1 REMODELING

What Is Remont?

First, what is remont if not just remodeling? What differentiates remont from an ordinary home makeover in any other time or place?

The roots of the word remont in post-Soviet languages go back to the historic French term remonte—the change or the secondary equipment of horses. According to the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, by the second half of the nineteenth century, remont was already used to identify repair, mending, and remodeling and only secondarily to refer to its French-inherited meaning.¹ The evolution of the term did not stop in the 1800s; in 1926, the early era of the Soviet Union, remont captured the attention of a Western visitor—the great German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin—as one of the most omnipresent words and concepts to be found in post-revolutionary Moscow. Svetlana Boym retrospectively wrote about Benjamin’s Moscow Diaries:

In Moscow, Benjamin mastered two words in Russian: remont and seichas. One characterizes the perpetual transformation of space, a process of endless repair that had neither beginning nor end. Remont may indicate a major construction, or else a mirage, a pretext for doing nothing. The Moscow visitor is familiar with signs that indicate that a store or an office is “closed for remont,” most often an indefinite period of time.²

Between the 1920s and the 1980s, remont preserved its indefinite nature described by Boym. It also remained a public affair so accurately noticed by Benjamin:

Shortly before Christmas, there were two children on Tverskaia always sitting in the same spot against the wall of the Museum of the Revolution, covered in rags, whimpering. This would seem to be an expression of infinite misery of these beggars, but it may also be the result of clever organization, for of all the Moscow institutions they alone are reliable, they alone refuse to be budged. Everything else here takes place under a banner of remont.³

By the late 1980s and 1990s, the formerly public, never-ending remont became no less omnipresent in private domestic spheres. During the late-Soviet decades, domestic remont, just like any activity requiring commodities and labor, was complicated by commodity deficit and sluggishness of the officially available labor. The story of the Soviet commodity deficit is well known.⁴ A Soviet citizen could not simply buy wallpaper due to the absence of variety or the lack of supply altogether. Yet a late-Soviet citizen was often able to encounter those commodities in film or magazines or by visiting other households. The awareness of fast and high-quality remont services did not come out of nowhere; rather this desire developed as a response to the known existence of better-quality services and trendy household interiors. A 1985 article in the Soviet women’s magazine Rabotnitsa (The woman worker) claimed that remodeling services and consumer goods offered by the state were delivered with a very long time lag and were of low practical and aesthetic quality.⁵ This perestroika outcry, belated by more than two decades of gradually developing consumer goods deficit, reflected less on the shortage of goods and labor and more on the growing ability of the individual to hire private construction workers for their apartment remont.

Remont as a culturally significant practice emerged in the USSR long before 1991. In fact, remont as maintenance or endless promise of improvement was so engrained in the Soviet society that the sociologist Ekaterina Gerasimova simply labeled it the “society of remont.”⁶ Yet, the Soviet remont—do-it-yourself maintenance and the grand Soviet projects of improvement that started to never be finished—differed drastically from the remont desires of the late 1980s and their realizations of the 1990s. A balance between seeing the practice of remont as continuous and denying its Soviet roots is necessary to understand the central place of remont in the post-Soviet life. The remont fever of the late 1980s and 1990s is often discussed in the context of previously state-owned housing privatization and the exposure to the West, which forced people to rethink their lived environments.⁷ The major argument in many studies is that Soviet citizens, being only nominally in possession of their state-owned apartments, may have been significantly energized to remodel their homes after they received the right to turn their apartments into private property. However, the emergence of the concept of remont appears to predate the earliest legal precursors of mass housing privatization and even the broad acceptance of the imaginary Western homemaking practices as a definition of quality and affluence. Remont is broader than these immediate consequences of the collapse of the USSR; domestic remont is a form of habitus that developed through the decades of patently problematic housing conditions and lack of means for their improvement or alteration.

Without a doubt, housing privatization and exposure to the Western understanding of domestic spaces are among the most important consequences of the collapse of the USSR. At the same time, no less important is the continuity of the Soviet infrastructure and means of governance that lasted long into the post-Soviet decades. Scholarly works on privatization, Western exposure, and the continuities of the Soviet infrastructure started to appear in the mid-1990s and continue into the present day. Their topics included the socioeconomic effects of privatization, creation of ghettos for the urban poor,⁸ and the new understanding of home that may or may not have emerged from privatization.⁹ Privatization turned apartment dwellers into homeowners and simultaneously solidified the homelessness of those who did not own housing before 1991.¹⁰ Finally, anthropologists and sociologists published studies concerned with privatization in the context of the state’s socialist infrastructures, apartment buildings, and housing management institutions.

The most prominent example of such works is a study by Stephen Collier. Collier argues that despite neoliberal reforms after 1991, the housing infrastructure (such as state-operated communal gas, electricity, and heat networks) persisted, sustaining life in small, post-Soviet towns in the times of economic decline.¹¹ In other words, while the neoliberal reforms at the corporate level ensured a stable extraction or import of natural gas, the state-owned, communal urban engineering structures continued supplying this gas to the local boiler stations, even if the local apartment population had chronic debt on their energy bills. The socialist infrastructure and the neoliberal political organization were not mutually exclusive. This revelation reinstated the view that many scholars are now taking on the post-Soviet era. Namely, the continuity between the Soviet and post-Soviet times was greater than accounted for by transition theorists. This continuity was especially prominent at the scale and through the lens of everyday life and its structures rather than through large-scale rhetoric of a breakup with the socialist past.¹²

The continuity of everyday practices and structures to no extent denies change. On the contrary, it reinforces knowledge about change by tracing its roots, often before the boiling point of the collapse of the USSR, throughout Soviet history and the politics of everyday life prior to 1991. The ground for the remont boom of the 1990s was laid years prior through multiple shifts in legislation, attitudes, and everyday practices. In the 1990s, the practice of remont exploded and developed into a matter of tremendous social and cultural importance. Remont occupied such a large space in the post-Soviet consciousness that it even gained some notoriety and comedic representations.¹³

In this chapter, remont is first analyzed through the public ideas about apartment housing and remodeling found in late-Soviet and post-Soviet magazines, TV shows, and movies. The analysis of popular sources helps date the increase in interest in apartment remont and track the characteristic issues of Soviet housing that remodeling was aimed to remedy. Second, this chapter addresses an issue of supply required for the practice of remont: access to construction knowledge and materials and the newly emerged late-Soviet and post-Soviet mobility of labor. Demand, somewhat counterintuitively yet necessarily, is addressed last. Urban apartment housing for a long time experienced a lack of maintenance and was often constructed under low-quality standards, leading to a steady increase in demand for better living conditions throughout most of the history of the Soviet Union.¹⁴ From this perspective, the demand did not emerge during the last Soviet and first post-Soviet years, but rather the supply was able to catch up with the demand for the first time since the relatively market-oriented New Economic Policy (1921–1928). Finally, this chapter speaks of the 1980s and 1990s remont as a social practice and a form of habitus. Backed with the continuity of demand and the shifts in supply for remont, the last section shows how these circumstances affected the way of life, the system of social interactions, and the bodily and spatial practices of post-Soviet apartment dwellers.

Remodeling in Popular Sources

The first part of this research traces the narrative of remont in the popular sources of the late-Soviet era. Domestic spaces were rather peripheral to the mainstream media with a powerful exception—Rabotnitsa magazine, the major women’s magazine read all over the USSR. This focus on Rabotnitsa is not random: besides its extreme popularity throughout the USSR and during most of its history, Rabotnitsa clearly reflected the changes in the Soviet society through its themes and visuals. In the “country of the victorious socialism,” domestic spaces and the domestic sphere were predominantly of interest to women’s magazines, Rabotnitsa in particular. It started in 1914, as the “women’s supplement to Pravda,” by then a communist propaganda publication.¹⁵ By the 1920s, it portrayed a Soviet woman in the spirit of military communism: with short hair, dressed in a unisex clothing, without any jewelry or makeup. By Stalin’s time, Rabotnitsa illustrated the return of the traditions, including women portrayed as wives and mothers, not just workers. In the 1960s, it reflected the romanticism of the USSR modernization and the promise of the bright future; in the 1970s, it illustrated the return of the domesticity in place of Khrushchev-era functionalism. Finally, to no surprise, in the 1980s, it took on the questions of remodeling.

Prior to 1985, remont was not a typical topic for major or minor articles even in Rabotnitsa with its emphasis on the domestic sphere. However, on the eve of perestroika, it suddenly started publishing articles on remodeling. At first, they were short articles on fixing or constructing pieces of furniture. Soon, articles on remont took over major magazine spreads and acquired large photographs representing fashionable domestic spaces, or in other words, fashionable remont. In 1984, there were several articles about the home in Rabotnitsa describing, among other issues, the difficulty faced to receive individual apartment housing for a typical Soviet family.¹⁶ However, throughout all twelve monthly issues that year, not a single article or reader-response letter was written about remont. The situation changed rather dramatically in 1985 and 1986: Rabotnitsa published two major articles boldly titled “Zona remonta” (Remont zone)¹⁷ and “Tsena remonta” (The price of remont)¹⁸ dedicated exclusively to remodeling and the troubles of doing it through the municipal institutions taking care of urban infrastructure—Residential Maintenance Offices or ZhEK (Zhilishno-ekspluatazionnaia kontora). The articles specifically uncovered the deficiency of construction materials that were supposed to be received from these institutions, the yearlong waiting lists, and the powerlessness of the residents in making remodeling decisions. For instance, “Tsena remonta” called for at least some quality accountability for state-executed remont.

Several general articles on housing in 1987 and 1988 were followed by an explosion of coverage. Between 1989 and 1991, Rabotnitsa published seventeen articles on housing and remont with two permanent monthly headings dedicated specifically to these subjects. In 1989, one of them, “Dom v kotorom my zhivem” (The house where we live), dedicated a page to remodeling; another one, “Domashnii kaleidoscop” (Home kaleidoscope), published articles on small home improvements, such as furniture construction. Besides these two permanent rubrics, Rabotnitsa published numerous articles on choosing colors, materials, and interior design elements for home remodeling. For instance, an article titled “10 metrov na 100 chelovek” (10 meters for 100 people) gave advice on how to make a small kitchen bigger. It offered two options: “in coordination with an architect you can move walls, expanding the kitchen and reducing the size of a room” or “the wall does not move, but niches are made in it for the shelves, drawers and the fridge and all this furniture is placed flush with the wall.¹⁹ Rabotnitsa was not the only popular gendered magazine with articles about remont. Burda Moden, an extremely popular magazine, entered the Soviet media scene in the spring of 1987 and at first did not publish articles about home interior or remodeling.²⁰ However, by winter 1988, Burda already had a permanent rubric titled “Our Home” that suggested interior design improvements. Pictures used to illustrate these design ideas were clearly taken from outside the USSR, and the interiors were created with construction materials unavailable to the Soviet reader.²¹

Not only magazines but also many books of the time were dedicated to remont. For instance, Home Academy Volume 1, issued in 1990 with the intention to publish more issues in the future. Remont in this book was presented as a private endeavor, also suggesting that patient and skilled apartment dwellers could conduct remodeling on their own without even hiring the newly emerged firms or construction cooperatives.²² Even those sources that simply informed citizens about homemaking practices without a direct mention of massive remodeling carefully addressed the issue, indicating its importance. In the late 1980s, central architectural and construction publisher Stroizdat published translated books on homemaking. A 1988 example of such publications, a book on domestic interiors originally published in Serbo-Croatian, started with a Soviet-added preface: “Contemporary multi-story residence buildings almost completely rule out the possibility of [layout] planning changes (moving partitions, making openings and such). Therefore, only those recommendations should be used that do not require such changes.”²³

This preface strongly affirmed that loadbearing walls and partitions should not be moved, even along the promise of a better apartment organization. A seemingly sound statement, it lost its credibility in the face of all the partitions moved and walls modified in later years. Rather than expressing the reality of Soviet apartment housing, it reinstated the predictable interest of the state and institutionalized architects in keeping things as they were.

Rabotnitsa continued publishing articles on remodeling throughout the early post-Soviet years but was no longer unique in its efforts. Multiple interior design magazines came to post-Soviet markets, this time not to suggest DIY remont techniques but to offer different aesthetic choices for those able to hire professionals to make their remont work. The most notable of these magazines were first published in the 1990s and early 2000s: Idei vashego doma (Ideas for your home) in 1995, Krasivye kvartiry (Beautiful apartments) in 2001, the Russian version of the Architectural Digest in 2002, and many others.

In 1999, Idei vashego doma magazine dedicated an entire issue to replanning strategies—moving, demolishing, or constructing walls—for the P-44 apartment housing series.²⁴ These seventeen- to twenty-five-story panel apartment blocks, first developed in the 1970s, were built throughout former Soviet cities. It also happened to be a rare housing series that kept being built after 1991. Apartment layouts in this series were commonly considered relatively spacious²⁵ (unlike, for example, the early Khrushchev-era series). Additionally, the series was updated in the 1990s to better respond to contemporary requirements, such as having bigger kitchens. Idei vashego doma published its special issue due to the commonality of P-44 buildings and the relative ease of replanning in these panel apartment buildings. And of course, most importantly, the magazine dedicated an entire issue to a particular case of replanning because of the extreme popularity of remont and replanning in the 1990s. This issue, just like many other printed materials at the time, indicated a major trend that took place in post-Soviet remodeling—the displacement of walls and the introduction of the open apartment plan, virtually absent from existing housing.²⁶

During the 1990s and early 2000s, multiple remont-centered shows premiered on television. The format for these shows was similar to widely popular American remodeling television shows: homeowners let a team of designers and construction specialists remodel their outdated or unmaintained housing and were later presented with their radically changed, professionally designed dwelling. However, a major difference between the American and the post-Soviet television shows of this kind was that US shows predominantly focused on the most stereotypical unit of US housing, a single-family house, whereas post-Soviet shows first and foremost dealt with an apartment and even more often with just one room. These shows, such as Kvartirnyi vopros (Apartment question) beginning in 2001 or Shkola remonta (Remodeling school) beginning in 2003, rarely featured replanning since replanning often had to be legally reported and was bureaucratically complex. Instead, they usually approached a given room-sized space with a cosmetic remont strategy and zoned a small room differently to comfortably fit more functions and visually or perceptually expand the space. These shows raised two major housing problems leading to the tremendous popularity of remont: the dilapidated state and small areas of apartment housing interiors.

The omnipresence of remont in the media was a reciprocal phenomenon. On one hand, it indicated the overwhelming public interest in remont; on the other hand, it instigated even broader interest and desire for remont as a necessary marker of access to resources and labor and the ability to keep up with the changing trends.

Supply: Hands, Experience, and Drywall

While the boom of remodeling-related magazine articles and books is a rather clear indication of the topic’s popularity, it does not explain why remont became an issue of interest in the first place. The roots of the fashion for remodeling could be found among the shifts in everyday life circumstances, which led to the growing interest and growing possibility of remont.

The first legislation allowing USSR citizens to privatize their apartments came out in 1988.²⁷ Together with the 1991 collapse of the USSR, it is typically analyzed as the historic threshold effecting the late- and post-Soviet understandings of home.²⁸ However, even prior to 1991, Soviet society experienced certain shifts that led to the fast increase in interest in home remodeling, as illustrated in the previous section of the chapter. Where there is demand, there should be supply. The late-Soviet supply for apartment remodeling can be broadly divided into two categories: the labor and the construction knowledge.

The first one, skilled labor, was determined by a set of late-Soviet circumstances. On November 19, 1986, the Supreme Soviet passed the law Ob individualnoi trudovoi deiatelʹnosti (About individual labor activity) which, for the first time since the 1950s, legalized private labor outside of state employment during citizens’ free time. This law effectively legalized the preexisting, unofficial construction method nicknamed shabashka. Shabashniki were construction workers who hired themselves out informally during their vacation time to do quick construction work. This practice existed in the USSR prior to the passing of the private labor law, yet after the law was passed, hiring shabashniki no longer required special knowledge or connections and was no longer looked upon as informal or illegal. The laws concerning private cooperation shifted from less to more restricting a couple of times between 1986 and 1991, but despite these formal norms, the legalization of cooperatives established an official positive precedent for private labor in the USSR. As the formal economy of the USSR gradually collapsed, workers shifted their efforts to informal private jobs, which had earlier had a deficit of skilled or motivated manpower. Apartment remodeling was a sphere where motivated workers were particularly valued.

The inept performance of official institutions—Residential Maintenance Offices or ZhEK—in remodeling services was ubiquitously understood. An apartment owner interviewed for this study, who over the years initiated several remodeling projects, mentioned that her family had to use a public restroom by her house for several weeks because the construction brigade disappeared after dismantling an old toilet but before installing a new one.²⁹ The rest of the interviewees, when asked about their attempts at remont before perestroika, reported minor changes, such as new wallpaper, and habitually doing superficial renovations nicknamed cosmetic remodeling on their own without any input from the formally responsible institutions. Construction workers, available through the Residential Maintenance Offices in theory, were either unavailable or absurdly unreliable in practice. Considering the incapability of municipal institutions to provide quality remodeling services, the demand for privately employed construction workers was very high. As soon as this demand was met, every Soviet citizen who had enough cash could receive a relatively fast and acceptable-quality remont.

No less important than the legal basis for the labor of private workers is the question of who were these shabashniki. A profound and detailed overview and the history of shabashniki can be found in Broad Is My Native Land by Siegelbaum and Moch.³⁰ In this book, shabashniki are defined as “temporary workers earning money ‘off the books’ in the late-Soviet period.”³¹ The heyday of shabashniki happened along with the Great Construction Projects of Communism in the 1960s and 1970s. At the end of the Great Soviet Construction projects and the opening of symbolic Baikal–Amur Mainline in 1984, shabashniki predominantly shifted their labor into the private sphere.³² Many formerly state-hired construction workers were now able to offer their labor and skills to the informal construction market.

Shabashniki exploited one of the newly emerged types of late-Soviet mobility: the growing formal and informal porousness of the Soviet borders with Socialist Bloc countries and the West. Shabashniki were the carriers of experience and knowledge from outside the late USSR; this knowledge, after entering the Soviet reality, became fashion trends in the understanding of domestic interior remodeling aesthetics. While it is hard to find official statistics on border crossings between the Soviet Union and its neighboring states, border crossings clearly took place, and a large part of it was due to temporary labor migration. To Soviet propaganda, seasonal workers were a foreign element, just like the experiences and knowledge they carried from abroad. Temporary workers migrated following demand for labor, carrying the newly acquired knowledge of new construction methods and materials. The populations of the Soviet border zones could cross borders under a simplified procedure, creating labor traffic between Western Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland; between Finland and Leningrad Oblast;³³ and between Belarus, Russia, and the Baltic states. An illustration of the scale of border crossing can be seen in the introduction to the 1990 Soviet law about the regulations for citizens crossing state borders: “In the context of international cooperation development in humanitarian sphere, the Cabinet of Ministers of the USSR notes that there is a growing number of foreign private and touristic trips conducted by Soviet citizens and visits to the Soviet Union by international citizens. The trips in near border regions of the USSR and the nearing countries have become particularly active.”³⁴

By 1991, the number of people who, according to polls, wanted to do unskilled work abroad had reached 33 percent of respondents.³⁵ In 1990, Vladimir Sherbakov, the minister of economy of the USSR and the first vice-prime minister, claimed that thousands of Soviet citizens already worked abroad illegally, in Scandinavia in particular.³⁶ Returning back home from other countries, these migrant workers carried resources for the reconstruction of their living environments and new knowledge about methods of construction, agriculture, and other industries. Moreover, in 1991, at the time when new construction materials entered the markets of the former Soviet Union, these former shabashniki were already somewhat familiar with these materials and willing to use them for apartment remodeling. To paraphrase Alexei Yurchak, these construction workers were utterly prepared for the collapse of the Soviet Union through their experiences of private labor and construction technologies outside the USSR.³⁷

Besides guest labor abroad, expertise with new materials was also brought to the post-Soviet states by importers and producers of construction materials opening operations in the post-Soviet markets. International corporations, such as Knauf Gips, that brought their marketing and production to the post-Soviet countries after 1991 had to provide training and support educational programs in professional educational institutions in order to supply the labor market with workers familiar with their technologies. Knauf Gips developed a framework of collaboration with these institutions in the post-Soviet states that involved instructor training and providing teaching materials, including textbooks that Knauf has been publishing in several post-Soviet countries.³⁸ At the same time, despite Knauf’s best effort, construction workers particularly good at drywall installation are rare in post-Soviet context, because as soon as they become truly good at their job they find higher paying construction jobs in Western countries.³⁹

In addition to shabashniki who traveled abroad, local populations and internal migrants were increasingly more involved in the construction industry. The last years of Soviet rule were characterized by a rapid change in the dynamics of job security, income, and respectability. The sharp economic crisis of 1989 to 1991 and the complete demolition of the Soviet centralized economy after 1991 led to the devaluation of income and jobs in previously respectable or at least stably paid professions.⁴⁰ The late-Soviet and early post-Soviet military conflicts created large numbers of refugees. One outcome this caused was the internal migration of workers from villages, small mono-industrial towns, and cities to metropolitan centers, where new types of jobs and resources were more readily available than at the periphery. A second related outcome was the shift of the labor force to professions other than their original occupations.⁴¹

Requalification, another form of mobility besides migration, characterized the late-Soviet working-class occupations. Professions such as coal mining, previously seen as economically and politically prestigious working-class occupations, no longer had much value or stability.⁴² A similar process took place in the post-Soviet armies, particularly among army professionals. Mykola N., a current-day owner of a construction business interviewed for this project, reported giving up a military career around 1991 to pursue construction jobs since he did not see any chance of worthy development in the contemporary army. In 1993, he was working as a foreman with construction brigades conducting apartment remodeling in Kyiv, Ukraine. He explained: “When the Soviet Union fell apart, I had to have some job. Since the army was shrinking, I wrote a discharge request. By the will of fate, I ended up here in Kyiv. My relatives were here; mom was also here. My sister’s […] husband worked as an architect; during the collapse of the Soviet Union, he started working with firms that entered the market to do evroremont.” “Evroremont” was a neologism for the remodeling done to new post-Soviet standards in the supposedly Westernized style, typically with the use of imported materials. Mykola N.’s account continues, “This was 1993. He recommended me to his partner, left, and I stayed with this partner … That is when I started working with real estate—remodeling and construction.” Commissions were “typically remodeling, rarely reconstruction. There were cases of cosmetic remodeling, but also cases of re-planning.”⁴³

From another perspective, the draft army could have prepared men for entering the construction job market. Another respondent, Ivan G., clarified that he first did construction work while a soldier in a construction battalion from 1976 to 1978. After the army, he did not pursue a construction career until the late 1980s, when he switched jobs from being a driver to doing construction work for government-sponsored and private projects. Ivan mentioned working on a small number of governmental commissions, such as cosmetic remodeling of schools and kindergartens, private domestic construction work, and several private business commissions as early as the late 1980s.⁴⁴

Mykola mentioned that his first apartment remodeling experiences were predominantly commissioned by foreigners who could not find housing acceptable to their standards and, hence, decided to remodel existing desirable housing for themselves.⁴⁵ Standards of quality expected by foreigners made a big impression on Mykola and his partner, architect Oleksii R. In the interview, Oleksii mentioned that this first experience was a shock and that the knowledge he gained during his first foreign-commissioned project served him well in his next apartment interior designs.⁴⁶

Professional construction worker Vitalii F. explained that, after 1991, he shifted to privately hired construction labor. Just like Mykola, he explained that many construction jobs in the early 1990s were commissioned by foreigners. Vitalii also discussed several cases of remont in which foreign construction professionals hired local brigades to work on projects commissioned by foreign investors.⁴⁷

By the late 1980s, despite the perestroika reform efforts, the rate of officially accountable construction in the USSR declined. Despite the never-ending housing shortage and the arrival of an additional two hundred thousand troops and their families from their former disposition in Eastern Europe,⁴⁸ housing construction rates in 1990 decreased by almost 10 percent, even in comparison to the previous, already-unsuccessful year.⁴⁹ At the same time, multiple private enterprises emerged that were capable of securing the means to hire construction workers for their purposes. Construction specialists interviewed for this study, who were active during Soviet and post-Soviet times, reported abandoning government-sponsored construction and shifting to the private sphere, where commissioners happened to have money and a stable supply of jobs.

The collapse of the USSR further secured the position of private labor in the newly emerging post-Soviet economies and opened markets in the former USSR to free trade. The prices skyrocketed, along with an accumulation of consumer goods previously unseen in Soviet consumer reality. Construction materials from abroad entered the former Soviet markets, shocked the population with their quality and functionality, and transformed the mass idea of what was possible in private apartment remodeling.⁵⁰ Certain remont methods, such as moving partition walls, had already appeared in mass media during perestroika. Construction materials necessary to move those partition walls or to make openings in load bearing walls, such as metal beams with drywall on the surface, became much more readily available after 1991.

Demand: State of Emergency

Just like with the hibernating consumerism for goods and services that seemingly came out of nowhere in the 1990s, the Soviet people were very well prepared, if not starved, for a chance at making changes to domestic interiors. By the mid-1980s, interiors of Stalin- and Khrushchev-era housing were partially worn out, and many pre-1917 apartment buildings were in a nearly dilapidated state. Thirty years had passed since the Decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union “On Elimination of Excesses in Design and Construction” and the beginning of khrushchevka apartment block construction (1954–1957). Also, fifty years had passed since the beginning of the construction of Stalin-era apartment buildings. These buildings and individual apartments had seen a very limited number of changes in that time. Some partition walls in Stalin-era buildings had been transformed to accommodate communal-style, multifamily living, and some cosmetic renovation procedures, such as wallpaper renewal or tile replacement, were done in Khrushchev-era apartments. But that was the typical limit of change taking place in individual apartments until the mid-1980s.

The pre-1917 buildings require a separate explanation. In many post-Soviet languages, there exists a common expression for dilapidated yet still occupied housing: avariinyi dom, literally an “emergency house” or, more accurately, “a building in a state of emergency.” In American English, the closest synonymous expression is found in architectural practice: “a building in precarious condition.” However, unlike the Soviet and post-Soviet analog, this phrase is not frequently used in everyday conversations about housing conditions. The widespread American expression “foreclosed home” carries a similar idiomatic connotation to avariinyi dom but does not have any widely used synonyms in Eastern European post-Soviet languages. Svetlana Boym raised an argument of cultural and linguistically untranslatable terms in her 1994 book Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia. Boym’s “common places” were incomparably more monumental: she spoke of the word byt, everyday life with a special Russian sense of stagnation and routine, and bytie, the spiritual and philosophical being. “A building in a state of emergency” can be read as a small fraction of the large byt category so carefully analyzed by Boym.⁵¹

“A building in a state of emergency” largely defined the domestic life of the Soviet populations residing in pre-1917 housing in the second half of the twentieth century. The pre-1917 apartment buildings that, prior to the Khrushchev construction boom, composed the largest type of available urban housing consistently deteriorated through the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, the pre-1917 apartments were massively turned into communal apartments, where a portion of a room, a single room, or a group of rooms were occupied by unrelated tenants and kitchens and bathrooms were used communally. Soviet communal apartments have been relatively well studied in many academic works,⁵² art forms,⁵³ and popular projects.⁵⁴ Yet the buildings that contain these communal apartments are often given less attention.

These buildings may or may not have experienced reconstructions after World War II if they happened to be located in the cities affected by war. Many of the buildings, not seriously damaged during the war, only went through cosmetic maintenance. The tenants of these apartments only maintained their personal spaces and only to a degree possible considering the deficit of construction materials. Common areas were typically used with regular cleaning but without other maintenance.

Although the state recognized the problem with poorly maintained housing at the highest level, its efforts to solve the problem were not entirely successful. In 1964, the State Committee of Construction of the USSR issued a decree specifying the terms and timelines of use and repair for different types of housing.⁵⁵ Despite this new legal framework for reconstruction and repair, by 1978, the state of housing was still unsatisfactory to the degree that the Cabinet of Ministers of the USSR had to issue another decree prompting housing repair and reconstruction.⁵⁶ By that time, repair and reconstruction efforts were no longer just about dilapidated pre-1917 housing but also about fixing construction defects and shortcomings of the new housing built in the previous two decades. This is clearly visible in the Cabinet of Ministers tasking the USSR Gosstroi State Committee in civil and residential construction by 1980 “to introduce into the developed and adjusted series [tipovye] of housing projects a section on ‘technical exploitation’ that will contain instructions on efficient technical maintenance and repair [remont] of the structure and mechanical systems of residential buildings.”⁵⁷

Both of these documents abounded with the term “capital reconstruction” (kapitalnyi remont or kapremont for short). The situation had not changed by 1989, when another decree on the framework and quality of reconstruction came out.⁵⁸ Right after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, William Moskoff described the scale of the problem as follows:

While the housing shortage was not a new problem, it got worse as Perestroika wore on. The predicament was so bad, that in a 1990 nationwide poll of a hundred rural and urban areas housing was rated as the most severe socioeconomic problem in the country. At the end of 1989, some eleven million people were living in dormitories, more than five million were living in what the Soviets regarded as dilapidated housing, and ten percent of all urban families were living in rooms in communal apartments. Almost fifty percent of the population lived in housing with less than nine square meters per person, an amount considered below sanitary standards.⁵⁹

The problem of run-down housing has continued past the Soviet Union; for instance, in 2017, the Ministry of Construction of the Russian Federation stated that 51 percent of apartment housing in Russia required capital reconstruction. This term was used to identify a type of reconstruction that involved repair with possible and typical replacement of the structural parts of the building without changing the function of the building. By the 1970s, a typical method was to demolish everything inside the building skin—historic facades—and replace the historic brick, wooden, or metal load-bearing beams and wooden floors with metal frames and monolith slabs.

When capital reconstruction was approved by the city, the dwellers of the dilapidated buildings were offered two choices: either to move to new apartments offered to them by the city or to temporarily move into the so-called “maneuver fund” housing.⁶⁰ Both options had shortcomings: new apartments were located at the outskirts of the city, unlike the old, dilapidated yet very centrally located buildings, and temporary housing was typically represented by dormitory-style apartment buildings with shared kitchens. Additionally, a Soviet-style capital reconstruction could last for years, so those residents who chose temporary dormitories could have been stuck there for a very long time. And yet, no matter how problematic, capital reconstructions offered some kind of change from the deteriorating housing.⁶¹

Although most acute in the pre-1917 communal apartment buildings, a lack of maintenance, space, and functional space separation led to the majority of the population living in undesirable conditions. The grand Soviet modernization project, the mass construction of functionalist apartment block buildings under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, was not an exception.

Khrushchev-era apartments, the first truly mass solution to the housing crisis, had very small square footage. A typical 1950s American home had three bedrooms, while a typical Soviet apartment had two rooms. Take, for example, National Plan Service catalogue homes. An American single-family, two-bedroom house from the 1952 catalogue had 816 square feet of living area.⁶² At the same time, an early Khrushchev-era apartment from the I-434 series built in 1958–1964 had 290 square feet of living area.

A detailed account of the minimalist dimensions of Soviet apartment housing can be found in the two recent books Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin⁶³ and Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years.⁶⁴ The former started with an investigation into the reasons for Khrushchev-era apartments being so small. In particular, in the very beginning of his khrushchevka study, Steven Harris brought up a letter to the Third All-Union Congress of Architects specifying that life in the standardized apartments was complicated with their small dimensions, making it impossible to normally perform daily functions.⁶⁵

Khrushchevka apartment eat-in kitchens were even more notoriously small than the apartments themselves—4.7 to 7.1 square meters (or 53 to 76 square feet)—while typical kitchens of small 1950s American houses reached 166 square feet (figure 1.1).⁶⁶ Already by the 1980s, these kitchens were perceived as largely problematic, which can be seen in a Rabotnitsa article suggesting their expansion at the expense of loss of space in the next room.⁶⁷ While this was often impossible in the prefab concrete block apartments, the article still insists that improvements were possible even for those “five-square meter” kitchens. The popular dream of a bigger kitchen did not start out of nowhere: by the 1970s, early prefab apartment series with small kitchens and rooms gave way to the “improved plan” apartments with slightly bigger kitchens and rooms. This newer housing was readily available for the residents of older Khrushchev-era apartments to observe, demonstrating that better residential conditions were possible and making them even more desirable. Most studies of Soviet elites specify that regular urbanites were aware of the lifestyles of the nomenklatura (bureaucrats) or other petit elites (highly ranked scientists, artists, and military). For example, a 1978 study of Soviet elites specifies that the émigré respondents reported visiting these luxurious political elite dwellings at some point in their lives.⁶⁸ Through this social mobility of direct interactions with elites, citizens were able to experience firsthand the possibilities of domestic comfort in better apartment layouts.

In addition to the personal experiences of visiting elite housing, citizens were exposed to the knowledge of better housing through popular culture. The 1981 Soviet blockbuster Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears introduced viewers to an elite apartment setting of so-called “generals’ apartment houses” on Mosfilmovskaia Street in Moscow.⁶⁹ More large domestic spaces that could have easily provoked jealousy in an average khrushchevka dweller were demonstrated to the public in another cult Soviet movie from the 1970s—The Irony of Fate.⁷⁰ The Irony of Fate, a very broadly cited film of the era, also illustrated a major zeitgeist element of late-Soviet lifestyles: the broad dissatisfaction with the sameness of consumer goods offered to the public. In The Irony of Fate, this sameness is shown through the two main characters confusing their homes in different cities—Leningrad and Moscow—due to the fact that their neighborhoods, buildings, apartments, and even furniture and decorations looked exactly the same. Besides Soviet movies providing the general public with a critical perspective of their everyday spaces, the late-perestroika TV audience was also exposed to foreign shows, particularly Brazilian and, later, Mexican soap operas, which are often believed to have had an effect on the ideas of the look and the spatiality of home.⁷¹ The constructed interiors of these soap opera movie sets exposed the population to a rather univocal definition of what an affluent house was supposed to look like, among other reasons possibly causing the notorious love of the early post-Soviet nouveau riche for historicized architectural styles.⁷²

Even the official Soviet architectural discourse was saturated with ideas about better housing conditions. During the 1980s and particularly the second half of the decade, Gosstroi (abbreviation for the State Construction Committee) held multiple architectural competitions to develop better types of residential housing, often on the basis of the Khrushchev-era apartment buildings. A detailed scrutiny of these competition projects is given in the following chapters. At this point, however, it is important to note that the problem of unsatisfactory housing conditions, in both old and modern buildings, was recognized at the highest level of the Soviet ministries. Attempts were made to find solutions for the problematic housing of the early prefab apartment block series, if not in practice then at least in theory.⁷³

Besides the Soviet indigenous demand for remont, it is important to separately mention the Western expats who entered the Soviet reality in the early 1990s. This rather small group of people, together with the newly forming post-Soviet elites, propelled the creation of the first premium construction services and interior design firms, as well as imported furniture and construction material stores. Available housing did not satisfy the standards of these Westerners, but the high salaries they received were enough to invest in apartment replanning and remodeling.⁷⁴ One of the earliest firms offering such services was Skanflot (a shared initiative of Aeroflot, Dutch Scanior Design, and local Avangard cooperative). In a 1991 commercial, Scanflot claimed to only work with “large businesses and wealthy entrepreneurs,” specifying a minimal sum and square footage of a commission.⁷⁵ Over the late 1990s and 2000s replannings in regular, nonluxurious homes became so popular that even the architectural institutions that had designed this housing in the prior years took interest in resident-performed replannings. So much so that in 2011, Moscow Scientific-Research and Project Institute of Typology and Experimental Design (MNIITEP) released a catalog of possible replanning scenarios for its most widespread housing series designed during the Soviet years.⁷⁶ Construction and furniture businesses that first came to fruition thanks to Western expats and local nouveau riche also soon opened to the general public in the form of construction material and furniture supermarkets, such as Epitsentr in Kyiv or IKEA in Moscow.⁷⁷

The post-Soviet urban population, long dissatisfied with the commodity and services deficit, eagerly plunged into remont as soon as the necessary qualified labor became available on a private basis and actively continued remodeling in the 1990s with the arrival of foreign construction materials. “Do not take your apartment [layout] for granted!” calls the late-1980s Rabotnitsa heading “The House Where We Live,” echoing the remont craze of the late-Soviet and the first post-Soviet decades.⁷⁸

Remont as a Domestic and Social Practice

This chapter started with Walter Benjamin’s observation of remont as a state and social practice in the beginning of the twentieth century and briefly after the dramatic changes of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. It is nothing but logical to end with an observation of remont as a social practice at the end of the twentieth century during perestroika and after the collapse of the USSR.

Once again, late- and post-Soviet remont was nothing like regular remodeling. First, since remont was predominantly undertaken in apartment housing, it inevitably led to cooperation, negotiation, or conflict between the dwellers of the apartment building. Although the same would be true for the rest of apartment housing elsewhere, in the post-Soviet cities conflict was aggravated by the omnipresence of remont. Second, these relationships were often aggravated by the continuity of remont, which may have taken months, years, and, in some extreme and often caricaturized cases, decades.

In the second half of the 1990s and, particularly, after the recovery from the 1998 financial crisis in the Russian Federation that also largely affected the surrounding countries, not just quotidian repair, mending, and repurposing but massive apartment remont became a form of post-Soviet habitus. This habitus was a physical embodiment of the social and economic hopes and insecurities of the first post-Soviet decades, or, in Edward Casey’s words, that which “ties the self and the place together.”⁷⁹

The population of the post-Soviet countries went through a radical socioeconomic downshift after 1991. Throughout the 1990s, the economies of European post-Soviet countries, still largely dependent on the Russian economy, experienced many ups and downs that were followed by a relative stability between 1999 and 2008. This period of economic safety was the time when remont practice extended past the limits of the upper and upper-middle classes and became a popular affair among the rest of the urban population. The economic stability allowed for saving, but the resources were still limited. This led to apartment dwellers often continuing to live in the apartment during remodeling, whether they remodeled themselves or hired professional construction workers.

With limited resources, remont became a way of life that lasted for years rather than a finite period of time.⁸⁰ Apartment owner Natalia S. reported that she and her family stayed in their three-room apartment during the remodeling and replanning of the kitchen and the bathroom, explaining that there was nowhere else to live.⁸¹ Another respondent, Oksana H., said that their resources were limited, so they worked on each area of the apartment as soon as they had enough money to get to it.⁸² This meant that remont could virtually last forever, until all tasks and complications that may have come along the way were done. Even those residents that were able to live outside of their permanent homes during remodeling reported remont taking a very long time. Maryna D., who purchased a newly built apartment with her partner in 2000, did not live in the home during remont. Yet it took an entire year.⁸³

Apartment resident Mykola I. recalled that his remont lasted for seven years and that construction workers “lived here [in the apartment]; they had their own keys.”⁸⁴ The family also stayed in the apartment during remodeling and, just like Oksana’s family, moved from room to room along with the moving construction. Mykola further explained, “Imagine, it is 8 in the morning. You are asleep. Suddenly a man enters your bedroom. He already has a lit cigarette because he is thinking. He thinks about what work can be done, and he doesn’t care that you are sleeping here.”⁸⁵ For Mykola, apartment remont lasted until, at some point in time, he “kicked out” the construction workers.

Curiously, the term remont in many post-Soviet languages defines not only a process of remodeling but also the state of the domestic space. For instance, one could say that an apartment has a very high-quality remont, echoing remont being a form of habitus—a stable prism for the perception of reality. The inadequate housing conditions, the availability of labor and commodities, and the desire to fit the new reality created the state of permanent remont, when the desire for renovation appeared to be more powerful than the ability to ever finalize the process. The lasting quality of late- and post-Soviet remodeling, also known as “eternal remont,” has inspired several scholars to address it as the perpetual resourceful mechanisms continuously present prior to and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.⁸⁶

The never-ending remont is equally in tune with Tatiana Bulakh’s observation about the post-Soviet change. Although scholars have long been critical of the “transition” principle that involved post-Soviet countries growing to resemble Western neoliberal democracies and economies over time, on the ground people may still speak about “becoming Europe” in the very same transition terms, especially when it comes to consumption. Bulakh’s Ukrainian respondents in 2014 referred to IKEA and H&M as signifiers of European belonging, because Ukraine did not have branches of these stores at the time.⁸⁷ Ironically, both IKEA and H&M were present in Ukraine in 2021, yet the process of “becoming Europe” was hardly complete, as there was always some consumer ideal that was yet to be fulfilled (with unrestricted travel being a part of the world of consumption). Equally, a post-Soviet remodeling, once started, often carried a doom of permanence as some other expense or type of work always emerged in the process.

Besides its infiniteness, apartment remont possessed other qualities of interest: its sensual component, its element of conspicuous consumption, and the social implication of those two factors. Remont was loud, and both early Khrushchev-era apartment series and later panel housing had imperfect sound isolation. While the dwellers of brick buildings were relatively lucky, concrete panels of the apartment housing series transmitted sounds perfectly. This problem is not unique to the USSR and the post-Soviet world; apartment buildings everywhere in the world are notorious for poor sound ecology in comparison to their single-family home counterparts. Yet in the post-Soviet cities where apartment dwellers massively went into remont, it was a highly acoustically toxic activity. Imagine the sound of a drill hitting the wall a couple of floors above you being transmitted by concrete walls into your own home. Now imagine that it is not just one apartment but several apartments that are undergoing remont along your or a neighboring staircase. As soon as this one is done, somebody else is going to pull together their courage and finances and plunge into their round of remodeling. Remont, in this way, became a part of daily life, not only for the owners of the apartment under remodeling but for the entire population of the hallway, staircase, and even the whole apartment block.

The problem of remont noise was reflected in the changes of legislation meant to control acceptable sound levels in residential buildings. Section 24 “Prevention and Elimination of Noise” of the 1969 Soviet law on sanitary norms and healthcare fundamentals is a two-paragraph general statement that it is the responsibility of both citizens and authorities to prevent and eliminate excessive noise.⁸⁸ Section 24 of the post-Soviet Ukrainian law on the same subject is a multipage document that specifies that at “protected objects”—apartment housing and other buildings—“holding construction (remont) works … accompanied with noise is forbidden on workdays between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m., and at all times on weekends.” It continues to specify that “an owner or a renter of the space, which will go under remodeling, must inform the dwellers of all contiguous apartments about the beginning of these works. Under an agreement with all the contiguous apartment dwellers remont and construction works can be also undertaken on holidays and weekends. Noise that occurs during construction works should not exceed the sanitary norms at any time of day.”⁸⁹

On the one hand, remont noises still frequently caused conflicts between neighbors, who thought that noise exceeded the norm. On the other hand, apartment remont often led to collaborations between neighbors deciding to perform it simultaneously. One apartment resident, who undertook a replanning and remodeling effort in the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, reported collaborating with their neighbors and doing remont simultaneously, since part of their effort was to privatize and connect the building’s attic to their top-floor apartments. There were three apartments on the floor, and the third apartment’s owners decided not to participate. Throughout the process, when the two neighboring families shared common construction brigades and legal repercussions, the third neighbor wrote complaints about the remont noise.⁹⁰

Whether the neighbors argued or collaborated and whether it was themselves or others taking on a remont endeavor, remont ended up being heavily present in everyone’s life for a long time. The gradually moving remont made some rooms or home functions unavailable or heavily limited. The already modest apartment spaces were even more limited as the residents’ possessions and everyday practices had to be relocated away from the area being remodeled. For instance, a three-room apartment undergoing remont in the kitchen and bathroom and using one of the rooms for temporary storage became a two-room apartment with limited kitchen and bathroom functions, while the number of occupants typically remained the same. All of this created semipermanent spatial relationships and altered the way individuals and families performed in those apartments. Remont became something bigger than just a spatial and aesthetic change but rather a new type of living condition that persistently continued into the post-Soviet reality. Remodeling was not something that was just supposed to pass by in a limited period of time. It became a habitus, a special social condition, defined not so much by the finality of remodeling or its final results but by the participation in the continuous remont craze. As the Saint Petersburg countercultural band Leningrad sang in their 2007 song dedicated to remodeling: “Remont has settled in my home.”⁹¹ Furthermore, for the protagonist of this song, just like for the millions of post-Soviet urbanites, remont determined not just their home but also their identity. Fehérváry described the juxtaposition of socialist concrete grayness and capitalist color in the Hungarian accounts of displeasure with socialism and demand for capitalist consumption and stylistic freedoms.⁹² This work argues that it is not the West-inspired stylistic or aesthetic choices that made a person and a home post-Soviet but rather the shifts in the spatial organization and the cultural practice of domestic remodeling itself that allowed an apartment dweller to leave their sense of Soviet self in the past.