CONCLUSION

Eventually, the total remodeling boom ended. Perhaps its end coincided with the time—the first decades of the 2000s—when scholars first started questioning whether the post-Soviet countries were ever going to transition to the Western models of democracy and economy.¹ Or perhaps it ended when Ikea halted its expansion in Russia in 2009, presumably due to corruption concerns.² Or when Georgia had its Rose Revolution in 2003, and Ukraine its Orange Revolution in 2004. In any case, at some point, remodeling stopped being among the primary concerns in the post-Soviet societies.

It shifted from the sign of the times, a trend, and the ultimate consumer demand to a more familiar ritual performed by residents when purchasing or otherwise moving into a new home. This is not to say that residents completely exhausted the demand for remodeling their existing apartments; apartments are still being remodeled to this day, often for the second or third time since the collapse of the USSR. Rather the opportunities for apartment purchase grew as new financial tools became available to the general population and the complete distrust of banks, so characteristic of the 1990s, began to ease.³ There eventually emerged a mortgage market, not quite like the one in the United States. The word “mortgage” firmly entered the post-Soviet languages (ipoteka in Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian; hipoteka in Lithuanian; and so on), while the concept of having a multi-decade housing loan settled into post-Soviet cultures. Mortgage became a substance for folklore and a signifier of class, as in this Russian joke: “Fasting not only is good for your health but also helps you pay off your mortgage.”

Ownership of an apartment, not just a fresh remodeling, became a sign of an individual’s social success in metropolitan cities. The condition of a home, which used to be of primary importance in the first post-Soviet decades, lost its absolute rule as soon as there emerged some residential mobility, however problematic.

Yet remnants of remont as an overarching societal practice and mode of existence remained. Olga Shevchenko noted that a sense of perpetual crisis developed as a model for dealing with the world in the post-Soviet 1990s, persisted longer than the crisis itself, and “remained a prism” through which post-Soviet subjects navigated the world in the later years.⁴ Similarly, remodeling remained as a lens for understanding the world, often in affecting rather unexpected realms of post-Soviet life. One such part of the post-Soviet reality are the ethnic stereotypes. Remodeling and construction fields remain highly ethnically stereotyped in Russia and to lesser degree in other post-Soviet states.

For example, Moldovans were often stereotyped as inherently good at tiling due to the many Moldovan guest laborers working in construction in other post-Soviet republics. These Moldovans were forced to find employment abroad by the war in Transnistria and the depth of the Moldovan economic crisis in the 1990s.⁵ Postwar and economically suffering Tajikistan also supplied a large number of laborers to major Russian metropolitan areas, and many of them ended up in small-scale construction with few state regulations, such as apartment remodeling. By the mid-2000s, the television comedy show Nasha Rasha (Our Russia) gained extreme popularity on Russian television and in places where Russian television broadcasted. The central recurring characters of this comedy show were guest laborers from Tajikistan named Ravshan and Jamshud, who remodeled expensive apartments in Moscow and were clearly exploited by their local supervisor.⁶ Besides the deep roots remodeling took in the post-Soviet cultural lore, these stereotypes also revealed the degree to which the multinational Soviet Union and the equally multi-ethnic Russian Federation failed to positively embrace national differences, without constructing a racist hierarchy of ethnicities and occupations.

Identity, and differences in self-identification, is also essential to another subject of this concluding chapter—the style. This is because “what we think we need is connected to who we think we are.”⁷ The idea of what constituted a respectable residential interior shifted drastically between the beginning of perestroika in 1985 and the end of the first post-Soviet decade in the 2000s. In the beginning of the 1980s, the desired qualities in a home were primarily determined by the neighborhood, the type of apartment building, the kinds of objects one owned, and the state of repair or disrepair the building and the apartment were in. For instance, central city historic or Stalin-era apartment buildings with tall ceilings were more valued than small, low-ceiling Khrushchev-era apartments in new buildings and new neighborhoods, as long as those historic apartment buildings were in decent shape and were not communal. The limited residential mobility tools that the Soviet citizens did have—to exchange their existing housing for something similar elsewhere, or to receive another apartment from the state or through a cooperative—were mostly used to address one of these variables: communal or individual, building type, and neighborhood. Finally, Soviet urbanites cared about dream domestic possessions: pieces of Czechoslovak furniture, color television sets, Central Asian rugs, and many others. What the majority of the Soviet urbanites did not care about was the style of their interiors. The style was simply not a relevant category in the larger scheme of things since it was determined by housing and consumer goods shortages as well as the square footage and layout of the apartment. What mattered most was owning a television and a cupboard, not the style of these material possessions.

Unlike during the Soviet years, style mattered a lot in the 1990s and the 2000s. Yet before proceeding any further, it is necessary to elaborate what exactly should be understood as style and what should not. The main post-Soviet trope that comes to mind in relation to remodeling style is the term evroremont. The very structure of this word starting with “evro” seemingly entails some sort of a stylistic approach. Yet it is hardly possible to find any architectural approach as stylistically inconsistent as the plethora of “evro” remodelings. I deliberately avoided this term as much as possible in this book’s narrative until now, but it seems fitting to finally address the elephant in the room in the conclusion. The term evroremont does not just mean “euro” style, whatever such style may entail; it was used to identify the type of remodeling services and the type of construction materials used (such as stretched ceilings and drywall), as well as the look of the interiors resulting from such remodelings. Attempts to identify what exactly evroremont meant stylistically are doomed, as the types of interiors produced under this umbrella term ranged from Neo-Baroque to Minimalism, with Memphis-like fixtures and furniture in between. This is because rather than being a style, evroremont was a framework of thinking and making that for the first time in post-Soviet history allowed for stylistic choices. All of a sudden, post-Soviet apartment dwellers could select finishes, fixtures, and objects they liked (and could afford) out of many different objects of the same type. The quest was no longer about finding a couch but about selecting a couch out of a variety of forms, features, and fabrics available. Of course, this perplexed the post-Soviet consumers, but not for long; they were after all consumers able to embrace choice, just like Westerners, even if their choices may later seem to be unsophisticated to their heirs and even their later selves.⁸

To reiterate my argument from the previous chapters, the incredible effort the post-Soviet populations put into the domestic architecture and interiors undoubtedly had to do with the objective needs for home improvement that gradually grew out of the many late-Soviet circumstances described in chapter 2 (“Remodeling”). However, it also derived from the need to develop a new identity, to become post-Soviet, described in chapter 6 (“Socializing”), a need formulated through social interactions and media access, the zeitgeist of the post-Soviet years, with their hopes and disenchantments alike.

The chapters of this book made an ambitious attempt to describe post-Soviet metropolitan populations at large, emphasizing the similarities in their thinking. Furthermore, I tried to find similarities through the fieldwork conducted outside of Russia, the traditional place to study the Soviet and post-Soviet condition. However, despite my attempt to locate large-scale similarities and connections and make general conclusions about the post-Soviet subjects, it is vital that differences between the post-Soviet subjects and entities are equally acknowledged. Post-Soviet nations have diverged tremendously since 1991. Of course, these national entities were never the same under or prior to the Soviet Union either. But it would be inaccurate to claim that the decades of Soviet rule have not changed its subjects and have not produced similarities across the USSR, near-identical housing infrastructure being a prime example. The similarities were there, even if it now becomes clear that such similarities were temporary. The clash of national identities and linguistic belongings, as well as the conceptions and misconceptions of each other demonstrated by the post-Soviet populations now, grew and matured since 1991 on the foundation of the former USSR, but outside of the late-Soviet circumstances and thinking.

As I am writing these last paragraphs, the post-Soviet cities and apartment blocks in my native Ukraine are being bombed by the Russian army. In Mariupol, Kharkiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, Kyiv, and many other cities, apartment buildings of all kinds—pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet—are under attack. Their residents are hiding in basements and subway systems. Civilians are being shot at by the Russian army if they attempt evacuation in places where fighting is especially acute. And for once, the Russian military crimes are not simply swept under the rug like in Chechnya and Syria but are loudly exposed for the entire world to see.

In a moment of dark humor between an architectural friend and me, I suggested that the Russian army shelling Ukrainian cities is an effort to demolish outdated Khrushchev-era housing, like Russians did in Moscow in recent years.⁹ My friend countered that Russians should know there are better ways to do urban renewal than shelling. The leading way of thinking about the post-Soviet world in the 1990s and 2000s—the transition paradigm assuming former state-socialisms were on the way to the Western model of democracy—feels particularly irrelevant now in March 2022. Even the finality of the dissolution of the USSR no longer seems to be a concrete fact. The current moment feels like history in the making, and from here the pendulum can still swing either way.

Yet one thing is clear: the post-Soviet era is over. This book, hence, is no longer the history of the present moment, but a proper history of the past.