview by the author, May 4, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

47. Vitalii F. (construction worker), interview by the author, May 28, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

48. Soviet troops were relocated back to the USSR after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

49. Moskoff, Hard Times, 65.

50. A curious example can be found in the widespread 1990s and early 2000s fashion for creating arched openings between apartment spaces. The readily available, high-quality drywall was easy to bend; as a result, an arched doorway, earlier an element perceived as Western and luxurious, became readily available for post-Soviet citizens.

51. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 29–40.

52. Boym, Common Places; David Crowley and Susan Emily Reid, Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (Oxford: Berg, 2002).

53. Joseph Brodsky, “Room and a Half,” in Less Than One: Selected Essays (London: Penguin, 2011); Pokrovskie vorota, directed by Mikhail Kazakov (Moscow: Mosfilm, 1982).

54. “Kurs No.15: Antropologiia kommunalki,” Arzamas Academy, accessed October 10, 2017, http://arzamas.academy/courses/6.

55. State Committee of Construction of the USSR Decree, “Ob utverzhdenii polozheniia o provedenii planovo-predupreditel’nogo remonta zhilykh i obshchestvennykh zdanii” [Provision on the carrying of the planned prevention remodeling of the residential and public buildings], September 8, 1964.

56. Provision of the Soviet of Ministers of the USSR, No. 740, “O merakh po dal’neishemu uluchsheniiu ekspluatatsii i remonta zhilishchnogo fonda” [On the measures for further improvement of exploitation and repair (remont) of the housing resources], September 4, 1978.

57. “O merakh po dal’neishemu,” ibid.

58. Provision of the State Committee of Construction of the USSR, No. 113, “On the Recognition of the Decree of the State Committee of Construction from September 8th, 1964, No.147 ‘About the regulations on the carrying of the planned prevention remodeling of the residential and public buildings’ as No Longer Valid,” June 30, 1989.

59. Moskoff, Hard Times, 64–65.

60. Housing Code of the Russian Federation, Section 106, “Provision of the Residential Spaces of the Maneuver Fund,” December 19, 2004.

61. Additionally, capital reconstructions offered a shift from the shared communal apartment occupancy, where many family members had to all share one room and multiple unrelated families had to share utilities with no functional separation or privacy possible whatsoever. Analysis of the Soviet communal apartments may be found in Ekaterina Gerasimova, “Public Privacy in the Soviet Communal Apartment,” in Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, ed. David Crowley and Susan E. Reid (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 207–230; or Steven Harris, “ ‘I Know All the Secrets of My Neighbors’: The Quest for Privacy in the Era of the Separate Apartment,” in Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia, ed. Lewis Siegelbaum (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 171–189.

62. Homes of Moderate Cost (Chicago: National Plan Service, 1952).

63. Steven Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press with John Hopkins University Press, 2013).

64. Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).

65. Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street, 41.

66. Homes of Moderate Cost.

67. “Zasedanie … na kukhne, kotoraia mogla by byt v kazhdom dome,” Rabotnitsa 1 (January 1988): 8.

68. Mervyn Matthews, Privilege in the Soviet Union: A Study of Elite Life-Styles under Communism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979), 45.

69. Moskva slezam ne verit, directed by Vladimir Menshov (Moscow: Mosfilm, 1979).

70. Ironiia sud’by, ili s legkim parom!, directed by El’dar Riazanov (Moscow: Mosfilm, 1976).

71. A reflection on the role of soap operas in the late-Soviet and early post-Soviet everyday life can be found in Boym, Common Places, 247–249.

72. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Things under Socialism: The Soviet Experience,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, ed. Frank Trentmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 464–467.

73. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the State Committee of Construction (Gosstroi) of the USSR held multiple architectural competitions for Khrushchev-era housing modernization and reconstruction projects. For instance, Illiustrirovannyi catalog proektov otkrytogo konkursa na razrabotku proektnykh predlozhenii po novym tipam maloetazhnykh zhilykh domov i prinzipov plotno-nizkoi gorodskoi zastroiki (Moscow: Gosstroi SSSR, 1981) and Illiustrirovannyi catalog proektov otkrytogo konkursa “Modernizatsiia i rekonstruktsiia zhilykh domov pervykh massovykh serii” (Moscow: Gosstroi SSSR, 1987).

74. Oleksii R. (architect), interview. Additionally, see Mariia Boyarova, “Istoriia dizaina inter’era postsovetskoi Moskvy v 1990e gody,” Houzz, November 23, 2016, https://www.houzz.ru/ideabooks/76622145/list/istoriya-dizayna-interyery-postsovetskoy-moskvy-v-1990-e-gody.

75. Anastasiia Romashkevich, “Skanflot” gotov sozdat’ rai v otdel’no vziatykh pomeshcheniakh,” Kommersant, December 12, 1991, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1815.

76. Katalog tipovykh reshenii pereplanirovok kvartir v zhilykh domakh massovykh serii (Moscow: MNIITEP, 2011).

77. Epitsentr is a construction material and furniture store that first opened in Kyiv in 1996 as a small business and by 2003 opened the first superstore. Roman Mal’chevskiy, “Aleksandr Gerega—o pervykh den’gakh i o tom kak sozdavalsia Epitsentr,” Politrada.ua, September 25, 2013, https://politrada.com/news/aleksandr-gerega-o-pervykh-dengakh-i-tom-kak-sozdavalsya-epitsentr/. IKEA opened its first store in Russia in 2000. “IKEA v Rossii,” IKEA in Russia (official website), https://www.ikea.com/ms/ru_RU/about_ikea/ikea_in_russia/ikea_in_russia.html.

78. “Dom v kotorom my zhivem,” Rabotnitsa, monthly heading.

79. Edward Casey, “Body, Self, and Landscape: A Geophilosophical Inquiry into the Place-World,” in Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies, ed. Paul Adams (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 409.

80. A comparison can be drawn between permanent remont and Olga Shevchenko’s permanent crisis in Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow, where she addresses the sense of crisis as a “the postsoviet hysteresis of habitus.”

81. Natalia S. (apartment dweller), interview by the author, May 2, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

82. Oksana H. (apartment dweller), interview by the author, May 14, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

83. Maryna D. (apartment dweller), interview by the author, May 6, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

84. Mykola I. (apartment dweller), interview by the author, June 26, 2019, Lviv, Ukraine.

85. Mykola I. (apartment dweller), interview.

86. See Ekaterina Gerasimova and Sofia Chuikina, “The Repair Society,” Russian Studies in History 48, no. 1 (2009): 58–74; Alexander, “Remont: Work in Progress,” 255–275; Wladimir Sgibnev, “Remont: Do-It-Yourself-Urbanism in Post-Soviet Tajikistan” (presentation paper, RC21 Conference, Berlin, Germany, August 29–31, 2013).

87. Tatiana Bulakh, “The Enchantment of Imaginary Europe: Consumer Practices in Post-Soviet Ukraine,” in The Socialist Good Life: Desire, Development and Standards of Living in Eastern Europe, ed. Christopher Scarboro, Diana Mincyte, and Zsuzsa Gille (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), 162.

88. The Law of the USSR, Section 24, “Prevention and Elimination of Noise,” in “About the Fundaments of the USSR and Republican Healthcare,” December 19, 1969.

89. The Law of Ukraine, Section 24, “Protection of the Population from the Harmful Influence of Noise, Non-Ionizing Emissions and Other Physical Factors,” in “About the Provision of Sanitary and Epidemical Wellbeing of the Population,” April 8, 1994.

90. Anton C. (top-floor apartment dweller), interview by the author, May 10, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

91. Leningrad, “Remont,” released November 20, 2007, track 10 on Avrora album.

92. Krisztina Fehérváry, Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 1.

1. For information on apartments without bedrooms in the United States, see John Hancock, “The Apartment House in Urban America,” in Buildings and Society: Essays on the Social Development of the Built Environment, ed. Anthony King (London: Routledge, 2003), 92, 96.

2. For example, Steven Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).

3. Fedor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (Oxford: Benediction Classics, 2016), 28.

4. In addition to communal apartments, many urbanites, particularly in smaller cities and prior to mass housing construction, lived in barracks. Barracks—temporary wooden or masonry housing split into rooms or even apartments—were typically built to house workers in new industrial locations around the Soviet Union. Since they were considered temporary, they often lacked amenities and were not properly maintained over time. However, like most temporary solutions, they turned out to be very persistent. For example, in 1980, two and a half decades after the beginning of the mass housing campaign, there were still 54 thousand people living in barracks and basements in the Ukrainian SSR alone. Fond R-582, Opys’ 12, Sprava 2938, 1, Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv vyshchykh organiv vlady ta upravlinnia Ukrainy, Kyiv, Ukraine.

5. Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home, 2.

6. Most importantly this includes fluid space use rather than identifiable room functions.

7. Yuri Trifonov, “Obmen,”in Moskovskie povesti (Moscow: Litres, 2017) (first published in 1969; author’s translation).

8. The Soviet and post-Soviet conventional meaning for a room is a separate domestic space other than the kitchen, bathroom, or entryway. The quality of a home is not defined by the number of bedrooms like in the United States but rather by the number of rooms. In this chapter the term is used accordingly.

9. Early modular (composed of panel) apartment series, nicknamed after Khrushchev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR between 1953 and 1964.

10. According to Soviet housing regulations, a family of three could not have received more than a two-room apartment.

11. Iu. S. Kukushkin and O. I. Chistiakov, Ocherk istorii sovetskoi konstitutsii (Moscow: Politizdat, 1987), 331.

12. Deirdre Harshman, “A Space Called Home: Housing and the Management of Everyday in Russia, 1890–1935” (PhD Diss., University of Urbana-Champaign, 2018), 40.

13. Vladimir Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 54 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1975), 350.

14. A. N. Fedorov, “Zhilishche v poslerevoliutsionnoi Moskve kak ob’iekt politiki i povsednevnoi zhizni,” Vestnik RUDN: Istoriia Rossii 1 (2008): 56–57.

15. This number varied at different times in different republics but has never gone above nine square meters per person. See Katherine Zubovich, “Housing and Meaning in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16, no. 4 (Fall 2015): 1007.

16. k stands for komnata (a room). In the 1950s and 1960s, this formula called formula rasseleniia (formula of settlement) sometimes reached k = n − 2 or even k = n − 3 values. Boris Rubanenko (ed.), Tipizatsiia zhilykh zdanii, ikh elementov i detalei (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1974), 91.

17. Vladimir Papernyi, Kul’tura dva (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2011), 103.

18. Isadora Duncan (1877–1927)—a famous American dancer who resided in Moscow 1921–1924.

19. Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 26–27.

20. “In the next three five-year plans every family will have a separate apartment!” Nikita Khrushchev claimed at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956.

21. The format of the Sanitary Norms and Regulations was first introduced in 1954 to replace the previous scattered rules. See SNiP II-V.10–58 Zhilye zdaniia (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1954).

22. Jane Roj Zavisca, Housing the New Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 30.

23. V. D. Elizarov, Massovoe zhilishchnoe stroitel’stvo v USSR (Kyiv: Budivel’nyk, 1966), 39–44.

24. A rare exclusion, when kitchens became big enough to occasionally accommodate sleep, is described in chapter 4.

25. Illustrirovannyi katalog proektov otkrytogo konkursa na razrabotku proektnykh predlozhenii po novym tipam maloetazhnykh zhilykh domov i prinzipov plotno-nizkoi gorodskoi zastroiki (Moscow: Gosstroi SSSR, 1981), 24.

26. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 150–159.

27. Compact housing (malogabaritnoe zhil’e) is a term typically used to define Khrushchev-era and post-Khrushchev-era Soviet apartments due to their small dimensions.

28. Trifonov, “Obmen.”

29. Pora bol’shogo novoselia, directed by Nebylitskii B. (Moscow: Tsentral’naia studiia dokumental’nykh filmov, 1959).

30. Merzhanov describes an intensively used common room as having “a dining and a living room zone” and at night “transforming into a bedroom, say, for a young couple.” Boris Merzhanov, Inter’er zhilishcha (Moscow: Znanie, 1970), 21.

31. For an in-depth exploration into the Soviet byt, see Boym, Common Places, 29–40.

32. “Russian Property Law, Privatization, and the Right of ‘Full Economic Control,’ ” Harvard Law Review 107, no. 5 (March 1994): 1044.

33. “Russian Property Law, Privatization, and the Right of ‘Full Economic Control,’ ” 1044.

34. “Russian Property Law, Privatization, and the Right of ‘Full Economic Control,’ ” 1044.

35. Verkhovna Rada URSR, Zakon URSR “Pro vlasnist’ ” (697-12) z 15 kvitnia 1991 roku (Kyiv: Vidomosti Verkhovnoi Rady URSR, 1991), http://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/885-12.

36. See Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty, and Gabriel Zucman, “From Soviets to Oligarchs: Inequality and Property in Russia, 1905–2016” (NBER Working Paper No. 23712, August 2017).

37. Sanitarnye normy i pravila I-B.II Stroitel’nye materialy, detali i konstruktsii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo literatury po stroitel’stvu, arkhitekture i stroitel’nym materialam, 1955), 48.

38. Gosudarstvennyi standard Soiuza SSR 6428-52 Plity gipsovye dlia peregorodok (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi komitet SSR po delam stroitel’stva, 1952).

39. Gosudarstvennyi standard Soiuza SSR 6428-74 Plity gipsovye dlia peregorodok (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi komitet SSR po delam stroitel’stva, 1974); Gosudarstvennyi standard Soiuza SSR 6428-83 Plity gipsovye dlia peregorodok (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi komitet SSR po delam stroitel’stva, 1983).

40. Werner Rödiger, Herbert Schumacher, and Wilfried Demel, Rost i stanovlenie: Biografia sem’i predprinematelei Knauf (Iphofen: Knauf Gips KG, 2003), 362–370.

41. “V khrushchevke,” Idei vashego doma 61, no. 4 (April 2003), https://www.ivd.ru/custom_category/custom_subcategory/v-hrusevke-4463.

42. “Prevrashchenia khrushchevki,” Idei vashego doma, no. 2 (2005), https://www.ivd.ru/custom_category/custom_subcategory/prevrasenia-hrusevki-5411; “Nemnogo sveta i tepla,” Idei vashego doma, no. 2 (2005), https://www.ivd.ru/custom_category/custom_subcategory/nemnogo-sveta-i-tepla-5413.

43. T. A. Korostleva, Pereplanirovka kvartiry (Moscow: Gammapress, 2000), 23.

44. Hanna F. (architect), interview by the author, May 15, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

45. Hanna F. (architect), interview.

46. Hanna F. (architect), interview.

47. Valerii M. (apartment dweller), interview by the author, April 27, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

48. Recorder of Deeds engineers, personal conversation with the author; anonymized Recorder of Deeds plans reproduced by the author, Kyiv, Ukraine, April 2017.

49. See chapter 5.

50. Since state-supplied housing for the most part no longer functioned after 1991, families who were unable to afford bigger homes continued living and growing in small apartments. To this day, several generations of the same family (more than one core family) commonly live together, with occupants outnumbering rooms. For more information on economic disparity, see Branko Milanović and Lire Ersado, “Reform and Inequality during the Transition: An Analysis Using Panel Household Survey Data, 1990–2005” (No. wp-2010-062, WIDER Working Paper Series, World Institute for Development Economic Research [UNU-WIDER]) and Zavisca, Housing the New Russia. According to Tsenkova and Turner, in 2002, 33.5 percent (Latvia) and 44.1 percent (Ukraine) of three-member families lived in two or fewer rooms. Another 25.5 percent (Latvia) and 23.7 percent (Ukraine) of three-member families lived in three-room apartments. Sasha Tsenkova and Bengt Turner, “The Future of Social Housing in Eastern Europe: Reforms in Latvia and Ukraine,” European Journal of Housing Policy 4, no. 2 (2004): 141.

51. Valerii M. (apartment dweller), interview.

52. Ekaterina Gerasimova and Sof’ia Chuikina, “Obshchestvo remonta,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 34, no. 2 (2004).

53. See Natalya Chernyshova, “Philistines on the Big Screen: Consumerism in Soviet Cinema of the Brezhnev Era,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 5, no. 2 (2014): 227–254; and Natalya Chernyshova, “Consuming Technology in a Closed Society: Household Appliances in Soviet Urban Homes of the Brezhnev Era,” Ab Imperio 2011, no. 2 (2011): 188–220.

54. Because of the consumer goods deficit, many goods could not be bought freely but had to be obtained through contrivances. For information about the consumer goods deficit, see Steven Sampson, “The Second Economy of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 493, no. 1 (2016): 120–136.

55. Gerasimova and Chuikina, “Obshchestvo remonta.”

56. IKEA first opened in the Russian Federation in 2000.

57. JYSK first opened in the Russian Federation in 1996 and in Ukraine in 2004.

58. Boym, Common Places, 150–159.

59. David Stea, “House and Home: Identity, Dichotomy or Dialectic?” in Domestic Space Reader, ed. Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 48.

60. Boym, Common Places, 155–157.

61. A detailed account of the growing housing inequality after the collapse of the Soviet Union can be found in Zavisca, Housing the New Russia, 89.

62. Oksana H. (apartment dweller), interview by the author, May 14, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

63. Oleksandra H. (apartment dweller), interview by the author, May 14, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

64. Aleksander Kuliapin and Olga Skubach, Mifologiia sovetskoi povsednevnosti (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kulʹtury [IaSK], 2013), 128.

65. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (London: Blackwell, 1982), 132–138, quoted in Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei, eds., Domestic Space Reader (Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 227–229.

66. It seems that out of all bourgeois habits, shame of the naked body was not one the Soviet society was ready to abandon: radical nudists were physically interrogated, taken off public transport, and finally condemned by the communist state itself. The Soviet People’s Commissar of Healthcare, Nickolay Semashko, stated in an interview to the major Soviet newspaper Izvestiia that “when such capitalist ugliness as prostitution and hooliganism, are not yet outlived in the Soviet society, nudity only promotes immorality, and not good morals.” Izvestiia, “Kul’tura ili bezobrazie?” September 12, 1924, cover.

67. See Papernyi, Kul’tura dva, 148 on Konstantin Melnikov’s house.

68. “Socialism in One Country”—A theory broadly accepted in the Soviet Union after the defeat of socialist revolutions in European countries. Formally introduced by Nickolay Bukharin in 1925. “Communism in One Apartment” was a running Soviet joke, meaning the promised communist paradise was created in a single apartment, often obtaining commodities through the informal economy and bribery.

69. “Vasha mechta—sobstvennaia spal’nia,” Rabotnitsa 3/4 (1992): 8/11.

70. Valerii M. (apartment dweller), interview.

71. Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 83.

72. While rhythmanalysis did appear in the field of post-Soviet studies, it was only used in a couple studies and applied predominantly to public space. Wladimir Sgibnev, “Rhythms of Being Together: Public Space in Urban Tajikistan through the Lens of Rhythmanalysis,” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 35, no. 7/8 (2015): 533–549.

Parts of chapter 3 have been previously published in Kateryna Malaia, “Transforming the Architecture of Food: From the Soviet to the Post-Soviet Apartment,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 80, no. 4 (2021): 460–476.

1. Oksana H. (apartment dweller), interview by the author, May 14, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

2. Elizabeth Cromley, The Food Axis: Cooking, Eating and the Architecture of the American Houses (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 3.

3. Late-Soviet housing stock, a product of seven decades of Communist rule, predominantly consisted of pre-Revolutionary communal, Stalin-era, prefabricated Khrushchev-era (first-generation), and Brezhnev-era (second- and third-generation) apartments. The intervention of the state into the apartment life of the Khrushchev-era is described in Victor Buchli, “Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight against ‘Petit-Bourgeois’ Consciousness in the Soviet Home,” Journal of Design History 10, no. 2 (1997): 161–176. The relationship between the home and the state in the Brezhnev era is addressed in Natalya Chernyshova, “Closing the Door on Socialism: Furniture and the Domestic Interior,” in Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era (London: Routledge, 2013).

4. In Victor Buchli, Materializing Culture: An Archeology of Socialism (Oxford: Berg, 2000), Buchli writes that the elimination of a dining room took place during the de-Stalinization effort and with the introduction of the utilitarian prefabricated housing in the late 1950s. According to Buchli, it was not until the 1950s that Soviet apartments shifted toward multifunctional rather than monofunctional spaces. However, it is possible to argue that Soviet apartments shifted toward multifunctional spaces with the introduction of k = n − 1 rule in the 1918 decree: O vselenii semei krasnoarmeitsev i bezrabotnykh rabochikh v zhil’e burzhuazii i normirovke zhilykh pomeshchenii (About moving red army soldiers and unemployed workers into the housing of bourgeoisie, and the norms for housing spaces). Rooms remained multifunctional in most Soviet urban households until 1991, excluding only the elites of the Soviet society. The decree meant that the number of people always exceeded the number of rooms in the apartment. Having a dining room was impossible for most urbanites throughout Soviet history. What Buchli identifies as a dining room was rather a multifunctional area in one of the available rooms, used for different purposes throughout the day. Despite Buchli’s examples drawn from a Soviet domestic interior advice book, the actual apartments constructed in the 1960s were too modestly sized for an open plan or for Buchli’s illustration to be realized. Except for a small number of first-generation apartments designed with kitchenettes, the rooms remained as segregated as they were before. A transformation shown by Buchli could only have taken place in a large communal apartment room, which made this scenario practically impossible due to the necessity to replace all furniture at once for no real reason in the society of an omnipresent commodity shortage. An Archeology of Socialism refers to the formal modernist discourse in Soviet domestic architecture rather than real domestic interior in practice.

5. In some experimental Constructivist housing, Narkomfin apartment buildings in particular, architects abolished apartment kitchens in favor of a communal canteen that was supposed to feed the entire population of the building. The experiment largely failed: apartment dwellers established and expanded individual kitchenettes inside their apartments.

6. Soviet bureaucracy divided domestic space into the so-called lived and auxiliary spaces, with auxiliary spaces being kitchens, bathrooms, lavatories, hallways, balconies, and storage, and lived space being everything else. In other words, everything other than auxiliary spaces was considered to be a lived room (zhilaia komnata).

7. See Paola Messana, Soviet Communal Living: An Oral History of the Kommunalka (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 117; or Ilya Utekhin, Alice Nakhimovsky, Slava Paperno, and Nancy Ries, Communal Living in Russia: A Virtual Museum of Soviet Everyday Life, http://kommunalka.colgate.edu/cfm/essays.cfm?ClipID=250&TourID=910.

8. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 147.

9. Lynne Attwood, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia: Private Life in a Public Space (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010), 224–226.

10. Attwood, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia, 223.

11. Prigov poetically suggests that all the most important events took place in the communal kitchens. These events later “flooded the rooms, as the secondary signs of offenses, spiteful looks, greetings, and sweet pies …” Dmitrii Prigov, Zhivite v Moskve: Rukopis’ na pravakh romana (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2000), 96.

12. For instance, in the movie Dobrovol’tsy, directed by Yurii Egorov (Moscow: Kinostudiia im. Gor’kogo, 1958), and the painting Utro (1954) by Tatiana Iablonskaia.

13. Sarah Bonnemaison, “Performing the Modernist Dwelling: The Unite d’Habitation of Marseille,” in Architecture as Performing Art, ed. Marcia Feuerstein and Gray Read (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 64.

14. Susan E. Reid, “The Khrushchev Kitchen: Domesticating the Scientific-Technological Revolution” Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 2 (2005): 289. The effects of the disappearance of servant labor from the kitchen are relevant far beyond just Soviet geographies. However, the effects of this labor disappearance vary and have taken different spans of time to unwrap. For instance, Elizabeth Cromley associates the merging between the cooking, dining and living room spaces in the American homes with the “change towards the servantless household evident since 1910.” Cromley, The Food Axis, 204.

15. Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 64.

16. Frankfurt kitchen is a commonly used name for the modernist fitted kitchen designed by Margarete Schutte-Lihotsky for the Frankfurt housing projects in 1926–1927. Christopher Wilk, ed., Modernism: 1914–1939; Designing a New World (London: Victoria & Albert Publications, 2006), 180.

17. Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home, 27.

18. Plans from Philipp Meuser and Dimitrij Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing: Prefabrication in the USSR 1955–1991 (Berlin: DOM publishers, 2015), 267.

19. Sanitarnye Normy i Pravila II-B.10-58 Zhilye zdaniia (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo literatury po stroitel’stvu, arkhitekture i stroitel’nym materialam, 1958), 20.

20. Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home, 26–28.

21. Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home, 150; and “Norma zhiloi ploshchadi,” in Zhilishchnyi kodeks RSFSR (Moskva: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1986).

22. Sanitarnye Normy i Pravila II-B.10-58 Zhilye zdaniia, 20.

23. Sanitarnye Normy i Pravila II-B.10-58 Zhilye zdaniia, 20.

24. Buchli, “Khrushchev, Modernism,” 166.

25. “Programma otkrytogo konkursa na luchshie tipovye proekty domov 3-4-5 etazhei,” Gosstroi SSR, 1956, Fond R-1657, Opys’ 1, Sprava 97, 16, Desrzhavnyi oblastnyi arkhiv L’vivs’koi Oblasti, Lviv, Ukraine.

26. Susan E. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (2002): 223–228.

27. Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home, 65.

28. Buchli, “Khrushchev, Modernism,” 167–168.

29. “Down with the Kitchen Slavery! Let There Be New Everyday Life [Byt]!” is a Soviet political poster promoting female liberation widely used in the 1920s and 1930s. Also see Reid, “The Khrushchev Kitchen,” 291–292.

30. “Programma otkrytogo konkursa na luchshie tipovye proekty domov 3-4-5 etazhei,” Gosstroi SSR, Fond R-1657, Opys’ 1, Sprava 97, 16, Desrzhavnyi oblastnyi arkhiv L’vivs’koi Oblasti, Lviv, Ukraine.

31. Meuser and Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing, 171.

32. O. Ia. Smirnova, “Vliianie bytovykh processov na formirovanie zhiloi iacheiki,” Stroitel’stvo i arkhitektura, no. 22 (1986): 13.

33. Dom v kotorom ia zhivu, directed by Lev Kulidzhanov, (Moscow: Kinostudiia im. Gor’kogo, 1957); Iiul’skii dozhd’, directed by Marlen Khutsiev, (Moscow: Mosfilm, 1966).

34. Operatsiia Y i drugie prikliucheniia Shurika, directed by Leonid Gaidai, (Moscow, Mosfilm, 1965).

35. Ivan Vasil’evich meniaet professiiu, directed by Leonid Gaidai, (Moscow, Mosfilm, 1973).

36. Yurii Poliakov, “Podruzhka: Moi milyi chto tebe ia sdelala,” Rabotnitsa 6 (June 1984): 28.

37. V. Stepanishev, “10 metrov na 100 chelovek,” Rabotnitsa 3 (March 1989): 8. Although this example is a consumer ideal of a late-Soviet urbanite—two television sets in an apartment, one of them in the kitchen—this does not mean that every single family had two television sets in their home. Nevertheless, this description would appear familiar and relevant to the general public.

38. Boym, Common Places, 142.

39. Stepanishev, “10 metrov na 100 chelovek,” 8.

40. Anna Alekseyeva, “Constructing Soviet Domesticity and Managing Everyday Life from Khrushchev to Collapse,” in Material Culture in Russia and the USSR: Things, Values, Identities, ed. Graham H. Roberts (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 61–63.

41. Alekseyeva, “Constructing Soviet Domesticity,” 63.

42. See Buchli on transformable furniture: Buchli, Materializing Culture, 143.

43. Owning a television was an important element of the late-Soviet idea of prosperity (Andrey Trofimov and Marina Klinova, “ ‘Sovetskii potrebitel’ v otechestvennom gumanitarnom diskurse 1950–1980kh godov,” Izvestiia UrGEU 4, no. 54 (2014): 110), while owning a second television set in the kitchen was a sign of particular comfortable living [for instance, a late-Soviet movie The Most Charming and Attractive (Samaia obaiatel’naia i privlekatel’naia) uses a second kitchen television set to illustrate the well-being of a secondary character, Susanna]. The growing late-Soviet consumerism is described and explained in Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era. Gerald Bezhanov, Samaia obaiatel’naia i privlekatel’naia (Moscow: Mosfilm, 1985).

44. On celebratory food and its meaning, see Albert Baiburin and Alexandra Piir, “When We Were Happy: Remembering Soviet Holidays,” in Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style, ed. Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko (London: Anthem Press, 2011), 247.

45. William Moskoff, Hard Times: Impoverishment and Protest in the Perestroika Years: The Soviet Union 1985–1991 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 28–43.

46. Adrianne Jacobs, “The Many Flavors of Socialism: Modernity and Tradition in Late Soviet Food Culture, 1965–1985” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2015), 240, https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/indexablecontent/uuid:123695e5-654d-4112-8efb-38980ad8e51a.

47. Anna Kushkova, “V tsentre stola: Zenit i zakat salata Olivye,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 76 (2005): 278–313.

48. Nika Zh. (apartment dweller), personal conversation and photoshoot with the author, June 30, 2019, Kyiv, Ukraine.

49. Natalia S. (apartment dweller), interview by the author, May 2, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine; as well as Boym, Common Places, 150–157.

50. Jennifer A. Jordan, Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 36.

51. Jennifer Patico, Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 177.

52. Meuser and Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing, 267.

53. Sanitarnye normy i pravila 2.08.01-89* Zhilye zdaniia (Moscow: TsITP Gosstroiia SSSR, 1989).

54. Out of the nine apartment dwellers interviewed for this project, four indicated kitchens as the primary spaces they remodeled and attempted to improve, either with efficient organization or by physically enlarging or connecting them with other spaces of their apartment.

55. Stepanishev, “10 metrov na 100 chelovek,” 8. This passage has an additional implication other than pointing out a perception of kitchens as insufficiently small. In this quote, the fridge is no longer treated as a technical breakthrough or a sign of social and economic well-being of its owners. On the contrary, it is shown as a bulky, inconvenient object that needs to be partially hidden inside the wall. This is in tune with Sandy Isenstadt’s argument that by the 1950s, in the United States, refrigerators became so commonplace they were no longer treated as a technological miracle, and their physical presence was downplayed in the interiors by their “spectacularization” as a vision of food abundance. While the quote by Stepanishev clearly shows an attempt to downplay the refrigerator in the kitchen interior, the social context of this quote from Rabotnitsa is quite different from the American case. It similarly suggests that refrigerators and accessible food also became commonplace in the late Soviet Union. However, the quality of this food supply was quite different from the “vision of plenty” described in Isenstadt’s article. Sandy Isenstadt, “Visions of Plenty: Refrigerators in America around 1950,” Journal of Design History 11, no. 4 (1998): 311.

56. Although there was no written rule to not use monolith concrete for floor slab construction, it is clearly evident in the recommendations for residential construction. The reason to limit the use of monolith concrete was the omnipresence of House Building Factories [domostroitel’nyi kombinat (DSK)]—factories that produced prefabricated panels. For instance, Yurii Dykhovichii suggests only using concrete panels in residential construction. Yurii Dykhovichii, Zhilye i obshchestvennye zdaniia: Kratkii spravochnik inzhenera-konstruktora (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1991), 9; Kateryna Malaia, “A Unit of Homemaking: The Prefabricated Panel and Domestic Architecture in the Late Soviet Union,” Architectural Histories 8, no. 1 (2020): 11.

57. For the discussion of the limited possibilities of prefabricated panel construction and the necessity to shift to monolith construction in housing, see N. K. Buts, “Puti i metody razvitiia monolitnogo domostroeniia,” Stroitel’stvo i arkhitektura 8 (1989): 14–15.

58. Some standardized housing construction did not stop immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union but rather continued for a couple more years, if money and materials were allocated for the construction before 1991. Typically, these projects took longer than predicted and were frequently finished by a funder different than the state.

59. Arsenii R. (engineer), interview by the author, May 18, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

60. Iaroslav D. (architect), interview by the author, May 11, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

61. Iaroslav D. (architect), interview.

62. Andrii K. (architect), interview by the author, May 24, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine. During an interview, Andrii K. recalled that in 1992–1993, imported cabinet elements replaced locally produced cabinet parts.

63. Taras S. (architect), interview by the author, April 22, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

64. Boym, Common Places, 155.

65. Stepanishev, “10 metrov na 100 chelovek,” 8.

66. “Of all spaces of an apartment the most universally used is the kitchen” from Smirnova, “Vliianie bytovykh processov na formirovanie zhiloi iacheiki,” 13.

67. For more information on anti-Soviet (dissident) gatherings in the kitchen, see Nancy Ries, Russian Talk Culture and Conversation during Perestroika (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1997), 92.

68. The damage from a potential gas explosion would be minimized as the window structures would be the first to burst.

69. Sanitarnye normy i pravila II-B.10-58 Zhilye zdaniia, 20; Sanitarnye normy i pravila II-L.1-71* Zhilye zdaniia (Moscow: Stroiizadat, 1978), 16, 23.

70. “Ob izmenenii i dopolnenii glavy SNiP II-L.1-71,” in Sanitarnye normy i pravila II-L.1-71* Zhilye zdaniia, 11 (dopolnenie).

71. Arsenii R. (engineer), interview. This interviewee worked on an apartment building reconstruction in the 1980s. Since this apartment building was located in the very center of a republican capital, the apartments were supposed to house Soviet elites after the reconstruction was over. Unlike in regular cases, future dwellers were able to put in personal requests. One of the future residents requested that engineers and architects develop his apartment with two kitchens, since the apartment was to be populated by both his and his child’s family and the two families wanted to cook separately.

72. A comprehensive account of the American National Exhibition that demonstrated American commodities to the Soviet public in Moscow in 1959 can be found in Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen,” 211–252.

73. Krisztina Fehérváry, “American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a ‘Normal’ Life in Postsocialist Hungary,” Ethnos 67, 3 (2002): 369.

74. Fehérváry, “American Kitchens,” 380.

75. For studies on Socialist Bloc suburbanization (i.e., urban decentralization), see Sonia Hirt, Iron Curtains: Gates, Suburbs, and Privatization of Space in the Post-Socialist City (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2012), 106–110, 127–128; K. Leetmaa, T. Tammaru, and K. Anniste, “From Priority-Led to Market-Led Suburbanization in a Post-Communist Metropolis,” Tijdschrigt Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie 100, 4 (2009): 436–453, and many others.

76. Matas Cirtautas, “Urban Sprawl of Major Cities in the Baltic States,” Arhitektura un pilsetplanosana 7, no. 10 (2013): 72.

77. Robert J. Mason and Liliya Nigmatullina, “Suburbanization and Sustainability in Metropolitan Moscow,” Geographical Review 101, no. 3 (July 2011): 316–333.

78. Irene Cieraad, “ ‘Out of My Kitchen!’ Architecture, Gender and Domestic Efficiency,” The Journal of Architecture 7, no. 3 (2002): 263–279.

79. Cieraad, “ ‘Out of My Kitchen!’ Architecture, Gender and Domestic Efficiency,” 263–279.

80. Stepanishev, “10 metrov na 100 chelovek,” 8.

81. Iurii Ivanov, Pereplanirovka, remont i dizain kvartiry: Sovremennye otdelochnye materialy i technologii raboty s nimi (Moscow: Ast. Astrel’, 2006), 18.

82. Hanna F. (architect), interview by the author, May 15, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

83. For instance, II-57 series and PP-44 series apartments had a load-bearing wall between the kitchen and the adjacent room.

84. “Fabrika komforta,” Idei vashego doma, accessed April 25, 2018, https://www.ivd.ru/custom_category/custom_subcategory/fabrika-komforta-5002.

85. Buro tekhnichnoi inventaryzatsii engineers, personal conversations with the author.

86. GOST 13025.2-85 Mebel’ bytovaia: Funktsional’nye razmery mebeli dlia sideniia i lezhaniia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo standartov, 1987).

87. Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsyklopediia (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsyklopediia, 1972), s.vv. “mebel’ ” and “mebel’naia promyshlennost’.” Since furniture production in the Soviet Union was centralized, if a piece did not appear in the catalogues of the Soviet furniture industry and did not make it into Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsyklopediia (Great Soviet encyclopedia), it means that it was not produced and virtually did not exist in Soviet homes.

88. Stepanishev, “10 metrov na 100 chelovek,” 8.

89. The comfort of fixed kitchen sitting may appear to be questionable when it comes to daily eating.

90. Stepanishev, “10 metrov na 100 chelovek,” 8.

91. Maryna D. (apartment dweller), interview by the author, May 6, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

92. Mykola H. (apartment dweller), interview by the author, June 26, 2019, Lviv, Ukraine.

93. Iryna M. (apartment dweller), interview by the author, July 11, 2019, Lviv, Ukraine.

94. Iryna M. (apartment dweller), interview.

95. Mariia K. (apartment dweller), interview by the author, August 22, 2019, Kyiv, Ukraine.

96. Mariia K. (apartment dweller), interview.

97. Cromley, The Food Axis, 207.

98. Cromley, The Food Axis, 207.

99. Stepanishev, “10 metrov na 100 chelovek,” 8.

100. See for example, “Sobianin: Kvartaly v Moskve budut pereseliat’ i snosit’ tol’ko po zhelaniiu zhitelei,” TASS: Informatsionnoe agenstvo Rossii, updated March 9, 2017, http://tass.ru/obschestvo/4081517.

Programma KPSS (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1961), 94.

1. Svetlana Boym speaks of the “communal duties” in “Archeology of Banality: The Soviet Home,” Public Culture 6, no. 2 (1994): 266.

2. Between 1987 and 1991, Rabotnitsa magazine published a number of articles on remodeling kitchens, living rooms, and other rooms but not a single article on remodeling bathrooms.

3. Valentyna B., personal conversation with the author, Summer 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

4. Krisztina Fehérváry, “American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a ‘Normal’ Life in Postsocialist Hungary,” Ethnos 67, no. 3 (2002): 383.

5. Ironiia sud’by, ili s legkim parom!, directed by Il’dar Riazanov (Moscow: Mosfilm, 1975); Afonia, directed by Georgii Danelia (Moscow: Mosfilm, 1975).

6. Lilya Kaganovsky, “The Cultural Logic of Late Socialism,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 3, no. 2 (2009): 192.

7. Moskva slezam ne verit, directed by Vladimir Menshov (Moscow: Mosfilm, 1979).

8. Christine Varga-Harris, “Foundation: Revolution Realized,” in Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 53–80.

9. For example, see Boris Merzhanov, Inter’er zhilishcha (Moscow: Znanie, 1970), 34.

10. Although not an image, another major introduction of the toilet to the discourse happened with Victor Pelevin’s “Vera Pavlovna’s Ninth Dream,” a short story first published in 1991.

11. Many communal apartments were established in pre-1917 apartment buildings. In these buildings, story heights sometimes reached 4.5 meters or almost fifteen feet.

12. Svetlana Boym, “Ilya Kabakov: The Soviet Toilet and the Palace of Utopias,” ARTMargins, December 31, 1999, https://artmargins.com/ilya-kabakov-the-soviet-toilet-and-the-palace-of-utopias.

13. “Respectable inter’er v panel’nom dome,” Salon inter’er, no. 1 (1994), https://salon.ru/article/respectable-interer-v-panelnom-dome-1744.

14. Boym, “Ilya Kabakov.”

15. For an example of a reference to “golden toilets,” see Mikhail Kolomenskii, “K voprosu o formirovanii vneshnepoliticheskogo imidzha sovremennoi Rossii,” Vlast’ (March 2008): 83. For further reading on Russian nouveau riche homes, see Caroline Humphrey, The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 175–201.

16. “Respectable inter’er v panel’nom dome.”

17. For example, see Merzhanov, Inter’er zhilishcha, 33, where the author claims combined and separate sanitary blocks to be the two main sanitary types available. Out of nine (K-7, G (Gi), I-464, I-335, I-467, I-447/I-447C, I-507, II-18, and II-38) prefabricated apartment building series of the first generation that Meuser and Zadorin list in their book on Soviet prefabricated construction, only one (II-38) had a separate bathroom and toilet room for one- and two-room apartments. At the same time, all of them had a separate bathroom and toilet room in three-or-more-room apartments. Philipp Meuser and Dimitrij Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing: Prefabrication in the USSR 1955–1991 (Berlin: DOM publishers, 2015), 167–256.

18. Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home: Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 152–153; Ekaterina Gerasimova, “The Soviet Communal Apartment,” in Beyond the Limits: The Concept of Space in Russian History and Culture, ed. Jeremy Smith (Helsinki: SHS, 1999); Steven Harris, “In Search of ‘Ordinary’ Russia: Everyday Life in the NEP, the Thaw, and the Communal Apartment,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 3 (2005): 583–614; Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 121–167.

19. Christine Varga-Harris, “Homemaking and the Aesthetic and Moral Perimeters of the Soviet Home during the Khrushchev Era,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 567.

20. Sanitarnye normy i pravila II-B.10–58 Zhilye zdaniia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo literatury po stroitel’stvu, arkhitekture i stroitel’nym materialam, 1958), 19.

21. Sanitarnye normy i pravila II-B.10–58 Zhiliye zdaniia, 19.

22. Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home, 2.

23. For example, the KOPE series developed in 1981. Meuser and Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing, 399–405.

24. Natalia S. (apartment dweller), interview by the author, May 2, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

25. Soviet literature provides numerous examples of limited access to hygiene facilities in a communal apartment. One such example can be seen in Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoy’s novel The Viper. The female protagonist carries out daily hygienic procedures in the communal kitchen, and the spectrum of these procedures varies depending on the presence of men. Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoy, “The Viper” in The Marie Antoinette Tapestry (Moscow: Raduga Pub., 1991).

26. For example, the KOPE series was designed to have only separate sanitary blocks, even in the small two-room apartments.

27. Henry W. Morton, “Who Gets What, When and How? Housing in the Soviet Union,” Soviet Studies 32, no. 2 (April 1980): 245.

28. Cooperatives and institutions had a little more freedom in deciding on the number of square meters per apartment than they would with state-owned housing. This often resulted in larger kitchens and separate bathrooms and lavatories. See Mervyn Matthews, Poverty in the Soviet Union: The Life-Styles of the Underprivileged in Recent Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 67.

29. For example, see an interview with the head of Moscow State Housing Inspection Aleksandr Matveevich Strazhnikov, “Vse o pereplanirovke kvartiry,” interview by Svetlana Olifirova, Komsomol’skaia pravda, May 5, 2005, https://www.kp.ru/daily/23519/40426/. Another example can be found in an article on the resettlement of the first-generation prefabricated housing in Moscow, where the vice director of the Department of Housing Policy and Housing Funds in Moscow states: “As for the new apartments, they are offered not on a square-meter-for-square-meter basis, but on a room-for-room. Take a two-room khrushchevka. It has 42–44 square meters, a small kitchen, typically a combined sanitary block, and walk-through rooms. Resettling from this housing, people will receive a two-room apartment of no less than 50 square meters, with isolated rooms, a large kitchen, loggia, and separate bathroom and toilet room. Is this person going to improve their housing situation? Of course, they will!” From “Zhiteliam moskovskikh khrushchevok predlozhat kvartity za MKAD,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, March 27, 2012, https://www.msk.kp.ru/daily/25858/2825855/.

30. The discrepancies between the Soviet texts and reality are a subject for Mikhail Epstein’s “The Origins and Meaning of Russian Postmodernism,” in After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 188–210. Epstein sees Soviet texts as inventing models of reality that “replace reality itself” (189).

31. Except for the homes of extreme elites, who could request individually designed layouts or were offered an outstanding apartment composition in the so-called institutional (vedomstvennye) buildings.

32. Boris Merzhanov, Sovremennaia kvartira (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1974), title page.

33. Merzhanov, Sovremennaia kvartira, 27.

34. Ol’khova A. P., Novye serii tipovykh proektov zhilykh domov dlia massovogo stroitel’stva: Arkhitekturno-planirovochnye resheniia (obzor) (Moscow: Tsentr nauchno-tekhnicheskoi informatsii po grazhdanskomu stroitel’stvu i arkhitekture, 1972), 46.

35. Merzhanov, Sovremennaia kvartira, 35–37.

36. Merzhanov, Sovremennaia kvartira, 35–37.

37. Anna Bronivitskaia and Nikolai Malinin, Moskva: Arkhitektura sovetskogo modernizma 1955–1991: Spravochnik-putevoditelʹ (Moscow: Garazh, 2016), 123.

38. Meuser and Zadorin list two third-generation series of apartment buildings equipped with two bathrooms: 112 and 148. The 112 series was originally developed for Vorkuta and soon became widespread in Norilsk, making it a general regional series for climatic zone 1. The 112 series built in Tashkent “over-compensated for the shortage of four- and five-room apartments with the additional conveniences such as large entrance halls and two sanitary blocks.” The abundance of four- and five-room apartments was regionally specific to Central Asian republics, as they were considered to have large families. Meuser and Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing, 407, 419.

39. Iaroslav D. (architect), interview by the author, May 11, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

40. Iaroslav D. (architect), interview.

41. Illiustrirovannyi katalog proektov otkrytogo konkursa “Modernizatsiia i rekonstruktsiia zhilykh domov pervykh massovikh serii” (Moscow: Gosstroi SSSR, 1987), 11.

42. Illiustrirovannyi katalog proektov otkrytogo konkursa, 16.

43. Illiustrirovannyi katalog proektov otkrytogo konkursa, 19.

44. Illiustrirovannyi katalog proektov otkrytogo konkursa na razrabotku proektnykh predlozhenii po novym tipam maloetazhnykh zhilykh domov I prinzipov plotno-nizkoi gorodskoi zastrojki (Moscow: Gosstroi SSSR, 1981), 6, 26–27, 67.

45. Sanitarnye normy i pravila II-B.10–58 Zhilye zdaniia.

46. Sanitarnye normy i pravila II-L.1–62 Zhilye zdaniia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo literatury po stroitel’stvu, 1964).

47. Sanitarnye normy i pravila II-L.1–71* Zhilye zdaniia (Moscow: Stroiizadat, 1978).

48. Sanitarnye normy i pravila 2.08.01–89 Zhilye zdaniia (Moscow: TsITP Gosstroiia SSSR, 1989).

49. See Jane Roj Zavisca, Housing the New Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 52.

50. This is despite the preservation of many elements of Soviet norms in the early post-Soviet building codes. The first construction regulations developed in the post-Soviet states often resembled the late-Soviet ones, but some received a new nomenclature; for instance, construction regulations became known as Derzhavni Budivel’ni Normy in Ukraine and Noteikumi par Latvijas būvnormatīvu in Latvia.

51. P-44 is described in detail in Meuser and Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing, 375–385.

52. I. N. Shkaruba, “Razvitie panel’nogo domostroeniia v Moskve,” Zhilishchnoe stroitel’stvo, no. 8 (2003): 11

53. Shkaruba, “Razvitie panel’nogo domostroeniia v Moskve,” 11–12.

54. Kateryna Malaia, “A Unit of Homemaking: The Prefabricated Panel and Domestic Architecture in the Late Soviet Union,” Architectural Histories 8, no. 1 (2020): 12, 13.

55. Iaroslav D. (architect), interview.

56. The scale of influence projected by Western expatriates in the large post-Soviet cities can be seen in Yuri Medvedkov and Olga Medvedkov, “Upscale Housing in Post-Soviet Moscow and its Environs,” in The Post-Socialist City: Urban Form and Space Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe after Socialism, ed. Kiril Stanilov (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer Verlag, 2007), 252. For more information on expats in post-Soviet states, see Natasza Camiah and Graham Hollinshead, “Assessing the Potential for Effective Cross-Cultural Working between ‘New’ Russian Managers and Western Expatriates,” Journal of World Business 38, no. 3 (August 2003): 245–326.

57. Oleksii R. (architect), interview by the author, May 4, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine; Mykola N. (construction firm owner), interview by the author, April 24, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

58. Selection of typical plans granted by Biuro Tekhnichnoi Dokumentatsii in Kyiv, Ukraine.

59. See apartment plans in Meuser and Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing.

60. Oleksii R. (architect), interview; Mykola N. (construction firm owner), interview.

61. Olga Gurova, Sovetskoe nizhnee bel’e: Mezhdu ideologiei i povsednevnost’iu (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008), 46.

62. Oksana Fomina, “Grozu domokhoziaek toshnit ot slov: ‘Vy vse eshche kipiatite?’ kak Bordovskikh ot gazirovki,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, November 20, 2003, https://www.kp.ru/daily/23161/24803.

63. Melanie Ilič, Susan Emily Reid, and Lynne Attwood, Women in the Khrushchev Era (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 11; Natalya Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era (London: Routledge, 2013), 82, 186.

64. Susan Reid, “Cold War at the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 227–228.

65. Ilič, Reid, Attwood, Women in the Khrushchev Era, 193.

66. For instance, one of the Soviet washing machines, Maliutka (first manufactured in 1973), had a height dimension of fifty-seven centimeters and could be stored under a standard sink (fifty-nine centimeters at the lowest point). The instructions for the machine suggest using a special structure if installing the machine on top of the bathtub. Mashina stiral’naia bytovaia SM-1 Maliutka-2: Rukovodstvo po ekspluatatsii (Sverdlovsk: Proizvodstvennoe ob”edinenie “Uralmash,” 1988), 8.

67. Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era, 186.

68. See Natalya Chershova, “Household Technology in the Brezhnev Era Home,” in Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era, 184–201.

69. Sanitarnye normy i pravila II-V.10 Zhilye zdaniia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo literatury po stroitel’stvu, arkhitekture i stroitel’nym materialam 1954), 227.

70. Sanitarnye normy i pravila II-B.10–58 Zhilye zdaniia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo literatury po stroitel’stvu, arkhitekture i stroitel’nym materialam, 1958), 11.

71. Biuro Tekhnichnoi Dokumentatsii engineers, personal conversation with the author, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

72. Jennifer Patico, Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 209.

73. Fehérváry, “American Kitchens,” 372.

74. Beverly Skeggs, Formations of Class & Gender: Becoming Respectable (London: SAGE Publications, 1997), 65.

1. William J. Tompson, Khrushchev: A Political Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 238.

2. See Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).

3. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 2005), 15–29.

4. William Moskoff, Hard Times: Impoverishment and Protest in the Perestroika Years: The Soviet Union 1985–1991 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 64–44.

5. A detailed discussion of this issue can be found in chapter 2.

6. Jane Zavisca writes that although there was a 1992 agreement between the United States and the new Russian government to implement a housing reform and introduce a housing market, such initiatives did not take off until later in the first decade of the 2000s. Jane Roj Zavisca, Housing the New Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 1.

7. Birgit Glock and Hartmut Häuβermann, “New Trends in Urban Development and Public Policy in Eastern Germany: Dealing with the Vacant Housing Problem at the Local Level,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28, no. 4 (December 2004): 920–923.

8. Glock and Häuβermann, “New Trends in Urban Development,” 920–923.

9. For instance, in both the Russian Federation and Belarus, the Soviet norms for apartment housing construction were only replaced in 2003. (SNiP 2.08.01-89* was replaced by SNiP 31-01-2003 in Russia and by SNB 3.02.04-03 in Belarus.)

10. For example, the earlier versions of Ukrainian building codes—Desrzhavni budivel’ni normy (DBN)—have repeated the language and the standards of the Soviet norms. A 2005 DBN for residential buildings contains lower and upper limits of apartment area, just like its Ukrainian (1992) and Soviet (1989) counterparts.

11. “Prichinoi obvala doma v tsentre Kieva stala rekonstruktsiia i pereplanirovka kvartir pod gostinitsu,” Korrespondent.net, July 25, 2003, https://korrespondent.net/ukraine/events/75805-prichinoj-obvala-doma-v-centre-kieva-stala-rekonstrukciya-i-pereplanirovka-kvartir-pod-gostinicu.

12. Derzhavnyi komitet budivnytstva, arkhitektury ta zhytlovoi polityky Ukrainy, “Pro zatverdzhennia instruktsii pro poriadok derzhavnoi reiestratsii prava vlasnosti na ob’iekty nerukhomogo maina, shcho perebuvaiut’ u vlasnosti iurydychnykh ta fizychnykh osib,” June 26, 1998, no. 399/2839, http://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/z0399-98/ed19980609.

13. Oleksii R. (architect), interview by the author, May 4, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

14. Michael Gentile and Tiit Tammaru, “Housing and Ethnicity in the Post-Soviet City: Ust’-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan,” Urban Studies 43, no. 10 (September 2006): 1764.

15. For instance, in Moscow a simplified procedure for legal apartment replanning was introduced in 2011. See Moscow Government Decree No. 508-PP, “Ob organizatsii pereustroistva i (ili) pereplanirovki zhilykh i nezhilykh pomeshchenii v mnogokvartirnykh domakh,” Ofitsial’nyi sait Mera Moskvy, October 25, 2011, https://www.mos.ru/authority/documents/doc/9600220/.

16. Florian Urban noted that in the late 1990s, state authorities and other institutions still owned 40 percent of all housing stock (not just apartments). Florian Urban, Tower and Slab: Histories of Global Mass Housing (London: Routledge, 2012), 141.

17. Oleh P. (former handy worker), interview by the author, May 8, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

18. Maryna D. (apartment dweller), interview by the author, May 6, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

19. Hanna F. (apartment dweller/architect), interview by the author, May 5, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

20. “Obrushenie zhilykh domov v RF v rezul’tate nezakonnykh pereplanirovok s 2006 goda. Dos’e,” TASS-Dos’e, May 31, 2016, https://tass.ru/info/3328058.

21. Elizabeth Cromley, “Domestic Space Transformed, 1850–2000,” in Architectures: Modernism and After, ed. Andrew Ballantyne (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 173.

22. James A. Jacobs, “Social and Spatial Change in the Postwar Family Room,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 13, no. 1 (2006): 70–85.

23. Judy Attfield, “Bringing Modernity Home: Open Plan in the British Domestic Interior,” in At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space, ed. Irene Cieraad (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 73–74.

24. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 148.

25. Bonnie Calhoun, “Shaping the Public Sphere: English Coffeehouses and French Salons and the Age of the Enlightenment,” Colgate Academic Review 3 (Spring 2008): 75.

26. Melissa Caldwell, Food & Everyday Life in the Postsocialist World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 11.

27. Evgenii Ivanov, “Houzz issledovanie: Chto rossiiane deistvitel’no delaiut pri remonte kukhni,” Houzz, February 2, 2016, https://www.houzz.ru/ideabooks/60830940/list/houzz-issledovanie-chto-rossiyane-deystvitelyno-delayut-pri-remonte-kuhni.

28. Poka vse doma (Moscow: RGTRK Ostankino, 1992–1994); and Poka vse doma (Moscow: Telekompaniia Klass, 1994–2005).

29. Ethan Pollock, “ ‘Real Men Go to the Bania’: Postwar Soviet Masculinities and the Bathhouse,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 11, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 47–76.

30. Tijana Vujosevic, “The Soviet Banya and the Mass Production of Hygiene,” Hygiene. Architectural Histories 1, no. 1 (2013).

31. Boris Merzhanov, Inter’er zhilishcha (Moscow: Znanie, 1970), 21.

32. Mila D. (apartment dweller), interview by the author, May 7, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine.

33. Vladimir Shlapentokh, “The Soviet Family in the Period of the Decay of Socialism,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 22, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 269.

34. Lynne Attwood, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia: Private Life in a Public Space (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 195.

35. Christine Evans, Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 4.

36. Alexey Golubev, “When Spaces of Transit Fail Their Designers: Social Antagonisms of Soviet Stairwells and Streets,” in The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 91.

37. For an in-depth analysis of the culture of children’s play in urban courtyards, see Iulia Cherniavskaia, “Sovetskoe kak detskoe: Opyt dvora,” Logos 27, no. 5 (2017): 224–226.

38. M. Rahu, “Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident: Fears, Rumors and the Truth,” European Journal of Cancer 39, no. 3 (February 2003): 295–299.

39. Cherniavskaia, “Sovetskoe kak detskoe,” 224.

40. For a recent account of a persisting social meaning of a post-Soviet courtyard, see Mateusz Laszczkowski, “Scraps, Neighbors, and Committees: Material Things, Place-Making, and the State in an Astana Apartment Block,” City & Society 27, no. 2 (August 2015): 136–159.

41. For data on parking assets at the apartment building territory, see Tamara Uskova and Sergei Kozhevnikov, “Monitoring uslovii prozhyvaniia naseleniia oblasnogo tsentra,” Problemy razvitiia territorii 62, no. 2 (2012): 35–36.

42. For example, see Lia Karsten, “It All Used to Be Better? Different Generations on Continuity and Change in Urban Children’s Daily Use of Space,” Children’s Geographies 3, no. 3 (2005): 275–290.

43. Cherniavskaia formulates this as follows: “The enclave of benches by the hallways was assigned to the elderly ladies, the rest of the space [of the courtyard] belonged to the children.” Cherniavskaia, “Sovetskoe kak detskoe,” 226.

44. See Stephen Bittner, “History and Myth of Arbat,” in The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 19–39.

45. Golubev, The Things of Life, 91.

46. Golubev, The Things of Life, 91.

47. Golubev, The Things of Life, 96–97.

48. Golubev, The Things of Life, 97.

49. For an analysis of the post-Soviet stairwell youth gatherings, see Irina Kosterina, “Konstrukty i praktiki maskulinnosti v provintsial’nom gorode: Gabitus ‘normal’nykh patsanov,” Zhurnal sotsiologii i sotsial’noi antropologii XI, no. 4 (2008): 122–140.

50. Living in basements or cellars of apartment buildings is described throughout Svetlana Stephenson, Crossing the Line: Vagrancy, Homelessness and Social Displacement in Russia (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006).

51. Being homeless in certain cities could have been an administrative misdemeanor due to the rules of local registration. Stephenson, Crossing the Line, 19.

52. Stephenson, Crossing the Line, 19.

53. Emil Nasritdinov and Philipp Schröder, “From Frunze to Bishkek: Soviet Territorial Youth Formations and Their Decline in the 1990s and 2000s,” Central Asian Affairs 3, no. 1 (2016): 24–25.

54. For example, see the descriptions of dilapidated common areas—hallways and staircases—in contrast to well-maintained apartments in George J. Neimanis, The Collapse of the Soviet Empire: A View from Riga (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 13. For another example of hallway and staircase door study, see Rosa Vihavainen, “Common and Dividing Things in Homeowners Associations,” in Political Theory and Community Building in Post-Soviet Russia, eds. Oleg Kharkhordin and Risto Alapuro (London: Routledge, 2011), 155–158.

55. Hanna F. (apartment dweller/architect), interview.

56. Hanna F. (apartment dweller/architect), interview.

57. Judy Attfield, “Bringing Modernity Home.”

58. Oksana H. (apartment dweller), interview by the author, May 14, 2017, Kyiv, Ukraine. In addition to a different apartment composition, such decrease in family contacts could be explained with the shift of importance from television to personal computers that coincided with the first decade after the collapse of the USSR.

59. Lindsay Asquith and Marcel Vellinga, Vernacular Architecture in the 21st Century: Theory, Education and Practice (London: Taylor & Francis, 2006), 130.

60. Asquith and Vellinga, Vernacular Architecture in the 21st Century, 131.

61. Asquith and Vellinga, Vernacular Architecture in the 21st Century, 131.

62. For the analysis of hybrid building identities and spatial practices, see Arijit Sen, “Staged Disappointment: Interpreting the Architectural Facade of the Vedanta Temple, San Francisco,” Winterthur Portfolio 47, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 207–244.

63. Zavisca, Housing the New Russia, 194.

64. Jeffrey M. Hornstein, A Nation of Realtors: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 202.

65. Zavisca, Housing the New Russia, 194.

1. See, for example, Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 1 (January 2002): 5–21.

2. Andrew E. Kramer, “Ikea Plans to Halt Its Investment in Russia,” New York Times, June 23, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/global/24ruble.html.

3. For distrust of the post-Soviet institutions, see Roger Sapsford et al., “Trust in Post-Soviet Countries, Ten Years On,” European Politics and Society 16, no. 4 (2015): 523–539. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23745118.2015.1039286.

4. Olga Shevchenko, Crisis and the Everyday in the Post-Socialist Moscow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 173.

5. Dorzhi Dondokov, “Verbalizatsiia etnicheskikh stereotipov i reprezentatsiia povsednevnosti v russkoiazychnykh sotsial’nykh setiakh (kraudsorsingovoe issledovaniie)” (conference paper, Russkii iazyk i kul’tura v zerkale perevoda, Proceedings of the 10th International Conference, Moscow, 2020), 526. Stuart Hensel and Anatol Gudim, “Moldova’s Economic Transition: Slow and Contradictory,” in The EU & Moldova: On a Fault-line of Europe, ed. Ann Lewis (London: Federal Trust for Education and Research, 2004), 89.

6. Nasha Rasha, TNT, 2006–2011. For information on abuse of migrant laborers in the construction field, see Jane Buchanan, “Abuse and Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in Russia,” part 3 in “Are You Happy to Cheat Us?”: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in Russia (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2009), 28–76.

7. Ronald Grigor Suny, “Provisional Stabilities: The Politics of Identities in Post-Soviet Eurasia,” International Security 24, no. 3 (Winter 1999/2000), 139.

8. Natalia Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era (London: Routledge, 2013), 17.

9. “Sobianin: Kvartaly v Moskve budut pereseliat’ i snosit’ tol’ko po zhelaniiu zhitelei,” TASS: Informatsionnoe agenstvo Rossii, March 9, 2017, http://tass.ru/obschestvo/4081517.