INTRODUCTION
The social importance and acuteness of the housing problem have predetermined a serious attitude to it. To provide every family with a separate flat or house by the year 2000, is, in itself, a tremendous but feasible undertaking.
—Mikhail Gorbachev, Political Report of the CPSU Central Committee to the 27th Party Congress, 1986
The first post-Soviet decades were accompanied by a near-pathological desire for home improvement. Domestic upgrade advertisements were everywhere;1 domestic gadgets were given to the winners of popular television shows;2 and architecture and construction professionals shifted from large-scale state commissions provided through their institutions to small-scale private remodeling and construction services. It was as if the entire metropolitan population decided to fix up their apartments on a scale from modest, do-it-yourself renovations to the majestic gold- and marble-finished homes of the New Russians.3 Building and finishing material stores, as well as fancy furniture salons, started popping up around urban centers to satisfy the needs of the remodeling clientele. Residential interior designers, a profession that had not existed in the Soviet Union, came to a quick fruition after the state fell apart.4
The 1990s, just like the decades after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, had its newspeak, such as evroremont (literally Euro-remodeling, or remodeling done according to European standards as envisioned by post-Soviet populations)5 and pereplanirovka (replanning, or change of apartment layout). For a while, domestic remodeling seemed to be the new “blue jeans” of the post-Soviet world: the defining cultural trend of the era. Inevitably, homes went through substantial transformations, often invisible through the uniform facades of the urban apartment blocks. This book shows that such seemingly chaotic transformations followed clear spatial and cultural principles and were strictly characteristic of the post-Soviet condition: for apartment dwellers, domestic change was among the ways of gaining a new post-Soviet identity and the newly redefined social success.
This work about urban apartment homes during perestroika (1985–1991) and the first post-Soviet decades (1991 through the first decade of the 2000s) asks: how does a dwelling transform along with and under the pressure of historical upheaval? And how does a dwelling help in understanding large-scale changes that may be otherwise difficult to comprehend? Despite its interest in the dissolution of the USSR, this book does not focus on the dramatic events of 1990–1991, such as the secession of republics from the Soviet Union or the removal of the Communist Party from governance. Judy Attfield wrote: “authenticity and ephemerality can be said to materialise the relation between time and change in ordinary things like houses and garments.”6 This work is concerned with the lived experiences materialized through everyday space transformations and continuities that took place in the years leading to the collapse of the USSR and after.
My inquiry starts in the 1980s, because it is impossible to speak about the collapse of the Soviet Union without first speaking about perestroika (rus. rebuilding). The 1980s were a checkered decade in the history of the USSR: it started with Brezhnev’s stagnation (zastoi), continued with the two fastest-dying general secretaries in Soviet history—Andropov and Chernenko—and ended with the energetic reformer Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev defined his years in office with his policies of perestroika and glasnost (openness): the former set of policies meant to restructure the suffering centralized economy of the USSR, while the latter suggested letting go of some (but not all) censorship principles characteristic of the previous Soviet eras. Eventually, the term perestroika became synonymous with the Gorbachev rule and the last six years of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991.
Perestroika, its politics and culture, and its ultimate outcome—the collapse of the USSR—were in no way a simple or fully predictable phenomenon. In the three decades that have passed since, many books have been published on the subject, all pointing to the special nature of both this period in the history of the USSR and the haphazard nature of its collapse. The aftersounds of it are still loudly heard in both the post-Soviet, large-scale politics and everyday life alike.
In the beginning of Gorbachev’s rule, the Soviet Union showed some signs of possible crisis but no writing on the wall that predicted its imminent collapse.7 For the general population, even the economic crisis of the late 1980s did not produce an expectation that the Soviet Union was soon going to cease existing.8 However, Gorbachev’s economic reforms, originally meant to revive the system, further compromised the centralized supply chains and resulted in worsening consumer and industrial shortages. With Gorbachev’s liberalization of trading policies, where manufacturers gained some independence in deciding how to distribute their products, existing chains of supply got interrupted and the entire centralized economy collapsed like dominos.9 While shortages were not a new phenomenon to the Soviet public and industry alike, the public discussion surrounding the late-Soviet decrease in life quality was new.
The closest precedent of discourse liberalization that the Soviet Union had before was the Thaw in Khrushchev’s 1950s and 1960s. The Thaw ended with Brezhnev’s tightening of censorship; so could have perestroika.10 Yet due to the peculiar combination of circumstances and constellations of actors influencing the last six years of the Soviet Union, the old system fell apart, and on its well-preserved carcass grew the new post-Soviet world with all of its continuities and changes that this book aims to track in the everyday life and architecture of the post-Soviet subjects.
Domestic spatial transformations of the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s were an inseparable part of the grand-scale social upheavals of the collapse of the USSR, just as changes in the architecture of homes were an inseparable part of individuals becoming post-Soviet and developing a new sense of self.11 “What does it mean to be post-Soviet?” Madina Tlostanova asks in her book on post-Soviet art and its role in the deconstruction of Soviet colonial modernity.12 Tlostanova suggests that a post-Soviet individual never fully parted from the communist idea of the radiant future. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the radiant future simply no longer required communism. But the old Soviet principle of the New Man for the new times continued, requiring post-Soviet individuals to either reinvent themselves or quietly become obsolete at the outskirts of the new reality.13
Many theorists have employed Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and hysteresis to describe the internal and external conflicts faced by post-Soviet individuals. These concepts help to explain the discrepancy (hysteresis) between the existing social dispositions of the individuals (habitus), the way reality changed around them after 1991, and the measures that these individuals undertook to bridge this gap. However, such research often treats Soviet habitus as stable, fixed, and in opposition to the world systems of the new politics and economics.14 It is a dangerous assumption to make—that habitus (the perception and the reactions of an individual to the social world) stayed the same over the seven decades of the Soviet rule and throughout the vast Soviet geographies. It is hardly possible to equate the habitus, perceptions, and social reactions of an individual in the pre-World War II, Stalin-era Soviet city to the habitus of an urbanite in Brezhnev’s 1970s or Gorbachev’s perestroika. Therefore, this book rather suggests that the obsession with remodeling was a clash between the changing habitus of the late-and post-Soviet individuals and the massive but stagnant housing infrastructure. It does so by tracing the roots of interest in domestic spatial change back to late perestroika and watching the evolution of the interest in remodeling into a major trend in the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s.
Becoming post-Soviet did not happen automatically. To become post-Soviet, one had to eradicate Soviet routines, sensibilities, and commodities from their persona, which includes the closest material extension of oneself: attire, modes of transportation, and dwelling. In Erving Goffman’s terms performing an identity not only required appearance and manner, but also a “setting”: a home, a public place, even a portable scene, such as a civic event that facilitated identity performance.15 In “Western European countries,” Goffman states, “a large number of luxurious settings are available for hire to anyone of the right kind who can afford them.”16 Arguably, a dwelling played an even more important role in an identity of a post-Soviet individual, because there were fewer “luxurious settings” for hire, where one could demonstrate one’s success in the new economic and social conditions.17
If one did not share the ideas and adopt material cultural elements of the new time, they risked being known as sovok or sovki (plural)—a pejorative identity term that emerged before 1991 but became particularly widely used after the Soviet Union collapsed.18 The identity question was always on the agenda in the USSR, the country composed of different historically colonized or formerly independent national subjects. In 1961 Khrushchev declared that the USSR saw the creation of a new community of people of different nationalities having common traits—the Soviet People.19 According to Khrushchev, these traits included recognizing the USSR as a common motherland, relying on the socialist economy, sharing a social class structure, having a Marxist-Leninist worldview, having the common goal of constructing communism, and sharing spiritual and psychological qualities. The late-Soviet term sovok or sovki defined the same individuals and traits—reliance on a centralized economy, belief in the Soviet narratives of a carrying government, shared ethical and psychological qualities—as strictly negative.20 In a nutshell, after 1991, sovok was used to describe those who did not want to catch up with reality, moving away from the familiar Soviet ways.
In addition, the proximity of the imaginary and real West—materialized in the form of imported and smuggled Western goods, ideas, rare expats, and frequent labor emigration—played a large role in outlining the post-Soviet identity. For instance, a curious allusion to finding the otherwise unattainable West inside a Soviet domestic space is seen in the early post-Soviet film Window to Paris (Okno v Parizh).21 In this film the protagonist accidentally locates a window in his communal apartment room that leads to a Parisian roof. In Paris, protagonists attempt to make a quick foreign-currency profit through street performances and petty crime. In the face of the West, they act completely outside of the former Soviet normal (even street performances were illegal in the USSR) and instead in the spirit of the “wild capitalism” unwrapping in the freshly post-Soviet states.
This is not to say that everyone in the post-Soviet cities was ideologically charmed with everything Western. In fact, in the decades following the collapse of the USSR, there emerged a powerful and rather widespread nostalgia for the socialist times and resentment for Western-style politics.22 At the same time, this nostalgia only spread moderately into the world of everyday material objects: while Soviet foods are a major nostalgic subject in the Russian Federation,23 it is hard to find any evidence of nostalgia for Soviet housing construction, perhaps because the Soviet-built apartment buildings are still present and very much real for a post-Soviet urbanite.
The omnipresent, post-Soviet, home improvement newspeak—evroremont—explicitly indicated that a change of home had to be done in the post-Soviet idea of European standards. However, Euro-remodeled domestic interiors were never about precisely copying Western interior design solutions but rather about the new sense of self and a post-socialist emphasis on the new self-respect and the new normal channeled through domestic interiors.24
Krisztina Fehérváry writes the following:
Accounts from the Baltic and Central European states in particular make clear that what I call a “discourse of the normal” indexes a profound adjustment of identity set in motion by the sudden geopolitical shift of these countries from Soviet satellite to aspiring members of a reconfigured “Europe.” Those nations and peoples once identified as the most western of the Soviet bloc states suddenly found themselves situated on the undefined eastern border of greater Europe, with all the loss of prestige this entailed. Now they were in the unenviable position of having to prove their “westernness” in a new context—to themselves as much as to a European Union reluctant to grant them membership.25
While this argument applies well to the Central European states of the former socialist bloc and some of the post-Soviet Eastern European countries, “Westernness” is not a universal explanation to all changes in domestic space, at least not in all post-socialist cities. In fact, lately a switch to the rejection of Westernness has been seen, at least in the political discourse in some post-Soviet states.26 At the same time, even if Westernness is dropped out of the equation, like in Belarus or more recently in the Russian Federation, the idea of home improvement is still present. Therefore, in the post-Soviet context, the key term to borrow from Fehérváry is normalcy rather than Westernness.
Where did the boundaries of normalcy reside in the USSR, and how have they moved since the USSR collapsed? The meaning of “normal” itself evolved significantly with perestroika and after 1991. In Juliane Fürst’s investigation of the late-Soviet notions of normalcy through the lives of Soviet hippies, she registers that the state’s definition of normal largely revolved around political complacency, maintaining studies or a job, and a place of residence.27 Yet in the early post-Soviet years, where neither a place of residency nor a job came automatically as the world plunged into what many saw as a perpetual crisis,28 normalcy could no longer rest solely on those pillars. Normalcy had to be found elsewhere than the old Soviet categories. Not only the normal but also the modern, the contemporary, and the cutting edge could no longer be found in anything Soviet; indeed, the Soviet Union no longer existed, and the socialism was gone even on paper. In the early post-Soviet years, the widespread nostalgia for the USSR described by Svetlana Boym was yet to develop.29 Instead of the good old days, the post-Soviet urbanites strived for modernization.
The post-Soviet remodeling boom signified an emergence of a new spatial freedom (some would say chaos), which is difficult to compare to Western apartment living or even some post-socialist counterparts, such as the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Apartment residents vigorously changed their homes, even in seemingly inflexible structures within prefabricated concrete block and panel apartments in mass-constructed buildings. In architectural research, such changes are called user-generated modifications. These changes are surprisingly little studied, despite their extreme importance in the context of growing housing insecurity around the world.30 The existing literature is scarce and very region specific: in-depth scholarship exists on Southeast Asian housing, South American housing, and immigrant housing in the West, but little can be found for housing elsewhere if it is not related to immigration.31 In the post-Soviet context, the literature is limited to several articles on apartment home extensions.32
This book’s goal is to understand the joint between the collapse of the USSR and the everyday architecture of urban homes. One issue is immediately highlighted: speaking about the collapse of the Soviet Union at large does not provide a meaningful understanding of what that change was like, just as “economic downturn” in no way suffices to express the extent and diversity of change during the Great Depression. Ever since scholars became interested in writing “history from below,” historic focus has shifted from the key political dates and figures to “the changes in the consumption and communication patterns of the population, the restructuring of familial and social relationships, the systems of cultural meanings that governed interactions with ideological authorities, and evolving practices at home, at the workplace, and at sites of leisure.”33 This shift in interests also opened a door for increased interdisciplinarity.
Many elements of Soviet and even pre-Soviet times have remained present and formative in post-Soviet urban everyday life, making it difficult to define what exactly has changed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Through sociologist Jane Zavisca’s urban scale lens, “little appears to have changed, at least in the overall quality of the housing stock and its distribution”34 (including dwelling sizes and occupancy numbers), yet the change appears undeniable through the microscale lens of an individual apartment. The everyday life of a family may have changed dramatically due to home modifications. The changes that occurred in the homes and the ways in which these changes took place are important manifestations of the tectonic shifts in perestroika and post-Soviet society. An apartment, in this sense, is a perfect allegory of this change: the outside load-bearing walls have largely remained the same, and even the internal partitions may have remained intact, but the spaces and the way of life have changed dramatically.
In her work on food-related spaces in American homes, Elizabeth Cromley suggests that users of residential buildings should be considered equal to architects in shaping their homes.35 Unlike architects, users continue shaping buildings throughout their lifecycle and are at the forefront of spatial and architectural transformations at the times of social change. Buildings may stay largely intact in outward appearance, but the homes do not remain the same on the inside. This is the sort of change within the seeming and factual continuity of larger infrastructure that this work hopes to capture and explain.
If social structures are internalized and embodied through daily cultural practices, what better place to study how social structures transform than the home?36 Looking at the physical and functional organization of a home to investigate the qualities of the society at large and its attitudes toward the private and the public is not new.37 However, often the visible stability of the superstructure of urban apartment buildings may be mistaken for a sign of the stable and uninterrupted continuity of domestic practices and, hence, the social structures that they embody. That is, of course, not the case: the behaviors of apartment occupants change, and so do their domestic spaces, their functions, spatial rituals, rhythms, and practices. In the case of the former Soviet Union, changes inside the home went along with the changing conditions of labor and consumption (see chapter 1), the post-Soviet retreat of the state from domestic affairs, and the changing demands for individual privacy (see chapter 2), as well as many other changes described in the following chapters.
This study requires rethinking common typological and formal characteristics of post-Soviet apartments, such as apartment buildings belonging to a particular period (type) of housing and the number and function of separate apartment rooms. This approach embraces a great variety of apartment building types comprehensively without extensive focus on differences. Rather, it explores the overwhelming similarities in spatial thinking of apartment dwellers and professional architects alike. Although this approach is used in this work in the case of late- and post-Soviet apartments, shifting focus away from apartment types is relevant far beyond the post-Soviet region.
Many transformations of post-Soviet apartment homes are impossible to analyze using the usual conventions of modern apartment description and naming. Take, for example, the word “bedrooms.” The vast changes that have taken place with the post-Soviet emergence of a specialized, monofunctional bedroom are impossible to describe without understanding that “bedrooms”—spaces meant mostly for sleep—did not exist in most Soviet households. Although they were mentioned in Soviet residential design theory and apartment planning documents (for instance, in apartment building series design blueprints), in reality these rooms were mostly multifunctional and were equally used for socializing, domestic work, schoolwork, etc. (see chapter 3). In this way, the established term “bedroom” itself limits the ability to conduct a detailed scrutiny into the late-Soviet housing situation. To avoid this problem, this work replaces conventional room names with terms like “spaces related to sleep” or “spaces related to eating” and focuses on practices instead of room nomenclature.
The repetitive, tactic,38 and rhythmic39 spaces of everyday life are the locus of inherent liberty, solutions, and decisions produced by the users rather than by the state, architects, or engineers. Dell Upton, speaking of Henri Lefebvre’s sense of power in quotidian life and space, writes: “Everyday life is both a colonized setting of oppression, banality, routine, passivity, and unconsciousness as well as the locus of an ultimate reality and a source of potential liberation.”40 Change—the clash between past structures and present opportunities—produces a condition that is hard to understand through formal naming conventions, even more so in translation. A Soviet and post-Soviet urban apartment does not adhere to the space-defining conventions of an architectural blueprint or the vocabulary of a classic apartment homemaking manual. Domestic practices, on the contrary, show precisely what happened inside these apartment homes without having to delineate the state enforced regimes from the acts of everyday resistance. Finally, abandoning formal nomenclature allows for a more flexible view of apartment architecture and spatial structure: the walls of separate rooms are not seen as an absolute definition of space but rather as just one of the dimensions that determine space use.
Besides abandoning naming conventions, this work offers another twist from a traditional history of residential architecture. It is not limited to the physical characteristics of space, such as walls, doors, windows, façade, and interior solutions, but instead speaks to spatial practices in de Certeau’s terms: routines, movements, actions, and other performances41 that changed along with the collapse of the USSR. However, unlike in de Certeau’s writing, this work stays in the field of architectural history and, hence, concentrates heavily on the materiality of apartment homes: the walls, the windows, the doors, and their dimensions, as well as the pieces of furniture that populate them. In this way, this work leans toward the explanation of practice offered by Shove, Pantzar, and Watson: that a practice consists not only of knowledge and meaning but also of “materials—including things, technologies, tangible physical entities, and the stuff of which objects are made.”42
This work analyzes five domestic practices: remodeling, sleeping, eating, hygiene, and socializing. This set of practices addresses different forms of domestic ephemera, from actions repeated multiple times a day to performances that only take place once every several years, if not decades; some last for minutes while others last for days, months, or years. Despite this great range of temporalities, they are all nonetheless characteristic of almost any domestic space.43 Hence, they open a possibility to transpose the narrow post-Soviet apartment discussion onto any dwelling place at large.
Everyday History and Scale
“Were there any changes in the approaches to housing design with the beginning of perestroika?” I asked an architect who has been active in apartment building design since the Soviet 1970s. “Changes where?” he responded sarcastically. “In the mentality of people who wanted to enjoy comfortable housing? Or state-level changes in relation to building norms and regulations?”44
How does one speak of the changes that took place along a major political rupture? Is simply identifying the change of a ruling ideology or an economic system enough to explain a historic upheaval? There is a methodological question: do we know change according to grand ideological affirmations, or is it through on the ground shifts in the patterns of everyday life? And if it is through the study of everyday life, where exactly are the limits of what composes everyday life? To paraphrase Olga Shevchenko’s critique of James Scott, does everyday life consist solely of resistance,45 or is it rather a balance between compliance, resistance, and opportunity presented on a multiplicity of historical scales?
A reading of the collapse of the USSR solely through the grand political gesture of the end of state socialism obscures the changes and continuities that have constituted the everyday reality of post-Soviet populations. This study does not intend to supplement the traditional grand narrative of the end of state-socialism and its replacement with democratic political systems and neoliberal economics but rather suggests an alternative story of the two decades in question—1985 to the middle of the first decade of the 2000s. This is not a revisionist history; rather, the goal here is to understand the lived experiences of change through their spatial dimension. The apartment home, as it entered the post-Soviet period, is seen as the formative product of socialist state engineering, social knowledge of navigating the communist state, and an internal enclave of personal freedom and difference within a totalitarian society.46 To paraphrase Egmond and Mason, who suggested to look at the mouse to understand the scale of a mammoth, the faces of both individuals and the state become visible under the microscopic lens of an individual dwelling.47
A quotidian interior contains a multiplicity of meanings, and no political narrative remains intact when observed from a standpoint of everyday life.48 A home may simultaneously carry a narrative of hierarchic power, a counternarrative of resistance, and a multiplicity of other narratives visible at different scales of historical inquiry. And yet, a home is not a thing-in-itself;49 it does not stand outside the rest of historic context but rather enriches the context with another dimension. Therefore, an apartment home in this work is presented as both a scene and a locus of change, both the predicate and the subject of politics and society, in hope to add a spatial dimension to the everyday life of late-Soviet and post-Soviet cities.
The social conditions that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union are currently loosely defined. The existing narratives, such as the transition to market economy or democratic elections, are typically determined through a binary opposition with the previous period: planned economy/market economy, communal property/private property, dictatorship/democracy, and such.50 These binary categories do not withstand a close scrutiny. For instance, the communal/private property binary fails to describe the sense of ownership that Soviet citizens developed towards their apartments in the later decades of the Soviet rule, despite the state being a formal owner.51
The collapse of the USSR is not the only example of when grand binaries prove useless in understanding the trajectories of change and the everyday life conditions that emerge in conjunction. The scope of subjects appropriate for microscale research is enormous; however, looking at quotidian practices and domestic spaces in relation to change over time makes up a particularly fruitful part of the existing research. John Foot provides an eloquent definition of the role of scale in approach to history and, in his case, memory in a Milanese neighborhood: “The particular, the everyday and the ordinary are used to try and explain the general, the extraordinary and the exceptional. The scale of research is reduced to a housing block, individual life stories, families, events and places.”52
In Foot’s case, the study of memory, change, and forgetting in Milan’s urban fabric is only possible through oral history and a microscale of inquiry, since economic and urban change have erased the physical traces of past landscapes.53 Similar to Dolores Hayden’s “Invisible Angelenos,”54 Foot speaks to the invisible experiences in Milan’s past and their importance for the understanding of Milan’s present palimpsest, unique among all Italian cities.55 Unlike Foot, centering the inquiry into Milan’s forgetting on one neighborhood, Nancy Stieber, an architectural and urban historian, studies a microscale of social interactions inside a reform that led to large-scale housing construction in early-twentieth-century Amsterdam.56 This approach helps Stieber avoid the discussion of architectural style that, in her own words, “has been ably described” in other studies.57 This also helps her hint at the controversial role of architects and politicians in urban and social change.58
The challenges of binary-reliant, post-Soviet historiography are similar to what French historians address as the Invisible Revolution, a period between 1946 and 1975 when a tremendous amount of social and cultural change took place but little formal change of political course was declared.59 In a short essay titled “May ‘68 Did Not Take Place,” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write about the non-normative causes of the iconic 1968 protests in France. The protests were not reducible to a simple set of social reasons,60 nor did they coincide perfectly with left or right political ideas. These manifestations did not focus on traditional political binaries—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, or the oppressor and the oppressed—nor were these protests reducible to a social class. Instead of social or economic equality per se, the protesters desired the seemingly impossible: a revolutionary cultural change “as if a society suddenly saw what was intolerable in it and also saw the possibility for something else.”61
In their disappointment with the outcomes of these protests, Deleuze and Guatarri go as far as stating that “May ‘68 Did Not Take Place,” since the demands and aspirations of the protesting crowds did not cause immediate structural transformation of the state system.62 However, even if no formal change of regime occurred, Nicole Rudolf argues that subtle changes did take place in what she calls an “Invisible Revolution.” Unlike Deleuze and Guattari, Rudolf argues that change should not be tracked in the formal discourse of public politics. According to Rudolf, in French postwar society, change had to be studied inside the urban lived spaces and in modernist housing projects in particular.63 “Invisible revolution” is a trope much broader than postwar France, perhaps broader than current-day political systems altogether. A revolution does not refer to definitive events, showcased with an overthrown government or a refusal to pay taxes. It rather refers to a sense of changed life, the sense that everything has changed, when it is difficult to tell what exactly that “everything” is.64
The pitfall is that most of this change is incredibly difficult to see from a planner’s viewpoint—a bird’s eye over the city with statistical numbers in hand. Moreover, in a post-Soviet city, this change is barely visible even looking at a single building, mostly unchanged except for the patchy balconies poking through uniform residential facades. Besides balconies, not much reveals the diversity of homes found inside a building. To illustrate this diversity, an interviewee for this study, an architect prolific in residential building design, recalled a case when, upon entering an apartment in a building of his own design, he could not find his way through because of the radical changes performed by the apartment’s residents.65 Almost three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, even the Biuro tekhnicheskoi inventarizatsii (BTI; Bureau of Technical Documentation) is unable to fully comprehend the exact changes that took place inside apartment buildings.66 That is because to structurally observe change, one must descend to the ground or rather onto the floor of an urban apartment.
Standardization, Domestic Practices, and Imploding the Type
Much of Soviet urban housing was standard, and if it was not standard to begin with, it was gradually standardized to match the many rules that the Soviet state established. Many people are familiar with images of modernist Soviet urban neighborhoods made up of uniform apartment blocks geometrically composed along vast avenues. These apartment blocks were designed, engineered, and constructed to a standard with the maximum possible reduction of panel production variety, and hence construction price, in mind. Of course, most Soviet cities were not limited to the modernist apartment blocks. In many historic centers, such as central Moscow or Kyiv, pre-1917 apartment housing dominated the cityscape all the way until the arrival of the grand housing project in 1955. In Lviv and Saint Petersburg, pre-Soviet housing still composes the largest portion of the housing stock. These urban homes were built long before standardized construction and varied dramatically among themselves depending on the social and economic standing of their occupants, not to mention the historic technology at the time of their construction. And nevertheless, these homes also experienced standardization under Soviet rule, starting with establishing a nine-square-meter standard of housing lived area (zhilaia ploshchad’) per person in 1918, finalizing it for the entire USSR in 1922,67 and ending with the standardized spatial organizations and furniture produced between the 1950s and the collapse of the USSR in 1991. In the 1910s and 1920s, this resulted in the creation of the infamous communal apartments, where rooms or partitioned segments of former rooms were occupied by unrelated families. All urbanites, except for a very small social strata of political or cultural elites, had to adhere to these standards, making Soviet urban apartments a perfect case study in standardized domestic environments.
There are two popular models of categorizing apartment homes: by building type and by themes and chronological progression. The former, illustrated by Gwendolyn Wright’s Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America, has a problem typical to the discussion of the early American apartments and tenements: Wright speaks of the different types of homes separately, almost as counterstatements, with a tenement portrayed as having nothing in common with earlier, fanciful upper-class apartment buildings.68 Although the economic differences between these homes are undeniable, such an approach obscures the fact that all urban multiunit residential buildings had fundamental commonalities: the dependence on larger infrastructure, the shared transitional spaces, the codependence of residents in keeping their homes safe, etc. Furthermore, it directs the attention of the reader to class difference as definitive to the differences in domestic life, although living in an apartment, rather than a stand-alone home, may be more definitive of the mode of domestic life than class identity alone.
In the subfield of Soviet and post-Soviet studies, the necessity of transcending the type of an urban home has long been present but not consistently formulated. Most existing scholarship uses the categories of two or more of these types of apartment homes: communal apartments,69 rare Constructivist experiments,70 Stalin-era buildings,71 or Khrushchev-era (first-generation) mass-built apartment blocks.72 Limiting an inquiry to a single type or a relationship between a couple of types might allow for a detailed exploration of a particular architectural and public discourse, yet it obscures the commonality of everyday life mechanisms that are pertinent to all forms of urban homes and domestic architectures. On an urban-scale level, typical studies of the post-Soviet social reality examine a particular neighborhood, microdistrict (mikroraion), or other kind of agglomeration. There are only a few powerful exclusions from this pattern on an urban scale of inquiry, the most prominent being Steven Collier’s Post-Soviet Social,73 which observes the qualities of post-Soviet infrastructures that are pertinent to all types of urban apartment homes.
In the Soviet Union, a room—a cornerstone of architectural convention—served as a unit of measurement for a home: apartments were labeled as one-room, two-room, three-room, and so on. A room was regarded as anything other than a kitchen, bathroom, auxiliary hallway, or storage space. Yet despite the importance of a room for apartment measurement and definition, domestic functions transcended the physical limits of rooms, putting the importance of a room to question. The formal room nomenclature used in the architectural profession is very easy to follow through the design documents issued for apartment building series—the backbone of mass housing, apartment buildings constructed according to serially designed standardized projects. In a typical blueprint from an apartment series booklet, a two-room apartment was portrayed with a bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom (combined or separate; see chapter 5), and an entry space (figure 0.1).
Starting from the second generation of standardized mass housing (1963–1971),74 Soviet architects consistently drafted monofunctional furniture into the designs of standard apartments, suggesting that each room was to be meant for one particular domestic function: sleeping, eating, socializing, and such. Beyond the professional language of blueprints, the choice to depict monofunctional furniture could have been influenced by a plethora of factors, including the overall drafting aesthetics and conventions. By the 1970s, Soviet architects advocated for the necessity of an isolated individual space for every family member (in other words, at least one room per person) in their professional publications, which if realized would have partially justified the monofunctional furniture in their drawings.75 Yet, this was virtually impossible, since the number of residents always had to outnumber lived rooms (zhilye komnaty) (see chapter 3). A living room during the day had to become someone’s bedroom at night. Another room, shown as a bedroom with a double bed in the apartment building series booklet, in reality would have served as a nursery, a sleeping space for a grandparent, and an office while young children were in kindergarten. The functional zones inside the house overlapped and changed over the period of a day, a week, or even a year, particularly for those not blessed with a Soviet country house (dacha).76 The spatial overlaps between functions produced complex daily space uses and choreographies inside these urban homes.
FIGURE 0.1. Apartment in an “84” apartment building series, designed by the governmental design institution Tsentral’nyi nauchno-issledovatel’skii institut eksperemental’nogo proektirovaniia zhilishcha (TsNIIEP zhilishcha) and built starting 1970. Illustration modified from Seriia 84: Krupnopanel’nye doma i blok-sektsii (Moscow: TsNIIEP zhilishcha, 1979), 16.
And what is a room after all? According to Soviet standards, a room is a closed space with four walls, windows, and doors. However, those same walls, windows, and doors of the post-Soviet apartments have been significantly changed by residents: moved, removed, new partition walls erected, new openings cut, and old ones blocked, all of this in different configurations and for a variety of functional purposes. How does one find logic in this seemingly chaotic rethinking of apartment homes?
When I first started working on this project, I found myself facing a puzzle: how was I supposed to speak of the changes in domestic spaces in segmented chapters if the physical domestic partitions—walls—and the formal domestic units—rooms—appear to be overstepped in the process of inhabitation? What if a wall inside a home is not a rigid physical or perceptional border but rather can be physically removed or moved or challenged with placement of functional zones and movement flows? What if a room does not contain a precise function but changes its physical outlines and performances based on the needs and desires of apartment occupants? The problem I faced is not unheard of; it has been rich grounds for anthropological and architectural inquiries into vernacular models of domestic living for decades. For instance, Dell Upton determines that in the mid-eighteenth-century Virginia home, room naming may have been assigned prior to the actual function of the space.77 Lizabeth Cohen, describing an early twentieth-century American working-class home, demonstrates how cooking, dining, labor, and socializing often overlapped in the same space of a kitchen.78 Elizabeth Cromley suggests questioning the boundaries and limitations of the terms “kitchen” and “dining room” in her work on food spaces in American homes.79 Lindsay Asquith, summarizing conceptual frameworks for the study of vernacular architecture, points out that “room functions need to be examined in relation to domestic routine and ritual,” since simply “the existence of many rooms in the house”80 does not tell a story in its own right.
In short, this is how I arrived at organizing this work along domestic practices: remodeling, sleeping, eating, hygiene, and socializing. When looking at domestic practices instead of room outlines, the common themes of the post-Soviet change, such as the emergence of private sleeping spaces or the overlap between socializing and eating spaces within the home, appear on the surface. Domestic practices reveal that the patterns of change were similar across incomes, class lines, and apartment types and sizes.81 The changes that took place in the home were a universal, sociohistoric, post-Soviet tendency rather than a set of isolated idiosyncrasies. This universality of outcomes presents the sought-for link between the microhistoric evidence and the tremendous omnipresent change, as well as the persistent continuities of the post-Soviet era. The apartment dwellers did not erect the physical structure of the apartment building, but they liberally moved walls, transformed balconies, changed room functions, and most importantly, unpredictably populated standard apartments offered to them by the state. The home of a Soviet urbanite, first seen by the authorities as a perfect device for the creation of a proper, “happy and healthy” Soviet citizen,82 by the late 1980s became a gray zone of desired Western commodities, DIY partition walls, and dusty carpets on the walls to fix temperature and sound isolation problems characteristic of the prefabricated apartments.83 Something as small as the construction of a new partition to separate and make private a previously walk-through room provides a tangible understanding of attitudes to post-Soviet privacy, where the grand communism/capitalism binary does not.
A critical reader may question the integrity of this approach, considering that this book is about an apartment home: a physical container with seemingly rigid boundaries of walls, especially the load-bearing brick and concrete panel walls of a Soviet apartment. Yet, an apartment home is not solely a built box; it is equally a vehicle for everyday life, “the space both geographical and intellectual,” and “the frame and map on which everyday world is reflected and through which an understanding is gained.”84 Walls do not limit a home in this work but outline the framework for thinking about change.
With domestic practices in mind, the chapter structure of this book is as follows. Chapter 1: Remodeling introduces dweller-performed remodeling as a massive, but largely hidden, shift in culture and life. This chapter has a double goal. First, it shows apartment remodeling as an inalienable part of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the early post-Soviet years. Second, it questions the stereotype that the desire to, and practice of, transforming one’s everyday life was primarily related to the widespread apartment privatization that occurred after 1991. Chapter 2 introduces an alternative claim that the roots of demand for apartment remodeling rested deep in Soviet reality and that the basis for supply of remodeling services began while the Soviet system was still standing.
Chapter 2: Sleeping analyzes the everyday practice of sleeping and the ways in which this practice transformed between the beginning of perestroika (1985) and the second post-Soviet decade. This chapter further breaks down the category of privacy, present in every study of domestic space, in order to locate the distinct peculiarities of Soviet and post-Soviet sleep. Unlike, for instance, in the United States, where the number of delineated spaces in a home is measured by the number of “bedrooms,” in the Soviet Union a designated bedroom was a rarity rather than a rule. Residents of Soviet apartments slept in multifunctional spaces with standards for acceptable sleep arrangements quite different from those found in American homes of the same era. Chapter 3 tracks the steps in the rise of the distinct bedroom in the late 1980s and early 1990s through media, apartment plans, and construction regulations, as well as the oral histories of the study’s interviewees.
Chapter 3: Eating analyzes the transformation of eating and cooking spaces during the same period. The importance of kitchens to clandestine political and cultural life in the Soviet Union between the 1950s and 1990s is well known.85 Yet domestic eating and cooking per se have been relatively understudied in comparison to the uniquely Soviet political life that took place in the kitchen. Soviet urbanites had a habit of socializing and holding political and philosophical discussions in their kitchens. While this trend first started in intelligentsia circles in the 1960s after the arrival of mass-constructed individual apartments, by the 1980s it became a general societal norm. Perhaps this happened in part because the possibilities for cooking and eating in the last decades of the Soviet Union desperately lacked diversity. Due to the same dull culinary scene, only a few researchers have directed their attention to late-Soviet domestic eating practices, yet the books that were published on the subject, such as Von Bremzen’s Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, gained significant success.86 This chapter fills the lack of knowledge about the spatial practices of domestic eating and cooking by directing attention to how these practices took place in the late Soviet home and how they transformed along the lines of political change. It does so by looking at the spatial qualities of the small Soviet kitchens, the complex choreographies necessary to navigate cooking, eating, and gathering in these tight spaces, and the ways in which apartment remodeling and layout changes shaped the spatial dynamic of food in the 1990s.
Chapter 4: Cleaning addresses the spaces of hygiene: bathrooms, water closets, and kitchens in late-Soviet and post-Soviet apartments. This chapter highlights the discrepancy between the late-Soviet institutional programming of homes, the aspirations of professional architects, and the desires of homeowners when it came to spaces of hygiene. The chapter also addresses the invisibility of the bathroom in the Soviet world of images and its powerful entry into visual culture, art practices, and socioeconomic anecdotes of the first post-Soviet decade.
Besides pulling together the entire investigation, chapter 5: Socializing speaks about the changes in domestic socialization that took place alongside the collapse of the USSR. Unlike the previous chapters, this chapter is not limited to the urban apartment but expands to the apartment building hallway and its courtyard. Yet like the previous chapters, it does not speak of just one kind of room but instead tracks the shifts in social life from the kitchen to a room, from a living room to the hallway stairs and the courtyard, and back again. Finally, it addresses the surprising resilience of modest multifamily urban housing, particularly important now when housing is once again becoming a central social and political issue, even in economically leading societies.
Geography, Reservations, and Sources
The interviews and most of the fieldwork for this book were done in Kyiv and Lviv, Ukraine, a perfect combination for a study of metropolitan post-Soviet apartment housing. Kyiv has a diverse housing stock: a mix of the Russian Empire–era apartment buildings largely transformed into communal housing with the arrival of the Soviets in 1919, Stalin-era apartment buildings, and mass-built apartment buildings of all generations, as well as new housing built after 1991. Lviv is a city with very different, chiefly pre-Soviet, housing stock, except for several mass-built mikroraion neighborhoods; this combination of geographies demonstrates that even in radically different built fabric, post-Soviet urbanites remodeled their apartment homes in a shared, uniquely post-Soviet way.
While the geography of the interviews and archival fieldwork is quite localized, many of the documents and interviews collected apply to geographies much broader than Ukrainian cities. Although the Soviet pursuit of standardization did not result in all urban housing becoming exactly the same, it did facilitate the creation of several very distinct apartment building types, including pre-1917 Revolution apartments, Stalin-era apartments, first-generation apartment blocks (Khrushchev-era), second- and third-generation prefabricated apartment blocks (Brezhnev-era until 1991), and post-Soviet-built apartment blocks.87 These categories of urban homes were widespread throughout the entire Soviet Union, with some reservations as to the quantitative relationship between these apartment housing types in different regions and modifications of these homes according to regional specifics.88 For instance, it is safe to say that the majority of the apartment building series designed between the 1950s and 1991 were built in multiple cities and republics. The pre-1917 housing also became standardized through establishing the same room-size norms inside buildings that may have previously differed.
A reservation should be made for Soviet-built housing in former Baltic republics; it is known that mass housing in the Baltic states was built to a better standard than elsewhere in the USSR.89 This curious exclusion, however, only proves the general rule to be true: apartment housing around the USSR was similar enough for the differences in Baltic mass housing quality to become noticeable on this uniform background.
While the urban Soviet housing funds entered the post-Soviet period in a relatively similar state, further divergences took place after the collapse of the USSR. Besides regional differences in the social composition of apartment dwellers and the resulting differences in their home improvement projects, housing legislature and institutions that oversaw housing varied in different post-Soviet states. This subject is further explained in the discussion of the BTI in chapter 5. Yet despite these variations, all these changes took places on the basis of a shared Soviet infrastructure.
Several types of secondary sources are used in this project: (1) popular magazines and books concerned with domesticity, (2) popular television shows on home remodeling, (3) professional magazines and books on interior design, and (4) films containing or commenting on domestic spaces. All four categories appear to have been transrepublican in Soviet times and largely transnational in the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s.90 For example, a home improvement television show named Kvartirnyi vopros (Apartment question), produced by the Russian television channel NTV, and many other Russian shows aired in Ukraine and Belarus as well as other post-Soviet states.91 A German franchise magazine with a section on interior design advice, Burda Moden, started being published in the Soviet Union in 1987, while the regional Ukrainian branch of the magazine did not start until 2006.92 Until then, the Russian version of Burda Moden was widely circulated in Ukraine, creating a shared knowledge about domestic interiors between these two post-Soviet republics. In other words, with regional specifics in mind, it is still possible to speak of major similarities across apartment housing in different cities and different former republics, particularly in the first decades after 1991. Therefore, although this book’s findings are most relevant to urban housing in Ukrainian metro areas, the trends, milestones, and causation detected are structurally similar to the processes that took place in other metropolitan urban areas across the former Soviet Union.93
Were there any traits to Ukrainian urban homes that differed from other post-Soviet metropolitan areas? Yes, and although it would require another book to address these subtle differences and their roots properly, I feel obligated to briefly review one such important large-scale difference.
In different post-Soviet entities, state funding and the amount of control exercised by the city and the state over housing and other urban forms varied. Take, for example, balconies. In many post-Soviet cities, apartment residents drastically modified their balconies, except for cities such as Lviv, where historic building facades were not to be modified by the residents due to the UNESCO-protected status of the entire historic city center. However, the degrees of these modifications varied based on the city and state. For instance, in Kyiv and Moscow alike, residents enclosed balconies in city centers and on the outskirts, but rarely extended the balcony floor past its original size or built additional load-bearing structures (figure 0.2). In Tbilisi, on the contrary, adding load-bearing structures and extending balconies past their original dimensions to create apartment building extensions was commonplace.94 Of course, these differences were not accidental: in the rigid context of historic Lviv, where laws about the balconies were strict, and strictly enforced, balcony enclosures simply did not happen, while in Tbilisi, where in the 2000s there was little control over balcony encroachments, they did. Thankfully, the phenomenon of post-Soviet balconies is well studied, therefore here I am using it only as a brief illustration of a state-to-state and city-to-city difference.95
However, balconies are just a single case of a larger pattern: a variation in the amount of power over existing environments exercised by different post-Soviet states and cities. The most striking case of such difference in state and city administration control comes from the Russian Federation. The Russian capital Moscow is the only post-Soviet city that has successfully demolished the early series of Khrushchev-era mass housing.96 Although many other cities, including Kyiv, considered this move, there was never enough resources or political power to execute such a massive infrastructural project.97 In Moscow, unlike Kyiv, the Russian petrostate and private investors provided resources for grand rebuilding projects, while Russia’s tightening authoritarian control over urban space, both public and private, overpowered democratic, bureaucratic, and institutional inertia to make these projects happen.
In Kyiv, large-scale urban projects tend to meet popular resistance, especially when residents believe they are being deprived of their rights to their residences or urban space. Ukrainian anti-construction activism is so well known it has attracted academic comparisons with the Ukrainian waves of Soviet monument removals.98 Often, anticonstruction or antidemolition activists are successful. Without a doubt, had the city started Khrushchev-era housing demolition in any Ukrainian metropolitan center, there would have been a major public outcry. That is because of the ownership—formal, spatial, and emotional—that residents have established over their apartments in the years after privatization; it is also because, in the Ukrainian context, this community of individual owners can be strong enough to repel autocratic solutions by the state.
FIGURE 0.2. Left: Enclosed loggias in Sykhiv, a bedroom neighborhood of Lviv; Center: Enclosed balconies in central Kyiv; Right: Enclosed balconies in Moscow. (Photographs by the author.)
In Moscow, although concerns over deprivatization of housing or unfair neighborhood relocation were voiced, the projects continued without major interruptions.99 Urban activism, public protests, or other forms of resistance in Russia have become increasingly difficult in recent years, the most famous case being a public campaign to defend Khimki Forest near Moscow from freeway construction. Not only did the campaign to save the forest fail, but one of the central activists had to take refuge in Estonia to avoid prosecution.100
In other words, although starting with a mostly similar housing infrastructure and largely shared informational field in the first post-Soviet decades, different post-Soviet republics did develop differences in built environments, due not just to their differing climates, social structures, and regionally available materials, but also to the degree of freedom and private control individuals had over their built environment.
Finally, the geographic reservations of this research reflect the decade and the places where it was conducted. Research in Russia has become increasingly complicated as the Russian Federation gradually solidified as a regime. More importantly, in this postcolonial, yet not postimperial world, it is essential that the Soviet Union does not get studied through Russia alone or become equated to just current republics within the Russian Federation. Limiting research related to the Soviet Union to just Russia not only manufactures an inaccurate view of the Soviet and post-Soviet reality, but also maintains the highly problematic perception of the Russian Federation as the locus of the normative condition for the entire post-Soviet region.
The sociological reservation of this research has to do with important subjects that I chose to mostly omit in this work: gender and sex. Although gender dynamics and sex were and are of central importance to the construction of domestic space in the Soviet Union and in the post-Soviet world, I chose to mostly avoid these subjects as it would have extended this book project indefinitely. In the interest of completing this project, I had to limit its scope to the domestic practices described in the following chapters.
The final reservation has to do with the nature of Soviet architectural and popular writing. On multiple occasions, this book takes time to point out the critical discrepancies between the Soviet formal, architectural, and public media discourse and the reality of urban apartment housing on the ground. Of course, the differences between discourse and reality are not exclusive to Soviet or post-Soviet housing; and yet the scale of those discrepancies reached a particularly impressive degree when it came to Soviet residential architecture. Unrealizable architecture was always a Soviet specialty: from the 1920s Constructivists, who almost exclusively produced “paper architecture,” to the classicists’ colossus of the Palace of the Soviets, to the 1988 exhibition of the new Soviet “paper architecture” as an aesthetic statement at the Frankfurt Deutsches Architekturmuseum.101
The awareness of the differences between discourse and reality is of extreme importance in the subject of housing. Looking at the discourse on its own, without considering actual apartment plans and construction norms and regulations and without talking to apartment residents on the ground, leads to problems such as claiming the existence of open plan interiors in the Soviet standardized housing of the 1960s,102 which, as this book shows, never existed widely in the reality of most Soviet cities, only in discussion.103 On the other hand, looking solely at plans, sections, and layouts would be misleading as well, since blueprints are partially silent as to the intentions behind the design.
The fieldwork for this book is a mix of easily available sources that have been previously and effectively used by other scholars, such as late-Soviet and post-Soviet media, and sources that I have reasons to believe have not been previously used for scholarly research, like the Recorder of Deeds-type plans and the oral histories, collected exclusively for the study.
Fieldwork involved collecting several different types of evidence:
- blueprints of apartment buildings, produced by architectural and planning institutions during the Soviet years and independent architects after 1991
- blueprints and schematic plans of individual apartments produced by me or the BTI or granted by apartment dwellers
- Soviet construction standards and regulations
- interviews with apartment dwellers, architects, construction workers, and engineers
- late-Soviet and post-Soviet media outlets, including the Soviet magazine Rabotnitsa, Burda Moden magazine, post-Soviet television shows, and printed and online resources (Kvartirnyi vopros, Idei vashego doma, and many others).
The use of popular media outlets, Rabotnitsa in particular, allowed me to track the specific timeline of public interest in remodeling, something that would be difficult to address otherwise. The choice of Rabotnitsa is not random, even though remodeling work was largely perceived as men’s or shared labor in the home during the Soviet and early post-Soviet years. A typical compliment for a man was that he had “hands of gold” or could fix anything in the house, yet the domestic sphere was still seen as a “women’s kingdom.”104 Besides Rabotnitsa being a women’s magazine, it was also the most popular women’s magazine, steadily published since before the 1917 Revolutions, and a rare publication that actually survived the collapse of the USSR.105 It is remarkable that this magazine managed to reinvent itself through the entire Soviet history and beyond and maintains some readership until today.
Burda Moden magazine, Idei vashego doma magazine and online platform, and the television show Kvartirnyi vopros present very different types of popular sources, based on globally successful models, but with a local twist. Kvartinyi vopros used a generic global television show format, yet with a local, historically recognizable reference: the idiom “kvaritrnyi vopros” (apartment question) was widely used throughout the entire Soviet history as a euphemism for the housing shortage.106 Burda Moden primarily published fashion photographs and sewing patterns, which made it very appealing to the late-Soviet and post-Soviet women used to creating and altering clothes at home. The addition of articles on domestic interiors was a logical extension of manufacturing one’s image with one’s own hands, whether personal appearance or a dwelling.
To understand the built environments in which the transformations took place, this work extensively uses Soviet and post-Soviet construction regulations—Stroitel’nye normy i pravila or SNiP. They are a universal legal document that prescribed the dwelling spaces to be built the way they were. SNiP were not unlike the International Building Code (IBC), but were stricter in some aspects, such as the upper limitations of floor area or open-plan dwellings. SNiP were updated when the political or practical need emerged, usually every several years.107
Central to this inquiry are architectural plans and other blueprints. When it comes to housing in microscale, except for a number of historic studies, architectural blueprints play a secondary role in everyday-life analysis.108 At the same time, architectural blueprints present a rich and multifaceted type of research source. The absolute majority of housing was developed or transformed by state institutions, and at least some stage of these transformations was documented. Therefore, an apartment plan and its accompanying documents109 are a precious source of information on the institutional attitude toward the production of home and, even more importantly, on the controversies inherent to the Soviet state housing agenda. Architectural blueprints help understand a gap that existed between the architectural discourse, the state rhetoric, and the realization of housing projects on the ground. The many architectural competitions handled by Soviet state agencies often compartmentalized and, offering some design freedom, produced numerous apartment housing proposals that may have never been realized but pointed out the problems of the existing housing, often more clearly than the official rhetoric.110
Another facet of information in architectural plans opens up with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of individual apartment design plans and Recorder of Deeds-type blueprints. These plans speak to the two major elements of everyday domestic life in post-Soviet urbanity: the popular image of an apartment home and how this image has evolved in the decades after 1991, as well as the cases of on-the-ground transformation of these domestic spaces.
An architectural plan, hence, is all-encompassing and rich in comparative data. The different types of apartment plans illustrate the Soviet reality, including the state-level orchestration of everyday life through the standardized apartment design, the professional discourse on theoretical problem-solving and practical marketing, and the everyday resistance and change performed on the grassroots level by the apartment dwellers themselves.
And yet, despite their historic richness, plans do not speak. The interviews collected for this book give its research subject a voice. These semi-structured interviews conducted with apartment dwellers, architects, and construction professionals are used as evidence sources and illustrations for the multiple avenues of domestic transformation. They add a final touch to the inquiry on home: without the voices from within the homes, inhabited and under construction, this take on the historic era would not be fair or possible.
Identity
In Mylan and Southerton’s take on developing an orderly method for a study of an everyday domestic practice, they note that “there is a tendency within empirical studies towards descriptive accounts of the micro with limited critical analysis of broader social processes.”111 Indeed, this inherent microscale challenge—that of transition between scales—is just as relevant for this book. To understand the larger stakes of this project, it is necessary to look at yet another dimension of cultural practices, that of social identity.
Despite the fascination with the West and the persistence of Soviet infrastructure, post-Soviet urbanites did not produce domestic spaces that resembled their Western counterparts, nor did they recreate the standard Soviet understanding of home but rather developed their own spatial model of apartment living. The spatial transformation of home was a necessary step for an individual to transition from a Soviet to a post-Soviet subject. In the final Soviet and early post-Soviet years, home remodeling became such an important part of social identity that home improvements were mentioned as a class-defining trait by the interviewees in Jennifer Patico’s ethnographic study of the transforming notion of the post-Soviet middle class:
Anya, who was in her twenties, divorced, and living with her mother, talked about herself and her friends as srednie [average, in the middle] and said that she thought that these srednie were people who had what they needed but could not often afford traveling abroad or completing significant renovations in their apartments.112
Domestic transformation established one’s relevance to the post-Soviet reality. This becomes especially striking when looking at the opposite example: those homes that experienced little change since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Such apartments are referred to as babushatnik, which can be loosely translated as a “grandma’s den.” Despite its reference to grandmothers, it is not an endearing term. Babushatnik is used to describe an apartment where the owners willingly or involuntarily preserved elements of the former Soviet well-being, such as carpets on the walls and on the floors, a varnished chest of drawers (komod), a china set, and old-fashioned souvenirs so graphically described by Svetlana Boym.113 Despite its clear ties to the lack of renovation and to former rather than present economic prosperity, babushatnik does not just define the homes of the poor or elderly. Neither does it characterize the antiquated habitats of former Soviet elites, unwilling to part with out-of-date luxury objects. Instead, it specifically describes an attachment to the old Soviet signifiers of normal people or srednie—a Soviet version of middle class—which have become irrelevant with the new signifiers of well-being.
Post-Soviet popular culture only knows one solution to the problem of an old-fashioned apartment—a remodeling, either massive or modest, yet often merciless to the signs of the previous epoch. Even when post-Soviet home improvement magazines offer advice on reusing or restoring elements of Soviet domestic interiors, they first and foremost suggest to rethink these pieces through the lens of Scandinavian style or Western mid-century modern.114
The transformations of domestic spaces described in the following chapters are a key to understanding the post-Soviet condition and post-Soviet mentality. Whereas in the United States homeownership describes one’s economic standing and class identity,115 in the early post-Soviet decades it was domestic remodeling (remont) that positioned an urbanite in post-Soviet societies. The next chapter of this work provides a detailed investigation into late-Soviet and post-Soviet remodeling and elucidates why this domestic practice became popular in the late 1980s and after the collapse of the USSR.