Acknowledgments
I am endlessly grateful to my parents, Liudmyla and Leonid. They have always been on my side and are behind everything I have ever accomplished. Furthermore, they are the primary reason this book exists. When I was a child in Kyiv in the 1990s and first years of the 2000s, they took on remodeling our apartment not once but twice. That meant going to hardware stores, endlessly picking tile, wallpaper, flooring, light fixtures, and kitchen cabinets. As a child, I hated the hardware stores more than the commotion of remodeling itself. In fact, remodeling was a bit of an adventure: all of our belongings had to be moved to one room, including the piano, blocked by dozens of boxes and bags that effectively put my much-hated music practice on hold. Sometimes we had no floors in the kitchen; once, for a couple of days, we had no windows. Another time we had no doors to the bathroom or toilet and hung blankets instead while waiting for new doors to be installed. For our first remodeling, our apartment gained a near-permanent presence: Petia, a handyman, who enthusiastically took over any kind of apartment construction, often to redo it later after the first attempt failed. Petia clearly spent more time at our home than he did at his own. At some point, our indoor cat Tikhon caught fleas from the sand and cement that inevitably accompanied our renovation project. Turns out these childhood adventures shaped my life for years to come.
The irony strikes me to this day: what I sincerely hated as a child became the subject of my research and an inspiration for me as an adult. This would have been impossible without my adviser at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee—Arijit Sen. It is Arijit’s vision of the life of everyday spaces that I channel in everything I do. His continuous support through multiple disruptions, including one global pandemic, one partial and one full-scale invasion of my home country, several major life crises, a couple of cross-country moves, and multiple minor hurdles made this project possible to complete.
I also thank my mentors Christine Evans and Jennifer Jordan at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee for their support, their patience with my sometimes-chaotic writing, and their readiness to always offer encouragement on the way toward this project’s completion. I thank the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv for hosting me as a fellow and providing me with the opportunity to work in Lviv archives and share my work with peer researchers. I thank the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History and the Legacies of Communism Group at the University of Potsdam, Germany, for hosting me as a fellow and, thus, offering me time for uninterrupted writing. I also thank ZZF scholars—Juliane Fürst, Corinna Kuhr-Korolev, Jan Behrends, and many others—for discussing my work, for their encouragement, and for precious suggestions on emphasizing normalcy as an important quantifier in the post-socialist everyday life.
I thank my friend and colleague Chelsea Wait for offering the earliest idea for this project’s structure when I was struggling with organizing chapters, each of which seemingly pertained to each room of any given apartment. I also thank Chelsea and Cindy Anderson for being a part of the extremely helpful reading group we have maintained throughout the years of me writing this work. And I thank my friend Joseph Witt for his readiness to edit my writing any time of day or night.
I am grateful to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee for the institutional support and dissertation fellowship resources it provided, and to Mississippi State University School of Architecture for the generous research support offered to junior faculty. I am also grateful to the Society of Architectural Historians and the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies for letting me present and receive feedback on this project from its earliest stages.
I am thankful to my interviewees: apartment residents who invited me to their homes and explained the history of their remodels, architects and engineers who practiced in residential construction and interior design, construction workers who made remodeling ideas come true, and many others.
Finally, I thank archives and archivists in Kyiv and Lviv, Ukraine, for their help with locating materials I used in my research. This includes Tsentral’nyi Derzhavnyi Kinofotofonoarkhiv Ukrainy, Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyiiy arkhiv vyshchykh organiv vlady ta upravlinnia Ukrainy, and Desrzhavnyi Oblastnyi arkhiv L’vivs’koi oblasti. It also includes specialists from Kyivproekt and librarians from Derzhavna naukovo arkhitekturno-budivel’na biblioteka imeni V. H. Zabolotnoho.
I am lucky to have been born and grown up in such a peculiar place—Kyiv—and during the time of change—the collapse of the USSR and the post-Soviet 1990s. I am even luckier that I was able to partially abstract from my personal experience and conduct broad research of the era that shaped my post-Soviet generation. I am lucky that I have not been killed in the war the Russian Federation started against Ukraine. And finally, to end this long list of acknowledgments, I am thankful for change, which may be scary but without which life would be stale.