Glossary
apartment building series—A package of architectural and engineering design documents, or the buildings constructed according to the package. These designs were meant for practically unlimited industrial reproduction. Attempts to create a universal housing unit were first undertaken in the early Soviet years, and many standardized residential buildings were built under Joseph Stalin. But the heyday of standardized mass housing in the USSR happened after the 1954 Central Committee and the Cabinet of Ministers of the USSR decree “On the development of prefabricated reinforced concrete structures and components production.” Starting in 1954, the absolute majority of housing everywhere in the Soviet Union was built based on the centrally developed projects. Each project could be reproduced an unlimited number of times with only minimal adjustments or variations dependent on the place of construction. At the same time, every residential project with an individually designed plan, section, or façade had to be approved by the Gosgrazhdanstroi (State Committee on Civil Construction and Architecture of the USSR in Moscow).
apartment reconstruction—A type of single apartment remodeling that involves refitting slabs and load-bearing elements in old or worn-out buildings. This term is used by construction professionals.
babushatnik (from babushka, Russian for grandmother)—An apartment that has not been remodeled since the Soviet times. A babushatnik is likely to be populated with Soviet furniture and objects. It may be run down or well cared for yet outdated.
Biuro tekhnicheskoi inventarizatsii (BTI; Bureau of Technical Documentation)—State or municipal organizations responsible for real estate record and stocktaking, like the Recorder of Deeds in the United States.
compact housing (malogabaritnoe zhil’e)—Typically used to describe small Soviet apartments built in the Khrushchev and post-Khrushchev eras.
compaction (uplotnenie)—Confiscation of housing space above the established nine-square-meter norm from bourgeois homeowners in favor of the working class in the first years after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
cosmetic remodeling (kosmeticheskii remont)—Remodeling that does not affect the apartment layout or structural elements. Typically, it involves changing wallpaper, painting windowsills, and other minor renovations.
evroremont—Remodeling done using imported materials or materials produced under foreign standards and according to Western quality standards, as imagined by the post-Soviet populations. Additionally, evroremont often meant a particular type of aesthetics and spatial organization, derived from the post-Soviet idea of how Western housing looked and functioned. A typical example of this spatial organization and aesthetics is the deconstruction of a partition wall separating the kitchen from the rest of the apartment spaces and a resulting transition to an open-/semi-open-plan apartment. The term evroremont emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
improved plan apartments—Umbrella term used to describe apartment building series in which apartments had bigger floor areas, bigger kitchens, and more storage space than the early prefabricated series. In terms of architectural series, improved plan apartments typically refer to the second generation of prefabricated apartment building construction starting in 1963. Philipp Meuser and Dimitrij Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing: Prefabrication in the USSR 1955–1991 (Berlin: DOM publishers, 2015), 267.
khrushchevka—Early apartment building series built when Nikita Khrushchev was the general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR and several years after. This term is typically used for five-story apartment buildings built between 1954 and 1968.
kommunalka—A communal apartment; typically, an apartment in a building built prior to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that has since been subdivided into parts and populated by unrelated families as the result of compaction. In most post-Soviet cities, the number of communal apartments has gradually decreased to near zero since the collapse of the USSR; the only exclusion is Saint Petersburg, where, due to the dominance of pre-1917 apartment housing, kommunalkas are still unexceptional.
lived and auxiliary spaces—Soviet bureaucracy divided domestic space into the so-called auxiliary spaces (kitchens, bathrooms, lavatories, hallways, and storage) and lived spaces (everything else).
mikroraion—A neighborhood built according to the Soviet method of urban planning that entailed calculating and building both housing and social infrastructure, such as schools, daycares, grocery stores, and clinics, all together.
pereplanirovka (replanning)—A remodeling where partitions and/or walls are demolished and/or new partitions are constructed. The term is typically used for private, rather than governmental, endeavors of changing an apartment plan. Replanning became popular in the 1990s.
perestroika—The course of economic and political reforms announced by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985.
Plattenbau (German)—Prefabricated panel housing construction in the German Democratic Republic (GDR); similar prestressed concrete panel housing in Czech and Slovak languages is called panelák.
remont—Remodeling; in this work, particularly in relation to home improvement. In several post-Soviet languages, remont can stand for both the process of remodeling and the resulting interior design.
sanitary block (sanitarnyi uzel, or sanuzel for short)—In Soviet and post-Soviet terms, a space specialized for hygiene needs. In a Soviet apartment, a sanitary block was typically composed of a bathtub, a sink, and a toilet. These three fixtures could be placed in the same room (combined sanitary block) or separately (separate sanitary block, with the bathtub and the sink in one room and the toilet in another).
shabashniki—Construction laborers working short-term jobs. A detailed overview and the history of shabashniki can be found in Broad Is My Native Land by Siegelbaum and Moch. In this book shabashniki are defined as “temporary workers earning money ‘off the books’ in the late Soviet Period.”
Sovok—A derogatory synonym for the Soviet Union, or a person who is nostalgic about the USSR or was never able to adjust to the post-Soviet times and lives in the past. See Alexander Genis, “Sovok” in Russian Studies in Literature.
stalinka—Apartments in individually designed or limited series buildings constructed during Stalin’s rule (1922–1952).
Zhilishchno-ekspluatatsionnaia kontora (ZhEK)—Residential Maintenance Office; a communal organization responsible for maintenance of several apartment buildings and their shared infrastructure, such as heating and gas supply.