4 CLEANING
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union sets a goal to resolve the sharpest problem in increasing the wellbeing of the Soviet people—the housing problem. During the first decade the housing shortage will be eliminated. Those families that currently live in overpopulated or bad housing will receive new apartments. As the result of the second decade every family, including newlyweds, will have a comfortable apartment, conforming to the requirements of hygiene and cultural byt.
—Communist Party of the Soviet Union, XXII Congress, 1961
Apartment sanitary blocks—either combined (bathtub, sink, and toilet in the same room) or separate (bathtub and sink in one room and toilet in another)—were rarely present in the late-Soviet visual culture, practically invisible, unlike iconic kitchens and lived rooms. In communal apartments, sanitary blocks were a common territory; as a result, dealing with their maintenance was perceived as a burden.1 Yet even in private apartments, the bathroom appeared to be second in line of maintenance priority after the kitchen.2 Elements of that hierarchy lasted until nowadays: “I am now done with the kitchen, so I’ll get to the bathroom as soon as I save enough money,” explains a one-room apartment owner, proudly presenting her new kitchen remont.3
Fehérváry expresses a similar observation to line up kitchens and bathrooms, both formerly utilitarian spaces, in the broader post-socialist context: “In the postsocialist era, kitchens and bathrooms have been singled out for transformation by residents, a trend reflected in special issues of home improvement/interior decor publications.”4
The interest in and visibility of bathrooms right before and after 1991 is particularly noticeable in contrast with their Soviet inferiority. While a kitchen firmly secured its place in the Soviet imagery in the 1960s, a bathroom and a toilet room mostly stayed out of sight until the last years of the Soviet Union.
This chapter not only explains the spatial transformations of bathrooms and toilet rooms throughout the late-Soviet and post-Soviet years but also tracks the introduction of bathrooms to the world of images and the accompanying commodification of these spaces of hygiene. At the end, this chapter suggests the shift of the post-Soviet bathrooms from the realm of utilitarian auxiliary spaces of an apartment (such as a closet) into the status of representational spaces, not unlike the status that kitchens gained several decades earlier.
The rare images of Soviet bathrooms—exceptions that prove the rule to be true—are found in comedic episodes of Soviet film, The Irony of Fate and Afonia in particular.5 In Ironiia sud’by (The Irony of Fate, 1975), drunk and heartbroken antagonist Ippolit showers in the bathtub, without taking off his coat and fur hat. In Afonia (1975), plasterer Kolia gets drunk and falls asleep in the bathtub. In both of these cases, the bathroom is a site of abnormal behaviors and embarrassment for the characters. Another rare exception is the bathroom episode in the film Moskva slezam ne verit (Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears, 1979). This latter film is a unique cinematic artifact that anticipated perestroika and the post-Soviet reality through speaking of desires: material, social, and romantic.6 Here the bathroom is shown as a clean, bright, pleasant space in a comfortable modern apartment of the main protagonist, a member of the Soviet elite.7
While late-Soviet spaces of hygiene were missing from the world of images, in the 1950s and 1960s they were omnipresent in the formal discourse on apartment housing. Varga-Harris provides numerous examples of individual bathrooms being used as an example of Soviet achievements in the home-building industry: an individual bathroom is presented as a sign of new happy times and a farewell to the constraints of life in a communal apartment.8 And yet in all of these examples, a bathroom is nothing but a rhetorical device: there are no concrete qualities to this bathroom other than its belonging to an individual apartment. There is no concrete description of a convenient sanitary block: whether it should be small or big, what it should contain, how it should be finished, and whether the pipes should be leak proof. Instead, this rhetoric focuses on individual access; it is not that the bathroom is supposed to be qualitatively different, it is that the communal apartment neighbors would no longer be there to limit and orchestrate the access to hygiene facilities.
Similar to the enthusiastic rhetoric of the 1960s, institutionally published manuals on domestic interiors, even in the last decades of the USSR, only mention sanitary blocks very briefly and without illustrations of toilets, instead concentrating on the choice of finishing materials for the bathroom: tiles, oilcloth, and such.9 Even Rabotnitsa, which published several major articles on remodeling during perestroika, did not mention bathrooms. There were many articles on the interiors for sleep, kitchens, children’s rooms, and hallways, but there was not a single one on bathrooms, which suggests that until the 1990s bathrooms and toilet rooms were simply considered utilitarian spaces with no particular aesthetic requirements and choices other than cleanliness. If one were to make up an idea of Soviet and post-Soviet bathrooms based solely on mass media imagery, it would have looked like bathrooms barely existed prior to the rise of remodeling magazines in the 1990s.
There is a precise, traceable moment when the Soviet toilet came out of the shadows and became a subject for public gaze and discussion: in 1992 Ilia and Emilia Kabakov presented their installation The Toilet at the Documenta art exhibition in Germany.10 A Soviet toilet suddenly transformed from an inconspicuous part of Soviet everyday life into a metaphor for perestroika and the collapse of the USSR. At Documenta, the Kabakovs presented an installation of a public, not private, restroom. This public restroom familiar to every Soviet citizen consisted of several stalls with no doors and an unexpected twist: upon entering the toilet a viewer realized that the toilet was rendered habitable and became a commonplace Soviet household with a couch, a table with a recently finished meal, and a reproduction of a classic painting on the wall.
The nightmare of the Soviet toilet and a fear of any hygienic space, which grew out of Soviet communal apartments and scary public restrooms, has taught Soviet citizens to squint their eyes upon entry. A dim, weak light hanging from an unattainably tall ceiling of a toilet in a communal apartment11 or the single lightbulb of The Toilet were there to emphasize: a public restroom was not a place to look at. And yet, The Toilet as an art installation subverted this basic principle: this toilet became a place and a subject for gaze. The disgusting Soviet public bathroom, which according to Boym caused a desire to “close one’s eyes,” entered the visible sphere of the Soviet home.12 Besides, just like the rare Soviet public restroom, it remained a place to look for: The Toilet pavilion accumulated lines, just like its insufficiently placed prototypes did in the Soviet public places.
While a typical reading of the Kabakovs’ installation implies that it is the home that has been established in the toilet, this chapter takes inspiration in a metaphorical reading: that of a toilet entering a home. Indeed, the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to have opened the lens of the former Soviet vision to the private spaces of hygiene. In the 1990s, images of bathrooms first appeared in mass media in relation to remodeling. The plentiful advertisements of tiles and fixtures, as well as luxurious stores that sold imported bathroom fixtures, entered the post-Soviet reality.13 According to Boym, the sanitary block, which for centuries has been a civilizing threshold between Eastern Europe and the West, blurred en route from Soviet to post-Soviet hygiene:
The toilet, of course, is an important stopping point for the discussion of Russia and the West. Travelers to Russia and Eastern Europe, from the Enlightenment to our day, have commented on the changing quality of personal hygiene as a marker of the stage of the civilizing process. The “threshold of civilization” was often defined by the quality of toilets. Perestroika started, in many cases, with perestroika of public and private toilets. Even Prince Charles pledged to donate a public toilet to the Pushkin Institute in Petersburg.14
Just like the rest of a post-Soviet apartment, the spaces of hygiene adapted to the new times, new understanding of cleanliness, and new aesthetic ideas. Unlike the previous period, post-Soviet spaces of hygiene obtained a new social quality that was not previously recognized by the Soviet media—they demonstrated status and economic standing, no less than the rest of the apartment. The introduction of sanitary blocks into the world of domestic interior aesthetics in the 1990s may have been similar in nature to the establishment of kitchens in the Soviet imagery of the 1960s, when kitchens stopped being perceived as solely utilitarian and outside aesthetic judgement (see chapter 3). The bathroom and the toilet room shifted from a domestic unshowable to the last frontier in the celebration of extreme wealth: post-Soviet nouveau riche were anecdotally claimed to admire golden toilets,15 equally as a cash overflow extravaganza of the early 1990s and a subversive commentary on the previous absence of the toilet from the public imagery. If a toilet was not made of solid gold, it had to at least have a golden rim, like in an apartment for a “respectable” person, as shown in the 1994 inaugural Russian issue of Salon inter’er design magazine.16
Combined or Separate?
On a practical level, the spatiality of late Soviet domestic hygiene boiled down to three categories: 1) not having a personal bathroom when living in a communal apartment, 2) having a bathtub and toilet in one room, or 3) having the bathtub and toilet in separate rooms.17 Together, the hygienic spaces of an apartment were typically addressed as sanitarnyi uzel or sanuzel, which best translates as a sanitary block. When toilet and bathtub were placed in separate spaces, those rooms were called a toilet (or toilet room) (tualet) and a bathroom (vannaia) respectively.
The communal apartment dwellers were the least lucky as they never had easy access to the domestic hygiene facilities. Because multiple families lived in the same apartment that typically only had one bathroom and one toilet room, getting to use the bathroom was always a matter of lines, time limits, cleaning disputes, and splitting utility bills. The troubles of the communal apartment residents with hygiene were many, and they are vividly discussed in scholarly literature. Svetlana Boym, Christine Varga-Harris, Ekaterina Gerasimova, and Steven Harris all indicate the lack of access to bathrooms in communal apartments due to overcrowding, the lack of maintenance because of their shared status, and the complex schemes of use. For example, in many communal apartments every family or single resident had to have their own individual bathroom light switch and toilet seat to use.18 The spaces of hygiene in an individual late-Soviet and post-Soviet apartment received much less attention; therefore, those spaces are the ones that this chapter will discuss in detail.
In the apartments built after the 1957 decree “About the Development of Residential Construction in the USSR” and the 1958 update of the building code, bathrooms no longer had gas water heaters. The gas heaters had originally dictated a larger cubic volume of the bathrooms, and since they were no longer there, a sanitary block safely fell under the official course towards minimization of apartment floor area.19 Although the 1958 building code indicates that “apartments no bigger than 45 square meters can be developed with combined sanitary blocks,”20 the same building code specifies that the apartments are to be designed “economically”—with a minimal area—and hence combined bathrooms, unless required otherwise.21 Indeed, in the first decades of prefabricated housing construction, smaller one- and two-room apartments were often built with combined bathrooms.22 This did not change until the third generation of prefabricated housing (starting 1971), when some series introduced a separate bathroom and toilet room to two-room apartments.23 At the same time, sanitary blocks with a separate bathroom and toilet room were seen as more convenient and desirable.24 Overall, despite the loud mention of comfort in the 1961 Communist Party program, the early series apartment design was not about comfortable use. Instead, it was about uninterrupted access to hygienic facilities, which communal apartments, particularly the ones in the pre-1917 buildings, could not provide.25
However, with the evolution of prefabricated housing types and the increase in floor area norms in the 1970s and 1980s, the discourse began shifting from simply having access to hygienic facilities to the quality of the facilities provided in individual apartments.26 In the late Soviet years, there prevailed a belief that a separate bathroom and toilet block was a much better planning solution than a combined one.27 A public preference for separate bathroom and lavatories is evident not only in conversations with apartment dwellers but also in the prestige gradation of different types of housing throughout the late-Soviet years. Elements of collective initiative were introduced to housing construction in the 1970s, with cooperatives and institutions receiving a certain amount of freedom in apartment planning. While architects designing for cooperatives were still limited by the upper limits of the building codes, unlike in social housing they no longer had to closely follow the lower limits. Although the later building codes suggested constructing combined bathrooms in smaller one- or two-room apartments, cooperative and institutional apartment building residents were often lucky to secure separate bathrooms and toilet rooms even in one or two-room apartments.28
A preference for a separate bathroom and toilet room continued dominating apartment dweller moods after 1991, yet the value of the separate sanitary block had been enhanced with a new meaning. This new meaning did not have to do with the increased comfort of using a toilet room and a bathroom separately in an apartment with more than one resident. Instead, it was about the possibility of demolishing a partition wall between the toilet room and the bathroom and gaining more useful space, since a separate sanitary block had bigger floor area than a combined one.29 But let us continue in order and first look at the way architects understood the situation with the late-Soviet bathrooms.
Architectural Fantasies and Reality
Soviet literature on residential architecture often enthusiastically discussed innovations and improvements that were never implemented in reality as if they were already present on the ground.30 The case of the late-Soviet and post-Soviet spaces of hygiene is a perfect illustration of this gap between the formal architectural and homemaking discourses and the practical reality of apartment dwellers. Just like any part of the Soviet apartment household, spaces of hygiene—bathrooms, toilets, and less hygiene-dominated kitchens—went through some dramatic transformations after 1991. The precursors of these transformations were reflected in the professional architectural discourse. Yet the estimates of the existing situation and the solutions formally voiced by architects in the late-1970s and 1980s were rather far from the reality of existing housing and apartment dwellers’ needs.
One architectural dream that never got realized in the late Soviet Union was a dream of multiple separate sanitary blocks.31 An illustration of the multiple sanitary block rhetoric can be found in Boris Merzhanov’s 1974 homemaking manual targeted toward “architects, designers, and a broad circle of readers.”32 In his book, Merzhanov uses a number of examples to illustrate a domestic spatial organization of hygienic facilities that he considers desirable. First, he suggests an example of a four-room apartment in 111–78 and 111–83 prefabricated panel apartment building series with two completely separate sanitary blocks, resulting in two toilets being placed in one apartment (figure 4.1). According to Merzhanov, the introduction of two separate toilets was to make the apartment “more comfortable for performing personal hygiene procedures for all family members.”33 A trustful reader may assume that 111–78 and 111–83 series four-room apartments were indeed always built with two sanitary blocks, equaling two lavatories and two bathrooms. At the same time, a formal booklet on 111–83 series presented plans with only one bathroom in four- and five-room apartments.34 Although regional variations of these series may have indeed included two sanitary blocks, this was certainly not a universal rule for every building in this series ever built.
FIGURE 4.1. 111–78 series according to Boris Merzhanov’s book Sovremennaia kvartira (1974). (Drawing modified by the author.)
Merzhanov again exemplifies progressive Soviet apartment planning with the apartments designed in the so-called New byt apartment buildings: experimental projects of residential buildings with public services—laundry, cooking, and/or childcare—planned into the apartment block. In such buildings, separate apartments were not supposed to have full kitchens but just kitchenettes meant for minimal use. The space freed with the absence of a full kitchen was to be taken by a second sanitary block in an apartment as small as three rooms.35 At the time of the publication, one such building was already constructed in Moscow’s Novye Cheremushki neighborhood. According to the original design concept, it was supposed to house regular families that were willing to change their lifestyle and reduce the amount of domestic labor.36 However, Merzhanov, as if on purpose, forgets to mention that the building was never constructed or populated according to the original design. Even prior to its completion, its public services and areas were significantly reduced. More importantly, right after completion, the building was assigned to the Moscow State University and became a dormitory, therefore eliminating the original concept of more than one sanitary block for an individual apartment.37 Despite all Merzhanov’s examples, very few prefabricated standard apartments had more than one bathroom and one toilet room.38 Individually designed buildings, a minority in the world of Soviet housing, also followed the rule of one sanitary block, even in large apartments meant to host five or more people (figure 4.2).
One very small category of Soviet housing had acquired multiple sanitary blocks before 1991. Only the housing for extremely high-status elites—military generals, major Communist Party figures, university rectors, and such—could evade most regulations and overcome the austerity principle of Soviet construction. Such apartment buildings were always designed individually and never in series, and many design decisions were made in coordination with the future residents. In an interview for this study, an architect who worked on individually designed apartment buildings in the last Soviet decades and after the Soviet Union collapsed explained the need for multiple sanitary blocks with multiple generations—multiple core families—living in the same apartment.39 According to him, even if an elite apartment was large, simply having a substantial amount of space for sleep or rest was not enough for truly comfortable living. In order to become comfortable, these apartments required another sanitary block. Otherwise, even a large and luxurious elite apartment became not unlike a communal apartment, with its morning and evening lines to the bathroom and toilet room.40 Such buildings were extremely rare and proved the general rule of one bathroom block per apartment home to be true.
FIGURE 4.2. An example of an individually designed apartment building with four-room apartments containing one sanitary block (blueprints issued in 1989). (Redrawn from Kyivproekt archives, folder #098833.AR-2. Drawing modified by the author.)
Therefore, despite the alternative reality of the professional architectural discourse, it would be incorrect to assume that Soviet architects and architectural writers were simply delusional. Rather, in a widespread Soviet manner, they projected what they knew was desirable onto the existing housing situation. A perfect case of such projections can be found in design competition catalogues suggesting reconstruction and improvements for early series, such as the competition organized by State Committee of Construction in 1987. The first prize project suggests arranging a combined sanitary block and a separate toilet room in apartments for five occupants.41 The second prize design offers the exact same solution for five-person apartments.42 The third prize design suggests that two toilets should be placed in an apartment for four people, which had never been realized in the Soviet mass-housing construction before.43 The outcomes of the competition are a clear statement on the hygiene issue: according to architects, large apartments were to be equipped with two toilets in a country where this has not yet happened on a considerable scale.
The unanimity of designers in 1987 is far more impressive when considering that the opinions were not as univocal only six years prior. In 1981, some projects suggested having one separated sanitary block in apartments for six or more people; some offered a strange solution to move the bathroom away from the toilet room in large apartments, while not doubling their functions anywhere else; and yet a third kind suggested introducing one full combined sanitary block (bathtub, toilet, and sink) and another toilet room placed separately in a different part of an apartment for three or more residents.44
While overall floor areas and kitchen dimensions grew consistently starting from the 1958 building code, bathroom dimensions did not. The 1958 Sanitary Norms prescribed separate lavatories to have minimal dimensions of 0.8 by 1.2 meters (2.6 by 3.9 feet) with high-tank toilets and 0.8 by 1.5 meters (2.6 by 4.9 feet) for close-coupled toilets.45 By 1962 the dimensions for the high-tank toilets disappeared from the building code, indicating the gradual end of using this type of fixture, which was popularly known as Niagara.46
By 1971 separate toilet room dimensions remained exactly the same. Bathrooms had to have minimal dimensions of 1.73 by 1.5 meters (5.6 by 4.9 feet).47 The last Soviet building code for apartment housing published in 1989 no longer mentioned separate toilet rooms but simply indicated that the minimal dimensions for a bathroom were to be 0.8 by 1.2 meters, which is exactly the same as in 1958.48 In other words, in the last three decades of the Soviet Union, virtually no changes happened in the floor area of sanitary blocks.
Post-Soviet Architects
After 1991, two processes took place simultaneously: while architects were finally able to realize their vision and design multiple hygiene blocks within the same apartment, residents of the existing apartments resourcefully transformed, partitioned, and combined their existing sanitary blocks and hygienic practices to gain more usable space for new functions and equipment.
Since most housing built after 1991 was no longer allocated by the state,49 the upper limits of floor area and amenities suggested by the Sanitary Norms and Regulations or other documents developed in the post-Soviet states no longer applied to the majority of the new apartment buildings being built.50 This meant that the plans, floor areas, and space compositions predominantly depended on the investor and the market, with only the minimal requirements defined by the legislature. In a large apartment, an architect could finally introduce as many bathrooms as they desired, only dependent on the future marketability of such an apartment home. Moreover, when factories that produced prefabricated apartment building series took the initiative to adjust to the new market conditions, they modified their series to fit the new post-Soviet demands by introducing another bathroom block to larger apartments. One such example is a set of post-Soviet modifications for one of the most widespread apartment series—P-44.51 In the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, several derivative series, such as P-44T and P-44M, were developed to substitute the “morally obsolete” original.52 Unlike its previous version, newly developed P-44M had two separate sanitary blocks in four-room apartments.
P-44 was just one example of a characteristic phenomenon: despite the collapse of the ruling system, many elements of the Soviet infrastructure remained and continued functioning after 1991, but not without changes. This was particularly true for the factories and organizations that specialized in producing prefabricated panels for housing construction. Stroitel’noe Upravleniie No.155, a former Soviet construction institution that became an independent organization after 1991, developed the new prefabricated series I-155 with two sanitary blocks in both three- and four-room apartments.53 The Moscow Scientific-Research and Project Institute of Typology and Experimental Design (Moskovskii nauchno-issledovatel’skii i proektnyi institut tipologii, eksperemental’nogo proektirovaniia, or MNIITEP) developed yet another series where three- and four-room apartments had two separate sanitary blocks.
In individually designed apartment buildings after 1991, the decision on the number of bathrooms in new housing was often left to the prospective owners (figure 4.3). Cast-in-place concrete construction became a dominant method for apartment housing construction.54 Cast-in-place concrete buildings were frequently commissioned without partitions and amenities in an expectation that the new owners would like to implement their own vision.55 This was unlike the earlier developed approach to prefabricated buildings, which were sometimes still built as an economical option; such buildings always had walls already in place.
Although the introduction of multiple bathrooms in new construction was a major trend after 1991, architectural microtrends are also worth mentioning. One such microtrend originated from Western expats, who became abundant in large post-Soviet cities. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, foreigners entered post-Soviet cities mostly in hopes of making business on the wreckage of socialism.56 These foreigners needed temporary, semi-temporary, or permanent accommodations. Although hotels meant particularly for foreign travelers were constructed and sustained at higher standards (such as hotels administered by the state joint-stock company Inturist), the functioning of those was also affected by the calamity of the 1990s. And even then, a hotel could only provide a temporary solution.
These foreigners took interest in the post-Soviet real estate market and were among the first clients to create a demand for organized, professional remodeling labor, able to change existing apartments according to Western standards of living (see chapter 1). Construction professionals and architects, who entered the rapidly invigorated apartment remodeling market as early as 1992, recall that one of the major problems cited by foreign clients were kitchens and bathrooms, the latter being even more important than the former.57 Because of small footprints and remote locations outside historic cities, mass-built apartment blocks were of no interest to Western expats. Instead, they purchased apartments in historic or Stalin-era buildings. These apartments had larger floor areas, yet the state of bathroom interiors and appliances left much to be desired. In addition, Western European clientele simply had requests different from Soviet standards. For instance, almost no Soviet housing was equipped with bidets. Although bidets can be found on some design stage blueprints for the third generation of prefabricated housing series (1971–1985), those same bidets never appeared on the Recorder of Deeds plans, which means that they were rarely installed in reality.58 Water supply and drain elements for bidets were not shown in project documentation either.59 Several architects interviewed for this study indicated bidets to be among the exotic requests Western clients made for their apartment remodeling.60
FIGURE 4.3. Individually designed post-Soviet apartment building home with two bathrooms, blueprints developed in 2002. From Kyivproekt archives, folder #330201-AP. (Drawing modified by the author.)
Although illustrative of what early post-Soviet bathrooms had, and what they did not have, this microtrend never spread to the majority of post-Soviet urban housing. Architects, interior designers, and construction workers took a lot of knowledge from these early commissions into their further practice, but bidets did not become overwhelmingly popular and are rather rare in post-Soviet apartments to this day. The reason bidets did not become a popular bathroom solution was that the majority of late- and post-Soviet bathrooms were simply too small to fit them.
Post-Soviet Bathroom Remont
During the same formative post-Soviet years when architects introduced the second set of sanitary blocks to new apartments, regular apartment residents combined their separate toilet room and bathroom blocks together to gain some more usable space for the newly available domestic object of desire: a stationary washing machine.
The collapse of the Soviet Union drove the extinction of some hygienic practices and enabled the emergence of others. A notable practice that came to an end was boiling laundry in the kitchen. Soviet women, the population predominantly responsible for laundry, used to boil durable white laundry in large pots on the kitchen stove as a way of removing stains and sanitizing fabric.61 This practice fell victim to the spread of washing machines and the introduction of effective laundry detergents. In the first decade of the 2000s, post-Soviet television was populated with the anti–laundry boiling commercials of Tide laundry detergent: a popular television personality traveled from household to household comparing the brightness of laundry when boiled and washed with Tide. After the inevitable victory of Tide, he notoriously threatened the audience: “Are you still boiling [laundry]? Then we are coming for you!”62 Despite the extinction of laundry boiling techniques, laundry processes did not completely abandon kitchens: now the question was about where to put a washing machine.
In the 1950s, when the first prefabricated series apartment buildings were constructed to house a wide range of the Soviet urban population, many Soviet people did not have washing machines.63 The 1960s official rhetoric was saturated with the subject of domestic machinery that was to liberate women from their domestic workloads. The tone of this rhetoric, inseparable from the Cold War competition with the United States, assumed that not all women had been liberated yet because not every household had the necessary machines, washing machines in particular.64 In the following decades, the Soviet industry produced a substantial number of washing machines, yet most of them were of a type quite different from currently common washers and required a completely different spatial set up.
Prior to the 1980s, Soviet industry only produced wringer washing machines or top-loading activator washing machines.65 These structures were portable, did not match the level of the kitchen countertop, and could not serve as an extra usable counter surface in the bathroom due to their intricate geometries or top-loading construction. This meant that in an apartment, washing machines occupied leftover space; they were not built in and were stored in the bathroom66 or elsewhere in the apartment until it was time to use them. At laundry time these washing machines were mounted on top of the bathtub (figure 4.4). In the 1980s, Soviet industry first started producing automatic washing machines named Vyatka. The number of households that owned washing machines grew to 78 percent.67 These machines were very similar to the front-loading automatic machines available today. They were large, heavy, and stationary. And they required a space of their own in the late-Soviet and post-Soviet home—the space that was desperately lacking in the sanitary blocks of mass-built apartments.
A front-loading washing machine quickly became a necessary attribute of a post-Soviet household.68 Therefore, the space for a washing machine had to be found somewhere, no matter how small the apartment. This problem divided apartment dwellers into several categories. Those who were lucky enough to live in Stalin-era apartment buildings could simply fit their washing machine into the extra space that they had in their bathrooms due to the bigger bathroom floor area. The last Soviet building code prior to the Khrushchev-era shift to extra-frugal housing construction determined the minimum sanitary block size as 0.9 by 1.4 meters with the caveat of being at least twelve cubic meters if there was a gas water heater. Since a residential story was not supposed to be less than three meters tall,69 this meant that the floor area of such a bathroom would be at least four square meters. This would have provided enough space for placing a washing machine in the bathroom, and if not, it could have always been placed in the kitchen that the code determined to be no less than seven square meters or seventy-five square feet—a large, comfortable kitchen by Soviet standards. Additionally, placing washing machines in kitchens became particularly popular with the new availability of modular furniture after 1991. The washer could now be built into the row of kitchen cabinets and other appliances underneath the kitchen-counter surface. And yet, this convenient solution was only easy in apartments with larger kitchens, not in the first generation of mass-built apartment blocks.
FIGURE 4.4. “Mounting washing machines” in bathrooms of different configurations. An illustration from a 1988 Soviet book on contemporary apartment interiors. R. N. Blashkevich, Inter’ier sovremennoi kvartiry (Moscow: Stroizdat, 1988), 95.
The 1958 building code, the first document to fully reflect the changes in the official housing planning policies, dropped the minimum volume for bathrooms with gas water heaters down to 7.5 cubic meters, placing the minimal bathroom floor area at a little higher than three square meters.70 These three square meters were not enough to fit a washing machine. Such apartments, equipped with three-square-meter bathrooms, were typically also the ones that had extremely small kitchens; therefore, a washing machine could not fit there comfortably either. And yet, many residents of these first-generation khrushchevkas found a solution: if the sanitary block consisted of a separate bathroom and toilet room, the dwellers of these apartments could demolish a wall between the toilet and the bathroom and remove one of the swinging doors from when it was two separate rooms, gaining the necessary 0.3 square meters to fit the washing machine. To no surprise, this type of re-planning is quoted to be among the most popular transformations that took place in prefabricated apartment housing (figure 4.5).71 The newly available hygienic options of the post-Soviet era called for more space, and the space was found at the cost of a partition wall between the bathroom and the toilet room.
FIGURE 4.5. A plan drawn by the author based on Recorder of Deeds documents of a Khrushchev-era apartment after removing a wall between the toilet room and the bathroom to fit a washing machine.
FIGURE 4.6. A combined sanitary block in Kyiv containing a bathtub, a sink, a toilet, a bidet, and a washing machine. (Photograph courtesy of Anastasiya Ivanova.)
After 1991, apartment dwellers and architects alike called for more space dedicated to hygiene in an apartment home. The Soviet spaces of hygiene were no longer enough to fit all the requirements of the new time, be it the luxurious bidet and Jacuzzi of the Western expats or local nouveau riche or the economically priced washing machines of khrushchevka residents. Furthermore, a bathroom became a visible part of a home, with the spaces of hygiene as much a subject for aesthetic transformation and judgement as the rest of the post-Soviet apartment.
Just as kitchens massively transitioned from utilitarian to representational spaces beginning in the Khrushchev era and ending in the Brezhnev era, the spaces of hygiene transitioned after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead of bleak spaces meant to produce a healthy yet modest Soviet person, these new spaces of hygiene became a place of comfort and self-appreciation. The bathroom was now to become, using Jennifer Patico’s terms, “respectable.”72 It became a place of conspicuous consumption, where bathroom equipment, hygienic products, and even the number of bathroom blocks emphasized social standing. Fehérváry addressed luxurious post-socialist bathrooms as the elements of “idealized lives—and selves—long imagined to exist elsewhere,” particularly in the West.73 Beyond the dreams of the imaginary West and the practicality of new appliances, a renovated bathroom quickly became necessary to conform to the standards of the new times that forced even less well-off post-Soviet urbanites to remodel the bathrooms in their small apartments. Since “hygiene is a strong signifier of respectability,” spaces of hygiene must satisfy societal standards for where cleanliness is produced.74 The terrifying bathrooms of the communal apartments and the utilitarian yet aging bathrooms of the Soviet prefabricated blocks inevitably gave way in popular imagination to the consumption-centered bathrooms fit to sustain respectable post-Soviet identities.