Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years 9781501701849

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Note on Transliteration
Introduction: Kommunalki, Khrushchëvki
1. Building a Socialist Home Befitting the Space Age
2. Foundations: Revolution Realized
3. Interior Spaces: Building the Socialist Person from Within
4. Liminal Places: Corridors, Courtyards, and Reviving Socialist Society
5. The Quest for Normalcy: Coming Home, Settling Down, Moving Forward
6. Constructing Soviet Identity and Reviving Socialism on the Home Front
Conclusion: Beyond the Housing Campaign that “Shook the World”
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

STORIES OF HOUSE AND HOME

STORIES OF HOUSE AND HOME Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years

CHRISTINE VARGA-HARRIS

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2015 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2015 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Varga-Harris, Christine, author.   Stories of house and home : Soviet apartment life during the Khrushchev years / Christine Varga-Harris.   pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8014-5307-6 (cloth : alk. paper)   1. Housing—Soviet Union. 2. Apartments—Soviet Union. 3. Communism and architecture—Soviet Union. 4. Architecture, Domestic—Political aspects—Soviet Union. 5. Architecture and state—Soviet Union I. Title.   NA7367.V37 2015  728.0947—dc23   2015015432 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my parents, Gizella and Jozsef

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgmentsxi Glossaryxv Note on Transliteration Introduction: Kommunalki, Khrushchëvki

xvii 1

1. Building a Socialist Home Befitting the Space Age

24

2. Foundations: Revolution Realized

53

3. Interior Spaces: Building the Socialist Person from Within

81

4. Liminal Places: Corridors, Courtyards, and Reviving Socialist Society

106

5. The Quest for Normalcy: Coming Home, Settling Down, Moving Forward

136

6. Constructing Soviet Identity and Reviving Socialism on the Home Front

171

Conclusion: Beyond the Housing Campaign that “Shook the World”

211

Notes223 Bibliography263 Index279

ILLUSTRATIONS

I.1 A floor plan for a separate apartment designed for a family of three

3

1.1 Celebrating Builders’ Day

31

1.2 Conveyor-belt-style construction

32

1.3 Nikita Khrushchev visiting Shchemilovka Street in Leningrad

33

1.4 A typical five-story khrushchëvka34 1.5 Convertible furniture

40

1.6 “Tasteless” decorative objects

42

1.7 Model furniture and decorative wares

45

1.8 A cozy work space

49

2.1 New housing completed in time for the Forty-Fifth Jubilee of the October Revolution

57

2.2 A happy housewarming for metro builders

59

2.3 A family settling into a new apartment

60

2.4 Defects in novostroika68 2.5 Continuously delayed construction

73

2.6 Anticipating new housing

79

3.1 Modern lampshade designs

86

3.2  K rokodil’s recommendation for repurposing outdated lampshades87

x    I llustrations

3.3 Overly adorned dormitory rooms 3.4 New décor and “hospitality”

92 93

3.5 Shortcomings in furniture production

100

4.1 Popular initiatives

112

4.2 Subjecting violators of the social order to public scrutiny

128

5.1 Family scheming to attain more living space

142

5.2 The trials of sharing a communal bathroom

153

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE EUPHORIA OF COMPLETING THIS BOOK is accompanied by a flood of gratitude for the tremendous encouragement, advice, patience, and faith that family, friends, colleagues, and mentors have shown me along the way. The idea for this work was conceived at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the guidance of Diane Koenker, who helped me conceptualize the research project out of which it developed, and offered prompt, astute critiques and suggestions at every turn. Her unwavering enthusiasm and support, not to mention her confidence in me, were invaluable to the realization of this book. Diane is not the only exceptional scholar with whom I had the honor of working: Mark Steinberg served as another keen and vital supporter, as did Antoinette Burton and Zsuzsa Gille. Always generous with their time and thoughts as mentors, I now look up to them as role models in my academic career as I continue to admire their intellectual inquisitiveness and rigor, their original approaches to research in their respective areas of expertise, and their creative energy. Also meaningful to me is the comradeship I enjoyed at the University of Illinois during gatherings of the Russian kruzhok and the East European reading group. The latter was anchored by Keith Hitchins, another scholar dear and inspiring to me. In each of these milieus I found good friends, including Theodora Dragostinova, Irina Gigova, Cristofer Scarboro, and Gregory Stroud; together with Robin Breeding, Greg filled the research time we shared in Russia with brilliant moments that helped quell my homesickness.

x i i    Acknowledgments

Alongside reading groups, the academic environment fostered by the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois honed my interest in interdisciplinary study. Over the years, cozy meetings of the Midwest Russian History Workshop and mass conventions of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies alike furnished me with constructive commentary on my research, as well as intellectual stimulation. The same is true of the following thematic conferences I had the privilege to participate in: “Complaints” (Princeton, 2013), “The Socialist Sixties” (Urbana, 2010), “After the War, After Stalin” (St. Petersburg, 2010), and “Divided Dreamworlds” (Utrecht, 2008). Because the attendees of these various workshops and conferences are too numerous to list, I thank them collectively. I also appreciate the friends and colleagues who discussed portions of this book with me or read draft chapters, or responded to pressing research queries: Theodora Dragostinova, Deborah Field, Steven Harris, Marjorie Hilton, Susan Reid, and Roshanna Sylvester. Steven Harris, who it turned out had embarked on his study of the khrushchëvka shortly before I did, warmly welcomed me to the block, kindly sharing with me an overview of his project so that as I proceeded with my own, I could carve out a unique niche for myself. I am indebted also to the two anonymous readers enlisted by Cornell University Press to review the manuscript for their insightful appraisals, questions, and recommendations. John Ackerman, as director, extended strong support for this book from the onset, and thereafter provided valuable direction throughout the bulk of the publication process; his assistant Michael Morris must be acknowledged for swiftly fielding the myriad inquiries with which I bombarded him over the past couple of years. I also thank Roger Haydon, the executive editor of the press, who although a relative newcomer to this project has boosted my morale during the final critical steps of publication with his interest and investment; these have been essential to bringing this book home, so to speak. The research for this project was made feasible by the resources and financial support of several institutions. The Slavic reference staff at the University of Illinois was a fount of knowledge, early on helping me locate sources and later assisting me in copyright matters and scanning images for the book. I am also grateful for having had the opportunity to work at the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg, the Central State Archive of St. Petersburg, and the Central State Archive of Documentary Films, Photographs, and Sound Recordings of St. Petersburg. The time I spent in Russia would not have been possible without funding, and for this I thank the History Department and the Graduate College at the University of Illinois for subsidizing my research—and subsequently, a semester of uninterrupted writing. I have also savored bursts of writing unencumbered by other

Acknowledgments    x i i i

responsibilities since joining the faculty at Illinois State University in 2007, thanks to summer fellowships from the College of Arts and Sciences, and to the confidence placed in me by my colleagues in the History Department who nominated me for these awards. I have written most of this book at Illinois State University and truly feel fortunate to be in the company of a diverse group of scholars in whom I have also found friends and a surrogate family. Among them, I distinguish two colleagues who had a direct impact on the completion of this work: Amy Wood, a mentor and friend who steered me through every stage of the publishing process, providing virtually immediate and always sage advice, and Katrin Paehler, who was consistently at the ready to cheer me on and assure me that my research project is “so cool” in those moments when I could not see that for myself. A terrific cohort of colleagues in the History Department at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, buoyed me in a similar way during my time there as a visiting faculty member from 2005 to 2007. I thank them for sharing with me their fascinating research on material and consumer culture, and for affording me the chance to include among my teaching assignments a number of topical courses into which I could readily insert my scholarly agenda and thereby begin to outline this book. At the heart of my research lies a deep interest in lived Communism. In this respect, this book has also traveled a circuitous route in a personal way—namely, from a curiosity about communist daily life nurtured by experiences in rural Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s, to research on urban Russia of the 1950s and 1960s. Looking back, I realize that this preoccupation had its genesis in long summer vacations spent with relatives in the respective birthplaces of my mother and father: the agricultural village of Gáva and the mining town of Csetény, where I first encountered Russians, fell in love with their language, and become incurably (if at first unconsciously) interested in the Soviet Union. Given that my parents had immigrated to Canada—and moreover, that my father was a “56er”—it is admittedly peculiar that of all countries I was so drawn to studying Russia. Confronted with my mania, my parents never questioned it, delighting in my pursuits, believing in my abilities, and offering endless moral and financial support from graduate school through tenure and the publication of this book. Words cannot fully convey my appreciation for all that they have lovingly given me, or my admiration for the life they have built for themselves. It is to them, Gizella and Jozsef Varga, that I dedicate this work. I am grateful too for my in-laws, Katherine and Arthur Harris, who are like a second set of parents to me—encouraging, loving, and generous in every way. My greatest gift in life, my sustenance, is my husband, Glen Harris. He never asked me when the book would finally be complete, recognizing it would take as long as it takes—a manifestation of his

x i v    Acknowledgments

own insistence on perfection and passion for learning. In practical terms, without his tireless editorial input, my prose would have been excessively unwieldy, and without his genuine engagement with my research, several of my interpretations would have remained grossly opaque. More significant, I thank him for uprooting himself more than once to accompany me as I pursued my Ph.D. and then a career in academia, and for enriching my life with his kind heart, open mind, vast interests, and numerous talents, as well as a joie de vivre that brings joy to my every day. Early versions or portions of chapters in this book first appeared in the following: “Forging Citizenship on the Home Front: Reviving the Socialist Contract and Constructing Soviet Identity During the Thaw,” in The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: A Social and Cultural History of Reform in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Polly Jones (London, 2006), 101–116; “Homemaking and the Aesthetic and Moral Perimeters of the Soviet Home during the Khrushchev Era,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 3 (spring 2008): 561–589; and “Moving toward Utopia: Soviet Housing in the Atomic Age,” in Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West, ed. Peter Romijn, Giles Scott-Smith, and Joes Segal (Amsterdam, 2012), 133–153. I thank, respectively, Taylor and Francis Group, Oxford University Press, and Amsterdam University Press for permission to reprint materials from these publications.

GLOSSARY

Terms byt—everyday life, way of life CPSU—acronym for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union druzhinniki—members of a voluntary peoples’ patrol for the protection of public order invalid—a disabled person, as per the Russian turn of phrase ispolkom—executive committee khrushchëvka—colloquial for the typical five-story Khrushchev-era apartment Komsomol—acronym for the youth organization of the Communist Party kommunalka (pl. kommunalki)—communal apartment kul′turnost′—“culturedness” lichnost′—“selfhood” meshchanka—the feminine moniker for an individual with a petit-bourgeois outlook meshchanstvo—related to the term “middle class” and pejoratively denoting a lifestyle or outlook considered to be base, vulgar, imitative, greedy, or Philistine mikroraion (pl. mikroraiony)—micro-district; essentially a type of neighborhood novosel′e—housewarming novosël (pl. novosely)—“new settler”; a term associated with moving into a new home

x v i     G lossary

novostroika—new construction oblast—region order—writ (for example, for a new apartment) otdel′naia kvartira—“separate apartment” in the sense of being intended for a single family pis′mo (pl. pis′ma) zaiavleniia—letter of request pis′mo (pl. pis′ma) zhaloby—letter of complaint poshlost′—banality, bad taste, and obscenity propiska—residency permit raion—city district red corner—a place for leisure, as well as for instilling communist values reid—“raid” or inspection by a social group Rodina—native land soviet—literally, “council”; denotes a type of government body found at various levels subbotniki—Saturday voluntary work campaigns voskresniki—Sunday voluntary work campaigns Abbreviations for Frequently Used Published Sources A i s Leningrada—Arkhitektura i stroitel′stvo Leningrada D i SSSR—Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR S i a Leningrada—Stroitel′stvo i arkhitektura Leningrada VL—Vechernii Leningrad Abbreviations for Archival References d.—delo (file) ed. khr.—edinitsa khraneneniia (file) f.—fond (document collection) l. (pl. ll.)—list (pl. listy) (folio/leaf of paper/page) op.—opis′ (inventory/list of files in a fond) TsGA SPb—Tsentral′nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga (Central State Archive of St. Petersburg) TsGA KFFD SPb—Tsentral′nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Kinofotofonodokumentov Sankt-Peterburga (Central State Archive of Documentary Films, Photographs, and Sound Recordings of St. Petersburg)

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

Throughout this book, unless stated otherwise, the translations of Russian into English and the transliterations from Russian Cyrillic into Latin characters are my own. For the latter, I tried to consistently employ the Library of Congress (LOC) system. However, when transliterating names for people and places, I have favored common usage over the LOC schema, resulting in sometimes conflicting spellings (for example, Natalya Baranskaya and Natal′ia Lebina).

STORIES OF HOUSE AND HOME

I N T RO D U C T I O N

KOMMUNALKI, KHRUSHCHËVKI

AFTER EIGHTEEN YEARS of petitioning various authorities with influence over housing allocation and waiting patiently, it seemed that Serafim Aleksandrovich Kolosov and his family would finally be moving from their tiny “closet of a room” into a spacious new apartment. Overjoyed, the Kolosovs began planning their housewarming party, preparing a list of everyone at their workplace and in government offices who had tirelessly intervened on their behalf to secure for them new housing. As the list grew, they fretted that they would not have enough space to welcome all those who had extended to them assistance or encouragement. Nevertheless, the invitations were finally sent. But no one came to the housewarming— not because of other commitments, but because in actuality, everything remained exactly as it had been for years, with Serafim and his family huddled together in a crowded apartment and their housing petition moving from hand to hand, growing thick with “resolutions.”1 In portraying the receipt of a good apartment as a dream frustrated by a bureaucratic nightmare, this sardonic tale published in the satirical magazine Krokodil encapsulates the story that long dominated discussion about Soviet housing: like other grandiose policies of the socialist state committed to bettering the lives of its citizens, the mandate to provide adequate living space seemed to have amounted to little more than “a brilliant failure.”2 The promise of mass housing was rooted in the 1917 October Revolution, and the expropriation and redistribution of private dwellings that followed within months of the Bolshevik victory constituted the first endeavor to

2    I ntr o d u c ti o n

achieve this goal. But the supply of living space inherited from the tsarist regime was far from sufficient, and the overwhelming influx of rural residents to urban centers that had occurred around the turn of the twentieth century continued into the 1920s, thereby exacerbating the housing crisis. Quite simply, more housing had to be built. Yet by the 1930s, Joseph Stalin was diverting capital, resources, and human power from consumer needs— including housing—to intense industrialization, land collectivization, and war preparation. Then, during World War II, the Soviet housing stock further deteriorated or was depleted by destruction. The shortage dragged on into the 1950s. Its end at last appeared within sight when, in July 1957, Nikita Khrushchev made residential construction a priority, announcing an ambitious decree to solve the housing crisis and to provide each family a “separate apartment” (otdel′naia kvartira).3 This policy also signaled the restructuring of the living space that Soviet citizens inhabited, namely, a transition from communal to one-family dwelling. In the communal apartment or kommunalka, tenants shared the kitchen, bathroom (with separate toilet), and storage spaces. Kommunalki were initially created out of the homes of the prerevolutionary elite that had been carved up over the course of 1917–1918 in order to minimally provide each family a room of its own; “house-communes” (dom-kommuny) of the 1920s–1930s—intended to supply individual rooms in conjunction with communal facilities—were an experimental variation on this theme.4 The separate apartment, by contrast, was to consist of one main room (two or three for large families) that served as a combined bedroom, living room, and study, together with a small kitchen and a bathroom. 5 Such apartments had been built under Stalin for state and Party elites, as well as awarded to accomplished model workers, but Khrushchev was determined to make them the norm.6 In quantitative terms, the outcome of the 1957 decree was astonishing. According to Western assessments, more housing was built during the 1956–1960 Five-Year Plan than during the entire period from 1918 to 1946, yielding over 145 million square meters of living space—and exceeding by nearly 8 percent the projected target for this plan of roughly 140 million square meters. Construction began to lag in 1961 as only about 83 percent of the plan for that year was fulfilled (approximately fifty-two out of sixty-two million square meters of living space).7 The overall record for the Khrushchev years is astounding: during the two five-year plans that coincided with his leadership, spanning 1956 through 1965, it has been estimated that in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) alone, well over thirteen million apartments were built and approximately sixty-five million individuals improved their housing conditions.8 Caught up in the euphoria, a statistical handbook aimed at a popular audience calculated that “if the area of the apartment houses built during the 1961–1965

Kommunalki , K hrushchëvki    3

I.1.  This floor plan represents a separate apartment designed for a nuclear family of three. On the left is the main “common room” (obshchaia komnata), on the top right is the bathroom, and on the bottom right is the kitchen. The main room is subdivided for optimal use into zones for sleep, study, and leisure. D i SSSR, February 1959, 46.

Five-Year Plan were to form a single line, one meter in width, its length would extend from Earth to the moon and there would still remain an excess of fourteen million square meters.”9 The attempt to provide each family a separate apartment—complete with modern amenities and an abundance of consumer services—comprised an initiative as emblematic of the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s as was the denunciation of Stalinist terror and of the cult of personality. Amid such extraordinary phenomena as the release of millions of individuals from labor camps, the rehabilitation of those formerly deemed enemies of the people, liberalization in the sphere of literature, the reorganization of the command economy, the revitalization of agriculture and advances into the cosmos, metal cranes soaring above the dust and debris of construction

4    I ntr o d u c ti o n

sites where apartment houses were being built virtually on conveyor belts represented another grand undertaking, one that for many, as the statistics attest, was making the receipt of a good apartment a reality.10 Alongside Soviet citizens moving into separate apartments in new buildings were individuals desperately petitioning to move out of crowded and uncomfortable kommunalki. Indeed despite the millions of apartments that were built under Khrushchev, demand still outpaced supply. World War II had taken a devastating toll on the housing stock. According to one official estimate, out of the 2.5 million dwellings situated in occupied cities in the Soviet Union, more than 1 million were destroyed.11 No less grim, another stated that wartime fighting had rendered uninhabitable over a third of the entire housing stock of major cities like Leningrad, while leaving Novgorod, Stalingrad, Kiev, Sevastopol, and Minsk completely destroyed; this left approximately twenty-five million Soviet citizens “without a roof over their head.”12 The return home of wartime evacuees placed additional strains on the housing stock. As an example, when the factory “Progress” was relocated to Leningrad after operating in evacuation in Omsk, it possessed living space for only 745 out of its 5,257 returning employees; the remainder consequently came to be housed in other factory facilities, including workshops, laboratories, and the library.13 Even rapid rebuilding, which remarkably eclipsed construction for the entire 1930s, could not keep pace with the voracious need for housing. To illustrate, during the 1946–1950 FiveYear Plan, about two million square meters of living space were built in Leningrad, restoring 80 to 90 percent of its prewar housing stock and providing living space to about 158,000 residents. However, the number of Leningraders whose homes had been lost due to wartime destruction numbered over 700,000.14 Chronic overcrowding, and reliance on housing lacking basic amenities like lavatories and running water, or even on previously uninhabited spaces like cellars, thus typified postwar living conditions in Leningrad—as in other places throughout the Soviet Union.15 Although four years of war had certainly ravaged Soviet housing, the promise of the 1957 decree was directly undermined by factors that carried through the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond. Most obvious among these were demographic changes attributable to births, marriages, and divorces, each of which caused the number of households throughout the Soviet Union to multiply, as well as migration, which affected specific urban centers and regions.16 Also noteworthy was the demolition of existing housing that sometimes accompanied new construction projects and urban development—a process that annually resulted in the destruction of millions of square meters of floor space. In 1964, for example, nearly 9.5 million square meters of housing were demolished, amounting to over 16 percent of total residential construction that year.17 While new construction was in

Kommunalki , K hrushchëvki    5

evidence everywhere, apparent too were abandoned cranes at incomplete sites where building was proceeding “slowly and badly”—to cite one negative catchphrase of the day. For reasons like these, the unrealized housewarming of the fictional Kolosovs, published just months before Khrushchev announced his massive housing campaign, continued to be a feature of Soviet life long after his ouster in 1964. In fact, although the Soviet press proclaimed that year that every fourth resident of the country was a “new settler” (novosël), the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution in 1967—which roughly overlapped with the tenth jubilee of the declaration “To each family a separate apartment!”—passed without the housing crisis having been resolved.18 Symptomatic of the inability of policy to meet the intractable need for housing, by the 1970s, the expression beskvartir′e had entered colloquial discourse for “the state of being without an apartment.”19 Further indicating the seemingly insurmountable dearth of living space, at the beginning of this decade, the average wait for an apartment ranged from a year and a half to three years, and although the housing deficit had declined since the 1950s, there was still a 10 percent shortfall of available apartments. 20 But the story of Soviet housing is not simply one of triumph or defeat. This is evinced by the extensive official and popular discourse it generated in propaganda, agitation, and prescriptive brochures; in newspapers and magazines; in architecture and design trade journals; in memoirs and fiction; and in petitions directed at municipal and national government and Party officials, housing authorities, and newspaper editors. Dialogue about housing between the readers and editors of local newspapers, for example, created a common frame of reference, as well as a vehicle for articulating both praise for and dissatisfaction with the regime. As Jeffrey Brooks discerned, although constrained by Party directives, the Soviet newspaper also comprised “the work of people who verbalized their own experiences, lexicons, and observations in an effort to make the world around them intelligible within the official given limits.”21 Unpublished correspondence between citizens and a gamut of authorities reveal similar societal mechanisms in a more intimate forum. Namely, housing petitions affirm that individuals were personally invested in the Soviet system, even as they criticized local bureaucrats for failing to satisfy their pressing material needs. Meanwhile, the divergence between policy and reality was publicly writ large in feuilletons that appeared in newspapers and magazines commending the successes of the housing program and deriding its deficiencies. Drawing on the notion that the experiential is referential (that is to say, informed by context), I maintain in this book that even the “small stories” about housing that appeared in these sources offer insight into the lives of ordinary Soviet people, encompassing their experience and subjectivity,

6    I ntr o d u c ti o n

while not discounting the social structure they inhabited nor its political dimensions. 22 That they so palpably rendered societal features is partly attributable to the fact that state allocation of the majority of living space in the Soviet Union made housing a vital point of contact between citizens and channels of authority, as well as individuals sharing dwelling and neighborhood spaces. Thus, housing—denoting the design, construction, and decoration of living space, and the ways in which people maneuver within it—was a negotiated site where policy matters related to distribution and consumption, norms associated with material culture, and social concerns all converged. Approaching housing in this multifaceted way, this book depicts everyday life (byt) during the 1950s and 1960s and the meanings it possessed for the state, citizens, and the socialist project. As such, it temporally shifts and conceptually broadens explorations of Soviet daily life during the 1930s that have investigated power relations between state and society, accommodation and resistance, and the internalization of official rhetoric and norms.23 It also engages throughout with scholarship that has delved into various facets of byt—alongside housing—during the postwar period. 24 From the 1950s on, Western policy experts and scholars in the fields of politics, law, sociology, geography, and urban planning contributed much to delineating the material elements, as well as the sociological, political, and economic parameters of housing in the Soviet Union. Among them were the first scholars to answer such fundamental questions as “Who gets what, when and how?”25 In the 1990s, scholars of art, architecture, and design enhanced the portrait of Soviet housing that had emerged over the course of the previous decades by studying it from the perspectives of social and cultural history, as evident in the 1993 volume Russian Housing in the Modern Age. 26 A virtually concurrent preoccupation with material culture was encapsulated in a special 1997 issue of the Journal of Design History, “Design, Stalin and Thaw,” which illuminated the contrast between buildings and neighborhoods of the Stalin and Khrushchev eras. In addition to juxtaposing the ornate flourishes of buildings of the Stalin period with the aesthetic simplicity and sense of lightness of those that followed in the Khrushchev years, its authors outlined a similar deviation within the broader residential landscape—from the long, wide boulevards, flanked by monumental structures that characterized urban development under Stalin, to the radial microdistricts (mikroraiony) that typified neighborhoods of the Khrushchev era. These architectural and urban forms, they concluded, signified the regimes that fostered them, with the aesthetic embellishments of the Stalin period mirroring its hierarchical nature and political extremes, and the simplicity and modernity of the Khrushchev one representing its populism and intention to realize the egalitarian ideals of communist ideology. 27

Kommunalki , K hrushchëvki    7

Since the early 2000s, Susan Reid has published an array of influential articles and chapters on numerous aspects of Soviet housing during the 1950s and 1960s, with fixed attention on the separate apartment. Her works, which conceptualize it as an exemplar of socialist modernity, a representation of Cold War rivalry, an expression of communist consumer culture and a site for the exercise of female agency, have been foundational to specific points of analysis in this book.28 Other recent historical monographs on housing have also drawn on Reid’s findings. To offer but a glimpse into these studies, Lynne Attwood provided a sweeping overview of the relationship between policy, gender, and everyday life in housing programs spanning from 1917 through the 1990s; Mark Smith detailed the wartime and Stalinist antecedents of the construction drive accredited to Khrushchev, as well as the nature of property relations and the underpinnings of Soviet ideas about welfare with respect to housing; and Steven Harris traced the history of the separate apartment in conjunction with critical aspects of its evolution—from developments in social policy since the nineteenth century to transformations in consumer culture under Khrushchev. 29 Presenting the forms and meanings of the shift from communal to separate apartment living, this book approaches novostroika (new construction) of the 1950s and 1960s as a material cultural artifact of de-Stalinization and the foundation of a distinctly socialist aesthetic and way of life. This is not to say that mass housing provision, even in strictly ideological terms, was an uncomplicated pursuit. Paradoxically, the 1957 decree established the one-family apartment as the anchor of a system oriented toward collectivism. It also presented individual apartments as dependent for their efficient functioning on public services like socialized dining facilities, and productivity in the work place as contingent upon the structure and quality of home life. I assert that the tension inherent in these stipulations was muted by accompanying rhetoric that rendered such pairings mutually supportive and linked housing policy with pragmatic, long-term national goals like modernization, the emancipation of women, and the merging of the various peoples of the Soviet Union. For instance, in the context of innovations in rocket science, housing construction was touted for employing the most advanced industrial, mechanized techniques in the building trade. Taking into account the continuing mission to liberate women from the burdens of housework, the separate apartment was pronounced a key component of a new type of living that would incorporate a network of consumer services. And in view of the burgeoning supranational identity of the Soviet Union, decorating with folk wares from throughout the country was connected to the ideal of harmonious ethnic diversity. On the whole, the well-built separate apartment, appointed with contemporary furniture and folk art and located in a neighborhood with ample consumer amenities

8    I ntr o d u c ti o n

and cultural facilities, embodied the more abstract overarching objective of the Khrushchev years—Communism. Attwood, Smith, and Harris underscored the ideological import, as well as the tensions with which Soviet housing was imbued. Exploring the place and experiences of women vis-à-vis men in the Soviet home, Attwood demonstrated that although they were projected to be the principal beneficiaries of state housing policy because they were the ones traditionally responsible for domestic activities, women were repeatedly summoned to compensate for shortcomings in daily life (for much the same reason). Analyzing provisions for individual housing—which continued to be tolerated to an extent alongside state housing—as well as mechanisms for confirming the “owner” of living space in disputes among tenants, Smith determined that the 1917 Revolution had failed to expunge individualism from Soviet society. Studying the consumer culture that blossomed concurrent with housing construction led Harris to a similar conclusion: those with privilege appeared determined to protect it or to seek greater distinction. This was evident, for example, among professionals whose relatively higher incomes enabled them to acquire living space superior to normal allotments by joining housing construction cooperatives, and to more readily partake in the purchase of novel household wares. Although the struggle for mass housing failed to produce an egalitarian society, as Attwood showed, each successive housing scheme, at its core, was intended to revolutionize everyday life. Similarly, Smith and Harris contended that the tensions they discerned within the housing and consumer boom of the Khrushchev years did not signal waning dedication toward Communism. According to Smith, the 1957 housing decree aligned individual property rights, of which construction cooperatives and the manipulation of official housing distribution mechanisms were popular expressions, with welfare rights for all citizens. In his assessment, the right to a separate apartment expanded the Soviet welfare state, rather than undermined its communal foundations. Meanwhile, ideologically correct representations of housing as a product of labor intended solely for consumption and not for profit provided a counterweight to the sentiment of individualism. Harris also indicated an equilibrium between state attention to consumerist desires and emphasis on a communist approach to daily life. I seek to further delineate the meaning and implications of mass housing in the Soviet Union by employing the pairing “house and home” to incorporate the spaces that surround it, the objects contained within it, and the ideas people hold for it. 30 In doing so, I demonstrate not only how the transition to one-family housing intersected with and complicated communist ideals and objectives, but also how it reflected the Thaw, as the Khru­ shchev period is conventionally labeled. A thaw is typically associated with “instability, impermanence, incompleteness, . . . temperature fluctuations

Kommunalki , K hrushchëvki    9

in nature, when it is hard to foresee what turn the weather will take.”31 In that vein, the era was distinguished not just by de-Stalinization, but also by illiberal measures like the persecution of religious faith and a ban on the publication in the Soviet Union of the novel Doctor Zhivago. The Khrushchev years were also marked by hard-line foreign policy measures like the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and the construction of the Berlin Wall. Acknowledging its erratic nature, this book complements recent scholarship that has restored to the Thaw nuances that had been obscured by simplistic designations of this period as one of “liberalization” or as a distinct “break” from Stalinism.32 Housing and the idea of a thaw were intertwined in a number of quite literal ways in daily experience. For instance, the ubiquitous letter of complaint and satirical feuilletons frequently depicted the consequence of springtime thaws coupled with shoddy construction or repair: the leaky roof, a hallmark of the housing crisis. In the metaphoric sense, housing also connoted the building of Communism. These were intertwined in the novella from which the name for the period was derived: Ottepel′. Written by Ilya Ehrenburg, this initial foray into different aspects of Stalinist repression— from restrictions on artistic creativity to the postwar persecution of Jews—was first published in serial form in 1954. One plot line involves Ivan Juravliov, an unsympathetic factory manager who misappropriates the housing fund allocated for his workers in order to further his production goals.33 Likewise, the Stalinist regime had ignored the basic human needs of the proletariat in pursuing socialism through intense industrialization and collectivization, alongside crusades to purge perceived enemies, thereby essentially betraying the Revolution. During the Thaw—as in Ehrenburg’s fictional tale—the importance of tending to the welfare and development of the individual was reestablished, and the link between ideological aims and popular interests reinstated. Based on this premise, I argue that mutual preoccupation with housing comprised a terrain upon which state and populace endeavored to construct a viable socialist society. Although the separate apartment was at the center of this venture, discourse about house and home also infused larger discussions about Communism. Thus, the transition from communal to one-family apartments cannot simply be conflated with a thaw in private life. Scrutinizing the tensions manifest in official policy and prescriptions, I challenge this association by illustrating the vigilance with which the housing program of the Khrushchev years strove not only to provide living space, but also to regenerate society and create model individuals, sometimes in ways reminiscent of the revolutionary 1920s. Addressing daily life in both the new and the old housing stock during the 1950s and 1960s, this book embraces and analyzes the contradictions evident in heroic advances and seemingly inexplicable delays in construction,

10     I ntr o d u c ti o n

model apartments boasting all sorts of conveniences and decrepit kommunalki, happy housewarmings and disappointing moves, and new residents and individuals petitioning to exchange old living space. It also conceptualizes the home in a way that rigorously incorporates the spaces bordering it, examining the place of the neighborhood within housing policy and the domestic landscape, as well as ideals for harmony between interior and exterior spaces in terms of design, function, and potential for social intercourse. As a whole, it elucidates the broader parameters of “house and home” as it corresponded with three official mandates: forging the Soviet person, invigorating socialist society, and attaining Communism. In doing so, it integrates with the Thaw two additional, overlapping contexts: postwar restoration and Cold War rivalry. Building Soviet Character The notion of forging the Soviet person invokes character, another theme for which housing served as a vivid metaphor in Ehrenburg’s novella. Contemplating the changing times, its protagonist Dmitry Koroteyev thinks to himself, “In the beginning, what could you expect?—You start building a house and there’s bound to be a lot of trash left lying around; but now it’s time we were getting tidier—the house is being lived in, after all.” His musing is prompted by his failure to defend a colleague who had expressed a viewpoint contrary to established opinion. Trying to comprehend his fear and conformity, as he ponders the state of Soviet humanism, he declares to himself, “We have taken a lot of trouble over one half of the human being, but the other half is neglected. The result is that one half of the house is a slum.”34 After the suspicion and denunciation that had marred daily life under Stalin, the question of the effects of repression on personal conduct is a highly significant one that is beginning to garner deserved attention. 35 More relevant to this book, however, is the allusion to character made in this inner monologue. Housing and the self were each implicated in the grand mission of communist construction. This was evident in state and Party rhetoric that aimed to mold passionate, upstanding communists and called on individuals to exhibit discipline and enthusiasm in the struggle for communist living through adherence to “communist morality” (kommunisticheskaia nravstvennost′) and participation in collective activism “at home, as at work.” As Soviet citizens were moving by the millions into separate apartments, official discourse juxtaposed the attitudes, values, and behavior that would ideally flourish within them with the character of the model domestic interior. Specifically, artists and architects preoccupied with interior design

Kommunalki , K hrushchëvki    11

urged restraint in consumption and adherence to their professional prescriptions for creating a functional household devoid of bourgeois signifiers like lace doilies, silk lampshades, and ornately carved commodes. Gender figured prominently in this discursive world, as experts designated homemaking the natural purview of women, advising them to set up a modern and efficient home and castigating them for any transgressions. Literary writers obliquely reinforced this predilection for moderation through unflattering female characters obsessed with the superficial accoutrements of byt and sympathetic male protagonists emasculated by senseless feminine flourishes of taste. Such decorative excesses were not only cast as destabilizing home life; they were also equated with a destructive amoral materialism antithetical to the communist future that mass housing represented. By contrast, the uncluttered interior featuring contemporary wares assumed a distinctly socialist hue. Invigorating Soviet Society In social spaces contiguous to the home, citizens were encouraged to partake in neighborhood initiatives, whether spontaneously created or driven by Party activists. These included tidying the stairwells of communal apartments, planting shrubs in the courtyards of new mikroraiony, organizing leisure activities, and ensuring public order. Endeavors like these nurtured what I refer to as “proletarian propriety” and cultivated the revitalization of sovetskoe obshchestvo (Soviet society). As one group of Party activists declared, “a building is not simply an edifice where they rent apartments. A block or street—this is not simply a row of neighboring buildings. This is a small part of our Soviet society.”36 In devoting considerable attention to the spaces nestled between the domestic and social realms, this book joins in scholarly dialogue about the place of the private and the public in Soviet society after Stalin. Deborah Ann Field was among the first historians to focus on this subject, exploring the interplay between reform and daily life within a broad range of relationships—from personal ones associated with sex, marriage, and childrearing, to social ones like those stemming from habitual interaction among neighbors in communal apartments. 37 According to Field, communist morality—an official precept that synthesized individual and collective interests and fused personal actions with their potential social implications— afforded citizens an opportunity to pursue their own interests. 38 I too contest the existence of a strict dichotomy between the private and the public in Soviet society during the 1950s and 1960s. 39 Specifically, I demonstrate that through practices related to homemaking (like decorating and furnishing) and shared activities “around the house” (like painting

12     I ntr o d u c ti o n

corridors or planting flowerbeds), individuals navigated between prescribed norms and lived experience, and between national aims and personal aspirations for domestic and neighborhood life. Recognizing, like Field, that ordinary citizens may have appropriated state and Party rhetoric, as well as professional prescriptions, I portray a convergence of personal and societal engagement with official intentions to create a veritable cult of socialist living. It is impossible to determine the number of people who eagerly joined in the profusion of neighborhood initiatives that agitators, newspaper correspondents, and neighbors promoted during the Khrushchev period. Published discourse about byt, however, offers insight into their motivations, indicating a sincere spirit of volunteerism and collectivism. In local newspapers, for example, officious voices projecting the ideal image of a vibrant socialist society shared print space with vernacular ones concerned with the state of apartment buildings and courtyards, as well as the conduct of neighbors. Here, ordinary people shared an interest in activism aimed at fostering an attractive, healthy, and comfortable daily environment, together with civil and mutually beneficial social intercourse. It therefore appears that they were neither driven solely by pragmatic quotidian concerns, nor subject to the machinations of an authoritarian state seeking to insinuate itself into every crevice of daily life. Popular investment in reviving socialist society coincided with vital elements of citizen initiative in resolving the housing crisis. Smith, for example, showed ordinary individuals securing living space in response to wartime exigencies by building their own housing in the individual and cooperative sectors. Harris depicted citizens acquiring living space of their own accord (including through participation in narodnaia stroika [people’s construction]); he also outlined their efforts to shape their built environment by writing to and attending public meetings with architects and furniture designers, challenging them when they felt their needs and desires were not being heeded. I demonstrate that in addition to obtaining decent housing and consumer goods, morality, cleanliness, and propriety also mattered to ordinary people, making common spaces around the home another arena for popular satisfaction. Achieving Communism While rendering universal goals like consumerism and coziness compatible with socialist living, decorating in proper measure and participating in neighborhood initiatives were cast as integral to “settling in” for those moving to separate apartments. After all, even though official rhetoric touted the comfort and conveniences awaiting new residents, unwavering advancement

Kommunalki , K hrushchëvki    13

toward Communism, evocative of continuous forward motion, remained a prominent goal throughout the Khrushchev years. Novostroika thus signified more than an altruistic gesture on the part of a reforming, paternalist state; it also represented and validated socialism. In the grand scheme of historical development, supplying mass housing affirmed governmental zabota o cheloveke (concern for the person); after Stalin, it also signaled a revival of revolutionary egalitarianism, essentially a departure from privilege and elitism. During the late Stalin years, as Vera Dunham showed, middlebrow fiction had projected the promise of domestic comfort to members of the professional class in exchange for their contributions to the reconstruction goals of the regime—a reciprocal arrangement that Dunham notably characterized as a “Big Deal.”40 I assert that over the course of the Khrushchev period, this “deal” became even bigger, extending to the realm of policy and also—at least as far as intentions were concerned—to all segments of the population. Of course, the state continued to encourage and praise great feats of productivity, as apparent, for example, in the commendations that were heaped on exemplary builders. Domesticity came to share the limelight with diligence and productive excellence as official discourse presented the home front as important an indicator of progress for the regime as the workplace had been during the industrialization drive of the 1930s or the military front during World War II. Moreover, the proliferation of good housing was fundamental to the identity of the state, for a communist system ideally provides for its citizens—materially (as in the case of shelter), as well as metaphysically (for example, by ensuring dignity and nurturing personal development). After Stalin, determination to resolve the housing crisis suggested that there was more to homo sovieticus than the fulfillment of quotas and technological development.41 World War II had bolstered the stance that the individual was not just a cog in a machine and that personal life should not merely be an “accessory to the production process.”42 Yet there did not immediately follow a “return to normalcy” in the form of a restoration of home life in the sense in which the concept is conventionally applied to the postwar United States or Western Europe. As Sheila Fitzpatrick noted, the prewar Soviet Union did not offer a satisfactory model of normalcy to which society could return after the war due to the spirit of struggle and conflict that had infected the political culture throughout the 1930s. Continuing terror in the early postwar years—evident in the persecution of returning prisoners of war, Jews, intellectuals, and Party officials—further delayed normalcy until Stalin’s death in 1953.43 Tracing a powerful degree of continuity from the prewar era through the Thaw, I place normalization in the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s not only within the context of the longue durée of reconstruction

14     I ntr o d u c ti o n

and de-Stalinization, but also of revolution: although basic rebuilding had largely been completed within several years after the war ended and restitution for Stalinist repression was proceeding, a socialist society had yet to materialize.44 Achieving the goal of mass housing, with its ideological and humanistic dimensions, would signify both normalization and the realization of Communism. After all, having emerged out of proletarian struggle, the Soviet home was intended to ensure a higher standard of living, something that assumed tremendous meaning following the tragedies of war and Stalinism. As suggested then, the home did not elude national import.45 This was apparent in the insinuation of Cold War competition into the agendas of cultivating communist morality and inspiring collective activism in the domestic realm and its contiguous social spaces. In symbolic terms, despite their divergent ideological frameworks, both the American and Soviet homes were sites for the containment, respectively, of Communism and Capitalism.46 Elaine Tyler May elucidated the significance of the American home in this respect. She argued that the reliable breadwinning husband who could support his family and deliver the latest appliances, together with the “purposeful” homemaking wife, served to quell unease over the widespread male unemployment of the 1930s and wartime female emancipation in the spheres of labor and sexuality that reverberated through the postwar era, as well as over continuing external threats. Household goods like refrigerators and vacuum cleaners constituted the linchpin, signifying male potency and female efficacy in the domestic sphere, as well as traditional values. More broadly, they “provided a means for assimilation into the American way of life: classless, homogenous and family-centered.”47 In short, during the Cold War, Americans came to be “bound to the home” because it had emotional appeal, offered material contentment, and comprised a bulwark against alien ideological forces. The Kitchen Debate between Vice President Richard Nixon and Khru­ shchev beside an automated washer on display at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow showcased the symbolic and ideological magnitude of the home and household goods in the international arena.48 Evaluating the meaning of the site of this heated discussion, Karal Ann Marling stated that the fact that it occurred in the “iconographic center” of the model ranch house on exhibit “raised the temperature of the debate by reminding those who saw the photos that what was at stake in an era of atomic bombs was existence—home, hearth, all the most basic human functions.”49 The Soviet populace was spared allusions to nuclear annihilation threatening the good life that was coming into being. 50 In the rare instances in which the arms race or the possibility of war was raised in connection with the home in public culture, any potential for eliciting fear was

Kommunalki , K hrushchëvki    15

dispelled by invocations of the righteousness of the socialist project and the denigration of anything that might endanger it. 51 Even as the external peril of the militaristic capitalist world was neutralized, the dismantling of the Stalinist regime was rendering moot the threat of internal “enemies of the people.” Basically, coercion as a means to legitimating the state was displaced by a barrage of testimonies to the advantages of socialism.52 That said, although fear did not figure into depictions of house and home in the Soviet Union, household consumer goods and prescriptions for homemaking were laden with ideology. As Reid demonstrated, although the Soviet home was a site for female agency within the rising consumerism of the Khrushchev years, it was intended to exemplify socialist rationality. 53 Much like its US counterpart then, Soviet public culture drew a relationship between housing and domestic consumption, on the one hand, and shaping a distinct mentality and way of life, on the other. Overall, even though the separate apartment of the 1950s and 1960s was in ways akin to Western variants—cozy, efficient, and grounded in the nuclear family—it was not supposed to imitate the capitalist home. The Soviet home was to eschew the bourgeois values, modes of thinking and conduct associated with the adage “my home is my castle.” Adherence to communist morality and collective activism were expected to combat traits like acquisitiveness for its own sake and the rampant individualism that separate apartment living might rouse, containing Capitalism—even as the Soviet regime strove to “catch up with and overtake” it. At the same time, novostroika, together with renovated buildings and refurbished neighborhoods, represented a society based on egalitarianism, social justice, and compassion by evoking a tangible contrast between life before the Revolution, with its many hardships, and after, when all want was finally being eradicated thanks to bountiful state provision. In this way, government and Party rhetoric presented mass housing as an articulation of the system as it was supposed to operate. The Time Has Come to Live Normally For ordinary citizens, normalcy meant adequate, dignified living conditions, indistinct from official aims. This is underscored in memoirs, works of fiction and published accounts of happy housewarmings portraying the joys of families moving from communal apartments, factory dormitories, and barracks, those for whom the dream of settling down had come true. It is thrown into even sharper relief by petitions for better living space composed by individuals still inhabiting dilapidated and overcrowded dwellings.

16     I ntr o d u c ti o n

To offer a general overview of these circumstances, even toward the end of the Khrushchev era, average per capita living space remained below the norm of nine square meters and room density high. 54 In 1963, for example, by one estimate for the urban Soviet Union, the respective figures were 6.19 square meters per person and 2.55 occupants per room. 55 Leaky roofs, the source of countless pleas for repair brought to local authorities, were but one of a myriad of problems that plagued the old housing stock. 56 Though statistics on amenities are rather elusive, it is clear that despite progress over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, many Soviet citizens still endured immense inconveniences due to the absence of basic utilities. For example, according to one calculation, by 1961, 100 percent of urban state housing had electricity, but only about 57 percent had running water and plumbing, less than 45 percent had central heating, only 29 percent had gas, and a mere 30 percent had a bath.57 The culture of petitioning, a terrain where official visions for house and home intersected with individual expectations, was as significant as the catalog of deficiencies that it produced; a brief anatomy of the process is therefore in order. Each housing petition generated a body of correspondence consisting of a request for a housing exchange, officious assessments and replies from the authorities to whom it was submitted, and subsequent letters from those who had initiated the process as their demands remained unresolved—most often due to the continuing shortage of available living space. As the case of the fictional Kolosovs aptly illustrated, a housing petition could span several years, only to leave those who submitted it still waiting in the very housing queue where they had begun their quest. Among the cases I examined for the Khrushchev period, some had been initiated prior to the 1957 housing decree, while others remained active after 1964. In terms of their approach, petitioners appeared to be “speaking Bolshevik”—drawing from the vocabulary of official discourse and creating a “field of play” through which they could identify themselves as members of “official society.”58 According to Stephen Kotkin, who coined the concept and pronounced it a ritualistic feature of Stalinist society, citizens shrewdly spoke “Bolshevik”—the language of the state, entrenched in socialist ideology— in order to further some personal cause.59 Focusing on appeals to authority figures in East Germany, John Borneman reached a similar conclusion; in his estimation, the “socialist self” was an empty category, a mere construct employed by disgruntled citizens to convince the state to meet a certain demand.60 The letters I scrutinized indicate far more than self-serving accord with official interests. First, petitions for improved housing revealed facets of daily experience that escaped publicity, including the absence of conditions conducive to tranquil living and personal development. They thus provided a sense of the real impact of defects and shortfalls in housing policy on

Kommunalki , K hrushchëvki    17

everyday life, and in turn, on popular perceptions about Communism. In demarcating overcrowding, poor hygiene, and emotional distress, circumstances contrary to official norms, petitioners also proclaimed the centrality of securing decent housing to cherished longings like establishing a family or enjoying deserved rest in retirement. They thereby outlined the kind of home life that they envisioned for themselves. Second, by drawing on official rhetoric on the housing program and the construction of Communism, petitions comprised a counternarrative to the glowing accounts of comfortable and harmonious living that dominated in published features on housewarmings. In doing so, they implied support for the yet-to-berealized communist future. At the same time, in exposing hardships predating or stemming from the war and extending into the 1960s, they articulated an additional, parallel agenda: the fulfillment of wartime and postwar expectations in the sphere of byt. Third, although petitioners might have focused exclusively on official resolutions or the schema of privileges that had been elaborated to dictate order in housing distribution, they highlighted autobiographical details of their life and asserted a personal feeling of entitlement. In this way, they affirmed the injustice of the meager or decrepit dwelling they occupied, contrasting it with the one they felt was owed to them. The self-assertion that emerged in housing petitions was rooted in two formative experiences: the Revolution and the Great Patriotic War. By exploring how petitioners presented themselves when demanding improved housing, I show that public identities that had been elevated through official accolades along a continuum stretching back to 1917 had come to be entrenched as “Soviet” in the popular mind. Analyzing autobiographical writing of the 1930s, Jochen Hellbeck argued that personal interactions with the state and Party were not disembodied from the self, as inherent in the concepts of resistance, accommodation, and appropriation.61 That is to say, they should not be dismissed as manipulations. Instead, they ought to be placed within “the larger frame of the Soviet Revolution and its trajectories of mobilization and self-activation.”62 So it was with the sense of identity invoked in housing petitions. This is not to disregard the actual material concerns that motivated petitioners. Instead, I suggest that even as they criticized bureaucratic indifference toward their plight or indicted the regime for failing to fulfill its commitment toward popular welfare, they affirmed an investment in the Soviet system that was genuine and not a mere construct of supplication. After all, petitioners had in some way— whether as workers, soldiers, veterans or Party members—contributed to building Communism. They had also made great sacrifices. Indeed the feeling of entitlement that is so prevalent in housing petitions stemmed not only from service to the revolutionary cause (as broadly conceptualized), but also from wartime

18     I ntr o d u c ti o n

struggle, survival, and triumph. The latter circumstances inspired a civic spirit that extended from soldiers serving at the war front into postwar civilian life, and incorporated a concrete and pressing sense of purpose, personal responsibility, and citizenship.63 This sentiment has been detailed in studies on veterans, on the wartime memories of Leningraders, and on society in general in the aftermath of World War II.64 It has also been associated with identity formation. For instance, as Amir Weiner demonstrated, the war made provincial peasants “Soviet” as subsequent rituals, holidays, monuments, films, and hero worship reached mythic proportions to become central features of their lives. Linking this sense of identity to the Revolution as much as to war, he claimed that “the postwar and post-Stalin eras epitomized the undiminished impetus for revolutionary transformation.”65 The transformative nature of the war was also evident in housing requests. Petitioning was certainly not a novel practice under Khrushchev; the tradition of writing letters to figures of authority was embedded in Russian culture.66 What is striking, however, is that those who engaged with the state through this process in order to obtain better living space during the Thaw, grounded their appeals in a personal experience of war, right alongside the motif of communist construction that was revived in its aftermath and flourished through the 1960s. In their estimation, they had earned a right to live “normally” (normal′no) through labor, military service or patriotism, and with the paternalist state publicly assuring them the very same, they insisted that their time to do so had arrived. Moreover, it is not inconceivable that ordinary citizens had faith in official projections, given that the Khrushchev era constituted a moment in Soviet history of great expectation and optimism owing to wartime victories and to Cold War achievements like those apparent in the space race. Where housing was concerned, as intimated above, Smith asserted that with the 1957 decree, “the occupancy of a separate family apartment, accessible via an orderly and accountable queuing system, became a right”—thus signifying the extension of social welfare rights to all citizens in the Soviet Union, not just children or the needy as in welfare states in the West.67 Identification with the Soviet system relates to another aspect of petitioning discussed in this book: its place in society as an indicator of the social(ist) contract that individuals perceived to exist between state and populace. Specifically, the sense of “duty served” that petitioning exhibited underscores an important element of interaction between officials and ordinary citizens, one that reinforced a sense of Soviet identity. Indeed even if their material appeals remained unfulfilled, petitioners could at least derive some satisfaction from persons of authority acknowledging—thus validating— their grievances. Theodore Friedgut characterized this popular pursuit as a manifestation of civil society within the Soviet political system, asserting

Kommunalki , K hrushchëvki    19

that “the feeling of being able to command attention from the authorities is the precondition of any civic culture.”68 That said, in conveying nuisances and privations, itemizing afflictions, losses, and disappointments, and seeking deliverance from them, housing petitions were perhaps more akin to litanies, as conceptualized by Nancy Ries, than to some sort of exercise in citizenship.69 According to Ries, although litanies did evoke a sense of belonging, perseverance, and moral integrity, they ultimately reproduced the very circumstances they bemoaned, most significantly, the powerlessness of the petitioner.70 Evaluating housing complaints and requests in conjunction with the responses they garnered, I argue the contrary—that petitioning conferred on Soviet citizens a degree of agency so formidable as to empower them. Juliane Fürst came to a similar conclusion in her study of autobiographical letters submitted by Soviet youth to newspapers, youth organizations, and Party officials during the late Stalin era. Confessional in nature, and laden with complaints and denunciations, these texts concurrently employed official language and presented personal narratives; they demanded certain rights perceived to have been unjustly denied and outlined achievements on behalf of society; and they criticized and expressed doubt in the system, as well as reaffirmed a sense of belonging to and oneness with the norms of society.71 Conveying the overall significance of these letters, Fürst asserted, Rather than considering themselves straightforwardly as victims, these writers understood Sovietness as a quid pro quo which required sacrifice but which also gave the right to expect certain rewards. Confessional letters were thus not necessarily pleas from subordinates to a higher authority, but could constitute a platform on which the dilemmas of daily life were brought into the open by citizens, who were assured that they had a right to do so and whose very act of writing confirmed them in their conviction of being valued members of a just community.72

This book demonstrates that during the Khrushchev years, the authors of housing petitions presented themselves as worthy individuals seeking the fulfillment of longstanding promises, while indicating a continuing investment in the radiant communist future that public discourse ardently associated with current housing construction. They also confirmed the importance of realizing harmony between work and home in their daily lives by both showcasing their exemplary service and dreaming of settling down in a place of their own. Furthermore, beyond merely appropriating official rhetoric in the interest of existential concerns, petitioners raised the matter of moral justice in direct relation to purported “concern for the person”; they insisted on being recognized for their admirable character, as evinced by their contributions to society, at a time when prescriptions for

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communist morality abounded; and they constructed a sense of belonging to the Soviet social body that mirrored official encouragement to participate in collective social initiatives. Essentially, in linking their living conditions with the performance of the regime, as well as their own identity, actions, and aspirations, petitioners invoked the social contract implicit in state paternalism, while synchronizing the public and private personas of the model Soviet person. By exhibiting their personal stake in it, they also positioned themselves firmly within the agenda of building Communism. Overview Detailing the national contours of housing policy under Khrushchev, this book provides a local perspective by delving into illustrations from Leningrad. In some ways, this city is a unique case. For one, possessing the highest concentration of kommunalki in the Soviet Union rendered it the “world capital of communal housing.”73 Tens of thousands among the total number of Leningraders who moved each year during the Khrushchev era had actually received or expanded their living space in old buildings of the state housing fund.74 Even through the 1990s, 10 percent of the apartments in Leningrad remained communal, while an estimated 40 percent of its households still had less than the nine square meters of living space that had been declared the “sanitary minimum allocation” during the Revolution. In short, decades after the decree to end the housing crisis, not only did a few hundred thousand Leningrad families not enjoy a separate apartment; they continued to live in substandard dwellings.75 Leningrad wartime experience is also distinct: besieged by German troops for more than two years, the city lost about two-thirds of its prewar population of approximately 3,000,000 people (through evacuation, casualties, and starvation) and around 16 percent of its housing stock.76 The latter figure might be a conservative one; according to another estimate, over 3,000 buildings with more than 3,000,000 square meters of living space were destroyed either directly by bombardment or by uncontainable fires that ensued, more than 9,000 wooden houses were dismantled by freezing residents for firewood, and over 7,000 buildings—which amounted to more than 2,000,000 square meters of living space—were rendered uninhabitable by the extensive damages they sustained.77 After the blockade was lifted in January 1944, Leningrad was inundated with hundreds of thousands of people. Its population rapidly rose from about 600,000 at the end of 1943 to nearly 2,000,000 by the beginning of 1947. Returnees and newcomers to the city overburdened its damaged water and sewage systems and other urban infrastructure, and despite controls designed to monitor the influx, they also threatened other residents with

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contagious diseases born out of the unhygienic conditions that characterized mass transport.78 As Siobhan Peeling demonstrated, during the late stages of the war and early years of reconstruction, local government and Party officials confronted the quandary of where to house a wide range of people, including reevacuees who had lost their homes due to wartime circumstances; Leningraders who had remained in the city but been forced by necessity to assume abandoned living space; individuals who had arrived in Leningrad during the war as a result of the German occupation of the Baltic republics, the Karelian isthmus, and Leningrad oblast; youths who had been mobilized to attend trade schools in Leningrad, who had come from other cities or had spent their formative years in evacuation; and enlisted, migrant workers.79 To offer a quantitative snapshot of their dilemma, in 1945, despite the fact that reconstruction was already underway, there was enough living space to accommodate only 300,000 or so out of 700,000 returning residents.80 Although the lengthy siege meant that Leningrad had been subjected to a distinct variant of wartime experience, other cities too had been ravaged by the war and subsequently faced hardships that endured after fighting had ceased. In effect then, Leningrad is but one of many cases that “disrupt the notion of 1945 as a complete hiatus.”81 Throughout the Soviet Union, municipal governments encountered a plethora of challenges besides the urgent need to rebuild homes, among them the imperative to restore transportation and communication networks, and to reestablish service networks, educational facilities, and cultural institutions.82 To be sure, under Khrushchev Leningrad enjoyed a privileged position, alongside the Moscow capital, as a focal point for experimentation with new building techniques. However, the industrial mode of prefabricated construction that was advanced here came to be replicated throughout the Soviet Union. Also, because Leningrad was bound together with other cities in the country by the inefficient central planning mechanisms of the command economic system, it shared similar problems with them pertaining to housing and urban infrastructure. In some key respects then, Leningrad was representative both of construction efforts and material conditions throughout the country. In terms of organization, this book is structured around specific sites or “scenes” associated with house and home. The first four chapters depict official visions linking housing policy with the overarching objective of building Communism. The next two chapters explore how those who continued to live in the old housing stock presented their current circumstances and future aspirations, as well as identified with the state and with the socialist project. Framed by the building site, chapter 1 addresses the following questions: What made Soviet housing distinctly socialist? And in what ways did house and home during the Khrushchev period constitute a rupture from

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or a reiteration of earlier conceptions of byt? Setting the Soviet housing program within the broader context of postwar European reconstruction, the chapter shows how architects and designers infused prevalent modern design concepts with socialist values through architectural specifications, plans for model neighborhoods, and prescriptions for interior decoration— all of which were to operate in harmony and counterbalance the shift away from communal living. Chapter 2 examines the “foundations” of the 1957 housing decree, namely revolutionary ideology. Centered on the housewarming, it contemplates the various meanings assigned to moving into a new home. In official portrayals, this private family occasion signified the soundness of the communist system and positioned the paternalist state as the embodiment of revolutionary ideals and a worthy opponent in Cold War competition. The chapter also assesses the impact of new housing on daily life, as it was conveyed in public culture. Here happy housewarmings were depicted in tandem with moves spoiled by building defects, as well as ones postponed despite the massive construction that appeared to be occurring everywhere. Like illustrations of completed apartments with all the conveniences, acknowledgement of these shortcomings displayed the venerated dialectic at work as communist byt advanced. The next chapter showcases the Soviet domestic realm. Approaching homemaking through the lens of gender, it shows how norms for cultivating a distinct socialist mentality and mode of conduct were transcribed into interior design principles, as evident in professional prescriptions and literary fiction. Establishing the ideal home as a reflection of the model Soviet person, the rhetoric that pervaded these sources established the domestic order as a moral, as well as an aesthetic matter. At the same time, it rendered the consumerism and individuality that arose alongside the separate apartment, if expressed in moderation, acceptable within the egalitarian, collective society being built. Chapter 4 looks at common spaces like stairwells and courtyards, and at campaigns to preserve and beautify them, as well as maintain public order within them. Here, at the nexus of the social and the personal, official and popular norms and expectations again intersected. Indeed while Party agitators aimed to instill in citizens collective sensibilities, foster a proletarian civic culture, and invigorate sovetskoe obshchestvo, ordinary individuals not only participated in social initiatives; they also reinforced and promoted them by writing newspaper editors to commend neighborhood activists, to clamor for greater involvement on the part of local officials and to reprimand neighbors who abused living space or disturbed the peace. The last two chapters focus on those still awaiting their housewarming— namely, Leningraders petitioning for improved living space. Here, public narratives about house and home were tested as petitioners asserted their

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own notions of harmonious communist living and commitment to the socialist project. Chapter 5 presents an overview of the range of tactics citizens employed to ameliorate their living conditions, and of the process of petitioning in particular. It also highlights popular characterizations of Soviet mass housing that drew on contemporary rhetoric about state concern for the person and the communist future, while also insisting that wartime promises finally be fulfilled. The final chapter juxtaposes the untenable material circumstances that petitioners described with the autobiographical details that they incorporated into their requests for better housing, showing how these reflected modes of identification with the Soviet system. In addition to alluding to perceived legal rights and universal conceptions of justice, petitioners presented themselves as loyal and deserving citizens, drawing on a number of “Soviet” identities in order to legitimate their entitlement to dignified living. They concurrently insisted that the state enter into dialogue with them, recognize their plight and their contributions to society, and meet their demands. Analyzing housing petitions in conjunction with the responses that they generated, this chapter also outlines how ordinary citizens related to the socialist contract, and to the building of Communism.

C H A P T E R 1

BUILDING A SOCIALIST HOME BEFITTING THE SPACE AGE

THE YEAR 1957 was an extraordinary one for the Soviet Union, ushering in the launch of both Sputnik, the first artificial space satellite to orbit the earth, and what Blair Ruble characterized as “perhaps the most ambitious governmental housing program in human history.”1 Soon afterward, the country was forging ahead in the cosmos, boasting the first man in space—Yuri Gagarin in 1961, and then the first woman to orbit the earth— Valentina Tereshkova in 1963. Like the Soviet space program, the housing campaign produced striking results, providing almost 300 million citizens about 70 million apartments by the late 1980s. 2 Plodding along amid the spectacular technological achievements of the global space race, however, domestic construction may have appeared less dramatic at the time. While appreciating how greatly Moscow had changed during the five years since his last visit, the US journalist Harrison Salisbury noted in 1959 that those who had been present during the transformation were less affected “because they had seen it all happen piecemeal.”3 Yet throughout the 1950s and 1960s, in official and literary discourse alike, progress in mass housing provision was associated with the dawn of the radiant future as much as the inauguration of the exploration of the cosmos, and it too was rendered worthy of awe.4 This is richly conveyed in the 1960 novel Dorogi, kotorye my vybiraem (The paths we choose). In one particular scene, the protagonist Andrei expresses wonderment with the southwestern district of Moscow, as he is seeing it for the first time after a long absence from the capital. Standing before a leading experimental

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construction site, this resolute worker finds himself in “a somehow strange, unfamiliar being-built world.” He had seen housing being built before, but never with such speed. Here apartment houses appeared to be miraculously “arising out of the earth.” The absence of old inhabited buildings nearby heightened the impression that “everything was in motion,” as did the frenzy of construction itself. Andrei states, everywhere around me rays of powerful searchlights aimed below were digging out of the darkness first the corner of a multistory building not yet faced with tiling, with hollow window holes, then a bottomless pit; at one moment a pile of brick, at another, roaring lines of lorries. . . . Dazzlingly bright flashes of electric welding arose, first above, then below, to the right, to the left of me.

The protagonist is so captivated by “the grandiose scale of construction unfolding all around” him that, ironically, he finds himself “standing motionless.”5 The focus of this fictional passage on the act of building, rather than on the finished product of a smartly designed apartment house, corresponds to a major shift in housing policy that occurred during the Thaw: architecture was effectively reduced to being “the unfortunate handmaiden to the construction industry,” as Stephen Bittner succinctly stated.6 The confrontation between architectural design and construction occurred at the November 1954 All-Union Conference of Builders. On this occasion, just a few years prior to assuming leadership of the country, Khrushchev publicly rebuked architects for being preoccupied with producing “fine silhouettes”—which required more resources and time to construct than simple ones—and inattentive to ordinary people, who “need homes” and “want to live in buildings.”7 Still more damaging, architects were purged and the Academy of Architecture was renamed the Academy of Construction and Architecture, symbolically demoting their profession.8 The construction industry was also subjected to criticism. The intention in this case, however, was to stimulate innovation in engineering, technology, building materials, production, and labor organization.9 Nevertheless, with housing provision bound to the same mechanisms of the command system as other sectors of the economy, the central authorities were in charge: the Communist Party, the Supreme Soviet and the Council of Ministers of the USSR provided the directives, finances, and supervision for architectural design, construction, and urban planning throughout the Soviet Union, while the Academy of Construction and Architecture was summoned to implement the resolutions that these bodies made.10 Where housing development was concerned, members of the Academy were responsible for practical matters like the industrialization, standardization,

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mechanization, and organization of construction; the planning and equipping of living space (from basic amenities to furnishing); and the expansion of consumer services and cultural establishments in housing blocks.11 Ordered to shed the extravagances that had characterized the monumental neoclassical buildings of the Stalin era, architects were expected to conform to the demand that Soviet housing be bright, clear, and simple. The matter of how, precisely, new housing was to manifest these qualities is one subject of this chapter. Significantly, plainness could facilitate another official objective related to dispensing with “fine silhouettes”: building faster, better, and more economically. Toward this end, the architectural profession was charged with harnessing the ingenuity of the building trades. Recognizing this mandate in the context of the broader technological advances of his day, one architect proclaimed it his duty “to work out the artistic principles corresponding with the technical peculiarities of the Twentieth Century—a century of atomic energy, space ships, automation and electronics.”12 Even as industrial methods appeared to be eclipsing creative ambitions, architects, artists, engineers, and urban planners—operating under directives issued by the state and Party—assumed a vital task. Collectively comprising a cohort of “aesthetic experts or taste professionals,” it was their role to realize the potential of new construction to restructure daily life.13 After all, the modern, separate apartment was not intended to constitute an end in itself; it was supposed to reflect socialism as it was becoming and to make daily living socialist. Thus, experts expended an enormous amount of energy synchronizing the various elements of the domestic sphere with contiguous spaces like building courtyards. Intent on integrating craftsmanship and technology, and art and utility, professionals in the fields of architecture, art, engineering, and urban planning generated a barrage of prescriptive literature, as well as conceptualized and critiqued exhibitions and provided lecture series.14 Also undertaken in the design realm was the ideological aim of conjoining the individual family dwelling with the collective ideals on which the Soviet Union was founded. At issue was harmonizing private and social interests to render an aesthetic with strong parallels in the West, representative of the communist society that was emerging. Indeed the traits of housing design that were so prevalent in the architecture of the Thaw were not unique to the Soviet Union. Following a tradition of appropriating concepts from abroad, architects under Khrushchev discussed North American and European models at length.15 For instance, the notion that form should follow function, central to Soviet housing design during this period, had dominated the thinking of earlier Western architects like the American Louis Sullivan, and the Swiss-French Le Corbusier, whose first large commission was in Moscow in the 1920s. Soviet architects during the

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Thaw also esteemed the US architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and implemented several of his signature elements. These included the use of reinforced concrete; the harmonization of internal spaces, as well as of interiors with the natural landscape; a striving for a sense of openness; and the conformity of form to function in terms of structure, furnishing, and décor.16 Even stylistic references from Russian tradition, namely 1920s Constructivism, were often imported from the West during the Thaw, “projected back at Soviet architects” after decades of official disfavor within the Soviet Union.17 The circumstances of the postwar era too played a role in determining Soviet construction methods and design. In particular, the “new” architecture under Khrushchev—simple and functional—had provided an inexpensive way to hasten reconstruction throughout war-torn Europe, suited as it was to mass production. Appropriating straightforward and practical furniture designs from the West was also determined by pragmatism, given the task Soviet architects shared with European ones after World War II—“to struggle, literally, for centimeters of free space” in the face of a severe housing shortage.18 It is in this spirit that an article in the trade publication of the Union of Artists, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR (Decorative arts of the USSR), featured practical tables of French design, together with illustrations reproduced from a Parisian home furnishings magazine. Described as affixed to the wall and measuring about one square meter in dimension, these tables were lauded for taking up a minimal amount of space, something that made them particularly suitable for small apartments. Presenting them as attractive as well as functional, the commentator noted that these tables could fold out to create a space for children to complete their homework or a dinner table for up to eight people, and with their plastic surface, adequately serve “decorative purposes” as well.19 Alongside the vision of light, spacious, functional, and comfortable dwelling that came to be associated with the Khrushchev period, the propensity toward plotting out each and every variable considered necessary for realizing the living concepts that underpinned housing policy was also not unique. 20 Commenting on the postwar interior in general, Witold Rybczynski asserted, “A modern building was a total experience; not only the interior layout but also the finishing materials, the furnishings, the accessories, and the location of chairs were planned.”21 In accordance with this trend, Soviet architects presented furniture and decorative appointments as essential for creating an efficient and attractive environment within the new apartment. They approached the production and distribution of domestic wares and household appliances as crucial to the ultimate success of housing policy. 22 Although the modern composition of the Soviet built environment implied a degree of postwar universality, its interior was designed to

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express a distinct temperament. Remarking on the characteristics of household objects, one Soviet expert acknowledged that like other items of furnishing and decoration, in terms of function or dimensions a chair is a chair, regardless of where it is manufactured. Yet, he asserted, the structure and values of a given society can be intimated through “all these things organizing daily life.” For example, the “relatively large quantity of spaces for studies” and “many book shelves” being incorporated into new apartments in the Soviet Union, he claimed, were testimony to the high literacy rate in the country. 23 He thus declared, “The contemporary interior . . . is the direct result, the concrete, material expression of the social order of the Soviet people.”24 More was at stake than building homes faster, better, and more economically with modern industrialized construction methods (solving the housing shortage) or supplying bright, simple, and efficient interiors (completing the transition to contemporary one-family living). “Khrushchev modern” signified grand transformations in both the form and meaning of Soviet dwelling. 25 Thus, although the harassment of architects surrounding the 1954 Conference of Builders appeared to indicate the continuation of authoritarian tendencies in political culture, the design trends that developed in its aftermath were antithetical to those of the Stalin era. 26 Two additional caveats should be made. First, the impulse to produce modern and functional housing was not absent among individual architects. 27 Second, the Thaw enabled architects to reassert their status and appropriate from Stalinist bureaucrats the traditional prerogative of intellectuals to define cultural standards in the name of “the people” by extending their influence over the “aesthetics of everyday life” as part of a cohort of design professionals. 28 The transformation of the Soviet home was intertwined not only with the Cold War competition signaled by the launch of Sputnik, but also by de-Stalinization. Building the Housing Ensemble—“Faster, Better and More ­Economically” In a celebratory moment that represents a tribute to new housing construction, the protagonist Boris of the 1963 short story “Khochu byt′ schastlivoi” (I want to be happy) proudly shows his romantic interest Kena the building he is constructing. Boris boasts that he can complete a building comprised of small separate family apartments in one month, thanks to the recent reorganization of the construction industry. Kena is incredulous—both of the experimental construction methods that he details for her, and of the four-room apartment that she is shown. Encountering a large dining room, bedroom, office, and nursery, all of which she considers more than

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adequate for a single family, she is particularly enthralled by the wallpaper, the fact that the wiring is concealed within the walls, and the white shelves and gas stove in the kitchen. 29 Her keen reaction conveys to the reader that this is a model of modern, convenient housing, one that has factored in all the needs and desires of its future residents. This fictional account showcases the innovation and forethought underpinning official ideals for the Soviet home of the 1950s and 1960s. It also accentuates how fundamental to its attainment were skilled and dedicated workers and industrial production techniques. Regarding the human power required, the transformation of Soviet construction was attributed to an advanced method of labor organization. This consisted of so-called complex brigades comprised of diverse workers with an “interchangeability of professions” (vzaimozameniaemost′ professii). Initially configured to rebuild Stalingrad after the war, such crews minimized the number of laborers required at a particular building site, while concurrently increasing productivity. 30 Each brigade had a leader who could read blueprints and was versed in quality standards for workmanship, as well as in regulations for general technical and labor safety. He was also responsible for selecting builders who possessed the specialties and qualifications needed for a given job, for acquiring tools and equipment, and for monitoring work discipline.31 As construction work became rationalized, the builder came to be recognized as a valued segment of the proletariat. Newspapers praised local workers who made outstanding contributions to rapid construction, some of which were awarded the honor “Hero of Socialist Labor” for their exemplary achievements. In a related initiative, a 1955 Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR had declared a new national holiday, Builders’ Day, to be celebrated on 12 August “in honor of the great service the huge army of builders laid before the Soviet state.”32 Although this proclamation was issued before he had secured leadership of the country, Khrushchev proved to be personally invested in training this legion. He noted in his memoirs that when he was growing up, metalworkers had treated construction workers with disdain because their trade remained on a “primitive level.” He was proud of having fostered the transformation of the builder from a “peasant” who could “slap bricks and mortar together” to a professional tradesman.33 Suggesting that the elevation of the aspiration of builder was part of a broad postwar trend, one brigadier claimed in 1958 that he had dreamed of families moving into homes built by his very own hands since witnessing the impact of wartime destruction and subsequent reconstruction as a child. 34 Being part of a lineage of construction workers, if less common than the vocational builder, was also deemed noteworthy. Thus, a human-interest story featuring four brothers working in construction applauded this

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“dynasty of builders” for purportedly having provided Leningraders, in merely a few years, 10,000 apartments. This amounted to dwellings for nearly 40,000 people or the equivalent of an “entire city.”35 Through public accolades for such incredible feats of labor, as well as for comradeship and perseverance (neither frost nor snow could thwart the truly dedicated), the construction worker was rendered an admirable figure within the lexicon of the proletariat. A variant of the Stakhanovite worker—with the ambition and energy to overfulfill quotas—the builder appeared to be approaching parity with the iconic blacksmith of the 1920s and the metalworker of the 1930s.36 Like his outstanding counterparts, the construction worker was typically represented by a physically strong, resolute, and inventive male figure. This robust individual, who nevertheless worked well in a collective, entered the popular imagination not only through the press, but also through cinema within the recurring context of the worksite. Although they did not constitute a distinct genre, a notable number of films during the Khrushchev era were set against the backdrop of construction (often in some remote location, far from “civilization”) and featured heroic male builders. The feat at the heart of such a film could vary from erecting a blast furnace to building an apartment block, but when housing construction was implicated in the drama, the worksite characteristically served both to display the commendable labor of the male protagonist and to symbolize the joy he brought to the new residents of the flats he had just completed. 37 Women were certainly not absent in the building trades; by the end of the Khrushchev era, they comprised nearly one-third of all workers in construction.38 Images of them in the mainstream press, however, were limited, and as one rare piece on a model female builder suggests, her role was that of helper.39 As such, she was entrusted with the “finishing touches” of housing construction like painting and pasting wallpaper, which were manual and detail-oriented, as opposed to mechanized or skilled activities.40 As Lynne Attwood demonstrated, even magazines committed to offering a female readership models of women “not just cooking in their new apartments, but physically building them” tended to highlight their femininity. Thus, a feature on a woman crane operator might balance praise for her competence in an implicitly masculine profession—operating heavy machinery—with enthusiasm for her ultimate marriageability.41 Alongside changes in labor organization, new building methods also contributed to modernizing construction. Prominent among them was the use of housing construction assembly enterprises (domostroitel′nomontazhnye kombinaty). These entities produced concrete panels for walls (replacing bricks) and manufactured stairwells, landings, and roofs. They also calculated the technological specifications for assembling buildings and worked in close contact with planning organizations. They then

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1.1  “We will greet Builders’ Day commendably!” Note the proud, heroic pose of the male builder in the foreground, and the modest, diligent posture of the female one in the background. Stroitel′, 17 July 1956, 1.

transported the materials to construction sites, where they assisted in the assembly of buildings.42 Dwellings could thereby be built virtually “on conveyor belts” (doma na konveiere). Standardized designs (tipovye proekty) dating from the early 1950s that kept buildings to a minimum of four to five floors so that elevators were not required, and stipulated that kitchens be small and ceilings low, also enabled construction workers to erect buildings more quickly and inexpensively—two key aims of housing construction.43

1.2  This humorous depiction of “home” delivery plays with the notion of conveyor-belt-style construction using prefabricated building materials. Krokodil, 20 October, 1961, 4.

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1.3  Nikita Khrushchev visiting the experimental housing construction site at the 122nd block of Shchemilovka Street in Leningrad, May 1957. TsGAKFFD SPb, Br 18377.

Although the first housing construction assembly enterprise was established only in 1959, Khrushchev had been lauding modernized construction techniques since 1954. Soon thereafter, the Cherëmushki district in Moscow and the territory adhering to Shchemilovka Street in Leningrad had become the first experimental construction sites in the country.44 To encapsulate the splendors of the new settlement that subsequently arose in the capital, the state commissioned Dmitry Shostakovich to compose the operetta Cherëmushki. In the 1963 film adaptation, characters variously refer with affectionate familiarity to the “southwestern” method of building used here, dance on prefabricated block panels as they are hoisted by a crane to complete yet another flat, and sing of a new city district blossoming like a cherry tree on the foundations of old Cherrytown (Cherëmushki).45 This burgeoning district epitomized the transformation of Moscow. Salisbury too had remarked on “the welter of construction which transformed the Cherëmushki prairie into an unknown city, gashed with new highways, studded with new apartment houses, boiling with bulldozers chewing at the ragged edges of the open fields.”46 The building feats on Shchemilovka enjoyed vigorous praise from the Leningrad press. For example, an article that appeared in Vechernii Leningrad (Evening Leningrad) in July 1957 showcased two recently completed apartment buildings on this street, lauding the apartments within them

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1.4  A  typical five-story khrushchëvka in contemporary Leningrad. Photograph by author, spring 2002.

for being equipped with all necessities. These included a kitchen and bathroom, as well as modern amenities like central heating and hot water. Also featured were the spaces allotted for shops on the ground floor of each building, and the lawns, flowerbeds, spacious verandas, fountains, benches, and playgrounds projected for the surrounding environs. It was therefore anticipated that the apartments in the area still under construction would provide their future tenants with “all the conveniences.”47 By 1959, nearly 95 percent of new housing in Leningrad was being built using industrial methods and based on designs like those that had been delineated for Shchemilovka. This was a sizable increase from just over 50 percent in 1957. Two years later, engineers were proclaiming, “Massive housing construction in Leningrad is being realized entirely by standardized designs. This means five-story residential buildings with small-sized [malometrazhnye] apartments, built out of large-scale panels, large-scale blocks and brick.”48 Soon entire cities were being built in accordance with specifications compiled by Leningrad architects, including relatively remote Angarsk, Salavat, Sumgait, Cherepovets, and Rudnyi.49 Besides the labor techniques and technical methods employed in novostroika, the separate apartment was modern also in terms of the design principles upon which it was based. Paramount was the directive that form must follow function. Geometric simplicity was also vital: buildings were expected to exhibit clarity and veracity rather than feature details

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that served only for beautification. Lightness in tone and effect was another touted characteristic. 50 On the broader urban landscape, architects rejected for residential blocks ostentatious layouts that focused attention on the sides of buildings facing major streets. A feature of Stalinist monumental design, this type of layout was associated with excessive decorativeness and considered more appropriate for administrative than residential buildings. 51 After Stalin, the center of gravity of architectural composition shifted to the interior of the mikroraion, where radial courtyards were envisioned to serve as “the foundation of the life of the population.”52 As experts strove to achieve compositional unity among built structures, they simultaneously charged “living ensembles” with providing a sense of the organic in a literal way: each neighborhood was to embody the “mutual relationship of dwelling with nature,” with the green spaces surrounding and joining together neighboring housing blocks creating the “single organism of the microdistrict.”53 Based on the ideal that greening would occur in tandem with housing construction, one exceedingly ambitious estimate stated that the current tempo of housing construction—with one apartment being erected every ten minutes—required that eighty to one hundred square meters of residential territory be greened and improved every ten minutes.54 Functionality was considered as fundamental to planning the natural landscape as to the built environment. Design professionals of the Khru­ shchev era thus accentuated the potential uses, rather than the decorative qualities, of public gardens, parks, and lawns within and between housing blocks. These spaces were intended to ensure the healthy relaxation of the population, providing fresh air, aesthetic tranquility, and a sound barrier, as well as places for enjoying leisure activities ranging from chess to team sports.55 Numerous rules and norms were established to support these objectives for the mikroraion. For instance, one urban planning handbook determined that green spaces would need to comprise more than one-half of the area of a neighborhood in order to have a significant impact on its residents. This meant an increase in prescribed per capita allotments of green space. In Leningrad, for example, the norm was to increase from the four to five square meters typical in older districts of the city to seven to nine square meters in new districts—the latter figure conforming to the established per capita standard for living space.56 Suggestions for making green spaces beautiful and viable included coordinating the aesthetic and technical aspects of greening (for example, integrating water supply systems); mechanizing garden work; and including a horticulturalist on housing administration staffs.57 With regard to composition, architects and landscape designers concurred that the heights of trees and shrubs should be accounted for whenever integrating vertical structures like pavilions and pergolas into

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courtyards. In some cases, practicalities were embedded in aesthetic considerations. Careful planning of the position of park benches and walkways between buildings, for example, was deemed essential for protecting lawns and gardens. 58 Thus, when it came to the spaces surrounding the home, thoughtful administration was presented as indispensable to ensuring the efficacy of the organic. In sum, official rhetoric on housing design and construction, together with that on urban planning and landscaping, presented an all-encompassing vision of harmony and balance among built structures and green spaces. Essentially, the home was portrayed as a “small city” in which every perceivable element was to be meticulously harmonized to facilitate healthy, tranquil, and gratifying living. 59 But producing a modern architectural ensemble required more than providing functional buildings equipped with amenities like central heating, and courtyards lush with greenery. It also demanded the elaboration of a new type of lifestyle, an objective with implications for the housing interior. Arranging, furnishing, and decorating dwelling space, often associated with personal taste, were therefore other integral components of housing policy in the 1950s and 1960s. Creating an Ensemble Within: Arranging the Contemporary Interior Given that the standardization of housing design and construction had the potential to make a mass commodity of the modern home, domestic space seemed to be the ideal site for individualizing living space.60 Recognizing this, Soviet design experts encouraged new residents to personalize their home as an antidote to the uniformity of prefabricated buildings. One propounded the psychological benefit of a person having his or her “own individual dwelling, distinct from others.”61 To attain this, another suggested, “Try to be an artist in your home and show creative inventiveness and initiative,” urging consumers to avoid imitating the décor of their neighbors and to incorporate items into their apartments that are “their own.” This could include objects dear to family members, connected with their interests and special occasions, or souvenirs from their travels.62 Sentimental objects, recognized for their capacity to harbor special associations, could conjure up pleasant memories and serve as “silent friends.”63 Even the contemporary kitchen, praised for its standardized amenities and prized, above all, for its functionality, was not spared recommendations for combating anomie. According to one design professional, the kitchen was to “combine utmost rationality with the ‘humanness’ ” of rooms designed for leisure rather than productivity.64 Creativity in home decoration was supported not only by such abstract advice, but also by instructions for do-it-yourself projects for a variety

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of household items that included bookshelves, kitchen and coffee tables, chairs, stools, ottomans, lampshades, and boxes for storing linen or creating balcony gardens. Feature articles in newspapers, magazines, and advice books provided the list of materials required and their dimensions, directions, and in some cases, step-by-step illustrations.65 Homemakers at times actively and independently sought out such guidance: it was supposedly in response to numerous letters received from readers that Rabotnitsa (The woman worker) offered recommendations for constructing or altering furniture in order to outfit small-sized apartments and to make them appear more spacious. Combining decoration with practicalities, the experts enlisted by the magazine suggested that by sewing a skirt onto the mattress, a bed could be turned into an ottoman, and that by setting up a bed perpendicular to a bookrack, the latter could function as a headboard.66 Do-it-yourself projects served not only to satisfy individual creative impulses; they had the added benefit of alleviating frustration over the dearth of decorative accents and furniture. They could also possibly remedy shortcomings in housing construction, as indicated by advice relating to electrical wiring, light switches and fixtures, and windowsills.67 Although design professionals promoted a degree of independence to make prefabricated construction homier and more functional, the aggregate was too significant to be entrusted to the ordinary homemaker. After all, furniture, decorative appointments, and household appliances were deemed integral to the success of housing policy, and as essential for ensuring the welfare of the Soviet person and the broad restructuring of byt as the separate apartment itself. This is encapsulated in the following ­assertion: The new apartment will be genuinely well-equipped and comfortable only if all elements of its outfitting and appointments (furniture, fabrics, wallpaper and lighting . . .) are carefully thought out and organically coordinated with the purpose of rooms, with their dimensions, and with the general style of the simple architecture of the residential interior.68

Architects thus strove to synchronize their planning and construction directives with the activities of interior designers organizing domestic space and artisans crafting household items. Their objective was to collectively resolve every aspect of the housing question—from standardized prefabricated block panels to folksy knick-knacks. To ensure the fulfillment of their vision, these experts provided consumers with precise instructions for setting up their home. These appeared in publications ranging from brief newspaper and magazine articles to manuals devoted to household advice. The proliferation of instructional literature, in particular, appeared to be

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part of a general post-Stalin phenomenon. As Deborah Field noted, the subject heading “Family and Everyday Life” appeared in the annual book catalog Ezhegodnik knigi SSSR in 1954; the new section contained books on housework, cooking, decoration, and home maintenance.69 Suggesting a pronounced emphasis on household organization, the number of such advice manuals reached its peak during the Khrushchev era, when it rose to sixty-three in 1960.70 In sharing their expertise, design professionals censured what they considered to be outmoded household objects, provided information about new types of furniture and decorative wares, and offered strategies for arranging domestic space that would make optimum use of the smaller scale of the separate apartment. That is to say, practicalities intersected with new concepts concerning the contemporary interior in the overall vision for restructuring the living space of Soviet citizens. Thus, homemakers were dissuaded from introducing into newly built apartments the kinds of heavy antique pieces that had been used to furnish the comparatively spacious rooms of communal apartments not only because they were antithetical to modern streamlined design; they simply would not fit.71 As for those who continued to live in older buildings, or even dormitories, experts offered suggestions for grafting updated design principles onto long inhabited interiors so as to improve their quality until residents were allotted new ­housing. The target audience for prescriptions on homemaking was female—even if professionals did not always explicitly designate decorating a feminine occupation. Simply, it was taken for granted that women were “natural” homemakers. As one expert remarked in Rabotnitsa, while loved by men and women, coziness is the responsibility of women. She wrote, “How much is connected with this word. Peace and rest, and the tidiness and warmth of the homey house comprise a representation of the caring female hand.”72 At the same time, she disapprovingly claimed, “women in naturally striving to decorate a room fill it up with statuettes and vases, and cover it with carved cornices, lace bedspreads, and table-napkins, not leaving an inch of free space.” “Fancifulness”—implied to be a female tendency—“is the enemy of beauty and coziness.”73 Despite this perception of a female “instinct” for decoration then, experts (contrary to the source of this last assertion, mostly male) considered it imperative that they guide women. In addition to being designated natural homemakers, women were likely to be targets for advice also because they were the main consumers of household wares. Indeed much like in Western societies from the turn of the nineteenth century on, women in the Soviet Union were perceived either as oppressed by mass consumption and “enslaved” by objects, or else temporarily liberated by consumerism, partly freed from the constraints of domesticity to engage in a creative act.74 Whatever their personal opinion,

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taste professionals during the Khrushchev era assumed the prerogative to monitor lay creativity and ensure that it conformed to their own ideas. At the center of their overall vision was a distinctly modern variant of comfort, one that favored functionality and harmony above all—in keeping with aims for exterior spaces. Design experts strove to ensure that the household interior reflected the lightness, rationality, and overall accord of the building ensembles and neighborhoods that architects and urban planners were designing and constructing. In this broad configuration, furniture was viewed as “a natural extension of architectural style” and as the most essential and noticeable element of domestic space; this “small architecture” (malaia arkhitektura) was therefore placed at the forefront of the household items that were to adorn daily life.75 Integrating their own ideals with the primary need of new tenants to optimally organize their limited living space, professionals advised that the amount of furniture to be included in an apartment, and the arrangement of each piece in relation to others, should conform to the spatial dimensions of a home. They urged consumers to discard suites and bulky items like sofas with built-ons (nadstroikami), pot-bellied chests of drawers, and wardrobes, and to exchange these for several necessary items with common characteristics that people could coordinate.76 In short, they condemned ornamentation within the home as passé and pressed consumers to create an ensemble among their various decorative appointments. Design experts disapproved of heavily embellished furniture not only because of its potential to clutter and impede activity in the small-sized apartment, but also because in their estimation it threatened good hygiene and health. As one art critic declared, “Think how much trouble it is for a woman if her apartment is outfitted with old cumbersome furniture with carved decoration. The poor thing must dedicate all her free time to tidying; otherwise, the family will choke from the dust.”77 Other professionals infused simple modern design with scientific rationality. One warned, for example, that too much variation in furnishings in a room—combined with “poor color resolution”—could “overstrain the eye” and “have a harmful influence on the entire organism of a person.”78 To both assure well-being and optimize space, experts recommended that new residents embrace sectional (sektsionnaia) and convertible (kombinirovannaia) furniture. The sofabed was thus applauded for its potential to enable five people to live comfortably in a two-room apartment without cluttering it up with five beds, and also for being easy to move around and transform. A bookshelf/chest-of-drawers that provided both open shelves for books, knick-knacks, and a television, and cupboards for clothing and linen, was also praised for maximizing space.79 Ever preoccupied with functionality when it came to incorporating inessential objects into the home, experts for the most part advised women of

1.5  Samples of convertible furniture ideal for “small-sized” apartments. D i SSSR, May 1958, 29.

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what to avoid. This included oversized crystal vases, dishes, and decanters; reproductions of famous works of art; and “tapestries with representations of ‘exotic landscapes.’ ” Design professionals declared such decorative objects to be in poor taste for domestic space and cited them for producing the effect of “vulgar, dismal ‘coziness.’ ”80 They also warned women that cluttering up a room with statuettes, knick-knacks, perfume bottles or vases with paper flowers would only make it resemble a “tasteless bonbonnière,” while to “overload a dwelling with embroidered things” would impart to it the appearance of a second-hand store. Select pieces of a china service displayed behind the glass of a sideboard were deemed sufficient, while small tablenapkins—employed sparingly—could effectively provide a way to coordinate new pieces of furniture with old ones, or to protect polished surfaces.81 Emphasis on moderation demonstrates that the integration of decorative wares required as much careful consideration as the selection and arrangement of furniture if the objective of efficient living was to be realized. Thus, the decoration of chests, side tables, and television sets with multicolored patterned silk scarves or table-napkins, and tables with tablecloths and runners, was denounced as irrational.82 Like ornately carved furniture, these decorative coverings—particularly plush ones—would only collect dust. One especially pedantic piece in Rabotnitsa provided readers with illustrations that would ostensibly appeal to their “female” sensibilities, in order to instruct them on the importance of the functionality of domestic objects. Asserting that the form of an object should comply with (and not impede) its function, the author claimed that “comfort and usefulness” were “indispensable” to “genuine beauty,” adding that without these traits, “a beautiful object becomes senseless and produces the very same unpleasant impression as a stupid beauty [krasavets].” He thus emphasized that a vase should immediately be recognized as a vessel designated for flowers, and not be shaped, for example, like a barrel. Similarly, a mug should not represent a woman’s head, nor should a perfume flask take the form of a dog or young boy. Furthermore, insisting that a decorative item be “true” in terms of representation, the author explained that kittens with little bows pictured on embroidered cushions and elsewhere did not conform to the characteristics of a real cat, which by nature is “a predatory animal, a cunning hunter.” The more charming variant was considered to be deceptive, thereby constituting “false prettiness.”83 Reproach that infringed on personal taste reinforced official and professional aspirations to harmonize the character of household interiors with the functionality, simplicity, and veracity of entire housing complexes. Condemnation of excessive adornment within residential interiors, meanwhile, echoed the denunciation of the ornate features of Stalinist building exteriors that Khrushchev had uttered. It appears that even as mere decoration within the home, “fine silhouettes” smacked of impracticality and spuriousness.

1.6  According to the distressed expert caricatured, outmoded decorative objects like the ones shown exhibit an “excess of taste.” D i SSSR, February 1960, 22.

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Precise prescriptions for items that homemakers should buy to decorate their domestic spaces were few and understated, and most experts focused on folk art. Design professionals recommended, for example, Russian Gzhel′ folk ceramics painted with their signature blue and white ­patterns; wooden Bogorodskie toys for their joie de vivre; bright Khokhloma wares (from functional dishes to decorative boxes), distinguished by their red, black, and gold fantastical flowers; smoky black Georgian ceramic sheep and jugs; and decorative fabrics and rugs from Russia, Ukraine, and the different Central Asian and Baltic republics. Such traditional objects were considered ideal for adding contrasting elements to contemporary apartments painted in light tones, filled with functional furniture, and adorned with wallpaper, curtains, and carpets with simple patterns.84 Encouraging residents to decorate their new homes with folk wares appears to undermine the modernizing mandate of housing construction and interior design. However, as one expert stated, decorative arts were not to stand aloof from contemporary advancements. Rather, like new building techniques, they were to reflect the times—a “century of refined thought, technical progress, cybernetics and the conquest of the cosmos.”85 Hence, design professionals publicized the role of modern mass production in making “folk art” available to the masses.86 In their estimation, industrial mechanisms, in contrast to handcrafting, imparted a simplicity and contemporariness to folk objects, without divesting them of their national properties. Examples of model pieces that were modern in terms of style, but still folksy in theme, included a Lithuanian rug depicting a herd of young rams in a geometrical rather than organic fashion, purposefully arranged in an ornamental pattern.87 As for folk art that could easily escape regulation, experts advocated that the millions of women in the Soviet Union engaged in embroidering objects like cushions for their home substitute geometric patterns for conventional motifs like staid flowers, swans gliding on lakes, and kittens playing guitar.88 One schematic that appeared in Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR consisted of alternating rows of rectilinear snowflakes, girls, and flowers.89 Such patterns were in keeping with the orderly configurations that characterized praiseworthy exemplars of mass-produced folk art; they also echoed the geometric simplicity of exterior architectural design. The increasing application of chemical manufacturing to household wares too contributed to modernizing the Soviet home. With this particular industry generating numerous synthetic materials and subsequently yielding an abundance of novel consumer goods, experts praised the “veritable reign of new materials—of plastics”—for the home. One boldly declared that the only items being displayed in model kitchens at exhibitions that were not plastic were pots and pans. Plates, pails, and boxes for storing vegetables were all made from plastic, while curtains and tablecloths were being produced from a type of vinyl that was quick and easy to wipe clean,

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she reported.90 Modern and functional, imitation cloth appeared to be the perfect finale to the prefabricated apartment. Introducing new technology into the ensemble of the home proved much more problematic than integrating ordinary household objects made of advanced materials. The form, function, and aesthetic qualities of appliances roused particular concern among design professionals simply because many such items (television sets, tape recorders, and wireless receivers) were new to the average consumer. Advice for selecting electronic wares, however, simply mimicked negative prescriptions for choosing furniture: heavy, cumbersome, and tasteless models were to be avoided. Thus, for example, one expert favored the Trembita television, with its contemporary, light coloring and conveniently placed handles, over the Khar′kov, which purportedly resembled a heavy, polished cube with awkwardly positioned handles.91 The arrangement of appliances within the interior was also relevant. As with furniture, interior designers advocated that homemakers strive to create distinct functional spaces. Placing a television with its back toward the light, one suggested, could create a zone of rest with the addition of a soft armchair, sofabed, and desk.92 Alongside innovations like plastic dishware and television sets, the organic retained an important place within the modern interior—much as in the mikroraion. In fact, alongside folk art, experts presented plants as constituting a key component of household decoration. One proclaimed, “Flowers not only convey joy to the person, but also appear to be valuable decorative material, enlivening the contemporary interior with its strict lines and laconic compositional resolution.”93 Given its importance within the domestic sphere, design professionals provided strict instruction on the placement of greenery, which they advocated not only for adorning windowsills, but as well, for distribution throughout an apartment—as long as it did not hinder everyday activities, of course. Moreover, as with other kinds of decorative objects, the color and proportion of vessels designed for flowers and plants did not escape instruction. As a case in point, short pots were heartily recommended as most sensible for short flowers.94 From the petty to the elaborate, decorating suggestions published in newspapers and magazines could be viewed firsthand at exhibitions such as that held in September 1959 in a newly constructed building on Vasa Alekseev Street, in the Avtovo district in Leningrad. This particular exhibition featured nineteen models of one-family apartments (one-, two-, and three-bedroom), based on standardized designs and fully furnished, complete with drapery, dishes, and even vases filled with flowers. Leningrad industries were the main contributors, though model wares from Moscow, Tallinn, and Vilnius were also shown. Experts and newspaper correspondents reviewing the exhibition highlighted the application of novel materials like plastics, and the simplicity of form and functionality of the furniture on display. Collapsible and sectional furniture earned particular praise for

1.7  Drawings of model furniture and decorative wares on display at recent exhibitions. Rabotnitsa, August 1962, back cover.

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making even rooms of small dimensions seem “spacious, light and cozy” while at the same time “satisfying all the needs of tenants.”95 Exhibitions functioned not only as trade shows or propagandistic forums for unveiling the multitude of consumer goods being produced for Soviet citizens; they also possessed an inherent educational role. In this way, they were reminiscent of expositions of the 1930s that had aimed to demonstrate industrial progress and increasing material welfare, as well as to stimulate rational demand among consumers.96 Indeed the stated goals of the 1961 Moscow exhibition “Art into Life” (Iskusstvo v byt) included showcasing the work of artists throughout the Soviet Union who were creating items for the dwelling and daily life of the individual; promoting new and “progressive” wares like plastics and appliances; and demonstrating “how furniture, lighting appliances, textile goods, plates and dishes, ‘get along’ with one another in the setting of the contemporary small-sized residential interior.”97 The implication was that consumers might be ignorant about how to organize their new, individual domestic spaces. The earnestness with which the contemporary, rational, modern housing interior was approached is evinced not only by the instructional elements incorporated into exhibitions, but also by lecture forums on homemaking open to the mass public. For example, the Vera Mukhina Higher College of Art and Industry in Leningrad organized talks by leading pedagogues on the general equipping and arrangement of the separate apartment, as well as on decoration and related themes. The school also offered group and individual consultation for those seeking guidance on how best to organize the furniture in their apartment, or how to create beauty and coziness in a frugal manner.98 Clearly, the preoccupation of design professionals with the correct arrangement of the separate apartment was oftentimes as excessive as the elements of the interior that they deemed deserving of censure. This is partly attributable to official state and Party directives aimed at rationalizing the infrastructure of daily life—all of which culminated in 1962 in the creation, by decree, of the All-Union Scientific-Research Institute for Technical Aesthetics (Vsesoiuznii Nauchno-issledovatel′skii institut estetiki). The purpose of this body was to provide the enterprises responsible for producing consumer wares the aesthetic expertise of a wide range of professionals, including architects, industrial designers, sociologists, and historians.99 Like consumers and homemakers, these experts had to navigate between exercising creativity and maintaining strict principles as they sought to transform byt. Restructuring Daily Life Central to Soviet housing design and construction was the ideal of establishing a harmonious balance between the material and human elements of

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society in general. Where the built environment was concerned, architects viewed each apartment house as the “organic part of a complex.” Thus, integral to the transition to the separate apartment was the notion that every individual building would be functional in its own right, in order to ensure the feasibility of the entire housing block of which it was a part.100 The importance of unity and coordination was evident also in the conceptualization of the mikroraion, where urban planners strove to create a balance between buildings for personal use and those that are typically public in nature.101 Thus, the model residential district was to include not only a housing zone and green spaces, but also consumer service establishments, and educational and cultural institutions. These included laundries, tailor shops, movie theaters, sports complexes, and places for culture and rest (doma kul′tury i otdykha).102 The mandate to provide a network of social facilities within each mikroraion was manifest in the February 1959 issue of the trade journal Arkhitektura i stroitel′stvo Leningrada (Architecture and construction of Leningrad), which was devoted to discussing and evaluating various designs and plans for developing and organizing a diverse array of everyday amenities. Meanwhile, formulations about communist living maintained that the home is where people rejuvenate and therefore, each element of the infrastructure supporting the household has direct bearing on the rational use of free time, and in turn, on labor.103 Designating services and facilities aimed at promoting enjoyable leisure as fundamental to urban planning, one factory newspaper declared, these are “not trifles [melochi], nor secondary things” because “both the mood of people and their labor productivity” depend on the manner in which daily life is organized and on the availability of consumer and cultural amenities.104 Individuals who were inspired to work more efficiently after moving into new apartments with bright, spacious rooms affirmed this. One group of new residents cited their “wonderful building” for making them “want to work even more, even better, in order to show gratitude.”105 Such popular reactions to novostroika were certainly ripe for publication. By casting living and working as mutually supportive, and the separate apartment as reliant on communal service networks, positive assessments of new housing blocks mitigated the tension between individual home life and pursuits beneficial to the collective. In the reasoning of professional rhetoric, domestic life bolstered workplace productivity, while decent living conditions were essential to a full personal life (lichnaia zhizn′) and to active intercourse with others outside of labor activity.106 The perception that daily living and labor were interdependent was most explicit in the recurring motto “Work and daily life are inseparable.” One curious manifestation of this entailed investing the expressly public workplace with characteristics and amenities associated with private domestic space. This was apparent in the displacement of the idyll of home life

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portrayed in the following fictional representation of cultured living. In this prize-winning short story published in Krokodil, the protagonist describes how gay it always is in the neighboring room. He and Dormidontovyi play chess; Izabella Iur′evna fills in a crossword puzzle; someone softly sings while cooking and Mariia Nikolaevna mimics them in a comical way; and in the corner, at the table, Arkadii Vasil′evich tells a fresh anecdote causing Iavitstkii to roar with laughter. Generally, all flows “in a domestic manner” (po-domashnemu). The setting was not, as the reader might have expected, a communal apartment; the vignette surprisingly concluded, “now the work day came to an end. We set off for home. To be bored.”107 Written in 1962, this piece foreshadowed the abysmal work ethic that would come to be associated with the Brezhnev era as a consequence of the absence of labor incentives for which the Soviet Union became notorious. What is relevant here is how elements of interior design associated with “home”—comfort and coziness—were being transplanted to the workplace. During the transition from communal to separate family apartments, this process was reinforced by the assertion that the quotidian needs of workers were worthy of fulfillment by management even on the shop floor. The necessities included sinks supplied with soap and fresh towels, clean and orderly shower stalls, kettles for boiling water for tea breaks, a pleasant place to eat that served warm and delicious meals, a red corner stocked with current newspapers and journals, and green spaces adjacent to factories and institutions. As a report on improving working conditions proclaimed, “one of the first and foremost obligations of directors of production” is to create “normal conditions” for successful labor by providing decent “sanitary-living [sanitarno-bytovye] premises.”108 Scientific studies seemed to confirm the link between environment and efficiency. For example, a nine-month experiment on the “aesthetic reorganization” of one factory in Aizpute, Latvia yielded a just over ten percent increase in productivity. Here, workers had been “cheered” by the new decorative elements added to their workplace. These included displays of photographs of model workers, pictures of landscapes featuring rivers and trees that created a sense of spaciousness, and plants. This approach to work space was subsequently transferred to factories in Riga, Vilnius, Kiev, Moscow, Leningrad, and Sverdlovsk.109 Meanwhile, official publications praised popular initiatives among workers striving to make their workplace “just like home.” A feature on the Red Triangle plant in Leningrad, for instance, detailed the ways in which one workshop here had gone so far as to cultivate a veritable indoor garden. “By the machines are little tables for tools and stands covered in bright green—vases with flowers,” the report stated. It also distinguished this workshop for its “cleanliness and order.”110

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1.8  A well-kept, cozy—and by implication, productive—work space. D i SSSR, June 1963, 29.

Emphasis on functionality in workplace design during the Khrushchev era harkens back to the revolutionary 1920s, when a mania for efficiency had prompted the adoption of Taylorist methods for scientifically organizing labor.111 Thus, at first glance, the coziness simultaneously prescribed for the shop floor seems peculiar. That said, combining prescriptions for beautifying the material environment with ones related to productivity did have a precedent in the 1930s, when the presence of flowers in factories connoted both the culture of production and the “material acquisitiveness” that came to accompany the overfulfillment of quotas central to the advancing Stakhanovite movement.112 Similarly during the Thaw, aesthetically pleasing, tidy, and comfortable spaces were recognized for their potential to increase productivity. As one expert stated, poetically infusing

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his assertion with an organic sensibility, “Communism and work, work and beauty, are inseparable from each other, as the inseparable roots of plants from mother earth.”113 On the eve of the pivotal Twentieth Party Congress, a Vechernii Leningrad correspondent applauded Soviet progress over the course of successive five-year plans. Distinguishing Leningrad as a center for technical innovation and talented labor in the construction industry, he stated that the country as a whole had witnessed so much progress in this field “since Magnitogorsk” that the technology of the past now seemed “pitiful” and “comical.”114 He thereby implicitly situated Magnitogorsk—iconic of the First Five-Year plan—at the genesis of a continuum of socialist industrial advancement, while simultaneously dismissing its significance as the paragon of modernity and rationality as it was once hailed. Perhaps this trivialization of Magnitogorsk was an expression of local pride for the benefit of a Leningrad readership. Whatever the case, the fact is that it was at the very moment when Khrushchev was poised to dismantle Stalinism that this correspondent chose to belittle the most ambitious project of the Stalin era: to transform the village of Magnitogorsk into “a huge mining-energychemical-metallurgical complex,” complete with modern housing, urban services and cultural amenities—in essence, to create a utopian communist “civilization.”115 What impact then did the Thaw have on housing development in particular? As Mark Smith demonstrated, the construction methods employed from 1957 on represented a degree of continuity with postwar Stalinist practice.116 Certain specifications for housing design and urban planning instituted under Khrushchev also had their antecedents, and during the Thaw, they were elaborated on, strengthened, and positioned as part of a broader rejection of the late Stalinist “architecture of victory”—a style that had been neo-Classical and monumental, placing primary importance on building façades, particularly those facing major boulevards.117 Scholars of art and architecture have gone as far as to present the ideal traits of Soviet design during de-Stalinization as architectural cognates of key principles of the Khrushchev regime. They have shown that simplicity in form contrasted the explicit excesses and implicit hierarchy of the Stalinist cult of personality; that the unity of the architectural ensemble, with each part of equal value and importance, reflected democracy and equality in society; and that “lightness” signified optimism about the bright socialist future.118 The elements of interior décor that design professionals touted— functionality, order, simplicity, truth, and clarity—can also be viewed as comprising a reflection of the general atmosphere of the Thaw, as “signs of the epoch of Khrushchevian reform.”119 In a period that witnessed the denunciation of the cult of personality, caricatures of kittens were as loathsome

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and intolerable as the façade behind which the building of socialism had stalled under Stalin. An orderly and uncluttered apartment mirrored the straightforward approach toward the radiant future guided by Khrushchev, its simplicity and functionality signifying strength and security, in contrast with the fragility of sentimental arrangements of knick-knacks. Susan Reid similarly discerned such allusions to teleology, noting that design experts of the 1950s and 1960s equated domestic wares of purportedly vulgar character not only with Stalinist policy, but also with the more distant bourgeois past.120 With the recommendations of taste experts signifying the future, the aesthetics of daily life envisioned by folk art enthusiasts among them can be interpreted as representative of progress in the realm of nationality policy under Khrushchev. During this era of conviction that Communism was imminent, Soviet theory postulated that the differences among the various nations of the Soviet Union were diminishing and that once the particular features that made each nationality distinct dissipated, the nations would seamlessly merge.121 From this perspective, adherence to professional suggestions to include an assortment of wares with “national” meaning from throughout the country could enable Russian, Uzbek, and Lithuanian homes to assume the multinational character of the Soviet Union. Displayed in combination with each other, folk objects would be divested of their distinctive national significance and associated instead with the supra-ethnic “Soviet” nation—and by extension, proletarian internationalism. As for ultra-modern household goods, electronic appliances and objects fashioned out of plastic had the potential to demonstrate the superiority of the socialist over the capitalist economic system.122 The development of these kinds of items was, in part, attributable to the military: beginning in 1953, the Soviet defense industry became increasingly involved in consumer production. According to Julian Cooper, by the Brezhnev era, the enterprises of affiliated ministries were producing “furniture, glass consumer goods, electric irons, hair dryers, light fittings, kitchen utensils, umbrellas and toys” so that in essence, very few consumer wares were being produced outside of the defense sector. Such manufacturing activities were the result of specialized production, as well as “assimilation” (assimiliatsiia), a process that entailed using the same facilities for making both military and civilian products.123 The ideological significance of domestic wares was underscored in the diplomatic realm by the “Kitchen Debate” that occurred between Khru­ shchev and the then US vice-president Richard Nixon at the American National Exhibition in Moscow during the summer of 1959. In a discussion that broached weighty matters like security concerns and the relative merits of the ideology that each superpower represented, Nixon stressed the options available to the US consumer.124 Among these, gadgets that

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could release women from the drudgery of housework symbolized freedom, while choices in color, style, and price offered by the free market economy signified democracy. Of course, certain household marvels accessible to homemakers in the United States also signified the successful adaptation of the “military hardware of the Atomic Age” for domestic use. A microwave oven that could cook three-year-old irradiated chicken dishes in less than four minutes exemplified such ingenuity.125 Khrushchev acknowledged the superiority of Western technology where household goods were concerned, but claimed that the Soviet Union would soon “catch up with and overtake” the capitalist world. Moreover, the separate apartment, provided by the state, was to comprise a humane and universally obtainable variant of the suburban single-family home, epitomized by the model ranch house available to hard-working middle class Americans.126 In the midst of Cold War competition, housing—along with domestic items like appliances, furniture, and decorative wares—was as ideologically charged in the Soviet Union as in the United States. In the Soviet case, prescriptive literature, trade shows, and academic initiatives aimed to curtail personal style (freedom), while more significant, the socialist economy offered consumers far less in the way of selection (democracy). But the Soviet home was not intended to imitate that of the capitalist West. In the words of the aforementioned architect who placed his profession within the context of broader technological advancements, a contemporary approach to construction, as to rocket science, was to “lay the foundation for the architecture of Communism”—a system that promised socioeconomic equality.127 That ordinary citizens recognized and had faith in this mandate is evinced by the fact that not all Soviet visitors to the American National Exhibition were unreservedly envious of the Western consumer. As Reid showed, the wide range of popular evaluations of this cultural exchange included skepticism over the extent to which the consumer goods and models of domestic life displayed represented “the ‘real America’ ”—or at the very least, an America that was accessible to a broad segment of the population. More significant, some visitors went as far as to employ their observations to remark on what domestic space meant to them as Soviet citizens. Such individuals distinguished between US and Soviet homemaking practices in a way that suggested that even in the popular mindset, a chair is not simply a chair. Visitors to one interior on display, for example, commented that the lack of bookshelves or desks here “would not do for Soviet citizens” because “they read a lot.”128 In curious accord with design professionals, they affirmed that the material world one inhabits is in fact revealing of a distinct way of life.

C H A P T E R 2

FOUNDATIONS Revolution Realized

ON 2 JANUARY  1961, the brigade of Ivan Shapovalov received a congratulatory letter from Khrushchev for its “victory” in the Malaia Okhta district of Leningrad. According to a newspaper report, Shapovalov and his colleagues were commended for their “patriotic work” in completing their construction assignment for 1960 before the year ended. Having erected thirty buildings by 1 November, they were also cited as model workers for other builders to emulate. For his part, Shapovalov—a building assembler (montazhnik) and deputy of the Leningrad city soviet—appeared to have committed himself to state directives for rapid construction based on the conviction that fulfilling plans, like performing duty in battle, was part of a national struggle. He declared, “We builders are soldiers of the front line. This has conferred upon us one of the major points of the program of the Party—to secure for each Soviet family a separate apartment.”1 The assertions that Shapovalov made about patriotic duty highlight an important dimension of the Khrushchev regime and its massive housing campaign. Namely, the battle to which Shapovalov alluded might more appropriately serve as a metaphor for the post-Stalin era than that of a thaw. According to Nancy Condee, Khrushchev purportedly despised the thaw as a label for his leadership because it suggested inconstancy, thereby undermining the impression of radical change. Instead, the idea of a battle— evoking conflict, crisis, resolution, and rebirth—ranked among the metaphors that the premier preferred to affix to his leadership. 2

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It is not surprising then that in his memoirs, Khrushchev situated himself firmly within one of the key battles that defined his regime—the struggle for a radiant communist future that would afford all Soviet citizens decent housing. Recalling the deprivation and hardship he had endured during his youth as a metal fitter, Khrushchev stated that like his fellow workers, he had been determined to sacrifice “for the sake of socialism, for the Revolution, for the working class, and for the future.” Then, explicitly emphasizing the confluence of the goal of realizing mass housing in the Soviet Union and the act of building it, he claimed, Our vision of the future knew no bounds. Our dream was a good dream, a creative and inspiring one. It inspired us to accept a Spartan life and selfsacrifice and it inspired us to throw ourselves ferociously into the job of improving the material conditions in which our citizens lived. First and foremost, this meant building houses—building, building, building!3

These reminiscences conjure up the image of resolutely battling privation to achieve the ultimate victory of a satisfying and happy new life. They also fuse together the attainment of good living conditions with the triumph of the communist system. As the triple exclamation “building!” indicates, immense construction signified both concrete and symbolic movement. By retrospectively casting himself as a devoted worker accepting temporary hardship for the greater cause of Communism, was Khrushchev merely speaking “socialist realism”? As Helena Goscilo discerned, the formula “K + x” (for example, “K kommunizmu!” [Toward Communism!]) was typical of Soviet-era pronouncements about the future Utopia, “which all invoked the Soviet rhetoric of ‘en route to,’ ‘moving towards,’ and similar circumlocutions.” Also characteristic was the continual deferral of this Utopia, as the proverbial destination was never reached.4 Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko explained the incongruity of the state and Party always “striving to define and build a specific space for this Utopia” while constantly deferring “the attainment of utopian happiness in time.” They claimed, “The temporal coordinates of the Utopia are always located beyond the boundaries of the present and are fixed on the future.” In their estimation, the Stalin period appeared to be the only exception to this rule. 5 However, the Utopia created at this time was merely the ersatz one offered by socialist realism—a genre that dictated that art, literature, and cinema focus on representing “what ought to be” rather than life as it actually was.6 During the Thaw, the brilliant future was not a spurious or unattainable mythological construct. Its nearness was manifested in the bulldozers and metal cranes animating the urban landscape, and its arrival was situated in a definable place: the separate apartment. The housewarming celebrated in

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each such Utopia-in-miniature verified that the paternalist state was at last realizing its obligation to provide housing for the people. Each completed new apartment also constituted evidence of both the overall improvement of daily life and advancement toward socialism, with Communism being the next, and final, phase of the Revolution. In formulating his colossal building agenda, Khrushchev drew on a legacy of state provision, specifically the nationalization and redistribution of private dwellings among workers that had accompanied the Bolshevik assumption of power. With the government in command, housing design, construction, and distribution came to affirm the concern for the person (zabota o cheloveke) that was embedded in the regime change signaled by the events of 1917. This mantra was touted throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Explicitly identifying developments in construction with revolutionary progress, Khrushchev conjured up the famous assessment of the Russian Revolution made by the US journalist John Reed when he proclaimed, “we ‘shook the world’ with our massive program to build housing for our people.”7 Assertions of continuity between revolutionary ideals and developments, on the one hand, and the current building surge responsible for the wave of housewarmings, on the other, permeated rhetoric on construction immediately after the July 1957 pronouncement—“To each family a separate apartment!” For example, a front-page spread about Builders’ Day that appeared in Vechernii Leningrad the following month stated that this holiday should be associated not only with construction workers, but also with the housing decree more broadly, as well as with the upcoming fortieth anniversary of the Great October socialist revolution. Underscoring the serious mission before builders, the anonymous correspondent claimed that in addition to being an occasion to celebrate, Builders’ Day also ought to be one for inspecting construction organizations to ensure that they are fulfilling their particular obligations, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in honor of the Revolution. After all, declared the author, “Socialist emulation must ever more brilliantly flare up in our building.”8 The commitment to end the housing shortage and to provide each family a separate apartment was part of a larger goal than guaranteeing every citizen a cozy home. In the longue dureé of Soviet rule, the reinvigoration of revolutionary ideology and social development through novostroika was an attempt to finally lay the foundation for a “normal” socialist society. According to Natal′ia Lebina, in the years immediately following the Revolution, normalcy had been delineated in juxtaposition to the persistent negative realities of Soviet daily life, from social problems like prostitution to the shortage of decent housing. Essentially, “normal” was defined in the discursive realm by way of comparison with actual circumstances that state and society alike regarded as anomalous to socialism.9

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In the 1950s and 1960s, the housewarming heralded normalcy as depictions of improvements in living conditions and the modernization of the Soviet material world evoked a tangible contrast between life before the Revolution—when the Russian proletariat was confined to slums, and after—when each worker could live in a humane manner in a clean, light, freshly painted apartment block. Rational, comfortable, dignified, egalitarian—these were the key traits of the separate apartment that was becoming the norm. As such, they offered a glimpse into the projected communist Utopia. In the context of international rivalry, the home as it was officially conceptualized articulated the vast distinction between “us” and “them”—between the Soviet Union, where the proletariat owned both the means of production and of habitation, and capitalist countries, inherently based on exploitative private ownership. This chapter focuses on the housewarming (novosel′e, which also connotes “new settlement”) and traces the ways in which the transformation of living space signaled the imminence of Communism, together with a revolution in byt. Exploring the meanings of a crucial component of the housing project—moving in—I show that the Khrushchev regime co-opted this private family occasion through the publicity of human-interest stories and bestowed on it the public functions of denoting the soundness of the ideological structure, and positioning the state as a paternal figure, as the embodiment of revolutionary ideals, and as a worthy competitor in the Cold War. Each housewarming—even imperfect ones—offered evidence of both literal and symbolic movement toward realizing the promises of the Revolution in the sphere of daily life and Communism. Overall then, at stake in solving the housing crisis was the identity of the Soviet state as socialist, for a socialist system ideally provides for the fundamental human needs of each of its citizens. These include shelter, one of the “ABCs of Communism.”10 Happy Housewarming—to the People, to the State and to Socialism! With the building site a habitual component of the urban landscape under Khrushchev, the joyous housewarming was a common theme in the local press. The typical feature included general observations of the beauty of new or refurbished city districts. Descriptions of the arrival of moving vehicles piled high with furniture and household items, or of smiling, happy families, first carrying their belongings into their new apartments, and then admiring the workmanship and hanging pictures, completed the staging. Articles on housewarmings also introduced readers to new tenants; presented housing as a gift to workers, often coinciding with national holidays like the anniversary of the October Revolution, May Day, New Year’s Eve,

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2.1  These images are excerpts from a larger cartoon composed of scenes portraying “new settlers” on the move. In the first one, eager residents-to-be are informed that their apartment building is not yet ready; in the second one they are welcomed into their new home. Krokodil, 30 October 1962, 3.

and International Women’s Day; showcased the comforts and conveniences awaiting new residents; and provided facts and figures on progress in housing construction, as well as projections for the future. Such features seemed to affirm for the “new settler” (novosel) of the Khrushchev era what the revolutionary iconoclast Vladimir Mayakovsky had once written: “It is very just, this, our Soviet power.”11 Builders, designers, and the state often figured as prominently in the housewarming narrative as the individuals obtaining an order (writ) for an apartment or the families moving into their new homes. Given their mission to provide an abundance of good dwellings for the proletariat, the press cast construction workers as servants of the people and the state.12 It also portrayed the government, which determined the structure of the built environment in communion with architects and urban planners, as providing the necessary resources for the “careful finishing” of housing, including

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such minute details as the “lovingly selected tone of the wallpaper.” Housewarmings thus attested to state and Party preoccupation with the wellbeing of the people (blago naroda), whether through editorial commentary or explicit testimony from new tenants. Concern for the person was at the core of the major housing construction resolution that the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Council of Ministers of the USSR had propounded in 1957. According to one excerpt, In a socialist country, where power belongs to the working class, the rise of the standard of living and well-being of the people comprises one of the most important tasks. For the Communist Party and Soviet state, no goal is higher than concern for the welfare and happiness of the people and for the improvement of the conditions of their life.13

This ideological sentiment linking caring and Communism became standard in propaganda of the period. Illustrative of the archetypal narrative of new settlement is an article on the experimental construction block of Shchemilovka Street in Leningrad that appeared amid a flurry of housewarming stories published in the fall of 1957. This particular piece featured the moves of several of the more than 200 families receiving a home in two buildings that had not long before been covered in scaffolding, but now contained all sorts of amenities. As the stream of moving vehicles laden with furniture and household objects headed toward the apartment block, the “cordial host”—the housing office manager—greeted new residents, assigning keys and showing apartments. One of the tenants celebrating a housewarming was sixty-year-old E. G. Khilimok, who had “worked almost all her life.” Having scrutinized the kitchen, bathroom, shelving, and pantry in her apartment, and discerned the fine quality of the finishing, she exclaimed, “Thanks goes to our dear Party and government for concern for us, simple working-people.”14 The buildings on Shchemilovka Street that Khilimok and others were moving into had been put into operation in recognition of the anniversary of the October Revolution—a fact that evoked a connection between the momentous private celebrations made possible by state housing provision and general progress toward fulfilling the promises of the monumental historical events of 1917. In the spirit of advancement (“building, building, building!”), articles chronicling housewarmings frequently highlighted the hustle and bustle of a move, publicizing the act of “settling in” more often than portraying a family already “settled in.” In some instances, workers moving into new housing were described as fretting over the perfect placement of their household belongings, hanging curtains, and setting up their television sets.15 A photograph published on the front page of Vechernii

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2.2  This photograph accompanied an article featuring dozens of workers employed at the Proletarian Victory factory in Leningrad moving into new housing on Blagodatnyi Lane in 1962. Proletarskaia pobeda [Proletarian victory], 27 February 1962, 2.

Leningrad in 1964 captured just such a scene, in this instance among members of a family of Metro workers settling into their new apartment. The new residents appear to be so engrossed in hanging drapery and pictures, and unpacking and arranging china, that they seem entirely unaware of the camera focused upon them. The two children depicted, too young to participate in these activities, look upon their elders seemingly entranced, patiently guarding the remaining jumble of items yet to find a place in the new apartment.16 Renewal and renovation, as integral to the housewarming scenario as novostroika, also signified movement. The former could entail evermore beautiful and spacious buildings arising on sites where homes had been destroyed by war. Receiving an apartment in just such an apartment house was described as a “dream come true” for one doctor who had tragically

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2.3  A family settling into a new apartment in Leningrad in 1959. TsGAKFFD SPb, Ar 108067.

lost both her home and her husband during World War II.17 Modernizing decrepit old buildings apparently made them unrecognizable to long-time residents upon their return from temporary resettlement. These “new” tenants typically found the facades of their buildings transformed, their dark kitchens made bright, and their stoves replaced by central heating.18 The wholesale revival of established working class districts—like sites of new construction or major restoration—also represented socialist progress. Rendering old urban districts habitable by modern standards was therefore incorporated into the framework of new settlement. For example, a newspaper feature on one such locale enthusiastically announced, “The Narva Gates [district] is becoming still more beautiful, even more well equipped, and here . . . the inexorable will of the Soviet people to more quickly construct . . . Communism proclaims itself.” Referring to a historically industrial area of Leningrad, this piece juxtaposed the precommunist Narva Gates district remembered by longtime residents with the housing complexes that had emerged here since the Revolution. Pitiful wooden hovels lacking ventilation, decent hygiene, and clean drinking water, brimming over with sickness and epidemics, along with muddy streets, tarnished kerosene lanterns, vacant lots, and trash heaps, all characterized the Narva Gates of the past.19 Another Leningrader, who had lived in the Moscow district for fiftyseven years, recalled for a factory newspaper correspondent the former

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debris and “destitute and hungry people” she had previously encountered here. She claimed that this part of Leningrad had been “typical for a capitalist city of working-class outlying districts, with its squalid hovels, taverns, churches, and impassable mud roads.” During the years of Soviet rule an enormous construction site had emerged here and hundreds of apartment buildings were erected with all sorts of amenities, including gas, plumbing, and trash chutes. In addition, a multitude of shops and services had appeared on their ground floors, among them public dining halls and hairdressing salons, the surrounding roads had been paved, and transportation links to the center had been established. The author of this particular chronicle of resurrection concluded, “All this again confirms the great concern of the Party and government for the welfare of the people.”20 As these accounts imply, “before” signified the capitalist past when workers lived in horrid conditions, and “after” comprised the socialist present in which, each day, more and more workers were moving into bright apartments equipped with amenities ranging from indoor plumbing to courtyard gardens. 21 In addition, they suggest that beyond fulfilling modern ideals for housing in terms of design and construction, attention to urban planning demonstrated government and Party consistency in solving “vital problems” and following the Leninist course—not only in industry and agriculture, but also in the sphere of daily life, as one housewarming feature avowed. 22 One construction brigadier connected enduring state concern for the individual with Leninism, and current housing policy with the foundation of the Soviet state, emphasizing that every task that the government had undertaken had been, and continued to be, “for the Soviet person”—just as Lenin had decreed it should be. He offered in evidence the city that bore his name, Leningrad, “the cradle of the Revolution,” and cited the beautiful, cozy, and well-equipped blocks of new apartment buildings that had recently emerged in several of its districts. Moreover, he was not simply a witness to the changing character of this city “where ‘each stone knows Lenin.’ ” As a Hero of Socialist Labor, he had personally advanced Soviet byt by devoting more than twenty-five years of his life to the struggle for better housing. 23 In publishing accounts of housing policy successes that included targeted remarks about their significance, journalists were no doubt subscribing to their established mandate to publicize the achievements of socialism. 24 The state obligation to abide by revolutionary directives cited in housewarming stories in the press was also at the core of dozens of propaganda publications issued under Khrushchev addressing housing more generally. These pamphlets frequently adhered to the following formula: they depicted housing and daily life during tsarist times, incorporating choice quotations from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; they outlined poor contemporary housing conditions in capitalist countries (citing statistics from their national

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presses); they traced the transformation of housing since the Revolution (namely, following its revolutionary repartition); they detailed the current housing construction program (including goals and achievements in building and renovation); and they provided concrete illustrations of change in specific cities and rural settlements, employing numerous facts and figures. 25 One such publication that appeared in 1963 noted that 50,000 Soviet citizens (about one-quarter of the population of the country) had moved into better housing in the preceding five years alone and that about 6,000 well-equipped apartments were being settled daily. This progress was attributed to the role of the socialist state, which had displaced exploitative private property relations. Industrialization that followed World War II was also touted (specifically, for making rapid construction from prefabricated materials possible), as was emphasis on urban planning that incorporated considerations for landscaping, cultural and recreational establishments, and service facilities that could satisfy all the needs of residents and promote kommunisticheskii byt (communist living). By 1980 each family would have a home with all the conveniences; the differences between town and countryside would further erode to eventually eliminate the “antithesis of rural life” that Marx and Engels had cited; and modern amenities would be accessible to all Soviet citizens. 26 This was the same year that Khrushchev was projecting for the attainment of Communism. In addition to showcasing social progress and illuminating transformations in daily living, official rhetoric juxtaposed the implementation of policies designed to ensure popular welfare in the Soviet Union with the absence of similar measures in capitalist countries. For example, the aforementioned pamphlet noted that in the five years prior to its 1963 publication, two times as many apartments had been built in the Soviet Union per 1,000 inhabitants as in the United States or France, and more than twice as many as in Britain or Italy.27 Explaining such divergences to the general public, one article in the Leningrad factory newspaper Rabotnitsa reported that while the Communist Party strove to construct Communism, raise wages, and reduce the work day, in the West investment continued to be concentrated on policies aimed at destruction (weaponry), which served only to increase international tension. With regard to housing in particular, the author quoted a US worker who had stated, “I bring home 32 dollars a week and must support my wife and one-year-old son. We live in one room, which costs us 15 dollars a week. I would be better off being in prison than enduring all this.” Elaborating on this portrait of American life gleaned from the New York Post, Rabotnitsa claimed that 40 to 50 percent of the earnings of the US working class went to rent, enriching landlords, in contrast with the mere 4 to 5 percent of its budget that the typical Soviet family had to apportion for housing. 28

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In emphasizing the difference between “us” and “them,” official rhetoric occasionally offered the reminder that in the Soviet Union, the proletariat collectively owned not only the means of production, but also the “means of daily living.” As one agitation brochure stated, “rooms and the household articles within them” belong to the people, as do entire buildings, parks, clubs, theaters, stadiums, and sanatoria. 29 Confident that the Soviet system, with its superior housing policy, would garner worldwide appeal, one journalist declared his certainty that capitalist countries will eventually transfer to “our Party.”30 Comparing Communism and Capitalism was a facet of Cold War rhetoric that would persist beyond the Khrushchev years, as encapsulated in the title of the 1973 propaganda brochure: “The Housing Question: Two Worlds—Two Approaches.”31 Furthermore, such comparisons were not limited to discourse on housing. As Vladimir Shlapentokh observed, official rhetoric generally presented the Soviet system as superior to prerevolutionary Russia (the present compared with the past) and to capitalist countries (cross-national comparison), as well as asserted the superiority of the future communist society over all others (based on future promises). 32 In his estimation, proclaiming the advantages of socialism was “central to the official ideology of the Soviet Union” and after the death of Stalin, comprised a means of legitimating the state in lieu of coercion.33 Yet housing discourse during the Thaw was neither entirely abstract, nor completely rigid, and rather than simply serving political legitimacy, it propagated a vision of society that the government was doggedly striving to realize. Making Novostroika Socialist Alongside evincing a regime based on shared ownership of property and concern for each individual, the mandate to provide “housing for the people” was intended to revolutionize daily living. Succinctly conveying the all-encompassing nature of this objective, one architect declared that the main purpose of his profession was to create the “material environment for the labor and existence of the people.”34 More concretely, the ideal home was one that “would bring joy to the Soviet person” with its brightness, “convenient layout” and “coziness.”35 Provisions for nearby consumer services and cultural amenities would also ensure the quality of everyday life, and commentary on these, too, occasionally figured into the housewarming scenario. For example, one human-interest story on “new settlers” featured an “old-timer” from the Red Banner Textile Factory who claimed that he was quickly becoming accustomed to his comfortable dwelling, with “all at hand”—from a school for his daughter to attend, to a variety of neighborhood service establishments.36

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Inside the separate apartment, the kitchen that tenants would enjoy epitomized the potential of novostroika to restructure daily life. As Susan Reid asserted, in the grander scheme, the individual kitchen was “aligned with the major projects of the era: industrialization, technological progress, supremacy in the Cold War, and the final transition to Communism.”37 In practical terms, having her own kitchen meant that the “housewife” (kho­ ziaika) would no longer have to move back and forth between the kitchen and the room that her family inhabited in order to prepare and serve meals, something she had needed to do in the communal apartment.38 At the same time, architects sought to rationalize the kitchen by incorporating such practicalities as cupboards and built-in shelving for household items, a sink for washing dishes and a rack for drying them, and a worktable. Sideboards and kitchen tables equipped with pull-out boards installed according to ergonomic specifications were to allow women to fulfill tasks like preparing meals seated, and thereby protect their strength and health. Domestic novelties (bytovye novinki) and items being produced in greater quantities than ever before were also anticipated to make housework more manageable. These included electric stoves with ovens, and refrigerators. 39 Expounding the benefits of appliances like these that were purportedly aimed at meeting the demands of the general population, Rabotnitsa proclaimed that electric devices “lighten and simplify the household labor of millions of women.”40 Of course, despite their potential to realize the socialist goal of female emancipation, the individualized kitchen of the separate apartment, together with mechanical gadgets, did not actually liberate women from the home. Rather, they permitted them more time for other obligations that fell exclusively to them. Thus, the same piece that cited the millions of women who would now be released from onerous housework stated that these circumstances would enable them “to become more involved in culture and art, and to devote still more attention to the upbringing of children.”41 Furthermore, with the new kitchen serving not only as a clean and efficient “workshop” but also as a place for family members to gather, its “mistress” was now summoned to create a cozy and elegant environment here, as elsewhere in the home.42 Ostensibly to also make the fulfillment of chores more pleasant, experts recommended that homemakers paint the walls in light tones, hang bright curtains, and add an item or two of folk art in order to “impart to the kitchen individuality and festiveness.”43 Overall, as in postwar societies in the West, emphasis on rationally organizing, mechanizing, and scientifically managing household labor raised expectations for housekeeping, while having little impact on the gender division of labor in the home.44 This phenomenon intersects with broader trends of the 1950s and 1960s. As scholars exploring family, gender roles in the paid labor force, and official and popular ideas about equality demonstrated, the reemergence of the woman question under

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Khrushchev did not lead to its resolution. Essentially, despite such achievements as sending the first woman into space, a sizable increase in state-paid maternity leave, and the appointment of a woman (Ekaterina Furtseva) to the highest echelon of power (the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party), gender stereotypes remained deeply entrenched in Soviet society.45 Where the distinctly female domain of the kitchen was concerned, as Reid astutely noted, “Made to woman’s measure, for an isolated female worker to serve her family, the new kitchen was confirmed as woman’s domestic workspace and hers alone.”46 For one, the economical kitchen of the new small-sized apartment made the presence of more than one body awkward. At the same time, the level of production and quality of domestic aids did not meet the rapidly rising demand for goods like washing and sewing machines and refrigerators.47 In addition, architects, scientists, doctors, and social scientists now came to delineate normative domestic practices, which began to trump the practical experience of “female amateurs.”48 These experts would determine modern socialist norms of hygiene and efficiency where housework was concerned, much as design professionals aimed to do in the realm of decorating. Thus, if the individual kitchen corresponded to the overall harmonization of traditional domestic space with technological innovation, concurrent expert recommendations, home economics advice and training, the dearth of appliances, and negligible change in attitudes prevented the revolution in daily life for women that the kitchen of the separate apartment promised. As a curious counterpoint, even as design experts were engrossed in rationalizing and beautifying the individual prefabricated kitchen, official discourse about consumer services suggested that its role, as well as that of the homemaker, would eventually wither away. The socialized house kitchen (domovaia kukhnia), located on the ground floor of apartment buildings, was expected to fill the void. More broadly, it was projected to contribute to “liberating women from the burden of labor-intensive housekeeping” and thereby further the development of a new form of living.49 House kitchens were to aid these objectives by serving lunches, as well as selling dishes prepared on the premises for daily dinners and even holiday meals that could be ordered in advance. One reader of Rabotnitsa with a family of four claimed to enjoy the services of her local house kitchen on a daily basis and praised it for reducing her household obligations. Encapsulating the appropriate effect of this type of service establishment, she exclaimed, “I forgot the running about shops . . . and was entirely freed from kitchen concerns,” adding that she would not have been able to prepare such delicious meals herself.50 The provision of a wide range of consumer conveniences was connected not only to female emancipation, but also to the larger goal of Communism.

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This is evident in a rhetorical piece that appeared in Krokodil featuring a conversation about house kitchens that the author purportedly shared with a fellow passenger on a train from Moscow to Ivanovo. During the journey, the latter had revealed her dream of a large new apartment building, complete with a kitchen operated by an experienced cook, preparing meals for all the tenants. The author responded that such kitchens actually exist, for example in new housing on the outskirts of Ivanovo. Astounded, the “dreamer” exclaimed, “This is Communism!”51 Having established through this anecdote a link between byt and ideology, the article shifted to an earnest discussion of how the efficiency of house kitchens, as well as the affordability and the quality of the food they produce, might be improved. It concluded by reinforcing the greater import of this convenience for women, with the author hailing the house kitchen as signaling “a revolution in daily life!”52 As in the case of efficient housekeeping, release from meal preparation meant that women would have more time to dedicate to family matters that fell within the female domain. For instance, one state and Party resolution stemming from Khrushchev’s Twentieth Party Congress address on the “welfare of the people” presented the provision of public catering as freeing millions of women from household concerns and thereby enabling them to occupy themselves with the more socially useful labor of childrearing. 53 However, the popularity of house kitchens—despite accolades published in the press—remains questionable. 54 If liberating women was riddled with problems, much like the new housing design, consumer goods production and urban planning that were to make it possible, what can be discerned from the larger “ ‘dialectical contradiction’ in housing policy—between the expansion and extension of public services, on the one hand, and the provision of a high standard of comfort in the home, on the other”?55 Shortcomings aside, relating the housing program to broader initiatives like the emancipation of women served to fuse policy aimed at providing individual family apartments with expectations for social collaboration. After all, in the larger scheme of daily life, neighborhood amenities like house kitchens served not only women, but also the community as a whole. Thus, alongside the general communist restructuring of daily life, they were conceptually linked to transformations in the purpose of dwellings over time, as much as to the goal of liberating women. To illustrate, one piece outlining how traditional chores like baking bread had been transferred to social enterprises claimed that such modern services not only freed women from time-consuming tasks, but also promoted “the spirit of collectivism and genuine comradeship” and engendered “the organic unity of the individual and social sectors.”56 In this way, the synchronization of all aspects of socialist dwelling was to inspire harmonious living on a wider plane.

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Disappointment and Satire in the Housewarming Narrative Even as the pleasures and benefits of the separate apartment were officially proclaimed, countless stories—from letters to local newspaper editors written by outraged tenants, to provocative feuilletons—publicly exposed the failure of the housewarming and undermined official pronouncements about housing ideals.57 The author of one article that appeared in Krok­ odil asked readers to imagine a new building, with balconies and a nice entrance, in a new district, on a new street. Then, assuming a somber tone, he divulged that even before the happy smiles had faded from their faces, the new residents found themselves desperate to “fly away from their nest” to escape the numerous shortcomings that confronted them. He added that buildings like this exist everywhere—in cities as diverse as Moscow and Votkinsk in the Udmurt Autonomous Republic. Yet, he lamented, the problems evident in abundance in the editorial mailbag inexplicably seem to merit no consideration amid the multitude of figures compiled by the Central Statistical Administration. Meanwhile, builders insist that construction is proceeding well, but for occasional defects that will soon be rectified. Speaking on behalf of his readership, the author protested such reasoning, asserting that people live “not in the future” but in the here and now. They therefore need such “trivial” things as doors that open and close properly. 58 One feuilleton began by extolling the happiness of a Leningrad family on the occasion of its move from a “tiny little room” to its own separate two-room apartment. The subtitle, however, foreshadowed the unpleasantness that awaited the new tenants: “Move in—shed a few tears.” Soon after settling into their new home, the family discovered that their radiator leaked and that water from the apartment above flowed into the kitchen and bathroom because of faulty water pipes. After repeated attempts at repair had failed, the author of this piece wondered, “Is it not time to eliminate these defects and to not darken the joy of the housewarming for residents of a new building?”59 The occasional satirical “diary of a new settler” similarly highlighted the simultaneous elation and chagrin of recent residents, typifying their trials and tribulations. In one such account, a group of tenants who had been waiting for months for their electricity to be installed dramatically likened their daily experience to “going through purgatory.”60 Meanwhile, stories about “second housewarmings” undermined tales of resurrection by depicting residents of older buildings returning to their apartments after major repairs had been conducted, only to find that conditions were as terrible as, if not worse than, when they had left their homes in order to facilitate extensive renovation.61 This problem occurred so frequently that in 1961 construction trusts began providing a “guarantee certificate” (garantiinyi pasport)—essentially a contract outlining the specific

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2.4  This cartoon satirizes shortcomings in new housing construction. The woman asks, “What do you have all this for?” while the man replies, “I have received an apartment in a new building”—as if no further explanation is needed. Krokodil, 30 January 1956, 14.

repairs to be completed at a particular address within a set period of time. Already by 1962, however, such “guarantees” had come to be viewed as nothing more than documentary evidence of unfulfilled obligations and efforts to rectify cases of extreme disrepair. This is implicit in the following subtitle of a newspaper report on the subject, inspired by letters from readers: “Guaranteed Shortcomings.”62 The fact that unsatisfactory housewarmings (including “second” ones) and shoddy construction were common themes in the national magazine Krokodil, indicates the ubiquity of such disappointment throughout the Soviet Union. As one correspondent claimed, despite the current, grandiose housing campaign, the thousands of families moving into new buildings comprise but “a drop in the ocean” and, moreover, there are many “flies in the ointment.” Underscoring his assertion with humorous embellishment, he stated that while an unprecedented number of “good, fully equipped buildings” had been erected in Astrakhan, in reality, they were “fundamentally bad.” In one of these buildings, the radiator had apparently exploded in a fountain reminiscent of Peterhof, damaging the floor and furniture. In another, tenants on the first floor were inundated with gaseous fumes from their radiator—although they at least had central heating, while those on the upper floor were freezing. The reporter blamed such “disgraceful” circumstances on “economizing” and indifference toward the people. The former was clearly a jab at a key principle of housing construction—building economically—while the latter was surely an underhanded reference to the very motivation underpinning official policy, concern for the people.63 Given the overabundance of defects that inspired both the feuilletonist and the Soviet variant of the investigative journalist, in one feature on novostroika, a new resident urged that housing be built “so that people will

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be satisfied with new buildings.” She elaborated that the gladness of the housewarming is overshadowed when light switches do not work, the gas installation is incomplete, and frames are mounted so poorly that tenants cannot open their windows.64 This piece, which appeared in Vechernii Len­ ingrad in 1961, apparently inspired the “heated comments of readers” offering all manner of advice for construction workers. Most demanded better quality construction and repair, complaining about problems like windows being installed with broken glass and carelessly laid parquet flooring. Based on the letters they had received, the editors concluded that people had a keen interest in housing being built “better, faster, and cheaper.”65 As popular commentary indicated, ordinary individuals expected dwellings to be reasonable in terms of quality; for them, building “better” was the most critical component of official housing construction mandates. Clearly, by trying to work quickly and economically, builders had jeopardized communist living. As one propaganda brochure declared, “the maximum development of the construction of well-equipped habitation” was crucial to the battle of restructuring daily life.66 When it came to essential amenities in particular, conditions were worse for those experiencing a housewarming in a provincial locale. For instance, one report in Krokodil incorporating grievances submitted by readers from the old town of Tikhvin (in Leningrad oblast) cited the assault on the senses and personal dignity of residents whose plumbing was so inadequate that they had to wash their laundry in the river. Even more offensive was the state of the plumbing and heating systems in nearby Boksitogorsk and Pikalevo—two established settlements that had arisen as cities during the previous decade. The author suggested that such situations are all the more distressing as daily life becomes “richer and more joyful.”67 Other exposés demonstrating the persistence of the “idiocy of rural life” provided yet another negative variant of the motif of resurrection. According to one investigative report, because of poor planning, the water supply in some parts of Kharkov and its surrounding settlements often flowed at only half, or even quarter, capacity. This necessitated that residents rush to their water pipes with buckets, pots, pans, and washbasins at all hours to stock up whenever water was available. The author of this piece marveled that the inhabitants of such a large, attractive manufacturing city should habitually be subjected to so much nuisance. “What a discrepancy!” he proclaimed.68 Clearly, such circumstances were not normal for a socialist society. Like construction and repair workers, as well as officials responsible for state planning and municipal services, the socialist architect charged with designing modern housing was also not immune from criticism. Indeed the housewarming narrative included commentary not only on serious structural defects with bearing on the functionality of a dwelling, but also on

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architectural designs that had failed to produce bright, comfortable, and convenient living conditions. In one account, the resident of a new building in a settlement outside of Groznyi complained about hallways so narrow only a cat could pass through them—circumstances that required her wardrobe and sideboard to be moved into her apartment through a window on the second floor. The author of this piece reported that the head architect of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic had dismissed genuine design problems like awkward corridors and doorways as mere “nonsense” (pustiaki) that tenants could alter by themselves. As a case in point, the responsible architect was purported to have offered the tenant the following illogical and insensitive antidote to the problem of tight hallways: “lose some weight.”69 Alongside architectural specifications like narrow hallways, the advantages of standardization were also publicly dispelled. As early as 1960, architects and building specialists acknowledged the “real danger of the rise of expressionless and monotonous construction” in new city districts and questioned whether the housing crisis should be resolved solely on the basis of standardized buildings of five stories.70 They similarly admitted that in emphasizing efficiency and economy, they confronted the dilemma of making buildings using industrial methods, and the districts around them, “attractive and poetic in their own way” so that a unique sense of place and of home “impresses itself upon the consciousness of each inhabitant.”71 In popular culture, the overwhelming uniformity of new housing construction became the subject of affable humor. This is exhibited in a short story submitted to Krokodil that presents a predicament resembling that central to the classic Brezhnev-era film Ironiia sud′by (The irony of fate).72 The tale begins with the protagonist having returned home from work, distracted by the sports page of his newspaper as he opens the door to his apartment. He then enters the standard stillness of his apartment, walks around, runs his fingers along the dusty furniture, and smokes a cigarette before facing the most cumbersome moment for a bachelor like himself: the work day has ended but it is too early to go to sleep. He therefore decides to tidy his apartment, and while doing so, finds much amiss. For one, there are flowers on the windowsill, but he figures that his aunt, who has a key, must have placed them there. In the kitchen, he finds that someone has eaten most of the loaf of bread and the kefir he had bought the previous night. Finally turning to his bedroom, he notices that the television set and dresser are out of place. Nevertheless, he manages to fall asleep. When it is morning, the protagonist awakens to a smiling stranger standing by the bed, who exclaims, “Nothing unusual!” and explains that he had simply entered the wrong apartment the previous night. “I too once confused [another] ‘individual’ dwelling [individual′noe zhiloe] [for my own],” he

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consoles the protagonist, attributing the error to this “most common episode of standard bachelor living.”73 Together with inadequacies in construction and the intense standardization of design, housewarmings could be spoiled also by shortcomings in urban planning. Specifically, consumer networks in areas of new construction failed to satisfy the demands of their increasing population because service and cultural establishments were rarely completed in tandem with new apartment houses—even in buildings where special premises had been allotted for them.74 According to one estimate, housing in new districts was sometimes occupied one to two years before the appearance of amenities.75 Consequently, their tenants might have had to walk numerous blocks or travel several bus stops to buy groceries and other basic necessities. Long queues and slow service added to this inconvenience, as visiting customers frequented shops already brimming over with the residents who inhabited the neighborhood where they were located.76 A 1962 exposé revealed that while tens of thousands of Leningraders had celebrated housewarmings in the Malaia Okhta district in recent years, the “grief of new settlers” was considerable, for they also wanted places to buy produce or eat lunch close to home. However, despite plans to build a canteen, a children’s shop, and other establishments, the realization of consumer-oriented building projects lagged far behind housing construction.77 The paucity of consumer amenities within blocks of novostroika primarily affected women, thereby contradicting proclamations of the remarkable conveniences of the new mikroraion, alongside those of new housing, to fulfill the socialist promise to liberate women. This became especially clear during the 1960s when Soviet sociologists eagerly endeavored to quantify various elements of male and female byt, particularly those related to household chores. Drawing on the array of time-budget studies that these professionals ended up amassing, Gail Lapidus discerned that Soviet women spent an average of twenty-eight hours per week on housework, compared to men, who spent about twelve hours per week on this general task; the number of hours available for free time was roughly the reverse for each sex. Although she found that men and women, to some degree, shared responsibility for shopping, the tasks of cooking and laundry—two fundamental services that the mikroraion was supposed to provide—remained largely the domain of women.78 The 1969 novella A Week Like Any Other offers an emotive and sometimes sardonic qualitative portrait of the impact of the dearth of consumer amenities—alongside prescribed female gender roles and attitudes toward women—on the daily life of the average Soviet woman. In it, Natalya Baranskaya offers a glimpse into a typical week for her heroine, Olga, and her female colleagues. Throughout, Olga struggles to balance her work obligations, professional development goals, love life, and childrearing

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with everyday household tasks like queuing for fresh produce, preparing meals, bathing her children, and mending and ironing the family clothing. Also evocative of the times, the women in this fictional story are summoned to complete “A Questionnaire for Women” in addition to the multitude of other tasks they must fulfill.79 Like the wave of time-budget studies of its day, this novella demonstrated the impact of the scarcity of consumer services on the socialist goal of female emancipation. A product of the Brezh­nev era, it also offered stark evidence that even by the end of the Khru­ shchev years, the objective to provide sufficient and effective public dining facilities, daycares, laundries, and repair shops had not been realized. To offer a quantitative sense of the dearth of services in the Soviet Union, by one calculation, in 1964, there were roughly four service establishments (including ones for repairing shoes, clothing, furniture, electronics and appliances, for chemical cleaning and dying, and for custom-making shoes and clothing) for every 10,000 people.80 According to another estimate, by 1965, only 113,000 personal and repair establishments were operating to serve an urban population of 122,000,000.81 Given the chronicles of “spoiled” housewarmings that appeared concurrent with glowing accounts of new construction, it is not surprising that among the terms generated by the housing campaign of the Khru­ shchev era—which were already being used colloquially in the 1960s—none were positive. The separate apartment (otdel′naia kvartira) quickly came to be designated khrushchëba—a play on the words Khrushchev and tru­ shchëba (slum)—or else kuriatnik (chicken coop). Both terms denoted buildings of poor quality that were small, uncomfortable, and in need of repair and renovation. Moreover, as Irina Corten showed in her Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture, Cherëmushki was eventually applied to any new neighborhood “with shoddy tenements” constructed in haste and lacking attention to detail—far removed from the model experimental housing construction site that the real Cherëmushki district initially represented. At the same time, the term dolgostroi—derived from the words longtime (dolgo) and build (stroit′)—characterized slow, inefficient housing construction, while nedos­ troika (from ne dostroit′ or not to finish building) came to signify construction projects left incomplete due to lack of materials or mismanagement.82 Meanwhile, caricatures suggest that the very concept of the housewarming became overused and exaggerated. This was conveyed in a satirical piece published in 1963, titled “Thousands of housewarmings.” The author claimed to know one family whose members had celebrated five separate “housewarmings” during the previous year: the husband, with the creation in his factory of a new fully automated department; his wife, in connection with the opening of a new house kitchen near their apartment; the grandmother, a pensioner who enjoys reading, with the unveiling of a new library; the older child, with the opening of a new school;

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2.5  In this rendition of dolgostroi, the pronouncements on the block panels chronicle years of unfulfilled promises as the completion date of this building is repeatedly delayed. Each panel reads, “We will absolutely complete construction in 19__,” with the given year continually shifting forward in time. Krokodil, 20 June 1960, 6.

and the youngest child, a five-year-old, with new kindergarten premises. The author playfully proclaimed that the word “housewarming” is “more all-embracing than we usually imagine.” Thus, he stated, people say to a new metro line or a new television tower—“Happy Housewarming [S novosel′em]!” and when Valentina Tereshkova flew into outer space, people offered the greeting, “Happy celestial housewarming!”83 As satirical depictions indicate, the housewarming constituted an imperfect and unstable scenario. What then of its power to convey the Revolution-being-realized? The divergence between ideal and reality that complicated the grand housewarming narrative is to be expected, but the degree of public acknowledgement of deficiencies in the general restructuring of everyday life suggests something of a postsocialist realist image

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of the Soviet system. The theme of the housewarming and the notion of housing as a gift to the people were not new. Victor Buchli demonstrated, for example, that the housewarming had been “a distinct genre of Stalinist socialist realist mythology.”84 Whether it appeared in magazines, newspapers, or films, the archetypal plot revolved around a deserving worker moving from his or her communal apartment or village hut into a new apartment building. Despite continuing paternalism, the relationship between state and society depicted within the framework of the ambitious scheme to provide each family a separate apartment was more genuinely reciprocal under Khrushchev than in previous regimes. As Jeffrey Brooks showed, where “public allocations of resources” were concerned, Lenin had designated the vanguard Party as the principal benefactor of Soviet society, while Stalin cultivated a sense of indebtedness to and dependence on him, personally, even in cases in which an individual was officially distinguished as enjoying state patronage because of his or her own heroic exploits or sacrifices.85 Brooks asserted, “Private rewards and enjoyment were public goods that came from Stalin”; by nature then, this exchange rendered the recipient beholden to his or her patron.86 By the Khrushchev era, gratitude had evolved to encompass a sense of esteem for the state, for fellow workers and for the ideology that made the housewarming celebration possible—Communism. When Fëdor Sopin was awarded the Hero of Socialist Labor, this soldier-turned-assembler thanked his friends, the Party and his Rodina (native land), promising to honor the title bestowed on him in the appropriate manner—“with new buildings.”87 As under Stalin, this circular tale of a feat completed, performance validated, and further exploits promised, served to resolve tension between revolutionary selflessness and personal interest. What is curious in the case of Sopin and other model builders featured in the press during the 1950s and 1960s is that it remains unclear whether any material reward was forthcoming for them. Meanwhile, those depicted as benefitting from committed labor in some other field by receiving a separate apartment were by no means cast as personally indebted to a single entity (the vanguard Party) or one sole individual (the leader as paterfamilias).88 Rather, even as it was orchestrated by the regime and presented as the substantiation of concern for the person, state housing was portrayed as a gift attributable also to the unwavering dedication of heroic builders working in the interest of their fellow citizens, and what is more, accessible to any hardworking citizen. A piece that appeared about a year before the 1957 housing decree encapsulated the burgeoning relationship between novostroika, communist ideology, and state paternalism; the collective interests and contributions of citizens; and the impact of all these factors on the broader social

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body. The author highlighted the commitment of the Communist Party to follow “the Leninist path—to create all for the welfare of the Soviet person,” who in turn would display character traits “distinctive of the epoch of socialism.” Showing such accord already in evidence, he commended his local readership, stating, “We all vividly feel the working-class pulse of our city. In Leningrad, all live by ideas and thoughts of movement forward.” Offering a variation on the motif “then versus now,” he stated that while in the past it was believed that “the place beautifies the person,” it is now recognized that “the person beautifies the place.” Allusions to innovation, the rationalization of production, and “audacious labor exploits” further reinforced the notion that the overall improvement of byt was a massive collective endeavor.89 In addition to representing a mutation in Soviet gift culture, the housewarming narrative reflected a hybrid of what Vladimir Paperny distinguished as “Culture One” and “Culture Two.” According to Paperny, the first of these, which extended from 1917 to 1932, was based on “instability, futurism, movement, change, equality, and collectivism.” The second, which spanned the Stalin years, was characterized by “stability, history, immobility, durability, hierarchy, and individualism.”90 In housing discourse of the Khrushchev period, declarations about the return to revolutionary ideals, concern for the person, building socialism, and movement toward the brilliant communist future were interwoven with emphasis on decent, dignified living. The reaffirmation of consumer needs was another aspect of the Thaw connected to housing. This was writ large during the Kitchen Debate when Khrushchev infamously proclaimed that the Soviet Union would soon overtake Capitalism. Hosting the American National Exhibition, the context in which this discussion occurred, itself demonstrated official confidence that the inadequacies that were a feature of Soviet daily life were diminishing. It also suggested that although the United States might serve as a model where the material elements of consumer culture were concerned, socialism would ultimately prove to be a superior regime. Such optimism can be attributed to the 1957 launch of Sputnik, the successes of Soviet Bloc exhibitions at the 1958 Brussels World Fair, and the recognition as an amiable contestant vis-à-vis the United States that collaboration in staging national exhibitions had conferred on the Soviet Union.91 New and refurbished housing districts, buildings-in-progress, and even shortcomings in novostroika were all part of the movement from the capitalist past to the communist future. This dialectic was evident even in the realm of architecture, contrary to the conventional view of the rigidity of standardized housing built under Khrushchev. Despite his early decree that architects should limit themselves to simple designs, experimentation continued. For instance, in a 1961 article that appeared in Stroitel′stvo i arkhitektura Leningrada (Construction

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and architecture of Leningrad), experts explained that it was necessary to continue to perfect the mikroraion so as to ensure that it would adequately reflect collectivism, as well as the development of social principles in the organization of daily life.92 Essentially, revising designs, like rectifying construction defects, connoted progress. In the meantime, happy housewarmings in completed apartment blocks confirmed that socialist normalcy or “life as it ought to be” was steadily being actualized. By highlighting “the absurdities of the familiar and the familiarity of the absurd” and revealing “deformities in society,” feuilletons fulfilled a similar purpose.93 As shown, those pertaining to housing indirectly conveyed desired norms by portraying a particular place and moment (with the precise details substituting for anyone anywhere), as they delineated conditions anomalous to a transformative socialist byt that also happened to be hampering movement toward the radiant future. Although especially biting with their use of hyperbole, feuilletons, together with critical reports published in the press, mirrored the content of complaints about the separate apartment voiced by citizens in venues as varied as public meetings with architects and housing officials, comment books provided at housing exhibitions, and letters submitted to architectural congresses.94 That said, although material defects and the slow pace of communist advancement were widely acknowledged, the jovial indignation that could accompany exposés in newspapers and magazines was often absent in unpublished complaints about novostroika.95 Moreover, explicit references to the serious impact of poor housing on health, hygiene, and human relationships were rarely made even in the most damning of published features on new housing blocks and housewarmings.96 According to one calculation, between 1956 and 1970, over 126,000,000 Soviet citizens—more than half the country—moved into new housing.97 Still, the promise of the ideal house and home that Cherëmushki and Shchemilovka represented eluded many. As the British journalist Alexander Werth noted during a visit to Moscow in 1959, notwithstanding spectacular building efforts, “there was still plenty of grumbling; the more ‘irresponsible’ citizens were arguing along the lines that, instead of sending rockets around the moon, they had better hurry up with the housing program.”98 That the supply of decent housing continued to lag behind demand was also evinced by a 1960 questionnaire on living standards conducted by the Komsomol′skaia pravda Institute of Public Opinion. Of the more than 1,000 individuals surveyed, nearly 53 percent cited housing construction as the number one state priority, more pressing than matters concerning salary, the availability of produce and consumer goods, the length of the work day, and consumer services.99 On a related note, when asked how their quotidian problems might generally be improved, the largest number of

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informants—nearly 40 percent—offered proposals related to housing issues.100 The responses to these surveys echoed the dissatisfaction over housing that Soviet citizens were publicly voicing in newspapers and magazines throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Together, they amplified the fact that despite the millions of square meters of living space that were being built, the Soviet housing stock, at best, was only approaching adequacy. The frustration that continuing scarcity and shortcomings in novostroika generated was reflected in Soviet anekdoty as well. One joke recounts an annual meeting of the State Housing Construction Committee and notes two topics on the agenda: “the building of new apartment houses and the building of Communism. The chairman opens the meeting: ‘In view of the fact that we have no bricks and no mortar, let us devote today’s session to the discussion of the second question.’ ”101 As this anekdot implies, was “building Communism” merely a diversion, a “red mirage” concocted by the state and Party to placate a populace disgruntled with its standard of living?102 This chapter has asserted that building Communism was inherently connected with housing provision during the transition to separate apartments under Khrushchev. Official commitment to both goals was substantiated by the numerous ideological treatises devoted to mass housing and by the enormous amount of living space actually built. Furthermore, with millions of citizens actually experiencing a housewarming, the fact that “bricks and mortar” were at times in short supply did not diminish the promise that the housing program held. This is encapsulated in the 1962 Yuri Pimenov painting A Wedding on Tomorrow Street. At its center is a smiling, just married couple leading its wedding party over wooden planks across a muddy construction site. Implicit in this celebratory, if still being-built world, is the sense that for these newlyweds, the happiness of their own little Utopia is near. The metal cranes soaring in the background, meanwhile, gesture toward the future abundance of joyous housewarmings. That policy inspired confidence in the regime is suggested by the vigor with which thousands of Soviet citizens seeking better housing during the Khrushchev years petitioned local and national officials. Pertinent to the housewarming narrative under scrutiny here is the way in which these petitioners, clearly familiar with government policy, appropriated the rhetoric of progress and asked why they themselves were not benefiting from the extensive construction they witnessed everywhere around them. For example, in a 1963 letter to Khrushchev, the factory worker G. P. Isaenkov rhetorically asked why, given the grandiose building efforts taking place in Leningrad, he and his wife could not be immediately allotted a mere oneroom apartment.103 The adverse living conditions that motivated housing petitions raises the issue of the “mythological level” of Soviet society after Stalin, as well as

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the question of popular faith in the basis of mass housing provision—the Revolution.104 Surveys of ordinary Russians conducted in the late 1990s on the interrelationship between power and society during the Khrushchev period are revealing in this respect. When asked how they had viewed “the idea of a society of universal equality and prosperity,” respondents tended to connect it to daily life issues, often related to consumption. This was the case for both individuals who claimed to have believed in Communism, and those who purportedly did not. Curious are the reasons for “belief” that were cited. These included faith in Communism (“Everyone believed, and we as well.”); hope for the future (“This [Communism] was a beautiful tale for us, we believed that we were building a society of universal equality and fraternity.”); and the basic appeal of Communism (“You know, they promised us something pleasant, why not believe?”). Some of the more optimistic respondents cited the housing program—for which they “owed thanks to Khrushchev”—for their positive outlook. One worker who had received a separate apartment for his family, exclaimed, “This was simply fantastical!” Of course “belief in Communism” could effectively be divorced from the socialist messages of the Khrushchev period. For instance, one teacher stated, “We believed in a good life in the future, but what it would be called—Communism or not—for us was unimportant.” Other respondents claimed to have believed in socialist ideas, but felt that Communism was “rubbish” and that universal equality was unattainable simply because some people would always live better than others. Even more enigmatic was the following assertion: “We believed in everything then: in God, and in Communism, and in Khrushchev.”105 As such sentiments suggest, the meanings with which people imbued the housing campaign were not necessarily (or genuinely) “socialist” in nature. For individuals who had obtained a separate apartment, as well as for those still awaiting their housewarming, comfortable and convenient housing was associated with universal aspirations to live with dignity, enjoy intimate moments with family and friends, and nurture and develop the self.106 Turning to the matter of ideological conviction, among those who for the most part did not believe in Communism, a number were pessimistic because life remained difficult and seemed like it would not improve. These respondents viewed Communism as a “joke” and felt that “breadand-butter” issues were more relevant than the drivel that the Communist Party was spewing. Indeed the most prominent uprising in Russia under Khrushchev was rooted in elementary, quotidian concerns: in June 1962, spontaneous protests arose in the city of Novocherkassk in response to low wages and the announcement of price increases for butter and meat. These culminated in a mass demonstration that the state quickly and brutally suppressed. Yet those who engaged in protest were not necessarily

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2.6  Eager to move into his new building, the father of the family standing on the far right points toward the empty sky above a construction site, prompting his wife and children to imagine their apartment—the one on the fifth floor, with a corner window. Krokodil, 30 May 1960, 6.

anticommunist, as evinced by participants who carried pictures of Lenin as they marched.107 If the evocativeness of Communism should not be dismissed, nor should the potential for a better life for those who received new housing during the 1950s and 1960s or even the possibilities suggested by the construction sites that dotted the urban landscape. As Harrison Salisbury noted with respect to Cherëmushki, this operetta served as a kind of a fairy story about Cherëmushki. Never have buildings been so beautiful. Never have colors been painted so bright. Never have neighbors been so happy. . . . All this is not the real Cherëmushki. But it faithfully represents what Cherëmushki means to Moscow and its citizens. It is Moscow’s daydream of what Cherëmushki is.108

Qualifying his assertion, Salisbury added that compared with the basement apartments in which some citizens were living, Cherëmushki seemed like paradise. Quite simply, official housing objectives resonated with individuals seeking a good apartment equipped with modern amenities, with consumer services nearby. But settling in would entail responsibilities, as well as pleasures. “Socialist” character traits and values—also rooted in the Revolution—were not to be diminished in the interest of the individual family living that the separate apartment signified. This is intimated by the fictional Andrei of Dorogi, kotorye my vybiraem (see chapter 1). The fact is that his main purpose in visiting Moscow is not to see the marvels of new construction, as it initially appears, but rather to visit his old “flame” Svetlana. Nevertheless, upon observing the great feats of building in the Southwestern district

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of the capital, he claims, “that Svetlana lived precisely here, and not in some kind of quiet, cozy, Arbat side-street, brought me joy.”109 As a serious worker, Andrei derides the long inhabited Arbat neighborhood, identified with elitism and intellectualism. At the same time, her residence in a new housing district suggests that Svetlana is of like mind with him—implicitly, as progressive as the construction methods underpinning her material habitat. Indeed the new material order—incorporating interior design, furniture, and decoration—was not just intended to render the Soviet home a signifier of socialism. It was also expected to transform its residents.

C H A P T E R 3

INTERIOR SPACES Building the Socialist Person from Within

AFTER MOVING into her newly built apartment, Tonia, the female protagonist of Posle svad′by (After the wedding), finds herself habitually going straight from work to the department store to gaze upon the rugs, sideboards, and refrigerators, amid the bustle of people shopping and clerks packaging goods. She marvels “that so many wonderful things exist in the world” but is “depressed” by them, for it will take months to accumulate everything she needs for her new home.1 Such excitement and concern over furnishing a new apartment were no doubt common among individuals moving into single-family housing during the Khrushchev period. One government and Party official reflected in his memoirs that when he and his family moved from the barracks of the factory where he was employed, first to a room in a communal apartment and then into a separate apartment, acquiring furniture was always an issue; it helped that he was able to obtain some of the metal-framed army beds that were produced at his workplace. 2 Like the fictional Tonia—though lacking her wonderment— his family appeared to be burdened by the energy and expense required to make a new apartment functional and homey. Settling into new housing customarily demands that residents supplement their furnishings to fill additional space they have acquired or to best arrange domestic configurations that are novel to them. Alongside consumerism, the process of making a house a home also typically engenders tension, as Peter Corrigan characterized it, between the “master narrative” of the ensemble envisioned by those who design dwellings, and “the personal

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epic of the subject” that individual pieces of décor selected by the consumer represent.3 In the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s, architects and artists eager to proffer advice for making appropriate choices for furniture and decorative wares were instrumental in shaping the “master narrative.”4 Determined to persuade new residents to fulfill their creative projections, these professionals appeared to be intent on establishing the parameters of taste. They therefore positioned themselves to monitor individual style and to limit the extent to which the ordinary consumer might graft a “personal epic” onto his or her domestic interior. 5 Soviet experts posturing for social influence benefited not only from their self-identification with proper taste, but also from the ideologically charged notion of dizain over which they presided. As Victor Buchli discerned, the Russian variant of the word design implied an assemblage of normative principles connected with the character of material objects that was intended to ensure the rationalization of the domestic sphere in accordance with the larger ideological goal of eradicating petit-bourgeois consciousness.6 For example, organizing furniture to create discrete zones of use within a room was important both to fulfilling design projections for functionality and to making the home socialist by disrupting the overtly “middle class” centripetal hearth, anchored by the dinner table.7 Clearly, practical and stylistic matters were not the only considerations of import in the selection of household wares and the layout of the home. This is strikingly illustrated by the unease with homemaking that the aforementioned Tonia experiences. The recently married protagonist feels that it is her duty to furnish the apartment into which she and her husband Igor have moved from their factory dormitory. However, she is anxious about becoming materialistic, and therefore scolded herself for greed[iness], called herself petit-bourgeois [a meshchanka], a Philistine [obyvatel′nitsa]. . . . But, finding herself in the store, surrounded by things glittering with newness, she forgot about everything, aroused by the desire to have all these beautiful things. Not for herself—for the house. . . . The temptation was a bit too much; she was not able to hold back and each time bought some trifle [meloch′] or other. Unforeseen purchases transgressed all her calculations and plans, but . . . she experienced incomparable pleasure, walking along the street with parcels, packages, and . . . at home, when it all tumbled out on to the table with a clamor.8

The compulsion to shop “for the house” depicted in this passage is matched by an obsession with decorating. Soon, these activities are interfering with the cultured life that Tonia and Igor once enjoyed, as hanging curtains and other such chores divert them from leisure pursuits like going to the cinema.9 More heartrending, by the end of the story, the apartment that the

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newlyweds had venerated and so joyfully anticipated moving into, now completed and furnished, has destroyed their intimacy and their entire relationship. In short, all the “things” that having their own place demanded, ended up creating a barrier between them. The denigration of negative character traits (greediness and Philistinism) and destructive strivings (petit-bourgeois materialism) expressed in Posle svad′by indicates the connection of the domestic realm to a key facet of byt reform within the broader culture of the Thaw that accompanied aesthetic de-Stalinization: communist morality. As Deborah Field demonstrated, fundamental to this concept was the belief that all personal matters— from sexual to decorating choices—hold implications for society as a whole and that private interests should therefore be synchronized with public goals. This vision for fusing personal and social concerns and actions necessitated strict attention to character and conduct within the confines of the home, as in public spaces. Communist ideology supplied the framework for domestic ideals, while housing provided by the state was the site where personal comportment and the intimate material world intersected with social life. In turn, a variety of professionals determined the norms for everyday life—from design experts distinguishing between good and bad taste and homemaking practices, to psychologists, physicians, educators, lawyers, and other specialists formulating prescriptions on family matters with innate ethical dimensions like spousal relations and childrearing.10 The connection between the Thaw and these various tenets of byt was precisely outlined in a treatise devoted to the intensification of socialist living. Beginning with an overview of the pivotal Twentieth Party Congress that highlighted its political context, it proclaimed, “Daily life should not be reduced merely to domestic comfort . . . , which is limited by household objects; daily life should not be severed from the everyday spiritual life [in a personal, rather than religious sense] of people.”11 The material, cultural, and moral surroundings of the individual, the aesthetic tastes, intellectual interests, and moral requirements of the person, as well as habits and dispositions, were all woven together as major elements of everyday life.12 Ideally, personal temperament would be characterized by qualities like sincerity, modesty, concern for others, courteousness, and tact, as well as cleanliness and order, to the exclusion of alcohol abuse, hooliganism, and coarse family relations.13 Thus, a healthy existence was associated not only with advancements in living conditions, but also with the strengthening of its moral foundation, integral to which was character building.14 This kind of outlook persisted throughout the Khrushchev era. A home economics manual published in 1962, for example, asserted that optimal daily life requires not only improvements in amenities and services, or personal well-being, but also “the strengthening of communist morals.”15

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The pronouncement of this ethical vision and the need to guide personal comportment in the home coincided with official declarations about the imminence of Communism and with the major political and social changes of the Thaw—each of which made the strengthening of communist living especially pressing. Scholars of material culture have noted the power of objects to manifest radical changes in society.16 In the Soviet case, an object as seemingly banal as a lampshade embodied transformations in society, in terms of aesthetics and values, across several periods. In her exploration of the late Stalin years, Vera Dunham presented “the orange lampshade, scalloped and fringed” as emblematic of bourgeois taste and values. She argued that this and other objects evoking coziness were rendered acceptable in postwar fiction by a regime intent on placating the “middle class” (for example, managers and engineers) in return for its participation in postwar reconstruction.17 During the Khrushchev period, the same kind of lampshade signaled objectionable character. Indeed from among her numerous acquisitions, the orange silk lampshade that Tonia purchases stands out as particularly abhorrent. The protagonist herself acknowledges it to be a “luxury,” admitting that she could have made one herself out of colored paper; yet it made her so happy that “to not buy it was not possible.”18 By implication then, she is impulsive and extravagant. This fictional portrait conformed to contemporary pronouncements: design professionals deemed lampshades with “massive, wire frameworks . . . covered with silk of the most malicious colors and shades” hideous to look at, imparting gloominess to a room, and concentrating light in some parts and leaving others dark.19 Signifying vulgarity in taste and considered antithetical to the demands of the contemporary interior, they metaphorically shaded or obscured the nascent radiant communist future. Large, bulbous, ostensibly gaudy lampshades therefore suffered the same censure during the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s as they had during the revolutionary drives for asceticism of the 1920s. Convergences and divergences in ideas about taste and in the meanings ascribed to furnishing and décor across these two periods is one subject that will be detailed below. More broadly, this chapter will demonstrate that the Soviet domestic realm during the Thaw constituted a material cultural “artifact” of communist construction. Operating from the premise that “the study of material culture is the study of material to understand culture, to discover the beliefs—the values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions— of a particular community or society at a given time,” it explores the rich discourses on domestic objects and the individual that appeared in fiction, prescriptive literature on homemaking, and articles on home décor published in newspapers and magazines aimed at a general readership. 20 It thus emphasizes the “textualization of things,” that is the way in which decorative wares were depicted or invoked in writing. 21

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In essence, the structure and trappings of the Soviet home were to reflect a socialist mentality, outlook, and way of life. Yet works of fiction, particularly less officious melodramas, not infrequently presented contradictory messages. For instance, a homemaker could be a Philistine in some respects, and a model modern Soviet person in other ways. Whether conveying one characterization or another, however, domestic wares served as foils for normative personality traits, values, conduct, and overall level of refinement, as well as vehicles through which writers wove morality tales at a time when building socialism was viewed as contingent on communist morality. Decorating in Appropriate Measure—Behaving Appropriately With the domestic interior designated to provide a healthy, fulfilling byt for the individual and a strong moral foundation for society, the inner world of the person vis-à-vis his or her home was subjected to vigorous discussion. Design professionals went as far as to infuse decorating with psychological significance. One expert, for example, advised that “the ensemble of the interior” can affect “the entire internal, spiritual image [oblik] of a person.”22 Mirroring this conjecture, another proclaimed that the items people choose for their home, “say something about them, about their artistic taste, mood and types of character traits.”23 Given the extent to which the household realm was charged with shaping and representing the individual—and in turn, society as a whole—the Soviet woman was greatly empowered by her role as homemaker. After all, it was she who was ultimately responsible for household consumption and for cultivating a certain kind of cultural propriety, while simultaneously “containing” values and behaviors associated with Capitalism like individualism and materialism. 24 Nevertheless, even as they appointed women to shop for the home, Soviet experts essentialized women as “slaves to fashion.” Thus, much as in modern Western societies, consumption came to be associated with such contradictory concepts as “dutiful female domesticity” (positively connoting the maintenance of family status and propriety) and “fickle femininity” (implying immorality, enrapture and caprice). 25 Concerned about the excesses that the latter supposedly innate female trait might foster, Soviet design professionals endeavored to proscribe the creative impulses of homemakers, advising them to temper their immoderate and individualistic fixation with domesticity, and warning them that ecstatic consumerist decorating manias could undermine the functionality and discipline of their household. In an effort to restrain women, experts stipulated the nature of domestic wares, for example, associating old-fashioned ballooning silk, orange,

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fringed lampshades with poshlost′ (banality, bad taste, and obscenity) and contemporary conical plastic ones with “style” (in this instance, devoid of its potential negative connotation of fleeting trendiness).26 Moreover, acknowledging that too much attention to contemporariness might generate a false sense of cultured living, design professionals doggedly strove not only to direct homemaking, but also—if less frequently—to curtail the avarice and frivolity that the very deluge of advice on consumption for the home could engender. One member of the Union of Artists cautioned, for example, that the onslaught of “useful suggestions” for outfitting an apartment being offered in magazines, books, and television programs, are “a bit superficial” and are “starting to turn into a trend toward stylization” and “excesses”—even if in “ultra-contemporary form.”27 Feuilletonists too conveyed concern over prescriptions for “modern” homemaking. Although their modus operandi consisted of absurdly overplaying expert rhetoric, they also intimated the moral implications of excessive attention to the domestic sphere—a serious approach that 3.1  Model lampshades for modern living. even Krokodil followed. In fact, the D i SSSR, June 1960, 23. stated aim of this satirical publication was to expose all aspects of society antithetical to the Soviet state, Communist Party, and socialist values, as determined by the government and its organs of censorship.28 Krokodil’s editorial staff maintained that just and rigorous criticism of shortcomings in Soviet society would only hasten success in the struggle to build Communism.29 It is in accord with this same objective that other publications also at times employed biting satire to tackle extreme and unhealthy manifestations of homemaking smacking of coarse materialism.

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3.2  Here Krokodil offers women a “rational recommendation” for repurposing disused bulbous lampshades that have outlived their original purpose. The cartoon also ridicules women as “slaves to fashion.” Krokodil, 10 October 1960, 11.

Curiously, the apprehension that this indicated had a counterpart in the United States. According to Karal Ann Marling and Robert Zieger, already at the beginning of the 1950s, US writers, journalists and sociologists were expressing anxiety about the conformity, conventionality, bloated consumerism and stress of “keeping up with the Joneses” that they observed in their society.30 At the same time though, as Elaine Tyler May claimed, amid postwar consumer affluence, “the values associated with domestic spending upheld traditional American concerns with pragmatism and morality, rather than opulence and luxury.”31 In the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s, prominent in representations of characters entrenched in the home were the morally laden Russian concepts kul′turnost′ and meshchanstvo. The term kul′turnost′— literally “culturedness,” but conjuring up also notions of civility and modernity—invokes a mode of proper conduct in a broad sense that incorporates personal hygiene, tidiness, good manners, appropriate speech, and good taste.32 Meshchanstvo, a word associated with the middle class since the nineteenth century, encapsulates several concepts. It pejoratively denotes a lifestyle or mentalité considered base, vulgar, imitative, greedy, Philistine, without spiritual significance (particularly in contrast with that

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of the ascetic intelligentsia), and is connected with idleness or, alternatively, unmeasured careerism. With regard to the Soviet period, meshchanstvo was implicated in excessive attention to homemaking that was often characterized as a “female” vice linked to “fervor for possessions.” The personification of this quality thus tended to be the meshchanka (the feminine noun derived from meshchanstvo) and not the meshchanin (its masculine variant).33 Whether displayed in the privacy of the home or in a social setting, kul′turnost′ was commended and meshchanstvo was categorically maligned. Yet when it came to furnishing and decorating, there was a great deal of ambiguity regarding acceptable and unacceptable variants of comfort, as embodied in the vagueness of the meaning in Russian culture of another concept—coziness. The terms uiutnost′ and udobstvo—with the former denoting “coziness” and “comfortableness,” and the latter “comfort” and “convenience”—do possess positive connotations. However, a preoccupation with comfort (and its immoderate enjoyment or cultivation) was associated with meshchanstvo. Illustrative is the way in which the female protagonist of Moi Dorogi (My journeys) relates to various domestic interiors throughout the novel. Tina appears to be a cultured individual; she is introduced to the reader as witty, knowledgeable about art, and ambitious (she is determined to be a famous architect). Yet when she visits her boyfriend Pavel in Sibirsk, to where he has been relocated from Leningrad, she is ill at ease in his small, unadorned room. She therefore decides to stay with her acquaintances, the Petunins, in their prerevolutionary mansion, decorated with rugs and runners, pictures in massive frames, old and heavy furniture, as well as a multitude of knick-knacks—all indicators of meshchanstvo planted by the author to conjure up an association with the former merchant class. 34 Even more indefensible, Tina urges Pavel to revoke his work contract and return to Leningrad, essentially to relinquish his construction obligations simply because his material surroundings do not suit her. In the end, she abandons him during a crisis and marries Feliks Petunin. Her fickleness and attempts to corrupt the diligent and industrious Pavel confirm her petit-bourgeois nature, as foreshadowed in the opening pages of the novel by the description of her own home: overly spacious, her apartment is filled with an excess of statuettes, vases, and sentimental objects.35 Immoderate attention to coziness within the home—an implicitly bourgeois tendency—could be harmful in other ways as well. Namely, it could engender disaffection rather than create hominess, its intended effect. Boris of the short story “Khochu byt′ schastlivoi,” who is trapped in a loveless marriage, feels suffocated by his surroundings—the insipid “comforts” of a deep armchair and television set, a wide bed covered with a plush bedspread, and a bedside table overrun with bottles and little boxes of all

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sorts. Matters are made worse by the daily routine and artifice that accompany this undue lavishness. Boris positively dreads going home after work because his wife Liza has taken on the role of “angel of the hearth”; as soon as he crosses the threshold of their home, she is waiting for him, asking him if he is hungry, and serving him a towel when he goes to the bathroom to wash his hands.36 He also hates that Liza relishes spending time sitting and embroidering.37 Because only the idleness of too much leisure time could ostensibly permit such a hobby, this handicraft too is a blatant signifier of her petit-bourgeois nature. Characters like Liza, who cling to outmoded tastes and furnishings, as well as to archaic roles in the home, represent miscomprehension of what it means to live a satisfying life. Curiously though, excessive attention to decoration in keeping with the recommendations of experts—contemporary and functional in character—too could undermine peace and contentment within the home. This is the root of the many misfortunes encountered by Vladimir, the protagonist of a satirical feuilleton who is eventually provoked to leave his home when his world is upset by his receipt of a new apartment. After receiving the gift of housing from the state, he endures three months without sleep or rest as his wife speaks of nothing but shops, sideboards, sofas, and lamps. To make matters worse, he must abide by a number of new household rules inspired by her recent purchases: he has to eat in the small kitchen rather than the dining room in order to protect the finish on the dining room table; he is forbidden from opening the cupboard to take out a book to read for fear its glass doors might break; and it is “blasphemy” for him to nap during the day on the sofabed that has replaced their bed. Convinced that all these changes are making him “schizophrenic,” Vladimir finally presents his wife with an ultimatum. “Either me, or this window-dressing [butaforiia],” he exclaims, only to end up moving in with a pal of his (evidently a bachelor), where everything is “as you please” (kak ugodno) and he can lounge about on the sofa in peace.38 The yearning for the latest accoutrements of home décor that Vladimir could not fathom not only had the potential to disrupt households. Mistakenly conflating acquisitiveness with “knowing how to live”—as his wife did—also indicated materialism and superficiality. An apparent equivalent of the US concept of “keeping up with the Joneses,” in Russian popular consciousness, “to know how to live” could be associated “with slyness and resourcefulness, as well as with a certain degree of dishonesty.”39 This was certainly true of Simochka, the protagonist of another feuilleton. After two decades of living contently, she is driven to irrational consumption by professional prescriptions for rational designs. She first begins complaining to her husband Mikhail that “everyone” is moving into a new home, while they are “souring” “like idiots” in an old building. Then, when they

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are finally assigned a new apartment, Simochka does not want to move in with their “old ramshackle furniture” and insists that her husband find for their home some “marvelous” things. Mikhail finally loses patience when she demands a television set, asking, “Why ever do I have to have all the best?” Simochka replies that he is undervaluing himself—he is an academic engaged in serious work—and that she is concerned with their daily life and what people think about their family. In her estimation, keeping up with the Pletiugins (their neighbors who even have Finnish appliances) is crucial to projecting Mikhail’s workplace status on their family at home.40 Striving to adhere to contemporary prescriptions on homemaking and household wares willy-nilly, as Simochka did, was illogical within the scheme of communist morality. In accord with this ideology, consumption was rational, and individual desire justifiable, only if it promoted the development of society as a whole.41 With the state boasting astonishing progress in housing construction and notable increases in the output of household goods, it was not domestic objects that were being criticized in satires, but rather the compulsion to amass consumer goods and cultivate modishness. Ultimately then, the real causes for concern in the case of Simochka were the envy and rivalry with her neighbors that motivated her, not her yearning for a particular aesthetic; in short, accruing material objects for the sole purpose of social posturing was downright petit-bourgeois. This explains why even denigrated domestic wares like the “merchant” ones to which the inconstant Tina was drawn, did not always foreshadow negative moral temperament. In some instances, purportedly tasteless objects concealed the true, “positive” disposition of a character. This is illustrated in Vasily Aksenov’s short story “Na polputi k lune” (Halfway to the moon). The small house on a rural street in far eastern Khabarovsk that the character Lariska inhabits is decorated in a manner entirely antithetical to the ideals of contemporary design prescribed by experts. Her wardrobe with its mirrored doors, and her bulky dresser displaying elephant figurines—conventional markers of poshlost′—appear to be positively egregious. Yet these furnishings are described as “cultured.” Perhaps it is the addition of a modern electrical appliance, or else military paraphernalia that rendered the cumbersome furniture and inane statuettes excusable. Indeed in addition to its traditional elements, the home contains a radio, a portrait of Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, and a certificate recognizing Lariska as an excellent gunner and her “successes in battle and political training.”42 Thus, despite the initial impression that the vulgar knick-knacks conveyed, this was the home of a woman with a proclivity toward modern living, evidently committed to patriotic service. The moral import of conduct over taste in home décor is showcased in the short story “Moi sosedi” (My neighbors). The character Zoia, who blathers on about such “frivolous” matters as love and feelings, is depicted

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as the busybody of her communal apartment, constantly insinuating herself into the personal life of the other tenants. Moreover, her room is crammed with petit-bourgeois signifiers like doilies and cushions decorated with roses and gaudy parrots. Yet it is rendered endearing by the admission that this cozy dwelling “conceals in fanciful designs the melancholy minutes of a single woman.”43 Zoia’s apparently unhealthy obsession with decoration is thus sympathetically shown to be a means to escape loneliness. It is also counteracted by her collective sensibilities: Zoia turns out to be the anchor of her kommunalka, helping her fellow tenants reconcile disputes and find happiness in each other. Model behavior similarly trumps poor taste in the play Fabrichnaia devchonka (Factory girl). The corner of the dorm room that Zhen′ka shares is immediately presented as excessively cozy: her bed is covered with cushions and her bedside table is cluttered with mirrors and little boxes made out of seashells. She is initially presented as a reflection of her shallow tastes, as she is disinterested in the Komsomol and has no apparent goals. Over the course of the play, Zhen′ka is publicly denounced for indifference to the “group” and dismissed from her job after an absence from work. In the end, however, it becomes clear that she has been grossly misjudged: she is offered back her job when her peers finally recognize her excellent work record. Also evincing her admirable character, a new “factory girl” testifies that Zhen′ka was the only one in the dormitory who welcomed her with kind words, even presenting her with a decorative cushion.44 Zhen′ka is thereby redeemed as both an effective employee and genuinely collective-minded in her personal interactions—key attributes of the model communist. In other instances, a slavish approach to domestic objects could threaten the kind of commendable sociability that made a bumbling character like Zhen′ka a heroine. It could even undermine a major feature of Russian domestic life, namely robust hospitality.45 This is starkly illustrated in a didactic article that appeared in Rabotnitsa. Unlike the lonesome Zoia or the gregarious Zhen′ka, who were ensconced in cozy, old-fashioned surroundings but nevertheless proved to be exemplary social beings, the one-dimensional Anna depicted here is portrayed as entirely outmoded in her approach to her modern material world. The narrator recounts a visit with Anna, a former neighbor who had only just moved into a new apartment, but already has managed to furnish it. Her guests, however, are forbidden from eating at her polished table unless it is covered with both a protective oilcloth and a tablecloth; they are also not permitted to drink tea from the cups of her expensive service, which remains locked up in the sideboard. Although Anna speaks much about “good taste” she is an unwelcoming host; instead of allowing her guests to enjoy the spacious common room of her apartment, she crams them into the hot, stuffy kitchen that

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3.3  The décor in these female dormitory rooms was precisely of the style favored by the fictional Zhen′ka and admonished by design professionals: too many items crammed into a small space and an excess of embroidered coverings. D i SSSR, March 1963, 30.

smells of braised vegetables because the window is kept closed to protect the room from outside dirt.46 What made this situation especially absurd was that by refusing to use them, Anna had rendered functional household items like a dining table and teacups utterly useless. At the same time, her new apartment was

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3.4  Depicted here is the mode of hospitality that could emerge after the purchase of new furniture. The hostess is so protective of her modern, lacquered pieces that she keeps them concealed beneath sheets. The decorative objects in plain view are types of items frequently derided by design experts. Krokodil, 20 September 1962, 10.

devalued by her preoccupation with safeguarding it over enjoying the pleasure of companionship that it could foster. Her home served as little more than a maquette of a prefabricated, furnished separate apartment: it was for display only, and not for genuine living or sharing. According to the narrator, this “domestic museum” was “ludicrous.”47 Guests also were unable to “make themselves at home” in the apartment of the meshchanka Raisa Martynchukova. This protagonist of a satirical piece first becomes obsessed with “modernizing” her “family nest” after an architect visits her home and informs her that her dining room is “aesthetically” out of proportion. Before too long, she obtains a “light-minded” (legkomyslennyi) sideboard with glass to replace her “gothic” one, an ottoman resembling “a racing car,” and some coneshaped chairs. Amid her mania to refurnish her apartment, a psychosis sets: Raisa places protective coverings everywhere—on the table, the ottoman, and the sideboard. She does remove them when receiving guests but finds herself anxious about monitoring their every action, unable to appreciate their company.48 Implicit in this particular feuilleton was the

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notion that an individual so engrossed in her things could contribute little to the collective or to public goals. As these scenarios demonstrate, like the excessively cozy interior, the overly modern one could just as easily conjure up artificial kul′turnost′ in terms of both décor and conduct.49 What exactly stock items in Thawera fiction like plush tablecloths and streamlined furniture might reveal about protagonists was not always predictable. Moreover, the characters and situations presented did not conform straightforwardly to standardized types. This is illustrated by the sparse material world of the character Lelia in Fabrichnaia devchnoka. The opening stage directions establish a stark contrast between her barracks-like corner, and that of the other young women with whom she shares a dorm room. Rather than embroidered pillows, portraits, and rugs, the only decoration in her part of the space is a certificate for participation in a choir. 50 Her ascetic décor initially seems to be an expression of her personality—Lelia works efficiently and is a distinguished Komsomol activist. Together, her things and actions suggest she is a modest and responsible person. Over the course of the play, however, it is revealed that this model worker and citizen had had a child out of wedlock, and to make matters worse, one fathered by a married man. Contrary to her exemplary image then, she had violated the norms of communist morality by committing adultery.51 Ambiguous fictional characters like Lelia reflected a general shift in literature during the Thaw. As Katerina Clark indicated, the period was marked by movement away from the conventional predeterminism of Stalin-era socialist realism to grappling with the complex nature of “truth”—particularly concerning private life, romance, humanism, and other subjects resistant to fixed portrayals. 52 Indeed some female protagonists, through their possessions or base zeal for acquiring domestic objects, were depicted negatively as superficial or uncultured, engendering the demoralization of their husbands, subverting family accord or undercutting the social aspects of home life. Others exhibited crass reproductions of famous paintings and colorful, embroidered runners, but in their daily interactions, behaved in a cultured manner, exhibiting neighborliness and enthusiasm for work, Komsomol meetings, and the building of Communism. Relating to household objects appropriately—sharing them, or making proper use of them rather than obsessing over them—also enabled characters to transcend negative material signifiers. Regardless of such variations, women were consistently essentialized in fiction as the principal consumers and homemakers in their family, and their fixation on material satisfaction and decorating was a common attribute among women displaying a gamut of personality traits, both positive and negative. This is not surprising given the tone and directives of

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professional discourse, as well as the traditional conflation of homemaking with female household obligation.53 Yet despite the responsibility for the home conferred on women, the nature of the domestic objects most often spurned—delicate, frilly, and flowery—as well as the character traits associated with them that were most frequently shunned, were all stereotypically feminine. This raises the following question: How did masculinity, or at least Soviet men, fit into the domestic realm? Prescriptive literature, for the most part, ignored men. As for fiction, in instances in which authors purposefully invoked some association between a male character and his domestic surroundings, the relationship was most often distinguished by alienation and unhappiness, and sometimes even by a nagging sense of guilt for harboring such negative feelings. Men generally appeared powerless over domestic space—set up by women and crammed with “feminine” objects or new-fangled furnishings that either suffocated or befuddled them—and were symbolically emasculated by it. 54 Furthermore, as design experts and wives excluded men from participating in fashioning a sense of place in the home, the state had effectively denied them the function of providing shelter. After all, with the nationalization of housing, the paternalistic Soviet government had largely assumed control over its distribution, a role it loudly trumpeted. The man of the house was therefore unable either to feel at home or to reign as undisputed king of his castle in the ideal, state-allotted, socialist dwelling. This scenario was part of a broader, developing crisis of masculinity in Soviet society that has been attributed to the economic impossibility for the Soviet man to be the sole breadwinner of his family and to the dominance of the Soviet woman in the private sphere.55 This gender order further explains both the proliferation of representations of women as petit-bourgeois and the absence of the meshchanin in public discourse. According to a study of consumer strategies and popular portrayals of gender from the 1960s through the 1980s, the Soviet woman was readily cast as a meshchanka because of her active role in ensuring the welfare of her family—a pursuit that necessitated unsavory and even semilegal practices like queuing in shops during work hours and speculation. The Soviet man, meanwhile, was divested of responsibility for organizing and maintaining home life. Thus, if he was referred to derogatorily, he tended to be rendered as the passive bezdukhovnyi obyvatel′ (soulless Philistine)—a designation that evoked his “useless” position at home, as well as professionally. In household matters in particular, his ineptitude was reflected in helplessness, mockery, foolishness, or resistance. 56 Although shopping for essential items like groceries afforded Soviet men an opportunity to participate in everyday activities, homemaking largely excluded them. Boris of “Khochu byt′ schastlivoi,” for example, finds himself encircled by an abundance of things that he did not have any say in

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choosing and that depress him; only the desk in his home is truly his own. Making matters worse, the cultured daily life that his wife Liza misguidedly cultivates subjects him to perpetual “petticoat rule” (zhenskoe tsarstvo).57 Boris finally decides to leave Liza for another woman, but upon learning that she is expecting their second child, he reconsiders, resigning himself to living in a house that is anything but a home for all the incessant arguing that rings throughout it.58 Boris might be faulted for failing to respect the woman who is unconditionally good to him (he himself recognizes his wife to be an excellent mother, as well as a true friend), and for continuing to see his high school sweetheart Kena. Yet the author managed to evoke sympathy for this male character, oppressed by an idyllic home life filled with fussy furnishings and delicate decorations that cause him to feel empty and dehumanized. In other instances, men were depicted as victims of the latest, streamlined models of furnishing. Even such ostensibly masculine domestic objects as sectional convertible furniture—modern in form, functional in design, and manufactured in accordance with technologically advanced modes of production—could undermine the status and dignity of the man of the household. Perceiving him to be unqualified to use modern furnishing, Raisa insists on strictly controlling the actions of her husband, Vladimir, for whom the new “rational” furnishings she is introducing into their home are completely alien. She warns him not to press too hard on their new table—which does in fact break while he is writing on it, and some mechanism in their new bed at times malfunctions, occasionally tossing him onto the floor in the middle of the night. In the end, Vladimir hurls the new furniture out into the corridor and returns their old furniture to the apartment, to be called a “barbarian” by his wife. 59 It was only by countering professional dictates of contemporary taste and kul′turnost′—to which his wife eagerly subscribed—that he could establish a place for himself in his home and find genuine comfort. Ironically then, as in the case of hospitality, domestic comfort and coziness could be jeopardized by modern functional design. The potential of state provision to emasculate men was also hyperbolized. In one feuilleton, what initially appears to be a wonderful reward for hard work, proves to be both a financial burden and a source of guilt. At the beginning of this piece, its male protagonist is greatly surprised upon returning home from work to his new apartment to find a leather sofa given to him by the directors of his factory and Party committees as a housewarming gift and bonus for thirty-five years of service. Before too long, however, his wife and daughter are ruining his nerves, constantly complaining that beside the brand new sofa, their cupboard looks like “an old horse cart beside a new automobile,” that their chairs appear pitiful, and that their red lampshade is “not in fashion.”60 Though the hero is

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frustrated, he soon finds the sofa that has caused him so much anguish anthropomorphized, “looking” at him as if to say, “However are you not ashamed? They organized a new life for you, the state does not want anything whatsoever for this, and in what a little home you live—with central heating, gas and a bathroom! And you cling to ramshackle furniture [rukhliad′].”61 Feeling remorse for his unenthusiastic response to the benevolence of his employer and the government, the protagonist becomes drawn into a consumer frenzy and rushes about buying chairs, a dresser with a mirror, a chandelier, and a secretary.62 Through shopping, a means for him to adapt to his new home and to express his appreciation for and participate in his good fortune, the male protagonist is effectively feminized. Portrayals of male characters victimized and diminished by homemaking served as a frustration valve, a source of “laughter through tears” for men undergoing similar experiences. In generating a variety of protagonists and scenarios when representing the material world, fiction thus appeared to obfuscate the strict agendas of experts. To be sure, design journals and agitation brochures were unambiguous in their messages. Employing officious rhetoric, such publications charged domestic wares with immense ideological meaning, given that, at the time, directives about personal comportment in the home were coinciding with declarations about the imminence of Communism. Professional discourse, in particular, exhibited a parallel with the rhetoric of byt reform of the 1920s. Assessing this earlier decade, Susan BuckMorss asserted, “If the bedrock of capitalism was private property, which in domestic life meant the private home, then socialism would need to be ‘anti-home.’ ”63 This accounts for the broad campaign against “domestic trash”—extending well beyond lampshades—that was waged on the pages of Komsomol′skaia pravda toward the end of the 1920s. This crusade, inaugurated by leftist art theorists in 1928, was inspired by a series of poems Vladimir Mayakovsky had written disparaging “the antiheroic everyday life” and challenging citizens to throw onto the rubbish heap lace curtains, porcelain figurines of elephants and mermaids, rubber plants, and singing yellow canaries. The objective of this grand gesture was to make space for a new way of life. As Svetlana Boym argued, “It was a campaign for a new topography of the home: an ideal revolutionary home, not a fetishistic refuge of bourgeois coziness.”64 Attacks on domestic trash also underpinned other crusades of the day, including those denigrating religion, encouraging physical culture, and promoting cleanliness. Thus, for example, “little idols of things” were associated with counterrevolutionary idolatry; “fat-bellied” chests of drawers were cast as ugly and unhealthy and therefore deemed “unfit” for the proletarian home; and elaborate displays of hard-to-clean knick-knacks were equated with poor hygiene.65

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By 1929, debates about interior decoration moved from mainstream publications to specialized art journals where scrutiny of the ideological content of domestic objects came to fully eclipse discussions about taste. For example, according to Karen Kettering, more than reflecting poor taste, the overly decorative scrolled, gilded handle of a porcelain teacup could potentially lull the user into a bourgeois outlook contrary to the revolutionary political struggle.66 Because such detail served only for beauty, and not for functionality, it denoted luxury. The battle against bourgeois elements of décor began to mirror the striving for “socialism in one country” signified by the industrialization and collectivization drives of the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932). By the middle of the 1930s, household objects associated with coziness and acquisitiveness were resurrected under the auspices of depicting the good life that was fundamental to “socialist realism” or the new byt coming into being; after World War II, they were revived.67 Within the wider trajectory of Soviet history, the campaign to regulate interiors that emerged during 1950s and 1960s was inspired by ideological contentions about “things” that had been in vogue during the first decade following the Revolution. Namely, as in its earlier incarnation, central to the struggle against tasteless objects was the belief that persons displaying bad taste might also harbor bourgeois perspectives contrary to the principles of building socialism. Thus, overstuffed sofas and cut crystal did not simply symbolize meshchanstvo. In a speech on values, morality, attitudes, and daily life, Khrushchev compared cumbersome old furnishings to “negative” types of conduct like indifference, religious observance, drunkenness, and hooliganism. In his estimation, these were all hindrances to daily life and to communist construction. “Even when a person moves to a new apartment,” the premier asserted, “he tries to deliver himself from all that is antiquated, to not drag along with him anything unsuitable.”68 As far as the domestic interior was concerned, ornately carved dressers and embroidered tablecloths had no place in the contemporary aesthetic order, and corresponding self-absorption, envy, unmeasured acquisitiveness, capriciousness, and coarseness had no place in the moral one. Yet where individuals and their possessions were concerned, the following assessment that Victor Buchli made of the 1920s, ultimately applies also to the Khrushchev era: “People and their relation to the world determined petit-bourgeois consciousness, and not specific items of material culture.”69 Arranging the Domestic Interior: From Fiction to Fact The extent to which the individual could conform to contemporary ideals for interior design was limited by a paucity of consumer goods, as much as by conflicting advice to outfit the home with new, modern wares and to

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avoid the lure of consumerism. As a piece that appeared in Stroitel′stvo i arkhitektura Leningrada in 1960 noted, members of the Soviet working class were still moving into new apartments with “cumbersome and inconvenient furniture” because problems with production, inventory and cost had yet to be resolved.70 Shortcomings in furniture manufacturing were detailed not only in such exposés in trade publications, but also in government reports, and in complaints voiced by ordinary citizens to newspaper editors and in comment books provided at exhibitions of household goods.71 Articles published in popular magazines and newspapers functioned to align the expectations of consumers with the absurdities of supply, effectively verifying the already evident “furniture famine.”72 Satire here served not only to censure (in the hope of eradicating) deviations from aesthetic and moral prescriptions, but also to offer a humorous outlet for frustration over shortcomings in economic policy. Most often, this involved ridiculing otherwise trusty design professionals, minor bureaucrats, and homemakers in a way that directed attention away from government accountability. While lampooning prescriptions for interior design might have obscured shortages and defects pertaining to furniture, appliances, and other household items, some feuilletons acknowledged the problems facing the average consumer—even if their rendering was ludicrous. One such piece that appeared in Krokodil, for example, humorously suggested that anyone unable to find replacement parts for his or her refrigerator might make alternative use of it as an “electric” bookshelf or a plant stand.73 Also making light of appalling quality and unavailability, another contrasted an exhibition of wares purportedly being produced in mills and factories around the Soviet Union, with the ones for sale at a local furniture salon. The latter included an armchair so massive it was virtually impossible to move, a mirror that distorted the face (thereby accurately representing only the quality of work of the manufacturer), and a dining table with a finish so rough and uneven it had been named for the Caucasus Mountains.74 In addition to shortcomings, alongside conflicting prescriptions, the crusade against vulgar taste of the Khrushchev era failed because of the impossibility of regulating the domestic realm. In fact, the tendency of experts to so frequently offer advice in negative terms—for example, recommendations to avoid bulky sofas and embroidered table runners—offers clues about actual decorating practices. In short, instruction on how not to set up household interiors suggests fretfulness over real trends like the misappropriation of living space and the application of too much independence in the sphere of consumption. Catriona Kelly employed the same approach to discern actual practice vis-à-vis a variety of types of advice literature in Russia from the eighteenth century through the 1990s. As she aptly

3.5  Speaking to shortcomings in furniture production, this cartoon parodies the contradiction between what a visitor might see at an exhibition (top), and what the consumer can actually purchase in shops (bottom). The visitors at the exhibition site are offered a comment book, and the consumers in the shop are furnished with a complaints book. Krokodil, 10 October 1963, 8.

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claimed, “the presence of an instruction not to behave in a certain way is generally some indication that a body of people exists who do so behave.”75 The kind of décor that the French author Eliane Jacquet encountered in Moscow in 1957 seemed to confirm the anxieties of experts. Describing one home she visited, she noted that although it was but a small room in a communal apartment, it was large enough to contain two couches covered with embroidered cushions, two rugs hung on the walls, a round table, several chairs, [and] a radio covered with knick-knacks in about the same taste as the lions of fake bronze with which the French charity bazaars abound. There were also a vase filled with very artificial-looking flowers, family photographs, green plants, lace doilies scattered all over, a sideboard almost in the style of Henri II, and . . . the plushy, ornate lampshade which seems to be omnipresent.76

David and Vera Mace, sociologists who were in Russia during the early 1960s, conveyed a similar impression of the homes they visited, citing the following as typical elements of Soviet decoration: lace or hand-crocheted curtains; “heavily and garishly embroidered” hand-made drapery; green glass and silk lampshades with fringes or bead ornaments (“sometimes in very garish colours”); and the use of “old-fashioned metal frames” on bedsteads as “display centers” for craft and lace work. Sofas covered in “drab coloured carpetlike material”—sometimes with hand-embroidered cushions for decoration—and dining tables with heavy plush cloth also caught their attention, as did rugs and photographs of family members or national heroes, including Lenin, hanging on the walls.77 Whether or not incorporating such elements of décor was intended to defy expert prescriptions, purchasing or refusing to discard outmoded domestic objects can be regarded as a means of appropriating, even if unintentionally, space one lives in but does not own. Essentially, with the state controlling housing, decorating provided Soviet citizens—denied de jure ownership—a way to establish a de facto sense of ownership over their home. This was most consciously manifested through place making or investing time and energy into household projects, rather than merely occupying a residence.78 This is similar to using decorative objects to personalize rented space. For example, as Sophie Chevalier showed in her study of rental apartments in postwar France, by displaying valued personal objects like photographs, mass-produced items like sideboards and television sets could be appropriated and integrated into an individualized way of life.79 Interspersing sentimental objects and family photographs with Soviet icons like busts and portraits of Soviet leaders, military officials and writers, was one manifestation of place making—and a feature of Russian

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décor that foreign visitors like the Maces frequently highlighted. Marshall MacDuffie, who had headed a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration mission to the Soviet Union after the war, during a subsequent trip to the country in 1954 noted the walls of one apartment he had visited as containing photographs of relatives, a color portrait of Stalin torn from a magazine, and a man’s watch and lady’s handbag “(relics of departed parents).”80 Joseph Novak, a bureaucrat who was in Russia during the Khrushchev years, observed at the home of one acquaintance family photographs displayed alongside portraits of Lenin, Stalin, and Maxim Gorky. He noted, “A picture of Lenin addressing a meeting had as its neighbor a dignified old lady, my host’s mother, holding a large icon in both hands. The picture of my host as a baby in diapers was next to a photograph of Stalin shaking his fist from a platform.”81 In response to his inquiries about this blending of personal and “political” objects, Novak claimed, Russians cited tradition, politics, and decoration.82 Displaying statuettes or covering furniture with lace doilies, whether unconsciously or out of some specific motivation, also indicated determination to individualize domestic space—if to the dismay of experts. The separate apartment was expected to restructure home life in a particular way, and to serve as a reflection of the model socialist person. Yet the reproaches of design professionals, together with fictional portrayals of women as purveyors of bad taste harboring bourgeois values, suggest that homemakers continued to decorate their interiors as they wished (thereby subverting expert recommendations), or were able (exercising creativity in the face of consumer goods shortages). Such deviance does not necessarily signify an intentional rejection of the principles of communist morality that accompanied prescriptions for outfitting and arranging domestic space. At the same time, homemakers did appear to be reinterpreting kul′turnost′ or what it meant to “live well.” It therefore seems that in the midst of the byt reform of the Thaw, much like in the age of the kommunalka, as Boym asserted, messy ordinary existence remained outside the intellectual and political debates, and outside of discourses on Russian identity or Soviet patriotism: Russian and Soviet everyday practices tended to embarrass political, economic and sociological projections. In this respect, zooming in on everyday life goes against the grain of many Russian and Soviet intellectual mythologies.83

Scholars in different fields have interpreted the streamlining of architecture under Khrushchev as symptomatic of continuing authoritarian tendencies. Asserting that architecture is a manifestation of power and political

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ideology, Anders Aman stated that like its socialist realist predecessor, the architecture of the Khrushchev era was opposed to diversity and pluralism and therefore, like that of the Stalin period, projected a totalitarian vision of the world. In his estimation, despite appearances of liberalism, Soviet architecture of the Thaw was not “democratic” because it became “official, formalized, and mass-produced.”84 Emphasis on a “total living” concept encompassing the entire mikroraion that would also govern the interior world of the separate apartment—in aesthetic and moral terms—seems to support this contention. Continuing shortages and the stubbornness of individual taste in the relatively private realm of domestic life, both of which prevented this vision from being realized, do not necessarily detract from this assessment. Yet authoritative mythologies about the home and daily life were not as totalizing as they might initially appear to have been. In fact, they sometimes conflicted with each other. On the one hand, there were the design professionals, members of the artistic intelligentsia, who assumed the role of cautioning homemakers against immoderation in the sphere of decorating. The officious rhetoric of these experts in the employ of the state was unambiguous: in harmony with the mikroraion in which it was situated, from the outside in, the separate apartment was to be modern, clean, light, understated, and functional. On the other hand, there were writers, elements of the literary intelligentsia, who in their feuilletons, short stories, and novels cast domesticity as antihero—even if at times positioning acquisitive protagonists as heroines.85 This perspective on home life replicated that of revolutionary ascetics of the 1920s. The “polemic about the bed” that avant-garde writers, artists, and film directors generated during this decade of cultural experimentation comprised one especially zealous manifestation of the denigration of domesticity. As Olga Matich illustrated, proponents of novyi byt—an alternative to the reviled everyday—sought to replace the plush double marital bed, which demanded a room of its own, with an austere single one that could be rendered publicly inconspicuous by literally doubling as a chair or a table. The aim of this byt reform scheme was to simultaneously displace the social stasis of generational continuity, romantic love, and bourgeois privacy associated with a luxurious bed, with the wakefulness, mechanization, and mobility that its Spartan alternative represented.86 Stretching further back in history, the Russian literati of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a similar vein scorned the overly commodified nature of the home, conflating comfort and coziness with stasis and conformity.87 The insistence during the transition to separate apartments that interiors be simple and functional—an implicit corollary to the emphasis on movement embedded in the housewarming narrative— therefore had direct analogues in earlier Russian intellectual and artistic ideas about byt.

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Though the revolutionary path that new housing of the 1950s and 1960s symbolized was a straightforward one, in fictional works—like expert instruction, not entirely immune to political rhetoric—the meanings assigned to specific domestic objects was inconstant. Thus, homemakers could decorate their beds with butterfly-shaped cushions, so long as they themselves conformed to communist morality. What was unambiguous was the role that depictions of homemaking played. Fiction in particular constituted a medium through which the private values associated with home life could be rendered publicly acceptable during the Thaw. Literature had served a similar purpose during the late Stalin era, as Dunham discerned. She argued that a “Big Deal” had been negotiated committing the professional segment of the population to the postwar goals of the state, in return for official sanction for comfort and domesticity.88 However, to abandon Bolshevik revulsion to such bourgeois indulgences could undermine the legitimacy of the proletarian state. Therefore, these private values had to be converted into public ones that could trickle down to all segments of the population. According to Dunham, middlebrow fiction facilitated the manipulation of doctrine that the concordat between the state and the educated populace demanded, for by reading about it, all Soviet citizens could at least partake in imagining a cozy home life. Acquisitiveness, associated with meshchanstvo, was thus made acceptable within the official canon.89 Under Khrushchev, the relative abundance of consumer goods on shop shelves made curbing avarice and outlining the parameters of domestic comfort seem all the more pertinent. After all, the separate apartment was metamorphosing into “housing for the people” and not just for the middle class or elite segments of the state and Party—though the unsatisfactory pace of residential construction and household goods manufacturing placed the touted egalitarianism of the era in jeopardy by making it most accessible to professionals and urban residents.90 Still, millions of citizens were moving to new housing; consequently, tensions that emerged in the interstices of taste and character within the interior realm of the individual one-family apartment had to be negotiated. The cozy home that was extended to the proletarian masses entailed reciprocal obligations, the most important of which was participation in socialist activism. Thus, while the homemaker was charged with shaping the character of her household interior, all citizens were summoned to channel their energies into collective activities outside the home. Arguing the necessity of so integrating personal and social life, the author of one instructional pamphlet proclaimed “the social interactions of people” to be the “essence of a healthy daily life”—alongside kul′turnost′ and a positive moral outlook.91 Given this conviction, crystal decanters and embroidered tablecloths even more starkly evoked bourgeois idleness and withdrawal into the familial hearth.

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By encouraging sociability in common spaces beyond the domestic sphere, official rhetoric in yet another way made compatible with socialist ideals the seemingly contrary postwar goals of comfort and consumerism that could besiege communist morality. As one discussion on the “culture of daily life of the Soviet person” stated, “One can have a good apartment, TV, radio, vacuum cleaner and refrigerator and live dully, boringly, unculturedly, in a Philistine, even swinish [po-svinski] manner.”92 Participation in collective activities was deemed the antidote to unhealthy attitudes and conduct.

C H A P T E R 4

LIMINAL PLACES Corridors, Courtyards, and Reviving Socialist Society Communism

is not only

In the field,

at the factory

in sweat,

It is also at home

at the table,

In attitudes,

in the family,

in daily life.

—Vladimir Mayakovsky

THE MASSIVE TRANSITION to single-family dwelling that occurred in the Khrushchev era has been cited for engendering a retreat to private life in Soviet society. The most extraordinary indicator of this was the rise in “kitchen culture” that has been credited for the blossoming of the dissident movement during the Brezhnev era.1 Individual apartments appear to have remarkably generated an extra-state or antisocial collective among the intelligentsia. Tracing the impact of separate apartments on society as a whole is more difficult to gauge. The Russian émigré Maurice Hindus claimed in the late 1960s that with more individualized housing, people generally “lost the zest for meetings and lectures. They preferred to stay at home, watch TV, listen to the radio or just sit around, talk, read a newspaper, a book, play the phonograph. They became increasingly aware of a fuller and freer personal life.”2 Also looking back at the Brezhnev years, Shlapentokh made a similar assessment. He attributed the “spatial withdrawal” of human energy and interest from activities controlled by the state during the 1970s and 1980s to the transition to separate apartments,

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and to the increasing importance of family, friends, and other personal networks for satisfying the demands for consumer goods and services that had been raised under Khrushchev.3 The housing campaign of the 1950s and 1960s was not intended to encourage individuals to retreat to the private realm and assume the precept “my home is my castle.”4 In contrast with this bourgeois adage, home life was deemed central to the flourishing of a healthy society. According to an acquaintance of Hindus, for most Russians, the housewarming certainly signified “the beginning of a new life . . . , free from the intrusion of neighbors. They become masters of their own household, and discover comforts and pleasures that communal living had denied.”5 Yet this same individual, an architect and sworn communist, claimed that while some people were anxious that the privacy of the separate apartment might detract from the collective and spawn egoism, he believed that a room of his or her own would make a child “a more contented citizen,” something that would ultimately benefit the whole.6 This conviction seemed to echo optimistic views publicized during the Khrushchev years regarding the social impact of new housing. As a 1963 pamphlet on communist interactions in daily life enthusiastically declared, People are not retreating to the four walls of their apartments. They are all the more and more abandoning them in order to take part in matters common to all tenants of a given building—be it subbotniki [Saturday voluntary work campaigns] for the improvement and greening of courtyards, or the organization of a sports playing field, or the maintenance of a red corner. A person is to a person a friend, comrade and brother. This formula of human relations is being realized right now not only in enterprises, but also in everyday life.7

The extent to which this formulation was being actualized is difficult to discern. The discussions surrounding it, however, provide further insight into the ideals upon which the Soviet home was based. Concurrent with the slogan “To each family a separate apartment!” and advice for residents to create a moderately cozy home incorporating zones for personal activities, official rhetoric encouraged individuals to quit the private realm and participate in harmony with others in the struggle for socialist society—a vital component of communist construction. Architects, urban planners, and interior designers working in unison had been assigned to create the material basis for this revolutionary society. In turn, ordinary citizens were charged with reinvigorating sovetskoe obshchestvo (Soviet society) through exemplary attitudes and conduct in the milieu of home life. Throughout this chapter, the Russian noun obshchestvo and the adjective obshchestvennyi are translated, respectively, as “society” and

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“social”—rather than as “public” in the Habermasian sense, which evokes a separation from the “private.” This characterization is informed by Oleg Kharkhordin who asserted the emergence of “society” rather than a “public” in the Soviet Union from the 1950s through the 1970s.8 Portraying the official canon, Kharkhordin stated, “The social, sovetskoe obshchestvo, was to allocate and regulate both the quasi-public (the world of work) and the quasi-private (the world of personal life, lichnaia zhizn′). There was no recognized sphere left which was not, in principle, part of the social.”9 While seeking to avoid connoting an Orwellian entity, I operate from the premise posed by Kharkhordin that Soviet society consisted of “transparent ‘public’ and ‘personal’ lives.” Excluding only those aspects of byt that remained entirely “unseen” (intimate relations), I emphasize the fluidity of the boundary between the public and the private in conceptual and spatial terms.10 Contributors to the edited volume Borders of Socialism also depicted the division between Soviet public and private lives as porous, recognizing that individuals might act in the interest of the public or of the state, just as the state might implement policies in the service of personal interests.11 The social and the personal converged at the intersection of the housing question and the revival of Soviet society. This was evident not only in newly built separate apartments, but also in the communal dwellings of old residential districts. Drawing a connection between a communist relationship to daily life and its material elements could unite residents who were benefiting from the current construction boom with tenants still living in the preexisting housing stock.12 That said, the most fertile site for the nascent kommunisticheskii byt was not the interior realm, with its propensity toward unbridled consumption and bourgeoisification. Rather, it was the “common spaces” (mesta obshchego polzovaniia) adjacent to it. In communal apartments these included the corridors, perhaps crammed with old furniture and bicycles; steamy kitchens that contained several stoves or multiple burners; and bathrooms with laundry schedules posted outside the door. The hallways, stairwells, and elevators of both old and new apartment buildings, as well as the meandering courtyards of old apartment blocks and the radial ones in new districts, also constituted shared spaces. The character of courtyards varied. Some featured whimsical sculptures of mushrooms and sandboxes for young children, basketball and volleyball courts, benches and tables for reading or playing chess, and flower gardens and trees for residents to enjoy while resting or strolling. Others offered only displays of laundry drying on balconies or a bed of dust littered with discarded construction materials or packing crates from ground-floor shops; these may have served as stomping grounds for “drunkards” and “hooligans.”13

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Integral to generating sociability in these common spaces that encircled the home was communist morality, though not in the sense of individualized character building, as reflected in decorating choices within the domestic realm.14 Instead, what is referred to here as proletarian propriety, comprised of collectivism, civic duty, and courteousness—in relation to the material world, and to others—was of utmost importance. This stemmed from the official determination that the Soviet person should not merely be a productive, model worker, but also must live po-kommunisticheski (in a communist manner). Essentially, socialist living demanded that individuals treat socialized property as if it were their own; that they engage in respectful interactions within and around the home; and that they inspire their neighbors to behave as morally upstanding citizens and censure inappropriate conduct. As these prescriptions suggested, reviving Soviet society would entail nurturing a distinct approach to daily life comprised of cooperative attitudes and normative modes of behavior that would secure collective accord.15 Accounts showcasing good living conditions and cordial social intercourse indicated that novostroika was having the desired effect in these regards. This was apparent, for example, in a human-interest story detailing the habitual joy experienced by two women who had recently moved from a dormitory to a separate apartment in a new housing district. The residents claimed, “Each day, when we arrive from work and ascend to our new apartment along the elegant stairwell, the heart fills with gladness.” They accentuated the convenience of having their own bathroom and kitchen, in addition to space for welcoming family. But their pleasure had not bred stasis. Rather, their marvelous dwelling had motivated them to commit themselves to properly maintaining it, as well as to respecting each other and the fruits of their labor. This was manifested in attentive maintenance of their courtyard, which in the springtime included planting flowers and trees.16 Representations in print space of such popular initiatives in common spaces evinced movement toward social harmony. In conveying such scenarios, local newspapers not only reflected the model sovetskoe obshchestvo coming into being; they also served as an arena for instilling communist ideals for living and for rallying people to strive to actualize shared goals for personal satisfaction. Ordinary individuals participated in these efforts to transform everyday life both by engaging in voluntary activities in common spaces and by providing feedback about them in print space, through letters to newspapers.17 This chapter explores the ways in which official recommendations and popular visions for the ideal sovetskoe obshchestvo intersected in discourse that appeared in agitation brochures, the local press, and letters from ordinary citizens directed at newspaper editors. It then explains how collective

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approaches to everyday life focusing on common spaces signaled the resurrection of Soviet society on the microlevel. In material terms, cooperation among residents could ensure that new housing was adequately maintained, as well as offer a means of coping with “growing pains” of rapid construction like heaps of improperly discarded building materials.18 Collective initiatives also had the potential to virtually revive older buildings and thereby enable those awaiting their happy housewarming, in the interim, to experience socialism through their social interactions and in their everyday lives. Delineating Communist Byt, Harmonizing Personal and Social Interests A 1963 propaganda pamphlet devoted to communist living presented the socialist city, designed to provide domestic convenience, support personal development and satisfy consumer demands, as a manifestation of the state and Party objective “to realize . . . the harmonious relationship between the person [lichnost′] and society on the basis of the union of social and personal interests.”19 It concurrently directed individuals to work collectively with others to nurture this gratifying relationship and to foster shared interests. Party organs throughout the Soviet Union produced dozens of brochures like this throughout the 1950s and 1960s intended for agitation “there, where the person lives.” Conveying a similar overall message, these pamphlets declared the goal of constructing the material and ethical foundations of Communism within the milieu of home life and detailed model initiatives toward this end undertaken by activists across the country—from its heart, the Moscow capital, to Vorkuta in the Komi Republic, at the “edge of the earth.”20 Lauded activities included general maintenance and beautification efforts like painting stairwells and corridors, planting trees, shrubs and flowers in courtyards, and clearing nearby city streets of trash and snow. Organizing reading circles and red corners, publishing building “wall newspapers” (stennye gazety), and offering lectures, tutoring services, film nights and concerts were also highlighted, as was the operation of in-house clinics for consultation with medical specialists and service agencies (biuro dobrykh uslug) loaning tenants household appliances. At the same time, a preoccupation with morality was exhibited in activism aimed at settling disputes among neighbors, reforming anti­ social elements—“parasites” and “loafers”—and assuming an active role in the upbringing of neighborhood children, for example by monitoring their study and leisure time. 21 Ideological matters—sometimes explicitly linked to de-Stalinization or revitalizing revolutionary fervor—surfaced in initiatives directed toward expunging the Stalinist cult of personality,

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raising Marxist-Leninist consciousness, and encouraging the growth of science, culture, and education among the populace. 22 I focus here on activities directly related to maintaining and improving material living space and cultivating amicable everyday social interactions. 23 The main vehicles for these endeavors included subbotniki and voskresniki (Sunday voluntary work campaigns), competitions for communist living, reidy (inspections by social groups), social commissions for assistance (komissii sodeistviia), social soviets (obshchestvennye sovety), parents’ committees, interest-based clubs, comrades’ courts dispensing popular justice (tovarishcheskie sudy) and voluntary people’s patrols for the protection of social order (dobrovol′nye narodnye druzhiny po okhrane obshchestvennogo poriadka). According to one estimate, 20,000 voluntary organizations, composed of 450,000 people, were operating in Leningrad by the early 1960s. Of these, 1,211 were comrades’ courts with 8,585 members, 1,726 were people’s patrols comprised of 55,000 participants, 205 were street committees with 30,000 activists, 1,780 were house committees, “and so on ad infinitum.”24 The pursuits of activists were inspired, guided, or harnessed by local Party organs in collaboration with official housing bureaus (zhilishchnye kontory) and pseudo-popular house committees (domovye komitety). Housing bureaus worked together with Party organs on agitation and propaganda aimed at dispelling so-called remnants of the past (perezhitki proshlogo) like drunkenness and religious worship.25 They were also charged with furthering a spirit of cordialness among residents of apartment buildings, as well as enriching their cultural life by organizing clubs, lectures, excursions, and even exhibitions of paintings owned by tenants or libraries of books provided by residents.26 Although they could be created spontaneously, house committees, like housing bureaus, did not operate entirely independently of local government and Party directives. They did, however, elicit voluntary participation from among the population at large, much like the other bodies noted.27 Print space in local newspapers served to reinforce and stimulate social activism by publicizing activities undertaken in districts that were familiar to readers, and by extending to city residents summonses to join in collective efforts to better their surroundings. In these respects, Vechernii Leningrad was exemplary. This local paper appeared to be aligned with other newspapers of the Khrushchev era in renewing what Thomas Wolfe discerned as one of the earliest mandates of the Soviet press: to instruct citizens on how to behave, and to prompt them to “continue the work upon themselves that was their public duty.”28 Simon Huxtable went as far as to cast journalists of the Thaw as engaged in a “civilising mission” to fashion or improve the individual. 29 Yet beyond merely dictating the tasks of building a model socialist society, they also actively encouraged reader input and initiative.30

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4.1  Illustrated here is the wide range of popular initiatives—from planting trees to building model rockets—reportedly undertaken by activists in the Vasileostrov district in Leningrad in the spring of 1964. VL, 17 April 1964, 1.

Like the other major local Leningrad newspaper, Leningradskaia pravda, and newspapers published on the national level (for example, Pravda and Izvestia), Vechernii Leningrad contained serious reports on industrial production and education, excerpts of speeches from Party congresses, and descriptions of the diplomatic mastery of Premier Khrushchev. However, based on the assumption that the average person at the time might be reading two or three newspapers, this nightly sought to address the minutia of everyday life, as well as illuminate socioeconomic, legal, and moral matters “within the jurisdiction” of other newspapers in a concise and conversational manner.31 Read casually, perhaps on the metro by urban dwellers making their way home from work, Vechernii Leningrad was thus typical of Soviet-era evening newspapers. Its Moscow counterpart Vecherniaia Moskva, for example, was comparable in terms of mandate, approach, and content.32 The attention that Vechernii Leningrad afforded to aspects of quotidian experience is especially noteworthy. As M. Gatchinskii, a regular columnist during the 1950s and 1960s, proclaimed in a retrospective of this paper, “The editorial staff devoted fixed attention to questions of daily life.”33 This was evident in the human-interest stories and ocherki (sketches) that it habitually published. Similar to the feuilleton in the sense that it depicted situations considered to be typical, the ocherk was a genre devoid

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of irony. First introduced around 1930, the sketch was supposed to be short and accessible in form, and in terms of content, to combine Party directives with concrete facts that illustrated their successful implementation. To do so, the ocherk delineated a dialectic unfolding in the building of socialism by portraying the “good” and the “bad” in individual workers and within the working class as a whole, and their transformation from backward and uncultured to politically conscious and cultured—whether in the context of the construction site, the factory, the collective farm or, as this chapter will demonstrate, the home.34 In addition to adhering to broad trends in Soviet journalism, Vechernii Leningrad frequently publicized neighborhood endeavors to improve the appearance of the city; participated in and relayed the findings of inspections of factories and housing complexes, praising excellent and critiquing shoddy workmanship; provided assessments of the efficacy of local bureaucrats; and included features on consumer goods and services. Recurring columns thus broached concerns related to daily life evidently on the minds of the typical Leningrader. For instance, the section “Na moral′nye temi” (On moral themes) often concluded with a stock statement about the importance of good order, cleanliness, and comfort, but it was at the behest of readers that it frequently assumed as its subject matter the state of courtyards, building façades, and streets. 35 Correspondence from readers was also either directly published or summarized and discussed by editorial staff in columns like “Chitateli nam pishut” (Readers write us), “Korotkie signaly” (Brief signals) and “Strok iz pisem” (Lines from letters). These functioned as venues for Leningraders to air complaints about problems like leaky roofs and defective radiators, the smoke and din emanating into their courtyards from nearby factories, and bureaucratic indifference to the consumer needs of citizens. Vechernii Leningrad thus continued another important innovation of early Soviet newspapers, what Jeffrey Brooks determined to be to provide an “interactive sphere” comprised of selected, redrafted, or invented letters and commentaries.36 It also served to protect citizens, a mandate of journalism that was revived during the Thaw alongside the notion of socialist legality. 37 In this vein, Vechernii Leningrad acted as a social advocate by publicly verifying, as well as seeking resolution and providing updates on, grievances submitted to the editor.38 Meanwhile, letters of complaint sent to the newspaper that were not published were to be forwarded to the relevant organizations for measures to be taken. The readers who sent them were then provided with responses, information, and opportunities for consultation. Notations in the margins of editorial reports indicate that this process of personal advocacy was honored to some degree. Signed and dated, such remarks stated that a given

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case had been addressed, the responsible authorities had been notified, and measures had been taken.39 Vechernii Leningrad, in harmony with more widely distributed agitation brochures, managed what Brooks referred to as “society’s public self-image.”40 Specifically, through human-interest stories, feuilletons, and ocherki, this newspaper depicted an emerging cult of social life in conjunction with dissipating remnants of the individualistic, capitalist past—all under the wise influence of the Communist Party. Yet alongside commendable representations of proletarian propriety within a grand official schema, Vechernii Leningrad acknowledged that the ideal sovetskoe obshchestvo had yet to be realized. It publicized not only voluntary activism—so as to reward and motivate, but also deviations from prescribed norms in treatment toward and conduct within shared spaces—so as to instruct and censure. Moreover, reporters and editors crafting articles intended to persuade individuals to conform to the model of neighborliness that Party officials were promoting were but part of a network to which ordinary Leningraders were essential. Although its full scale cannot be determined, annual summary reports do offer a quantitative assessment of popular input in Vechernii Leningrad. Those for the Khrushchev period demonstrate that a low of 705 and a high of 1,405 letters were received each month by the editors, and a low of 101 and a high of 465 letters were published. In 1959 as a whole, a particularly abundant year, 14,177 letters were apparently received, and of these, 3,921 were purportedly published in some form.41 Reports on letters from readers suggest that Leningraders took pride in their city, insisting that the common spaces within and surrounding their apartment houses be clean, orderly, and beautiful, and characterizing violations of these standards as offensive. The summary of the contents of the mailbag for May 1956, for example, noted that the editor had received more than 150 letters from readers in response to a feature published that month on repair, renovation, and improvement throughout the city. This correspondence revealed the esteem in which Leningraders held their city, as well as their frustration with courtyards that looked like “dirty slums” and their “outrage” over the state of some streets. One reader, I. A. Predtechenskaia residing at 12 Rakov Street, complained about the trash accumulating in her courtyard. Particularly irksome to her was the perpetual heap of discarded ashes from the boiler room. She claimed that the slightest breeze would turn them into dust, which would then fly through the open windows of the apartments above, while children playing outside had to frolic around in them. Thus, upon entering the grounds of her apartment building—in the very center of the city no less—she often found herself wondering, “as if awe-struck: where am I, in which century is this? This is a genuine Petersburg slum.”42 Another reader, V. V. Kopylov at

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27 Dostoevsky Street, wrote that it was with “a pain to the heart” that he looked upon “the barbaric attitude toward the green adornment of the city.” He scolded those who trampled on lawns for squandering the resources spent on greening, and asserted that individuals “must safeguard the protection of greening and take care to value people’s labor.”43 What Predtechenskaia depicted was no Leningrad of the communist future, while what Kopylov revealed was certainly not an appropriate reflection of the new socialist person. Demonstrating a confluence with such unpublished material in terms of subject matter, the author of one published report claimed in a similar tone that it would “grieve” a person to see the state of Savishkin Street after the great transformation that had occurred during the postwar years in the Novaia Derevnia district where it was located. Here, marvelous multi­ story buildings and public gardens had arisen in a short time. “Against the backdrop of handsome buildings,” she claimed with dismay, “cluttered vacant lots, scrap-heaps, impassable filth and debris are particularly striking.” Especially egregious was the disrepair into which a recently erected playground had already fallen. The laundry frequently hanging on the balcony of a neighboring building constituted another unsightly display, in her estimation. Arguing that her district ought to be a place for rest and for strolling, she proclaimed, “There must not only be beautiful buildings here, but also exemplary, clean streets.”44 This piece on Savishkin Street was part of an extensive exposé that served both as a frustration valve for readers and as a forum for discussing the causes of aesthetic disorder. The author claimed that the state of public spaces adjacent to the home is the responsibility of the entire collective. She thus blamed the executive committee of the district soviet with jurisdiction over the neighborhood in question for the “disgraceful goings on” and for failing to create robust activists in the housing economy and in nearby institutions and enterprises. She also indicted ordinary people who showed indifference to their surroundings by discarding wrappers, tickets, and other garbage on city streets. In turn, she recommended that police employees educate and fine people for violations of order, and that commissions for assistance operating in housing management offices investigate the conduct of “negligent tenants.” Finally, she instructed caretakers to diligently clear stairways and courtyards, and sweep city streets.45 In addition to verifying that editors incorporated material that expressed the interests of readers, official reports confirm that certain kinds of letters of a critical nature were not published. Where housing was concerned, these included testimonies that ventured beyond cataloguing the material aspects of poor living conditions and criticizing local bureaucrats, to detailing the effects of adverse housing circumstances on physical, psychological,

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and emotional well-being. Also excluded was commentary disparaging the Soviet system.46 The historical record is predictably silent about individuals who were too disinterested in common spaces, or skeptical about the Soviet society coming into being, or pessimistic about improving their living space to approach state and Party authorities, let alone the press. As for the letters that were published—even if only in part—taking into account the viewpoints readers articulated was fundamental during the Thaw to producing plausible texts that would represent “the trains of thought of socialist subjects.”47 Illustrating a confluence of official and popular opinions and objectives, one survey of letters addressed to Vechernii Leningrad revealed that Leningraders expected their city newspaper to “more actively struggle” for “order and cleanliness” and that generally, they were passionately interested in “the health of socialist living” and “questions of social morality”—respectively, the same expectations that the publication placed upon readers, and the very interests it hoped to nurture in them.48 Overall then, this newspaper comprised a venue for deliberation over matters ranging from material, quotidian concerns related to housing, to issues of moral import central to daily life. More broadly, the sovetskoe obshchestvo invoked on the pages of Vechernii Leningrad represented the harmonization of personal and social interests through the purposeful coordination of officially prescribed scenarios, as conjured up in agitation brochures, and popularly generated ones. Maintaining Buildings, Beautifying Courtyards, and Cultivating Collective Living The “coordination of part and whole” in endeavors to maintain and improve housing, courtyards and city streets reflected official architectural design and urban planning conceptions for harmony—from the core of the home, radiating out into the green spaces surrounding apartment buildings and uniting neighboring housing blocks. Essentially, the popular initiatives undertaken in interior spaces, and those assumed in the liminal spaces bordering housing complexes, often overlapped. The boundary between private and public places was thus blurred. This is especially evident where courtyards were concerned. These served as places where children played and the elderly chatted during the day, and they became sites where young people, feeling constricted by their crowded homes, courted at night.49 The pleasures that people derived from these particular common spaces can be attributed to the lack of privacy that domestic space afforded. This was the case even in separate apartments, due to their notoriously small size.

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Illustrative of the prominence of courtyards amid household concerns, as well as of a general reverence for green spaces, is a popular campaign to transform one large courtyard on Tipanov Street in Leningrad. This site had purportedly been a “scrap heap” before tenants and members of various house committees assumed the initiative to improve it over the course of 1961–1962. After only one year, the courtyard was apparently unrecognizable, filled with trees and shrubbery, and equipped with a playground. This remarkable transformation was attributed to collectivism: residents had not waited for their respective housing bureaus to bring order to the territory in question, but rather had invested their own energy in greening it. Among the local heroes who contributed to these efforts were pensioners and schoolchildren. 50 The coordination highlighted in this popular initiative mirrored yet another element of housing policy: construction too required synchronizing the energies of state and society, and rousing every individual to work in unison with others, and with the state, for the good of all. 51 Indeed realizing the aim of providing each family a separate apartment “with all the conveniences” represented the success of millions of workers with diverse specialties—from persons preparing prefabricated building panels to those manufacturing electrical household appliances. Each worker, with his or her specific talents and skills, was seen as constituting a synecdoche of Soviet society, the entirety of which was needed for realizing contemporary objectives for daily life. 52 The necessity and significance of integrating “part and whole” was also transcribed into the often repeated maxim “at home, as at work.” In this vein, an agitation brochure compiled by one Party committee proclaimed, “The builders of Communism should struggle not only for production—for the honor of their [work] collective, but likewise at their place of residence—for the honor of their [housing] district.”53 According to expert opinion, the home was where a person regenerated after the workday and a treasured space that could serve both to cultivate a rigorous sense of personal morality, and to inspire the cooperation needed to make entire city districts attractive and livable. 54 Citing the synchronicity of individual devotion and collective action in honoring residential space, a feature on one model collective asserted, “There, where they love their building and street, not for a minute do the chores abate in the courtyards. Shovels ring out, crowbars thump—they are clearing snow, piling up ice and removing trash.” While showcasing tenants, schoolchildren, and housing employees industriously working in harmony, its author reminded readers that such enthusiasm and voluntary activism were not ubiquitous; in some places, he divulged, there remained mountains of snow and thick slabs of ice.55 In presenting praiseworthy initiatives in tandem with woeful neglect, the

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objective of this article appeared to have been to prompt readers to reflect upon their own outlook and conduct, and to reform it, as warranted. The recurring slogan “Your home—your concerns” provided a more explicit directive. 56 In the Khrushchev era, when the mode of daily living was presented as being as important as the means of production, assertions like this commanded individual investment in conserving the national, socialized wealth of the country, namely the housing stock. At the same time, inculcating a personal commitment to civic duty was essential to rousing the coordinated efforts that preservation demanded. Thus, even if “your” sometimes appeared in the singular form tvoi rather than the plural vash, ideally tenants would behave as masters of their home in the collective sense and demonstrate concern for both private domestic spaces and common places. Instructing his local constituents on the notion of collective ownership, one housing bureau chief declared, “Buildings are our wealth. . . . Our general duty is to take care of and protect our own dwellings.”57 As Susan Reid noted, “To abuse the gift of housing through failure to observe norms of hygiene, décor and repair was to show contempt for the state. By reducing public housing to an uninhabitable condition, such that the proprietor-state or its agents could not even redistribute it to a more deserving tenant, delinquent tenants removed it from circulation.” Negligence or willful impropriety therefore amounted to “a form of theft or sequestering of public property.”58 Thus, the housing bureau chiefs who contributed to one exposé bemoaned the fact that there were still individuals who assumed that someone else would fulfill petty, “cosmetic” repairs like replacing broken glass in the windows of their apartment building. They also conveyed dismay over the categorical disrespect for communal property exhibited by violations of basic norms of hygiene and acts of vandalism like dismantling stoves, presumably for scarce parts. 59 Expressing consternation over habitual disregard for the housing stock, one plumber addressed Vechernii Leningrad to voice his complaint about those who frequently clog up residential water pipes by discarding bones, rags, tin can lids, and other rubbish in their drains. Besides making his job difficult, he cited the flooding and dampness caused by drainage problems for affecting entire buildings, ruining the plaster on walls and ceilings, and rotting the floors. He thus proclaimed that while it was wonderful that so many new apartment houses were being built, “It is necessary also to take care of them!” That his fellow Leningraders shared his conviction was evinced by the fact that this report “on those who do not protect their dwelling” was based on commentary from readers from the editorial mailbag.60 Meanwhile, tenants who demonstrated a heightened sense of proletarian propriety were cast as models for imitation. An article featuring the collective

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respect for property displayed by residents sharing an apartment at 15 Grecheskii Avenue—apparently penned by the subjects themselves—bore the instructive title, “In the building we are not simply tenants, but masters [khoziaeva].” Once again, the designation “master” was not intended to elicit the sentiment “my home is my castle.” Rather, the authors declared, “The undamaged state of the housing stock, its correct operation and improvement, greatly depend on us ourselves.” In order to ensure this, they claimed, the “caring” hands of all residents were needed: by their own means and measures, they were expected to complete all repairs in a timely manner, both in the dwelling space they occupied and in places of common use. They clarified that although “formally” tenants were obliged only to pay their rent, while housing and construction offices were responsible for major repairs, it was imperative that residents nevertheless conduct minor maintenance on their own. This included tasks like mending cracks in ceilings, cleaning walls, and repairing doors—all of which required coordinated efforts.61 The model residents at Grecheskii Avenue urging their fellow Leningraders to exercise initiative in preserving housing were clearly summarizing official regulations for the use and maintenance of living premises. These decreed that tenants were obliged to care for the state housing stock by assisting in the operation of dwellings, ensuring cleanliness and order within individual apartments and in places of common use, informing housing management officials of disrepair, conducting minor repairs using personal resources, and contributing to the greening of the surrounding environs. They also outlined requirements for the disposal of trash, for fire prevention and for washing laundry, and provided advice for dividing up payment for amenities and time for bathroom use within communal apartments. Alongside offering practical recommendations, housing rules also stipulated that it was the duty of residents to uphold standards of socialist conduct and to actively participate in the work of house committees.62 Some scholars have interpreted official encouragement of voluntary activism as above all serving the pragmatic purpose of prompting tenants to assist understaffed housing officials.63 Although local administrations were certainly beleaguered by shortages of human and material resources, fulfilling pressing menial tasks around the home did not appear to be the sole objective of drawing individuals into collective initiatives. Most obviously, the maintenance and beautification of apartment buildings and neighborhoods benefited the populace as a whole by providing decent and attractive living spaces, as well as fostering civic pride. It was clearly in conformity with official instructions for collectively safeguarding their building that one group of Leningrad activists beckoned their neighbors with the following: “let us, friends-tenants, by means of our combined strength, undertake the improvement of our courtyards, the

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repair of apartments, and the creation of conditions for genuine communist living!” They concurrently proclaimed their personal stake in maintaining the housing stock, rhetorically asking, “We are living here and for whom if not for us would we bring order to our dear home [rodnoi dom]?”64 Similarly, even if it was mimicry of official rules and ideals that had garnered the aforementioned tenants at Grecheskii Avenue print space, the declaration with which their piece began would likely have resonated with readers: Everyone agrees: it is good to live in a clean, well-equipped apartment. The heart gladdens when all corners are tidy . . . and there is a place for everything. . . . it is as if one becomes better, more exacting of oneself. You do not allow yourself to tread on the floor in filthy galoshes, you do not hang up your coat and hat just anyhow, and you are going to do everything in precisely such a way so as not to breach exemplary order.65

Despite the absence of an explicit assertion of local pride, the firm sense of propriety that these Leningraders exhibited might have stemmed from practices that had been generated by wartime circumstances. In response to severe damage to the city water supply system during the winter of 1941–1942, Leningrad residents engaged in a massive springtime volunteer effort to cope with sewage problems like flooded basements. They also tended to the excessive accumulation of trash, which, in the absence of municipal services, had led to the makeshift disposal of rubbish in courtyards and “in urban wastelands created by the bombings and the demolition of buildings for firewood.”66 Rooted in this pivotal moment during the Blockade, from 1942 on, each March and April in Leningrad, thousands of people and hundreds of vehicles were mobilized in voluntary efforts to reduce the number of unauthorized garbage dumps and filthy courtyards, and then again in the fall, as these invariably resurfaced. Thus, Siobhan Peeling asserted, the 1942 spring cleaning became a symbol of the wartime resilience of Leningraders.67 Also significant was the conflation of cleanliness with morality, as “dirt, disease and disorder” persisted into the early years of reconstruction. This was partly attributable to the influx of an additional 1.5 million residents into Leningrad following the end of the Blockade in January 1944. In this context, Leningraders perceived those who had been in the city during the 1942 spring cleaning as “morally good” and insisted that recent arrivals assimilate by showing concern for the cleanliness of the urban environment. As Peeling claimed, “The local mythology of a clean and moral city, alongside the reality of an unsanitary postwar urban environment formed the background for the process of integration of newcomers to Leningrad.”68

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Concerns about “social contamination” often accompanied ones pertaining to health and hygiene. Essentially, Leningraders deemed the public swearing, fighting, hooliganism, and drunkenness that could escape the sanitary controls established to cope with the inundation of newcomers to be just as offensive to the urban environment as overflowing cesspools and random rubbish heaps. They therefore cast them, too, as threatening “the purity of the culture of the city.”69 The fact that Leningraders raised similar concerns well into the Khru­ shchev years suggests that this fixation with the moral order and cleanliness extended beyond the exigencies of war and reconstruction.70 At the same time, the importance of initiatives that had been instrumental to restoring damaged housing and improving sanitary conditions, including springtime cleaning campaigns, had not declined. The sense of propriety that Leningraders continued to share is reinforced by summaries of letters from readers of Vechernii Leningrad; these indicate that popular activism actually increased the demands placed on local officials responsible for providing and coordinating resources and practical assistance.71 For instance, the editorial report for August 1959 stated that a “significant number” of critical letters received by the newspaper were directed toward housing administrations, citing their poor preparation for wintertime. The summary elaborated that the readers who had written these letters were insisting upon an end to “sluggishness” in repair work and concrete measures instead of mere “formal replies” (otpiski).72 In a similar vein, in published articles as in unpublished reports, Leningraders cited employees of shops housed on the ground floor of apartment buildings for the shameful appearance of residential courtyards, where they often carelessly discarded boxes and other trash. Readers also complained about workers affiliated with construction and repair trusts leaving behind pipes, fixtures, and other refuse in plain view of tenants.73 Recommendations that supervisors in housing management offices, enterprises, and building trades tend to the maintenance and cleanliness of the everyday environment should not be dismissed as a renunciation of individual responsibility. Rather, they suggest that common space was popularly perceived as warranting the coordination of both personal and state time and resources. Reports published in the press defended this viewpoint. The author of one exposé explicitly stated that the issue of improving living conditions was not the “private matter of residents.” He indicated that even if a group of tenants was intent on assuming a major task like remodeling a kitchen or bathroom, it still needed to acquire a building permit. He also complained that only if a building were already in need of major repair would the directors of the City Housing Administration (gorodskoe zhilishchnoe upravlenie) contemplate renovation. Otherwise, they were “not very attentive to the needs of tenants” and did not worry that residents

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were living in “sometimes badly equipped apartments.” The author recommended that housing administrations and city planning organizations, together with the executive committees of district soviets, promptly provide the means for reconstructing the old housing stock. This way, Leningraders could be more quickly and inexpensively provided improved living space.74 Such criticisms and demands in the realm of print space not only appeared to bolster commitment to harmonizing personal and social responsibilities and interests. They also implied that disposition was as significant as sheer pragmatism or aesthetic gratification. As Huxtable outlined in a case study of the Communard movement, a grassroots initiative intended to revitalize the Komsomol under Khrushchev, practices evoking citizenship were supposed to be meaningful on a personal level. He explains, “Individuals were expected, not just to observe the form, but to find their own relation, their own place, within Soviet civic life”—an exercise that demanded that they synchronize their “authentically personal inner core” with “publically [sic] mandated values.”75 This is particularly evident in official prescriptions that connected the advancement of sovetskoe obshchestvo to the realization of Communism. As the author of one instructive pamphlet claimed, To be a worthy member of socialist society demands, first of all, a firm communist world outlook. . . . A resolute person—this is a collectivist, and above all for him is the concern of the collective. If, however, a person lives only by narrow household interests and thinks only about himself all the time, then he will not become a genuine builder of Communism.76

Modesty, sincerity, tactfulness, courteousness, concern for others, and cooperation, alongside attention to cleanliness and order in terms of domestic space and personal appearance, were offered as particularly desirable qualities and markers of a communist outlook.77 The development of such character traits that would enrich the collective is depicted in a short story published in 1960 that revolves around a voskresnik. Here the focus is not so much on the tasks confronting the protagonists as on their attitudes and on the impact of their deeds on personal growth and the evolution of neighborliness. When the housing management office in this tale calls on tenants to join together to clear snow from the roof and courtyard of their building, the narrator-protagonist notes, “All were silent” for “we had kind of a strange building: all are reserved; no one says how-do-you-do to anyone; they meet in the courtyard—they lower their eyes and disperse.” Nevertheless, he and a friend decide not only to participate in this initiative, but also to take this opportunity to make amends with their neighbor Kotov, an elderly man on whom they

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had played many a childish prank. The two boys thus become determined both to complete their own share of shoveling and to assist Kotov with his assignment for the voskresnik. In the end, all the snow is cleared, the boys and Kotov share tea, and the greetings “Hello,” “Good day,” and “Good health” begin to resound among neighbors in the courtyard.78 Vechernii Leningrad traced similar awakenings of collectivism and collegial interaction. For example, a human interest story published in the same year as this fictional tale reported that the first subbotnik organized to tidy the courtyard at 1 Smol′nyi Avenue brought together in a cordial way those in “uneasy” apartments where tenants had not been on good terms with one another.79 Fostering cooperation was especially important within communal apartments, which were notorious for being tainted by scandals, arguments, and even physical brawling. Moreover, it was in old apartments that the social component of daily life had been most grossly destabilized under Stalin, when the looming possibility of individuals denouncing fellow residents had the potential to add tragedy to the discord produced by the discomforts of collective living. As the dissident Vladimir Bukovsky recalled, “A carelessly dropped word could become a weapon in . . . kitchen warfare, to be used for a political denunciation, particularly if it offered the hope of moving into a vacated room.”80 Such facets of the Stalinist past were not broached in the local press during the Khrushchev years; however, habitual sources of conflict frequently figured into public discussions about the culture of everyday life. One summary article that appeared in Verchenii Leningrad acknowledged that the inconveniences of inhabiting close quarters could occasionally give rise to “squabbles, quarrels, and petty unpleasantries.” It therefore emphasized the importance of living harmoniously because the state could not yet provide each family a separate apartment. Offering a model for circumventing discord, its authors described a building where “simple Soviet people” (workers and pensioners) were living on genuinely friendly terms. Here the “gladness of one is the gladness of all,” they asserted. This spirit of comradeship was manifested in a general courteousness, as well as in collective leisure pursuits: residents attended the theater or watched television, in addition to celebrating birthdays and holidays, together as a group.81 Portraits like these echoed those that appeared in more officious pamphlets lauding practices aimed at strengthening friendship between tenants and realizing cultured living. According to one brochure, “In buildings where communist obligations had been assumed, apartment spats disappeared, complaints about the absence of normal rest ceased and tenants began to safeguard the peace of one another.” Such apartments became cleaner, and life within them became more pleasant as “foul language and drunkenness” began to dissipate.82

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Collectivism could also facilitate the transition to new housing. Integrating the housewarming narrative with visions for harmonious living, one article began by showcasing the Moscow Gates district, where twelve new buildings had arisen on the barren landscape in the previous seven years. It then shifted focus to the variety of initiatives undertaken by residents in one of the new housing settlements in the area. Finding that construction workers had left behind trash, scraps of lumber, and potholes, tenants chose to immediately clean up the territory surrounding their building themselves, rather than wait for the builders to return to complete these tasks. A subsequent voskresnik to plant shrubs and trees and to clean up the garbage in their courtyard, afforded neighbors another opportunity to commune with one another. Illustrating the further blossoming of their camaraderie, the author noted that residents subsequently set up a parents’ committee, a library, and a red corner.83 Concern for the cleanliness, order, beauty, and civility of new neighborhoods was especially important because separate apartments were not always settled by single families.84 Recognizing this predicament of novostroika, the author commending the voluntary measures carried out in the Moscow Gates district also praised residents of communal apartments who—like one noteworthy group featured had—pledged to “live harmoniously in their family and with neighbors,” “respect each other,” “display comradely mutual assistance,” and “raise their own children in the spirit of communism.” It was only through adherence to such “rules of socialist conduct” (pravila sotsialisticheskogo obshchezhitiia), the tenants themselves asserted, “that people, living here, could truly rest well.”85 The author thus offered a model for tranquil, happy, and cultured cohabitation for residents of separate and communal apartments alike. Regardless of the circumstances then, harmonious living—the epitome of sovetskoe obshchestvo—was portrayed as contingent upon collective initiative. The realities of everyday life did not always converge with the ideal, even if there were citizens actively striving to realize it. Outlining continuing customs that diverged from prescribed norms—much as in cases of negligence of the housing stock or of green spaces—served to reproach and to inspire alternative approaches to daily living. One ocherk, for example, described the “Philistine” relations within one kommunalka where each tenant-family used its own light bulb in the corridor, kitchen, and bathroom and designated for its own use specific burners on the stove.86 As Svetlana Boym demonstrated, practices like these, including even devising separate doorbells or rings (“three rings for Petrov, two for Khaimovich, one for Skripkina, four for Genalidze”) were commonplace in communal apartments. Assessing such measures sympathetically, she asserted, “In circumstances of extreme overcrowdedness and imposed collectivity there is an extreme—almost obsessive—protection of minimal individual

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property.”87 Presenting the official view on this approach to communal living, one contribution to Vechernii Leningrad characterized efforts to mark individual space as “remnants of the past” and weeds that must be removed by their roots.88 Alongside individualistic conduct, simple disregard—whether in connection with the material world or in relation to others—was equally indefensible. Prompting local activists to recognize and address this particular deviation from the ideals of sovetskoe obshchestvo, one agitation brochure expressed disappointment that some people adamantly defended the maverick position, “It is my apartment, I am the master here and I ask you not to meddle. I pay the rent, and that’s that.”89 Another publication admonished the similar sentiment “I accurately fulfill my employment obligations, and as far as my daily life is concerned, that is my personal, private business.”90 Implicit was the notion that one’s home was not categorically one’s castle. Indifference manifested itself in concrete, negative ways. One summary of letters, for example, explicitly attributed the persistence of undesirable behavior to such “remnants of the past” as the “Philistine principle: ‘It is no concern of mine—I know nothing.’ ” Moreover, it declared, while those who perpetrate offences like “hooliganism” or “parasitism” should be “strictly and ruthlessly” punished, others are obliged to struggle against expressions of an “antisocial way of life.” Much like blatant abuse then, disregard was deemed capable not only of damaging common spaces, but also of undermining the collective. Peaceable neighbors were thus summoned to participate in preventing breaches of communist morality and enforcing standards of socialist conduct.91 The value of collective action in ascertaining an offense and reforming the accused was prominent in the agitation brochures from which local activists apparently took their cues. One such publication detailed a case of truancy in Kuibyshev that a social soviet had taken upon itself to address. Noticing that a certain neighborhood boy had been absent from school for several days, its members confronted his parents. They soon learned that his family was living in “abnormal” conditions and “terrible chaos”: their home was filthy and the children were neglected. A meeting was then convened to discuss the matter, and the activists resolved to tutor not just the boy who had initially come to their attention, but also other local children who were experiencing challenges with their studies. The social soviet had also ordered the parents under scrutiny to meet with its members directly, and speak with them “face to face.”92 The call to vigilance in monitoring neighbors and holding them accountable for their behavior indicates another role for liminal space: providing a site where social bodies could investigate and subject to censure those whose inappropriate conduct might undermine communist living. Purported offenders typically corresponded to the designation “hooligan”—a

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category that had permeated Soviet culture and society by 1960, when the Criminal Code of the RSFSR defined it as “a crime against society” (namely, its values) and eliminated the stipulation that hooliganism had to occur in a public space. With the development of bytovoe khuliganstvo (domestic hooliganism), the boundaries of the act became as elastic as its definition. Indeed hooliganism encompassed offenses petty and outright criminal, including cursing, pestering people, disturbing the peace, demonstrating a lack of civility in public, minor theft, the defacement of property, drunkenness, and verbal, physical and sexual assault. Given the millions of Soviet citizens punished for hooliganism during the 1950s and 1960s, and the countless others who participated in marking them as hooligans, Brian La Pierre went so far as to assert that the Khrushchev period was as much a “golden age of hooliganism” as one of de-Stalinization and cultural liberalization.93 Amid this mass preoccupation with and campaign against hooliganism, the peer-to-peer modus operandi of comrades’ courts exemplified the role of social pressure in encouraging appropriate conduct in apartment complexes and in reeducating alleged troublemakers—regardless of whether or not they were explicitly labeled as hooligans. Indicative of their quantitative breadth, it has been estimated that more 197,000 comrades’ courts existed throughout the Soviet Union in 1963.94 In terms of structure and functioning, unlike the higher people’s court (narodnyi sud), its popular counterpart was composed of comrades in every sense and was officially touted for being based on democratic principles and spontaneous initiative. To elaborate, a comrades’ court was usually created in an apartment complex at a general meeting of residents. Most cases were brought to its attention by written request of ordinary citizens, including the tenants and members of voluntary people’s patrols residing in a given building.95 In keeping with the notion of the inextricability of work and home life, comrades’ courts could also be assembled by employees of a given enterprise, establishment or educational institution, by members of a local trade union or Komsomol organization, or by state investigators and public prosecutors.96 On the whole, these social bodies were invested with “collective power to correct the individual.”97 In the workplace, the jurisdiction of comrades’ courts encompassed violations of work discipline (truancy, wasting time, and producing defective work), misappropriation of public means (equipment and money) for private purposes, and speculation. “At home” it extended to breaches of morality or standards of socialist conduct within apartment complexes and on city streets. Within these particular categories of infringements, the destruction of green space, hooliganism, public drunkenness, the disgraceful treatment of women, and failure to fulfill parental duties were considered to be especially egregious assaults on proletarian propriety.98

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The rulings of comrades’ courts were final, offering no possibility of appeal unless circumstantial evidence or existing legislation contradicted them. A decision could be made by majority vote in the absence of the accused if he or she failed to appear after a second summons. If a comrades’ court could not resolve a case, the matter was to be forwarded to the people’s court; then if the higher court concluded that the offense was a crime, the case would be submitted to the public prosecutor for further action.99 The terminology that governed comrades’ courts indicates that their mandate was envisioned as “persuasive” in nature; lacking a legal basis until 1961, their rules and procedures were largely inferred and improvised.100 Yet comrades’ courts did have the authority to publicly forewarn or reprimand, fine or demand payment for damages, propose demotion or eviction, as well as oblige an offender to publicly apologize before the injured person or collective. They could also bring violators “face to face” with society by submitting to the press for publication details about individuals who violated the norms of socialist conduct.101 Illustrative is the case of A. D. Sushkov, who had allegedly been monopolizing for the “personal use” of his family, the pantry in their kommunalka. His neighbors had turned to many organizations for help, including a comrades’ court and the higher city court, but to no avail; he simply disregarded the rulings of each body that he should share the storage space with his fellow tenants. The details of his violations subsequently came to be divulged in Vechernii Leningrad—perhaps by the very comrades’ court that Sushkov had initially ignored. Writing to their local paper seeking assistance, residents were frustrated that he exhibited two modes of behavior: one for work and another for home. At work, he was an esteemed specialist who readily fulfilled any task and always seemed to remember that a communist is obliged to serve as an example to others. At home, however, he was “waging ‘war’ with his neighbors” over their storage room, of which he had effectively taken possession.102 Exposure in the press through the publication of the full name and address of the offender appeared to be a last resort; the matter was finally resolved in favor of the plaintiffs, in accordance with the rules of socialist conduct. The key sentiment that pervaded the exposé on Sushkov was blatantly declared in its title: “Let him be ashamed!” Evidently, shaming was a standard feature of exposing violators (narushiteli) of communist morality—one that did not depend solely on publicity, but was facilitated by the physical closeness of crowded communal dwellings and the presence of keen activists in the corridors, stairwells and courtyards of apartment buildings in both old and new districts. Highlighting their particular efficacy in reforming wayward neighbors, Vechernii Leningrad pointed out that tenant meetings required the offender to endure the unpleasantness of

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4.2  Here passersby are viewing a wall newspaper (stennaia gazeta) featuring photographs of transgressors cast as spiders weaving a web of disorder. Posted by a local voluntary people’s patrol in the Kuibyshev district of Leningrad, the heading roughly translates, “They are disrupting our lives.” TsGAKFFD SPb, Ar 139052.

standing before people he or she encounters daily, rather than an official investigator or anonymous court. This was apparent in a piece showcasing a group of residents at 45 Nekrasov Street who had called to a meeting of the people’s patrol affiliated with their building a neighbor whose habitual drinking, in their estimation, posed a negative example to his daughter. The activists believed that their fellow tenant had no right “to maim the spirit” of his child and warned him that if he did not reform, they would report his behavior to his colleagues at work. The offender purportedly begged his neighbors to circumvent this measure, promising to cease his disgraceful conduct. Recounting this episode months later, Vechernii Leningrad reported that nothing alarming had since occurred in this household.103 Shaming the offender “at home”—and threatening to further compound his humiliation “at work”—appeared to have succeeded. Humiliation thus seemed to be a prescribed punishment for, as well as a tactic in eradicating, behavior ranging from the misappropriation or outright destruction of socialist property to “poisoning” the lives of others with incessant quarrelling, excessive drinking, or idleness. Popular initiatives “at home” embroiled in monitoring conduct, in communion with published features decrying specific types of behavior,

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suggest that the invigoration of socialist society possessed a sinister element, namely the potential to seep into personal matters like minor disagreements between neighbors over mutual concerns and individualized approaches to childrearing. Illustrative is a case involving a man identified as V. Egorov who purportedly regularly violated the norms of socialist conduct in his apartment by organizing dusk-till-dawn drinking parties. Though his neighbors were inarguably justified in confronting him for denying them peace and quiet, their scrutiny extended into a matter that had no direct bearing on their lives: the antagonist was habitually unemployed for months on end. A comrades’ court was finally organized to contend with Egorov, and it sharply condemned him and threatened to evict him if he did not reform. Since the ruling though, he had allegedly come to his senses and was working at the Leningrad commercial port.104 As this case indicates, comrades’ courts and other social bodies, with their collective modes of intervention into private life, evoke the emergence of a system of “horizontal surveillance” during the Khrushchev era that Kharkhordin discerned.105 In this very vein, one agitation brochure claimed that collective activities had inspired the following approach to daily life: “the need to keep watch over one’s own conduct in society and in the family.” “Each began to live as if in view of all,” its author asserted, much as in a “friendly” family.106 House committees in particular had a mandate to intervene in personal concerns, for example, by helping unemployed persons find jobs, or by pressuring alcoholics to seek treatment so that their family could live a “normal” life.107 In fact, house committees appeared to have been expressly designed to spy on, denounce, or provoke people.108 They thus complemented the work of officials appointed by local soviets, including housing managers who were assigned such formal surveillance duties as maintaining registries of tenants, informing the police about their arrivals and departures from the city, and ensuring that their passports were valid.109 Although common spaces where tenants encountered neighbors and housing officials potentially constituted sites for social scrutiny, declarations aligning widespread material progress with personal moral advancement suggest that vigilance in the realm of “public” space during the 1950s and 1960s was less a matter of base control (let alone a Soviet Panopticon) than an effort to create a new kommunisticheskii byt. Print space too was a multifaceted site, as indicated by an exposé detailing the “deformed” attitudes of Victor Kol′tsov and his wife Marionila. The two are initially introduced as models at work. Marionila is cited as the director of a laboratory guiding a collective of scientists, and a “humanist” striving to help people preserve their health and live longer. “Meanwhile at home, the communist doctor . . . does not so much as approach the bed of her sick mother-in-law” who lives with them. “At home,” it is divulged, “she is an

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unkind, egoistic daughter-in-law.” Victor is also presented as “callous,” refusing even to buy his mother medicine when she is ill. Furthermore, the seventy-eight-year-old woman has to cook her own meals, wash her own laundry, and buy her own bread. The author of this discussion “on moral themes” concluded that the Kol′tsovs must be made answerable for their reprehensible conduct at home—if necessary, at their place of work.110 No resolution was provided in the case of the Kol′tsovs; the intent of the feature appeared to be simply to instruct on and admonish cruelty so as to deny it a place in the nascent sovetskoe obshchestvo. The author claimed that although the behavior of the antagonists is “not typical,” it is nevertheless necessary to “not be silent” when confronted with such conduct. She subsequently summarized the grave import of fulfilling this responsibility by proclaiming, “Our nation is constructing Communism, and . . . we cannot drag into this bright future deformed types of relations between people.”111 Gross indifference to others converged with the mentality “my home is my castle” among the “deformed” approaches to daily life and social intercourse that could inhibit communist construction. Thus, the tenants coping with Sushkov exhibited dismay that in an apartment where everything was otherwise in order (modern and conducive to comfortable living), “only ‘the problem of the store-room’ remains unresolved.” Essentially, although residents enjoyed conveniences like centralized heating and hot water, “Philistinism and a petty proprietary outlook on life” continued to surface. Detailing the importance of behaving appropriately “at home as at work,” the role of the collective in ensuring proletarian propriety, and projections for harmony within spaces adjacent to old or new dwellings, the over­ arching message of this report was widespread: “A communist, at home too [implicitly, as elsewhere], cannot be a petty egoist and personal proprietor. He is obliged also to be worthy of imitation.”112 This firm directive illuminates how imprecise was the boundary between private affairs and matters of broader social significance. This can be attributed to the national import that upstanding conduct—as much as productivity—had assumed to the image of Soviet society. In short, as in the case of communist morality vis-à-vis interior decoration, the confluence of personal and social interests was deemed fundamental to building Communism. Attaining Communism included realizing a humanistic society in which offenders, even of a criminal nature, could be reformed. Miriam Dobson situated this approach to law and order within the wider context of the Thaw, citing a personal interest in it on the part of Khrushchev.113 Elaborating on this stance in relation to petty crime, La Pierre placed gumannost′ (humaneness) at the center of a soft line, introduced in 1959, that relied on the participation of obshchestvennost′—ideally in the form of public

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meetings where offenders would be confronted by their peers, confess to their misdeeds, and ultimately recommit themselves to their family, factory, and society. Rooted in the noble notion that decriminalizing petty offenses would spare wrongdoers the corrupting influence of incarceration with hardened criminals and would remake them into benign subjects, all the while underscoring the superiority of the Soviet system with its enlightened approach to criminal justice, the mobilization of “the social collective” also had its practical advantages. Basically, it was a means of conserving police and judicial resources for fighting dangerous crime. The shift to a hard line that occurred in 1962 was also partly attributable to a lack of resources.114 Ushered in by the 1961 Party Program in which Khrushchev had proclaimed a rigid stance toward “antisocial elements,” other factors that garnered support for a harsher approach included misapplication of official directives, abuses in policing on the part of vigilant citizens coupled with indifference among others, lack of cooperation from offenders being reprimanded, and the perception that sentences were too light, therefore contributing to an increasing crime rate.115 As this brief portrait has intimated, official and popular perceptions surrounding petty crime and hooliganism had a cognate in notions about conduct on the microlevel of Soviet society—the home. In essence, while the state was to lay the material groundwork for society through mass housing, ordinary individuals were expected to secure its moral foundation through exemplary behavior, as well as participation in the reform of wayward neighbors. The voluntary initiatives that members of social bodies carried out thus constituted the actualization of the agreeable communist morality and collectivism propagandized in agitation brochures and newspapers.116 Of course, attitudes and approaches toward collectivism varied, as did the nature and extent of involvement in activism in common spaces. For instance, an individual who expressed exasperation over a filthy stairwell or participated in a greening campaign might nevertheless have been reluctant to partake in reprimanding the personal conduct of his or her neighbors. Even in an overcrowded kommunalka, in which disruptive behavior would have made daily life especially unpleasant, residents sharing an apartment may have stubbornly distanced themselves from the concerns of others, perhaps in the very same spirit that drove them to construct a sense of personal space by using their own light bulbs in shared spaces or answering only to the doorbell ring that they had composed for their own guests to use. An extreme illustration of the mutual respect for privacy that communal living could engender is refusal to cross the threshold of the room of another family even to defend a woman against spousal abuse.117 Meanwhile, those who abidingly joined popular initiatives “at home” may have either effectively “performed” collectivism in accordance with

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their own particular interests, or “domesticated” official ideology about the collective simply because the “human” values it represented resonated with them.118 One interviewee in the oral history collection Russia’s Sputnik Generation recalled that during the Khrushchev era, one could not escape encountering the “Moral Code of the Builder of Communism”; not only was this treatise posted at her school, but students were required to memorize it. She added, “there was absolutely nothing wrong with this” as it was “almost like the Ten Commandments.”119 The interplay of official and popular visions for the functioning of society, and the harmonization of personal and social interests, are starkly illustrated by a 1963 case in which the Leningrad city court overturned—for an undisclosed reason—the decision of a comrades’ court to evict one belligerent “parasite” and scandalmonger. Incensed by the perceived injustice of this ruling, the wronged individuals turned to Vechernii Leningrad to assuage their affront. They emphatically proclaimed, “Humanity in the treatment of hooligans turns into cruelty toward us, her neighbors.”120 This proclamation echoed the popular ridicule of humanism as “undying hatred for the enemies of our people” that appeared in press campaigns of the early 1960s amid rising crime statistics.121 In a similar vein, a 1960 exposé based on the contents of the editorial mailbag rhetorically asked why hooligans should be suffered “within our walls” when they are not tolerated in public spaces like city streets and trams. According to the conscientious tenants striving to maintain order in one apartment at 3 Red Cavalry Street, life could be comfortable for all of the residents of their kommunalka. However, because of one couple among them, some tenants were seeking to flee their home, petitioning to exchange their living space. The offenders, the Kolesniks, apparently disturbed the peace and conducted themselves so aggressively that other residents were afraid to move about the corridors of the apartment at night. The Kolesniks also occasionally barred access to the communal kitchen when entertaining guests. Two years before the complainants finally wrote to Vechernii Leningrad, the offenders had been summoned to a people’s court, which ended up recognizing the grievances of the plaintiffs. However, this body limited punishment to a mere warning. The house committee to which the incensed tenants next turned was also ineffective. The newspaper report thus concluded wondering, “Is it not time . . . to call such criminals to answer?”122 As suggested, the pervasiveness of popular vitriol against conduct classified as a “weight of the past” (gruz proshlogo) is borne out by broader research on antisocial behavior during the Thaw. Studies on parasitism, like those on hooliganism, reveal that Soviet citizens demanded that comrades’ courts and peoples’ patrols intervene in domestic space because they considered the laws regulating behavior here to be far too lax. As the efforts

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of such popular bodies faltered, some prompted the state to abandon the soft line and toughen its stance toward crime.123 Overall, individuals had a stake in the social order. Thus, exposing and criticizing wrongdoers and urging ordinary citizens to participate in rooting out negative attitudes and conduct, much like supporting the activities of social bodies, served a more meaningful function in common spaces than raw surveillance. The same is true of print space. Instructing on what comprised an inappropriate mindset and encouraging collective vigilance against the unsuitable conduct it could breed, published depictions of activists holding unruly neighbors accountable simultaneously reflected a general, popular aspiration toward human dignity and civility in daily interactions. After all, readers participated in shaping the public image of Soviet society by corresponding with and soliciting the intervention of journalists and editors. Although the range of motivations for the variety of types of voluntary initiatives undertaken was surely vast, public portrayals of social activism represented a fusion of official and popular voices. Furthermore, the positive narratives among them evoked the advancement of the ideal sovetskoe obshchestvo. The types of initiatives that ideologues promoted, activists carried out, and journalists publicized during the Thaw were reminiscent of those that had emerged during the long Revolutionary decade that extended into the First Five-Year Plan.124 For instance, campaigns aimed at citywide “greening” or improving neighborhood courtyards in the interest of creating a distinct urban aesthetic and a new society, spanned from the 1920s through the early 1930s.125 After World War II, initiatives to produce viable green spaces were revived.126 Of course, the war itself inspired a tremendous range of voluntary labor activities; during this time of crisis, ordinary citizens were already spontaneously contributing to the vital task of the reconstruction—as well as the general maintenance and preservation—of the housing stock.127 Like greening and repair initiatives, house committees, the most prominent of massive organizations operating in apartment blocks under Khrushchev, had their origins in the 1920s.128 At the same time, there is a rough parallel between the purpose, voluntarism, and activism of the house committees of the 1950s and 1960s and the “housewife-activists’ (ob-­ shchestvennitsy) movement” of the 1930s. Both entities established or fostered affiliations with house clinics, parents’ committees, and other social bodies.129 Such antecedents to the popular neighborhood initiatives of the Thaw evince a broader trajectory in the construction of sovetskoe obshchestvo. Theodore Friedgut went as far as to present the social bodies that supplemented state administrators and resources during the 1950s and 1960s as

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“heralding a stage of Soviet political development in which the Marxian vision of the ‘withering away of the state’ would begin to be affected, with ‘Communist self-government taking its place.’ ”130 More to the point of the voluntary activism under scrutiny here, collectivism evoked the realization of the Revolution in the sphere of social relations, as much as housewarmings signaled the resuscitation of socialist housing policy in the realm of habitation. In this spirit, one propaganda pamphlet published in 1963 infused collective endeavors with the revolutionary-era motif of rebirth, conflating them with the general “struggle for the communist resurrection of daily life.”131 Allusions to earlier revolutionary enthusiasm sometimes pervaded reportage on the maintenance and improvement of living space. One article injected the efforts of a featured repair brigade with loyalty toward the socialist regime, asserting, “This is the old guard, combatants [boitsy] of the first Five-Year [Plan] and of the Great Patriotic war.” In addition to skilled workers, this group of activists had apparently attracted pensioners—individuals willing to employ their rich life experiences for active social labor rather than accept the deserved rest offered them by the state.132 As the reference to “combatants”—and elsewhere, to a struggle—suggests, discussion of civilian mandates on the peacetime home front was sometimes imbued with militarism. This mode of discourse, like popular initiatives, harkened back to earlier periods of Soviet history. Notably, martial metaphors had been used in connection with feats of labor during both the era of the First Five-Year Plan and that of the New Economic Policy.133 Under Khrushchev, the mikroraion was presented as a microworld (mikromir) that had to be defended. This was purportedly clearly understood by one group of Party activists who considered themselves “combatants of the Party always and everywhere, at any time and in any situation. Including ‘domestic circumstances.’ ”134 The following similarly conjured up the notion of a militant crusade for sovetskoe obshchestvo, integrating the moral, productive and domestic worlds of the individual: “There, where the person lives, at the place of each Soviet toiler, is located a major part of the national front of the struggle for instilling the . . . principles of the moral code of the building of Communism, and increasing his labor and social activity.”135 In the flurry of activity depicted in this chapter, the medium was the message, as collective endeavors within common spaces and official ideology reinforced each other. Campaigns for building maintenance and courtyard beautification, which were considered essential for health and enjoyment, could also generate comradeship. Thus, tidy stairwells and green corners became as important for propagating Communism—in terms of both cultured living and instilling socialist values—as red corners designed for propaganda and agitation.

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By documenting the development of the socialist person and the advancement of a communist way of life during the Thaw, the press returned to key questions raised upon the founding of the revolutionary regime: “Who was the Soviet person? What was the Soviet person to become? What was a society of Soviet persons to look like?”136 In addressing these matters—in order to accomplish both pragmatic goals and socialist ideals—it also revived its early functions of enlightenment (propaganda) and mass mobilization (agitation).137 The response was encapsulated by a group of activists who voiced their opinion that only in capitalist countries do people live by the formula “my home is my castle.” By contrast, the daily life of the Soviet person was imbued with a “spirit of collectivism, comradeship, mutual assistance and communist morality.”138 Such model tenants embodied the ideal image of Soviet society. They represented “the person of tomorrow” or the “noble cause” to which the Party organs of housing bureaus were ostensibly devoting their strength and energy.139 Such rhetoric might be perceived as patronizing, but in an era of optimism over the imminent realization of promises for a good life ordinary citizens had a considerable stake in activism around the home and in monitoring the conduct of their neighbors: civic duty, social responsibility, and cooperation could foster an attractive, healthy and comfortable daily environment, together with civil and mutually beneficial social interactions. This was particularly pertinent in living space that continued to remain inadequate. In addition, the pursuits and outlooks that the state and Party cast as “collectivist” or “socialist” had the effect of creating a sense of “hominess”—usually associated with private life—within the liminal spaces bordering the home. Whether in the old or the most recently built housing stock, freshly painted corridors and courtyards lush with trees and flowerbeds rendered common spaces an arena not only for communist conquest, but also for popular satisfaction. One appreciative pensioner succinctly conveyed this in stating how his receipt of a thoughtfully designed, well-built, bright, spacious, and comfortable apartment had transformed him. He confirmed, “They say that in a new improved apartment, the person becomes different—full of joie de vivre, sociable. This is certain. I know myself.”140

C H A P T E R 5

THE QUEST FOR NORMALCY Coming Home, Settling Down, Moving Forward

IN MARCH 1958, RESIDENTS at 100 Borovaia Street in Leningrad made a fervent plea for better housing. Even before World War II, their building had been officially declared a “house of menace” (dom ugrozy) because the apartments within it did not meet even the most elementary demands for hygiene and comfort, nor “for the protection of the health of its inhabitants, raising children, normal sleep, and rest.” Here tenants had to contend with a narrow, windowless, unventilated, and poorly equipped kitchen (with several families sharing a single stove), the vagaries of water pipes in dire need of replacement (in some of the apartments, residents lived completely without water), rotting walls in the toilets (due to dampness), cracking plaster, and an unkempt courtyard. Since 1931, neither major nor cosmetic repairs had been conducted on their building, which was further destroyed by artillery bombardment during the Blockade. Then, because the foundation and walls had withstood the shelling, and housing had become even scarcer, new tenants were moved into it, exacerbating the overcrowding and making daily life markedly worse.1 The demand presented in this letter was straightforward: 100 Borovaia Street must immediately undergo extensive repair work. By the end of 1959, however, residents of this building were still waiting for their apartments to be renovated. Anticipating having to vacate their homes for the duration of the repairs, they marveled that “at a time of new massive housing construction,” they should have to tolerate this immense inconvenience instead of being moved into a new building. 2

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Major repairs were finally completed at 100 Borovaia Street in 1961, though with numerous shortcomings. The rooms in some apartments had been subdivided into awkward configurations. One, which came to measure roughly two by seven meters after it was renovated, now resembled a “tram car.”3 Throughout the building, meanwhile, the heating that had been installed in the appreciably brighter bathrooms and kitchens was defective. This purportedly made conditions worse than during the Blockade, when tenants could at least warm up by a small stove. “Now that we have a radiator,” they remarked with irony, “we go about in felt boots and warm coats.” They wondered for how long they would have to endure this latest “outrage.”4 On the most fundamental level, this housing petition, which spanned several years, represents the reality that for many in the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s, daily life remained virtually unchanged by mass construction, let alone postwar rebuilding. Official accounts were also revealing. For example, a report compiled by the ispolkom (executive committee) of the Leningrad city soviet in 1960 acknowledged that although the number of families in Leningrad receiving living space had been increasing, acute housing need would span the entirety of the Seven-Year Plan (1959–1965). By way of illustration, it noted that 37,000 families had received living space in 1958 and 40,000 in 1959, but that it would take about five years to render satisfactory the outstanding 1.5 million square meters of the old housing stock, in varying states of disrepair, that continued to house a minimum of 250,000 Leningraders. 5 That such extensive renovation merited consideration in the midst of expansive new construction, further elucidates the scope of the housing crisis. In this chapter I focus on the chronic problems that besieged inhabitants of old apartments requiring essential repairs and improved amenities. These included leaky roofs, incessant dampness, defects in plumbing and heating systems, poor ventilation, perpetually peeling paint and plaster, and overcrowding. Each year, such deficiencies drove many thousands of Leningraders to compose lengthy and recurring letters of complaint (pis′ma zhaloby) or request (pis′ma zaiavleniia); they then submitted these to local housing, factory, military, municipal government, and Party officials and national figures, as well as to newspaper and magazine editors who might intervene on their behalf in resolving their housing grievance or appeal. Given that the city soviet was ultimately responsible for administering the bulk of housing in Leningrad, letters sent to other offices were invariably forwarded to its deputies for examination. In 1955, this body had assumed responsibility for the distribution of all new housing built by the main construction trust in Leningrad, Glavleningradstroi.6 By 1956, more than 70 percent of state housing was operated by the Leningrad city soviet.7 Such streamlining, intended to increase efficiency and reduce corruption,

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diminished the role in housing allocation that had previously been played by employers and workplace organizations at industrial enterprises, and academic and other institutions. To offer a sense of the volume of housing petitions that city soviet deputies had to contend with annually, out of the roughly 53,000 complaints and requests that they received in 1959, about 65 percent (approximately 35,000) concerned the housing question. The overwhelming majority of these (around 27,000) pertained to some aspect of housing distribution (for example, an exchange or registration in a queue for the receipt of living space); the remainder involved matters related to repair.8 Although submitting a letter to persons or bodies of authority was not the only strategy that Soviet citizens employed to improve their living conditions, figures like these attest to the tremendous value that citizens attached to the process. In terms of their content, petitions provide a general portrait of daily life for those still waiting to settle into a new separate apartment “with all the conveniences.” They also offer a discursive inventory of popular designations for prewar housing that spanned from “alien corners” to “coffins.” Moreover, details regarding the absence of conditions conducive to good health and hygiene, tranquility and contentment, and dignified living and personal fulfillment provide insight into the kind of home that petitioners alternatively imagined for themselves—in other words, what “house and home” meant to the ordinary individual. In these respects, housing petitions presented a variant of the account “then versus now” that was so prominent in the glowing housewarming scenarios published in the press during the Khrushchev era, as well as reflected popular conceptions of normalcy.9 More broadly, juxtaposing the “small stories” of Leningraders with the official narrative of Revolution-being-realized temporally propels forward “the psychological frontier of the end of the war” that Elena Zubkova associated with the conclusion of rationing, the restoration of prewar industrial production, and the demobilization of the Soviet army in 1948.10 Housing petitions of the 1950s and 1960s demanding the establishment of circumstances associated with routine peacetime normalcy also force the grand gestures of de-Stalinization—from the rehabilitation of unjustly accused “enemies of the people” to the liberalization of literary production—to recede into the background. They thereby demonstrate a degree of continuity from the prewar era through the Thaw. Specifically, living conditions like those that residents at 100 Borovaia Street had to tolerate more than a decade after the end of World War II reveal that shortcomings continued to be as characteristic of Soviet housing policy during the Khrushchev period as its impressive chronicle of progress. In addition to undermining the grand narrative of advancement toward providing each family its own apartment, descriptions of the material discomforts and inconveniences of living in close quarters with others implicitly

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challenged another motif of public culture during the Thaw: the revival of socialist society.11 Articulating the psychological and emotional effects that communal living could engender, individuals petitioning for better housing conveyed the impression that they felt beleaguered by, or else alienated from, those with whom they had to share a dwelling. Some conflated escape from close and constant contact with others with the development of a self distinct from the collective—even if only on the small scale of domestic life. Embedded in their requests was a yearning for their “own” space. Desperately Seeking Better Housing: “Possible Options” Housing in the Soviet Union was theoretically owned by the people and distributed on their behalf by a benevolent and just government. This precept was vociferously reinforced by Khrushchev as he endeavored to fully assert state paternalism and revive communist egalitarianism. What, if any, opportunities remained for Soviet citizens to determine their own living arrangements? Although “private property” (chastnaia sobstvennost′)—connoting the accumulation of profit and the exploitation of others—was abolished during the Revolution, as Mark Smith illuminated, individual ownership of property resulting from labor was not. The right to own “personal property” (lichnaia sobstvennost′) was embedded in legislation introduced between 1917 and 1922 and then consolidated in the 1936 Soviet Constitution. In accord with revolutionary principles, such housing was to be limited to use by a single family, which could not derive financial gain or amass unearned resources from it. Still, its members could sell (on equitable terms), gift, or leave it as a legacy; they also had the option, however limited, to rent parts of it out. Such legal stipulations, coupled with security of occupancy, resulted in personal property accounting for as much as one-third of the overall urban housing stock from 1941 through 1964.12 Contributing to the continued growth of individual housing in the postwar era was a May 1944 decree that authorized straightforward loans for precisely such building projects. As Smith explained, this wartime measure enabled citizens to acquire an extended lease for a plot of land from their local soviet and build a house. Throughout the process, they were entitled to obtain through their workplace bank credit, expertise in formalizing legalities, assistance in the procurement of standardized building plans and construction supplies, and help in the transportation and assembly of those materials. They would then own the dwelling they had built, in accordance with the legal provisions regarding personal property.13 Although individual construction was not prohibited during the Khrushchev period, it was disparaged in favor of state housing, given that

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it could engender such sordid practices as speculation and the acquisition of funds and building supplies through questionable means like embezzlement and pilfering. Krokodil was particularly vigilant about exposing individuals who so abused Soviet laws on personal property; the magazine also presented the construction of exceedingly large osobniaki (private residences), teremki (towers), or khoromy (mansions) as no less egregious.14 In fact, a 1958 decree limiting the size of personal property, from a vague five rooms and two stories to the more stringent maximum of sixty square meters, may have been a direct response to such excesses.15 Restrictive measures might also have served to make housing situated outside the purview of direct state provision more ideologically palatable. That Khrushchev himself deemed individual construction to be outmoded and unbecoming for a communist city is evinced by a 1963 decree banning it from any urban area with a population greater than 100,000.16 Here, amid massive apartment blocks, osobniaki would have appeared especially conspicuous. At the same time, to supplement state construction, Khrushchev promoted cooperative housing through enhanced legislative and financial support.17 A phenomenon that predated his leadership and was revived in 1958, the Soviet housing cooperative was usually composed of employees at a given enterprise or institution who wanted to invest their savings to build and manage an apartment building on their own. Such housing was officially classified as “socialist property” rather than “personal property,” and the rights of the cooperative as a whole trumped any claimed by an individual member.18 The least orthodox strategies for overcoming intolerable housing conditions or acquiring additional living space included scheming against neighbors and even family members in order to dispossess them of their rightful living space; entering into fabricated marriages (one way for single persons to escape dormitory life in the context of policy that inherently favored married couples); swapping with others or, alternatively, hoarding living space; and enlisting the services of speculators.19 Fictional and personal accounts made such practices infamous, while newspapers and magazines featured them expressly to admonish against them, thereby suggesting that they were quite common. For example, one report “on moral themes” published in Vechernii Leningrad recounted a case in which a couple attempting to usurp for itself an entire apartment made life miserable for new tenants, in order to force them to vacate the room that had just been allotted to them. The author claimed that unfortunately, letters to the editor describing such episodes were not rare. 20 The play Kak pozhivaesh′, paren′? (How’s life, chum?) depicted the strategy of entering into a marriage of convenience in order to resolve personal housing matters. The plot revolves around the characters Evgenii and Zain′ka, whose union enables both to quit their workplace dormitory and

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the latter to obtain the propiska (residency permit) she needs to rightfully continue living in the city where she is employed. The straightforward practicality of their arrangement is undermined, however, when each falls in love with another person, which introduces new complications into their daily life. 21 Masterful manipulation of the per capita norm was another tactic employed to obtain better housing, as methodically outlined in Obmen (The exchange). Although it appeared in the early Brezhnev era, what this novella so plainly revealed about the lengths to which ordinary citizens might go in order to improve their living conditions is applicable also to the Khrushchev years. The plot centers on Lena, who schemes to secure extra living space for herself, her husband Victor, and their daughter by inviting her terminally ill mother-in-law to live with them. She reasons that by moving the sick woman—a fourth person—into their home, they will become eligible for additional housing. Lena can then exchange the living space that her mother-in-law has vacated, together with that which her family already inhabits, for one larger apartment in which the three of them can live comfortably once the matriarch of the family dies. To execute her plan, Lena doggedly tracks potential housing exchanges, meticulously working out all of the details, while Viktor—heartbroken that his mother is dying—hopes for a miracle. In the end, the exchange is completed according to the plan that Lena has devised. While Viktor experiences a crisis of conscience so great that the death of his mother leaves him bedridden, Lena disavows her callous scheme, attributing it to the deprivation and cruelty of life. In short, she justifies her actions as serving the good of her family. 22 Lena was precisely the type of person that an article published in Krok­ odil reproached for an obsession with amassing that “insidious housing idol” covered in thick parquet, square meters of living space. 23 In addition to conniving to accumulate more space for her family than its rightful allotment—essentially hoarding—the protagonist engages in another strategy that individuals might have employed to ameliorate their living conditions: consulting exchange networks. Indeed those not willing to simply wait their turn in a queue for more amenable housing could visit a local exchange bureau, fill out an anketa (application) delineating their needs in terms of location, family size, and other considerations, pay a small administrative fee, and wait for official notification of a swap agreeable to all parties involved. Such offices, however, were extremely slow and ludicrously bureaucratic. 24 At the same time, the grounds of municipal housing exchange bureaus were notorious for harboring speculators peddling quick exchanges for exorbitant fees. 25 This is apparent in a newspaper article disparaging the rampant speculation evident at the Leningrad housing exchange bureau located at 8 Boitsov Lane. The author recounts an episode in which a man

5.1  This cartoon depicts a man who invites a gaggle of his relatives to live with him and registers them in his apartment so that he can submit an appeal for a larger one based on “an increase in family size.” Once his request is granted, he bids adieu to his relatives so that he might be left alone in peace to enjoy his spacious new home. Krokodil, 10 February 1964, 7.

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on a tram bemoaning his inability to find a room for his family is urged by his fellow passengers to go directly to Boitsov Lane. There, they claim, he is sure to encounter someone—implicitly, not a vetted official—with living space to distribute. 26 In addition to loitering around housing exchange bureaus, speculators set up independent operations, even promoting their services on advertising columns through notices like “Possible options” (vozmozhnye varianty). Such announcements provided contact information that included a name (often an alias) and telephone number. In terms of their modus operandi, speculators charged a general price for their services and separate payment for each individual dwelling they showed to a client. Many demanded an additional fee for formalizing with an exchange bureau the transaction that they had facilitated, ostensibly to pay a bribe to render it legal; others simply defrauded people, conning them out of what living space they already possessed. Given their often questionable character and unsavory business dealings, the press rebuked speculators, blaming their flourishing on housing administration officials who failed to complete exchanges in a satisfactory and timely manner, as well as police officers who were insufficiently vigilant in eliminating them. 27 One assessment of the impact of unsanctioned exchanges and bribery posits that unofficial means of “purchasing” living space counteracted the benefits of socialized housing. Effectively rendering subsidized housing insignificant, responses like these to the dearth of living space also undermined state paternalism and egalitarianism. 28 What then of the role of the state itself in housing allocation? Municipal government offices, which held designated visiting hours, provided additional prospects for citizens hoping to improve their living conditions. Officials here were not necessarily more effective—or less immune to corruption—than those employed at housing exchange bureaus. As a reid of two raion (district) soviets divulged in Vechernii Leningrad, while hundreds of people were turning to their local officials for assistance concerning housing matters, deputies were sometimes absent when they were scheduled to be in their offices, or there were too many visitors and too few officials available during reception hours. Meanwhile, queues were so lengthy that there were never enough chairs to accommodate all the people waiting. 29 The executive committees of the Leningrad city and district soviets acknowledged these shortcomings in unpublished reports evaluating their reception of citizens and outlining recommendations for rectifying deficiencies. These typically suggested that officials should manage their visiting hours more conscientiously, produce clearer and lengthier transcripts of their meetings, resolve complaints more quickly, and treat visitors more compassionately.30 That said, given that they could be inundated with thousands of complaints and requests on a monthly basis, it is

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not surprising that their operations were slow to advance. According to one breakdown, over the course of 1961, individual members of the ispolkom of the Leningrad city soviet had received roughly between 5,000 and 9,000 complaints and requests each month.31 An additional option for obtaining better housing entailed submitting a written petition to a municipal government official or any person in some authoritative capacity perceived to have even a modicum of power in housing allocation—from housing administration personnel to newspaper editors. The process of petitioning could prove just as futile as other strategies. Among the more than one hundred cases I studied, which taken together yielded over 1,500 pages of correspondence, most petitions extended for several years and remained unsatisfactorily resolved. In some instances, petitioners were provided scant explanation as to why their request to exchange their living space was denied. In others, they might already have been in possession of housing deemed “fit” for habitation and sufficient in size. An additional reason for refusal was ineligibility. Some petitioners lacked the documentation required to verify their possession of a dwelling that they could then rightfully exchange, for example, an order (a writ) or some evidence that they were the principal lessee of the space they inhabited. Alternatively, they might not have possessed housing in the city or district in which they wanted to live; this meant that they effectively had nothing to exchange in that particular locale. Residency stipulations also complicated matters, as a propiska was required to reside in a given city. 32 Most often, however, petitioners were confronted with the simple fact that there was not enough housing available to meet their demand. They would just have to wait their turn in a queue. Waiting lists for housing were compiled by individual enterprises and institutions, as well as raion and city soviets, which initially shared responsibility for distributing living space. Then, at the beginning of 1961, as part of the general drive for standardization and efficiency, the different housing queues in Leningrad were amalgamated under the ultimate authority of the city soviet. This reform was intended to facilitate greater coordination in the development of new housing—over which the soviet, by this time, had sole control in terms of allocation—and urban planning. 33 Among those eligible for registration on the revised Leningrad housing list were the following: individuals inhabiting a dwelling that provided less than three square meters of living space per family member; those living in space deemed “unfit” for habitation, as determined by an interdepartmental commission; persons lacking any housing of their own whatsoever, who had arrived in Leningrad by 1 January 1956; and families living in dormitories designated for single persons. Ineligible for registration on the new waiting list were individuals employed in Leningrad but registered outside of the city; those with a temporary propiska; and persons residing in

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a dwelling that had been granted them in association with their employment.34 The local press, including factory newspapers, helped Leningraders navigate through the complicated and changing registration process by providing instructions for determining eligibility for a housing exchange. 35 In addition to choosing from a range of options in order to improve their living circumstances, citizens also carefully selected their words when soliciting the assistance of local housing, factory, military, municipal government, and Party officials. What they candidly divulged about their personal and material situation in their letters of request and complaint was strikingly vivid. This is not to suggest that the egregious conditions existing in the old housing stock were not publicly acknowledged. In fact, alongside portrayals of imperfect housewarmings that dispelled the merits of standardized designs and of “better, faster, and cheaper” construction, accounts of the problems plaguing older housing frequently appeared in newspapers and magazines. These depicted leaky roofs, damp or flooded basements, rotting wooden ceiling beams and window frames, poor plumbing and heating, cracking plaster, chipping paint and peeling wallpaper. Also frequently cited were the seemingly endless wait for sorely needed major repairs and the gross inconvenience of having to relocate before extensive renovations were to commence in order not to interfere with the fulfillment of work orders. Still, even amid palpable indignation, when the misery that such circumstances engendered was recognized publicly, it was muted by commentary sometimes so hyperbolic as to be laughable. This approach was especially evident in feuilletons, investigative reports, and articles based on letters from readers. One provocative tale published in Krokodil absurdly inverted the realities of habitation in the old housing stock to magnify them for the amusement of readers. At its center is an apartment that did not require extensive renovation, but was nevertheless slated for immediate major repairs; these in turn were quickly and satisfactorily completed. But such results were not the norm. Thus, when the author first introduces the protagonist of this story, he is engaged in a valiant effort to prevent his home, in need of only minor cosmetic work, from being subjected to extensive renovation. He most of all dreads the interruption of his life by the temporary resettlement to another dwelling that was customary in such cases. He is also dismayed by the mere anticipation of defective and careless workmanship (including ruined furniture and broken windows)—typical outcomes of major repair work that would necessitate subsequently having to waste copious amounts of time submitting complaints to various housing authorities to rectify the damage. When his wife and two children leave home just before the work begins, the hero opts to remain in their apartment for the duration of the repair, comforted by a neuropathologist friend who assures him that he can register him in

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a sanatorium for peace and quiet should the situation become intolerable. After the renovations are completed smoothly and quickly, and prove to be of outstanding quality, the protagonist and his family move back into their home. But the tale did not end here.36 If by this point the reader was not already questioning the plausibility of this story, the author confirmed the rarity of such rapid and successful renovation by stating that the apartment he had described effectively became a public exhibition. State inspectors, members of the press, city officials, students in technical schools and the building trades, and hoards of representatives from dozens of different organizations all flocked to see this paragon of “exemplary major repair.” Exhausted by all the commotion, and with the sanatorium unable to accommodate his entire family, the hero sought to bar strangers from his home. However, the raion housing administration to which he appealed for assistance informed him that his request was “antisocial”; a lawyer in turn confirmed that as an artifact of model repair work, his home always had to be open to visitors, except during lunch break—much like a museum. The story concluded with a postscript stating that the protagonist and his family currently live with acquaintances and that only every now and then, with great wariness, do they visit their “domestic museum.”37 Although especially absurd, this feuilleton is archetypal of published accounts depicting byt in the old housing stock. These usually revealed the endless frustrations connected with severe disrepair that residents here experienced, followed by pointed accusations intended to channel the frustration of readers in similar predicaments toward the responsible, if disinterested or heartlessness, local officials. Typical of this conventional approach was a newspaper report citing the frequent “loafing” in plan fulfillment and shoddy repair work that often forced tenants to repeatedly assume a “nomadic” life and move into the so-called maneuverable housing stock (manevrennyi fond). 38 Apparently based on letters from readers residing in the Kaliningrad raion of Leningrad, the author directed blame at the superintendent in charge of the renovations and the deputy chair of the ispolkom of the district soviet, identifying each individual by name. 39 For the most part, articles that appeared in newspapers and magazines during the Khrushchev era failed to address the grave threats to health, or even life, that marked the old housing stock. Also notable, they rarely directly or seriously questioned central state concern for the person. Meanwhile, together with socialist advancement, with which the mandate to provide mass housing was interwoven, national policy remained untarnished in public culture; it certainly was not sullied by any systematic explication of why so many Soviet citizens continued to live in crumbling old apartments.

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Building Socialist Normalcy—Dignity, Individuality, and Family Life In a letter written more than a decade after the war had ended, the residents at 100 Borovaia Street declared with dismay, “During this time in our native land there occurred an enormous improvement of life. Two artificial earth satellites were launched! . . . And our building remains without change, not improving, but rather worsening.”40 Living in a dilapidated nineteenth-century structure and evidently familiar with state policies and objectives, they marveled that they were not benefiting from mass construction. By plainly showcasing circumstances antithetical to desired norms, these petitioners challenged propagandistic accounts of progress both in the sphere that concerned them the most—housing construction—and in the wider realm of building a modern socialist society. Similarly citing official rhetoric on progress, L. M. Semenova stated, “Often I hear on the radio and in the newspapers that the entire life of the Soviet worker is always improving. A great many apartment houses are being built, which are being settled by workers.” Having seen for herself the massive construction efforts taking place everywhere, she claimed to be incredulous that there was no available housing for her own family.41 As it was, she and her husband had been living in a basement for ten years already, in terrible cold and dampness, washing and cooking alongside the bed that they shared with their child. In outlining these horrible conditions, she underscored the disjuncture between her life and the pronouncements about socialist advancement she had encountered in the press. Another petitioner, M. E. Edige, seemed determined to coax the Leningrad city soviet into allotting her better living space by providing concrete evidence of central housing policy: she included with one of her letters an article from the newspaper Sovetskaia Rossiia that she had underlined in various places to accentuate its dramatic claims about current construction. Among the sections she highlighted were one on a housing brigade that had assembled a building in a mere forty-seven days, and another on a group of building assemblers that Khrushchev commended for having completed three buildings in a mere month. Also underlined was the bold proclamation with which the article concluded: “NEARLY 290 APARTMENTS ARE BEING BUILT EVERY HOUR.”42 Meanwhile, all she wanted was to exchange the one room that she and her two children were inhabiting with her former husband for two separate rooms. Emphasizing that she was asking for no more than twenty or so square meters of their current twenty-eight square meters, she indicated just how meager was her request in the context of the heroic construction feats about which she had read so much.43 Indeed the amount of space she deemed rightfully hers to share with her children was below the norm, which for three persons would have amounted to twenty-seven square meters.

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While some petitioners juxtaposed their living conditions with facets of state policy in a way that questioned the extent of the progress lauded in the media, others did so in order to demonstrate the continuation of problems stemming from World War II that had yet to be resolved. These included the destruction and deterioration of apartment buildings, as well as of fundamental amenities.44 The correspondence I examined abounds with cases of persons living in the same buildings they had inhabited during the war, or individuals who were still to acquire a satisfactory replacement for housing lost “due to wartime circumstances.” The latter category included homes that had been outright destroyed, and those that Leningraders had lost possession of after they were evacuated from the city, as new tenants moved into them in their absence.45 Residents at 11 Il′ich Lane explicitly evoked the Blockade in their plea for better housing. Distressed above all by their habitually clogged plumbing system—something that not only rendered their water supply unpredictable, but also undermined good hygiene and health—they likened their circumstances to “living through a second blockade.”46 Whether or not the pun was intended, these petitioners had intentionally sought to elicit laughter through tears regarding their lamentable circumstances; among the letters they composed detailing their plight was a sardonic one addressed to Krokodil.47 More explicitly relating their circumstances to the war, they recalled how even during the Blockade, their water supply had been interrupted only once, “in the winter of 1941–1942.”48 Invoking this traumatic wartime episode that had disrupted the entire Leningrad water supply system constituted a condemnation of the state for failing to restore decent living conditions, even after a reasonably sufficient period of reconstruction. Assertions like this also indicate popular belief that references to the monumental events of the war and Blockade—as much as those to socialist construction—would resonate with housing, government, and Party officials, and appeal to their sympathy. Loss of housing due to wartime circumstances had been one criterion for consideration for a housing exchange—that is, until the merger of queues, when it began to be phased out.49 Nevertheless, public narratives in the press continued to feature current progress effacing precisely such past hardship. Illustrative is a housewarming reported in Vechernii Leningrad in 1963. The focus of the article was a new building in the Dachnyi district, where F. T. D′iachenko, a Hero of the Soviet Union who had defended the city, was interviewed. Recalling the war nearly two decades later, he explained that his best friends had died at this very site, having given their lives for their native city so that once the enemy was defeated, it might be even more beautiful than before. 50 Central to this human-interest story was the fact that D′iachenko had just been allotted an apartment here. The article thus presented the following formula: individual wartime survival (optimally,

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while in active service defending the country) + state paternalism = a bright future, which was precisely what the state was promising and for which ordinary citizens longed. Petitioners who referenced the war at times articulated a profound attachment to home in a way that evoked the more sentimental strands of wartime discourse linking patriotism and family. They thus conjured up the personal stakes enmeshed in stoic commitment to enduring the war with courage or safeguarding their native city and Motherland (Rodina mat′) with loyalty and determination. 51 Claiming that the austerity she had experienced in wartime still had yet to cease, in 1958 I. S. Semenova declared that although her husband had given his health to his Rodina (native land), his family continued to live in the most wretched circumstances. Confined to a room measuring a mere twelve square meters, in a building that had served as a military barrack, she was already in the housing queue for the “desperately” (ostro; literally, sharply) needy. She was therefore intent on acquiring for her family the special treatment afforded to veterans like her husband, who had been classified an “invalid of the First Group.”52 In the meantime, she stated, the well-being of her family remained compromised by overcrowding and by the absence of the most basic amenities: eight persons were sharing the less than five square meters of kitchen space in their apartment, while the toilet was located fifty meters away from their building. 53 In other cases, the persistence of adverse prewar circumstances into the postwar era was presented as justification alone for a housing exchange. For example, in their 1959 letter to the chair of the ispolkom of the Leningrad soviet, residents at 14 Kolpinskaia Street asked how it could be that their “time to live normally” had not yet arrived. 54 Tracing the particulars of their long unfavorable housing situation, they noted that their building had been erected in 1911, and that the plaster was cracking, the sewage system was so old it was made of wood, and the cold and dampness were causing many tenants to suffer from rheumatism. As the various cases discussed thus far demonstrate, letters demanding decent living conditions drew from personal experience of dreadful material circumstances, as well as invoked official pronouncements about socialist development or the process of postwar reconstruction. They thereby indicate genuine faith in the housewarming narrative or clever manipulation of it—though one does not preclude the other. Either way, housing petitions implicitly delineated the lack of distinction between “then” (before or during the war, let alone the Revolution) and “now” (the present era of communist emulation), contrary to the massive transformation in daily life that propaganda so proudly showcased. Alongside referencing socialist construction and postwar restoration, descriptions of the old housing stock also challenged proclamations of state

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and Party zabota o cheloveke, which professional prescriptions explicitly linked to the provision of adequate and dignified living conditions. As one Soviet commentator proclaimed, “Without a dwelling normal life is inconceivable.”55 This assertion embodied the professional assessment that decent living space is a prerequisite for “normal” byt, which requires the fulfillment of spatial norms for fundamental biological functions like eating and sleeping, as well as for satisfactory leisure. Nine square meters per person was considered to be optimal. However, the deviation from the ideal that the state confronted on the eve of the proclamation “To each family a separate apartment!” was enormous. According to one estimate, per capita living space in Leningrad had declined from 8.73 square meters in 1926, to 5.18 in 1956.56 Although it was on the rise after the 1957 housing decree, reaching 5.9 square meters in 1958, it was still only on the verge of meeting the optimum in 1970, when it measured 8.3 square meters. 57 The continuing failure to fulfill quantitative norms for housing had a real and significant impact on residents. At the most basic level, it deprived them of what was deemed to be a key qualitative component of normal living: rest.58 Indeed even simple serenity eluded residents of the old housing stock. The pensioner M. N. Mikhailova, for example, was motivated to request alternative living space above all because she sought “peace and rest.” The dwelling that she shared with her husband and two daughters was not only small for them at just over twenty-two square meters; it was a makeshift room cobbled together from the common space of a large kom­ munalka comprised of six rooms. 59 The situation for individuals inhabiting buildings that housed both residential spaces and public establishments was infinitely worse. K. D. Shiliaev and Z. N. Konopleva had to endure the incessant thumping of loud music and foxtrots for hours each evening after the dormitory of an educational institution was moved into their building and its red corner came to be located above the thin ceiling of their room.60 As of 1958, they had for nine years already been seeking to “secure the possibility to live peacefully.”61 The widow L. A. Denisenko and her children had to cope with a different kind of din; lacking alternative housing, she had accepted a room in the school where she worked—one that happened to be located alongside the corridor where students conducted their morning calisthenics. Since the institution was an internat (boarding school), she was denied the opportunity for “normal rest” even on weekends and holidays.62 In a variation on this theme, some petitioners evoked official assertions about the inseparability of “life and labor” and the organic bond between domestic comfort and workplace productivity.63 For example, A. A. Chunaev, who lived with his family of four adults in a room measuring about twelve square meters, claimed in an officious tone, “This shortcoming of the sanitary norm of space has a strong impact on our work capacity, for

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upon returning from work, we do not have the possibility, as owed us, to rest.”64 The medical doctor M. A. Zhilinskaia, a senior researcher at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, focused on the other side of the paradigm life/home-labor/workplace. Preoccupied with securing the quiet and solitude she needed to pursue her professional objectives, she desperately wanted to exchange her living space in a communal dwelling for a separate apartment. She explained that although her current housing allotment was above the official norm and featured many conveniences, communal apartment life hindered her from both living peacefully and devoting herself fully to her scientific work, which she conducted largely at home.65 Petitioners often ventured beyond raising corporeal concerns to delineating how decent living space would provide the vital material foundation for establishing or fortifying their sense of personhood or even humanity. In this respect, they alluded to official rhetoric on lichnost′ (selfhood).66 This is evident in the case of the twenty-six-year-old invalid V. V. Koskin, who during his early teens had lost his parents due to the war. Referencing state concern for orphans when submitting his request for better housing, he pleaded for assistance so that he could overcome his ruined childhood and go on with his life feeling like a “worthy” human being.67 Without a room of his own, the unease that he experienced due to his lack of privacy was tinged with shame: Koskin claimed that his ailments purportedly caused people to be repulsed by him, as from a “persistent fly.”68 I. S. Semenova too wanted something less tangible than tolerable material conditions for her family. Seeking to restore the dignity of her veteran husband, she claimed, “at one time he was a person, and not a cripple.”69 Although composed years later, assertions like this had a counterpart in early postwar fiction aimed at healing society. According to Anna Krylova, literary narratives within this genre were constructed so as to “restore” male heroes suffering from physical wounds and psychological trauma through postwar images of family happiness that cast women as preservers of the private hearth.70 Although it is impossible to discern the intentionality of such parallels to literary discourse—unlike blatant references to propaganda—certain housing petitions exhibited a yearning for postwar healing similar to that portrayed in fiction. Denied the opportunity to reintegrate her husband into the life they had previously shared, the war widow V. G. Ashevskaia sought decent housing for the benefit of her child. She stated that she required only one room to raise her son to be “a genuine person [nastoiashchii chelovek] in the name of his father.” Feeling like a stranger living in the home of her mother-inlaw, she added, “I first of all must feel like a person myself. Right now I cannot say this.”71 I. P. Rybkina too was preoccupied with lichnost′. This Leningrader had moved in with relatives after losing her home in the war but did not set up

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house with them in any practical sense. She was therefore frustrated that officials assumed that because she happened to be living with relatives, her housing situation was tenable. Rybkina claimed that although she had managed to secure “alien [chuzhaia] living space,” “each wants [his or her] own . . . , so as not to be a slave to another person, so as to be free and independent.”72 Like Rybkina, many petitioners living in dreadful circumstances described their dwelling space as an “alien corner” (chuzhoi ugol′), with chuzhoi connoting also “someone else’s/another’s” and “strange.” Often this feeling of alienation stemmed from communal living. On the most elemental level, residents of kommunalki experienced cramped living conditions and every imaginable nuisance associated with sharing common spaces like the kitchen and bathroom. As Katerina Gerasimova remarked, having to queue for basic household amenities like stoves and toilets deprived residents “even of corporal autonomy,” while the general lack of control over “domestic territory” placed them in a position of perpetual “discomfort” and “submission.”73 To add to such habitual sources of unease, tenants of communal apartments might also have had to endure persons deliberately monopolizing common spaces like the pantry, or continuously disturbing the peace by playing their music too loudly, drinking excessively, or hurling insults. Placing the blame for such daily miseries directly on state housing policy, Natalya Baranskaya claimed, Home [dom] was replaced with “living space” [zhilploshchad′]. A loathsome concept. Space for habitation, life in a space, revealing to a strange eye, while being curious, checking up on and shadowing. The best years of life were lived out in a crowded state and throng of “communal apartments” together with strangers.74

Like extreme disrepair, the trials of living with obstinate or uncooperative neighbors were recognized in newspapers and magazines, and were even subjects of fiction. In the more officious of these sources, namely exposés, readers were directed to vent their frustration at the tenants responsible for violating the norms of socialist conduct, or at local officials who proved ineffectual at intervening to ensure order in apartment buildings. Meanwhile, central state inefficiency, which was responsible for perpetuating the overcrowded situations that bred quotidian conflict, was not broached. The effects of daily challenges to performing elementary bodily functions and household tasks on the physical, psychological and emotional welfare of residents of kommunalki, while afforded cursory reference, also escaped rigorous discussion. Exemplifying the public approach to the range of problems that could plague collective living was a newspaper article based on letters from

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5.2  Portrayed here is one of the many inconveniences of overcrowded, communal living: having to share a bathroom with other tenants. Krokodil, 10 May 1958, 13.

readers that was aimed at making “drunkards and hooligans” answerable for their behavior. Intersecting with rhetoric on constructing communist society, this exposé noted a variety of transgressions that could “spoil the mood” as people were building the “bright tomorrow.” The article seethes with indignation over the indifference of local police officers, as well as the behavior of the offenders, whose names and addresses are provided. However, it never explicitly acknowledged the concrete impact on fellow residents of drunkenness, swearing, petty theft, and even physical violence.75 The particular predicament of Soviet women coping with emotionally or physically abusive husbands—a matter that did not arise among the housing petitions examined in this study—also occasionally surfaced in the press.76 One report in Rabotnitsa outlined the typical plight of the wives of alcoholics, acknowledging that they were usually forced to endure living with their husbands because both spouses were registered in the same dwelling and each lacked alternative housing. One anonymous reader claimed that although her husband was marring her life and that of their child, while she herself was struggling to juggle her work and studies, the local public prosecutor curtly dismissed her trying circumstances, stating that her spouse “is working and the apartment was given to him. There is no basis for eviction.” Astonished, she wondered, “If I do not want to live with a drunken petty tyrant, then I must be left without a dwelling?” The author of the article noted the ineffectiveness of police workers and law courts in rectifying such situations, and the reticence of witnesses to become involved, sometimes out of fear for their own safety. Among the solutions she cited was sending alcoholics to labor colonies—an idea that,

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incidentally, was featured less prominently than that of promptly resolving the housing shortage.77 Less serious than emotional and physical abuse, though also distressing, was the distrust that could pervade communal living. This was humorously conveyed in a mystery written by Anatolii Gladilin in the early 1970s, which is also pertinent to the preceding decades. As its protagonist, the detective Vadim, begins his investigation of the theft of a coat and bag in one kommunalka, the reader is introduced to the irritations that habitually confront him in his own apartment. One particularly meddlesome fellow tenant, a pensioner with little else to occupy herself besides monitoring the habits of her neighbors, constantly accuses him of being an alcoholic. Her proof: he never appears to be inebriated and he keeps irregular hours. The fact that Vadim has refused to show her his official documents and listens to what she mistakes for jazz music, only fuels her mistrust. Determined to continue resisting her ludicrous allegations, the hero nevertheless ends up “confirming” her suspicions when on one occasion he admits that, just as she had thought, he does listen to Bach. “Exactly,” she illogically responds, “Bach—and there are no bottles.”78 Alongside characterizations of communal living as annoying at best or unbearable at worst, are accounts suggesting that some aspects of it were immensely gratifying. This is evident in a short story published in Krokodil that had been submitted by a reader. At the beginning, its protagonist is living in a surprisingly “heavenly” kommunalka: it has been retrofitted with modern amenities, and but for the odd rabble-rouser, its residents are quite agreeable. Just how pleasing communal living is becomes clear to her only after she acquires a separate apartment. To be sure, her new home boasts all sorts of novel conveniences. Yet she ponders what kind of paradise this is without other people to argue with. Thus, after only a few days, the protagonist decides that she would sooner “go to the devil” than live in this kind of “heaven.”79 Although this tale might have been intended to ridicule those nostalgic for their former less-than-ideal housing arrangements, it suggests that the companionship that the kommunalka could provide, even if sometimes fraught with tension, was invaluable. Joseph Brodsky offered a still more nuanced portrait of communal living, poignantly illustrating in his memoirs the range of experiences and interactions that manifested themselves within a kommunalka. Distrust was certainly one facet of daily life in the six-room, four-family apartment in Leningrad where the writer spent his formative years. Brodsky wrote, The neighbors were good neighbors, both as individuals and because all of them were working and thus absent for the better part of the day. Save one, they didn’t inform to the police; that was a good percentage for a communal

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apartment. But even she . . . a surgeon in the nearby polyclinic, would occasionally give you medical advice, take your place in the queue for some scarce food item, keep an eye on your boiling soup.80

Acknowledging the importance of the sense of family fostered through communal living, he continued, It’s often you in whom your neighbor confides his or her grief, and it is he or she who calls for an ambulance should you have an angina attack or something worse. It is he or she who one day may find you dead in a chair, if you live alone, or vice versa.81

Brodsky concluded his reminiscences about his neighbors on an ambigu­ ous note, What barbs or medical and culinary advice, what tips about goods suddenly available in this or that store are traded in the communal kitchen . . . ! This is where one learns life’s essentials. . . . What silent dramas unfurl there when somebody is . . . not on speaking terms with someone else! . . . What depths of emotion can be conveyed by a stiff, resentful vertebra or by a frozen profile!82

As Brodsky detailed, although they sometimes engaged in acts of betrayal, insult, and injury, tenants of communal apartments also provided each other advice and friendship, as well as assistance both at times of crisis and in everyday tasks. These redeeming interactions were indispensable to parents employed outside the home with young children, and to the infirm and elderly. A. Luk′ianova attested to the significance of dependable neighbors in a letter she submitted to Vechernii Leningrad to publicly express her gratitude to her fellow residents for their compassion when she fell ill. The eighty-nine-year-old pensioner revealed that despite previous spats, her neighbors proved to be “sensitive” and “responsive” during her time of need. One of them, a retired physician, took it upon herself to examine her. Another immediately promised that everyone in the apartment would help her to get well soon, and within minutes appeared with a bowl of hot soup. Luk′ianova claimed that each visited her daily and fretted over her “like close relatives” would.83 The comfort of being able to rely on neighbors for emotional and material support in times of difficulty is illustrated also by the protagonist of the sentimental short story “Sosedi” (Neighbors). This sixty-year-old curmudgeon, without any family of his own, finds himself in a hospital after losing consciousness on the street. Here, fellow tenants he once considered the bane of his existence prove to be true friends, visiting him with kind wishes

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and gifts.84 Thus was the “dual nature of kommunalka life,” as Deborah Ann Field succinctly characterized it.85 In short, communal living could beget egregious assaults on privacy ranging from intrusions into intimate matters to formal surveillance, but also a sense of community and precious gestures of concern. The good neighbor who served as surrogate family or a companion on whom one could rely during trying times, as recounted in memoirs, praised in the press and exemplified in edifying tales about kommunalki, was absent in requests to exchange housing. Here, the frustration, resentment, and restrictions inherent in living in close quarters with strangers typified quotidian interactions. More broadly, petitioners indicated that rather than provide adequate dwelling for the masses and foster collectivism, the revolutionary redistribution of living space had succeeded only in engendering humiliation and disaffection, much as Baranskaya had cynically concluded. Crammed into an overcrowded dwelling, N. I. Dolmant′ev proclaimed that the kommunalka in which he lived resembled “a dormitory more than a home.” His apartment housed more than thirty persons and contained only one kitchen—a situation that roused squabbles and scandals on a daily basis.86 F. Ia. Struchkov, requesting more living space than the twenty square meters in which his family of six was confined, declared that he was tired of the unpleasantness and scandals of communal living, finding them “offensive.”87 Motivated by similar indignities, the four families inhabiting an overpopulated kommunalka on Serpukhovskaia Street proclaimed that having to share insufficient common spaces was depriving them of a “normal life.” Their kitchen, a mere ten square meters in dimension, was jam-packed with five tables, practically disallowing tenants access to the one gas stove. To add to this inconvenience, two additional families were being moved into one of the two rooms possessed by a family already living there; this room was to be subdivided by a slender partition.88 As it was, a building official had declared that the sanitary norm of this dwelling was being “crudely violated”—much like the residents’ sense of decorum.89 Even interactions of a friendly nature could be unbearable for the tenants of overcrowded apartments. The disabled pensioner Kh. F. Shakhmamet′ev sought to exchange his living space for housing equipped with a bathtub because the household treatments for his various ailments included soaking in water. In addition to the inconvenience of having to frequent a local bathhouse, he revealed that he simply did not always feel like “chatting.”90 Unavoidable social interaction therefore added to the burdens of his current living circumstances. Such grievances contradicted agitation brochures and newspaper articles touting the proliferation of collective ideals—namely, the notion “one for all and all for one,” according to one optimistic assertion.91 For example,

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adamant about her desire for solitude, F. A. Shifrina declared that she and the family in the room adjoining hers “so annoy each other” that her nerves can no longer endure it. She wanted nothing more than to return from her workday to rest in her own “corner.”92 Though her fellow residents were a constant source of irritation for her, Shifrina faced a much more pressing issue—the possibility that her daughter might contract tuberculosis from their neighbor, I. N. Chirkov. Indeed families conjoined by difficult material circumstances might have experienced not only affronts to their sense of normalcy and humanity, but also threats to their physical well-being. Specifically, the presence of persons suffering from contagious illnesses could render constricted living arrangements perilous in a more insipid way than buildings with structural problems. In fact, Shifrina and her daughter did not share a room with Chirkov. Instead—further evincing the irrational division of space typical of the old housing stock—the dwelling they occupied was essentially a passageway (prokhodnaia komnata) into other parts of the apartment. This arrangement made frequent contact with others in the apartment, such as their tubercular neighbor, inevitable. For this reason, an official commission declared their living space “UNFIT” for habitation by a “separate” family.93 Yet Shifrina and her child seemed fated “to undergo trying experiences” (mytarstvovat′) as they waited in the queue for better housing.94 In the meantime, Chirkov also suffered: his living space was located on the mansard floor and was described as “damp, dark, and demanding repair”—conditions that only exacerbated his illness.95 Somewhat similar to Shifrina, the housing shortage necessitated that G. A. Zhigalev and his infant child live together with a former military serviceman suffering from tuberculosis, in a room divided into two by only a thin partition. In his estimation, the danger to the child of close contact with a contagious illness signified the worsening of their living conditions to the point of “impossibility.”96 In obvious ways, the portraits of daily life provided in housing petitions contradicted utopian pronouncements about collective byt. Generally, residents of kommunalki were unable to feel “at home” in the presence of so many others, as living with strangers interfered with their privacy or else subjected them to disgraceful, even harmful, interactions. Housing requests also illuminated broader shortcomings in official policy and construction that were largely muted in public culture. Namely, alongside demonstrating the failure of the state to build new housing quickly enough, unpublished correspondence starkly illustrated that the dearth of sufficient per capita living space also made state goals for adequate rest, the rational use of leisure time, professional development and productivity impossible to realize. In essence, overcrowded and decrepit housing was antithetical to official

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and popular conceptions of normal living, and threatening to body and self alike. Like physical well-being and lichnost′, family and personal life were also imperiled by the housing crisis. A shortage of living space or adverse conditions could destabilize households or force individuals experiencing changing family circumstances to live in a state of awkwardness. It could also hinder victims of war and Stalinist terror from reconstituting their home. Many petitioners thus presented “settling down” in a decent dwelling as essential for family unity, stability, and harmony, or for establishing or resuming a normal personal life. Illustrative of the raw impact of unfavorable material conditions on the family is the case of Iu. A. Solov′ev. Although he lived in a space that had been determined to be “unfit for habitation,” he emphasized in his housing petition, “the main issue is my family, the well-being of which depends upon the quick resolution of this matter.”97 Due to his “terrible situation with living space,” officials refused to grant him permission to register his wife and son at his home with him. Consequently, after three years of marriage, he continued to live 150 kilometers apart from his family as he waited to exchange his housing in a queue behind thousands of others.98 Poor living conditions could not only disallow family members from living together; they also hindered the flourishing, or even the establishment, of a nuclear household. M. E. Pavlova, a widow and pensioner, was desperate to acquire living space of her own, separate from her son and his wife, in order “to create . . . normal living conditions” for both herself and the young couple. Sharing a room of only twenty square meters, already below the per capita norm for three persons, Pavlova emphasized that her request was all the more pressing because her son and his wife were expecting a child.99 Citing the dearth of housing for obstructing family life in a different way, T. F. Fainberg bemoaned the fact that her twenty-four-year-old son was unable to study, work, and find a wife because his cramped living conditions denied him any “possibility to set up his own personal life.”100 In a different vein, the case of Anna Trofimovna Solov′eva details the strains of divorce on family life. After her husband had been imprisoned for an undisclosed crime, Anna and her two children continued to reside with her mother-in-law Tat′iana. The latter argued that the four of them did not live as one family, that Anna was a “stranger” to her, and that her son had not fathered the children (they were, in fact, from a previous marriage). To add to the emotional injuries that these circumstances and accusations sustained, Anna appeared to have been abandoned by her husband, who left Leningrad after completing his sentence. Thus, even after the matter of her living space had been “resolved” (she was granted a right to six of the roughly twenty-three square meters she inhabited with Tat′iana), she

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remained defenseless against the quarrels that her mother-in-law ceaselessly instigated.101 S. V. Bogdanova was in a comparably vulnerable position when she asked to exchange her housing. After her husband had “acquired for himself a frontline family,” she and her son had no option but to move in with her sister into the cramped room of twenty-seven square meters that she was already sharing with three other persons.102 The proliferation of contemporary anecdotes about complicated living arrangements suggests that the types of scenarios that housing petitions illuminated were widespread. At the center of one such account is a man who had been happily married for fifteen years until his recently widowed mother-in-law came to live with his family because she could not find a room of her own. Having an additional person in his cramped dwelling caused him so much misery that the man finally divorced his wife, “simply to get rid of her mother.” His wife eventually remarried, and together with their daughter, moved away with her new husband. But his mother-in-law did not, for she still lacked alternative living space. To cope with this situation, the remaining two of them divided their room with a curtain and the man embarked on a quest for another wife—one “with a room.”103 Such convoluted scenarios, which were virtually mythologized in memoir literature, persisted throughout the Soviet era. Archetypal is the case of a woman identified as Olga that the journalist David Willis outlined. After the death of her father, Olga, her sister Natasha, and their mother were suddenly left with more than the twenty-seven square meters to which three persons were entitled. This meant that another family could be moved into their home. Thus, the women set out to exchange their housing and managed to acquire a single room of barely twenty-seven square meters, though with their own kitchen and bathroom. Their wait for the exchange was long, and in the interim, Natasha had married. Thus, when they moved in, they erected a thin barrier within their room—now below the minimum per capita norm—in order to provide Natasha and her husband a modicum of privacy. Eventually, thanks to the birth of their child and the excellent work record of her husband, Natasha received a separate apartment with two small rooms. This now left Olga and her mother with more space than the norm for two persons. They therefore had to exchange their dwelling for one of eighteen square meters. Complications again ensued when Natasha divorced. She and her husband managed to exchange their two-room apartment for two separate, single rooms (one for her and her child, and another for her ex-husband). But Olga, Natasha, and their mother hoped to live together again. Finally, after many months of pleading, visiting housing administration offices and pouring over housing exchange registries, the three women at last succeeded in swapping the room that Natasha possessed, and the one that Olga and her mother shared, for a dwelling appropriate for the three of them.104

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Alongside difficulties resulting from ordinary life changes like marriage, divorce, or the birth of a child, were untenable arrangements due to extraordinary circumstances like wartime destruction, evacuation, or the confiscation of housing in connection with Stalinist terror. In citing these, petitioners suggested that an adequate housing allotment was a necessary material precondition for reconstituting their family or ensuring its health and well-being. Z. V. Novikova, for example, who had been evacuated during the Blockade, had been “going through purgatory” (khozhdeniia po mukam) since her family returned to Leningrad because their home had been assumed by someone else. At first they stayed with acquaintances, and then in a space measuring only six square meters. Ultimately, they ended up being housed in a building that had served as a stable so recently that the stench of fecal matter from the horses still lingered within it. Faced with such wretched conditions, Novikova was determined to save her family of seven—including her infant child and her sickly mother—“from death.”105 The importance to familial normalcy of the restitution of housing for those formerly deemed “enemies of the people” is evident in the case of D. B. Markosov. This petitioner had lived in Leningrad from 1920 until the time of his arrest “on the basis of false denunciation” in 1932. Nevertheless, after being notified of his rehabilitation in 1964, he was denied placement in the housing queue in his native city because he already possessed housing in Sverdlovsk, where he happened to be living and working at the time he submitted his request.106 Thus, Markosov not only protested the inadequacy of his dwelling—a one-room, damp, semibasement apartment (“if it is possible to call it that”), without a kitchen or bathroom. He also declared, “I am connected to Leningrad by family ties.” Several of his family members lived in this city, and he longed to be reunited with them.107 V. T. Kochubei also experienced family displacement because of repression. He had been living in Moscow when he was exiled in 1937, but after his rehabilitation, he sought housing in Leningrad because he, his wife, and son had been registered since 1945 as inhabitants here, where they were living with his sister-in-law.108 After his ordeal, Kochubei simply wanted to obtain proper housing with his family in Leningrad, rather than return to Moscow. As the unsatisfactory resolution of such cases suggests, provisions for resettling rehabilitated persons were determined by directives that afforded little attention to individual circumstances. For instance, in accordance with a decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR pertaining to such matters, Kochubei had a right to living space only in Moscow, that is in his city of residence at the time that he lost his housing in connection with repression. In Leningrad, he could register to obtain living space only on a general basis, like anyone else who had arrived in Leningrad as of 1 January 1956 and lacked housing. Essentially, repression was not the cause of

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his lack of living space in Leningrad; he therefore was not entitled to special consideration for housing as a rehabilitated person in this particular city.109 In contrast to petitioners intent on reuniting with family members, some presented the receipt of their own, individual housing as a necessary precondition for ensuring familial harmony. Such was the case with A. I. Komarova, who had lived in Leningrad from her birth in 1901 until her “administrative exile” (vysylka) to Central Asia in July 1937. Upon her return ten years later, she had no alternative but to live with her brother, P. I. Senkevich, at whose home she was registered as a resident, but without any right to living space.110 When Senkevich married, he moved in with his wife and stepson, and Komarova assumed his former housing. This prevented him from acquiring the additional living space he needed because between the dwelling he continued to possess and the one he now occupied, he effectively exceeded the prescribed square-meter allotment for his family of three. Komarova became distraught that these circumstances restricted her brother and his family to a crowded room of thirteen square meters—something that exposed him to “reproach and attacks” from his wife and son. She stated, it “gnaws at my conscience” to be the cause of family discord.111 Bemoaning her situation, she declared, “I appear to be a hindrance in his normal personal life,” something she found to be “morally dispiriting.”112 That housing petitions related to rehabilitation, like those drawing connections to wartime conditions, stretched into the 1960s, reinforced the delayed nature of the establishment of normalcy in the postwar Soviet Union.113 Cases that raised the matter of restitution after unjust persecution also situated housing provision within the overlapping process of de-Stalinization. Rehabilitated petitioners frequently invoked the significance of acquiring a home after imprisonment or internal exile by enumerating the spaces they had inhabited prior to repression and after rehabilitation, rather than by extensively describing how persecution had affected them. In effect, the changing perimeters of the living space that they had possessed over a period of time usually conveyed their personal tragedy more so than the autobiographical details that they offered. The case of Z. V. Bekhtereva is typical in this respect. Bekhtereva had lived in Leningrad “in the period of the cult of personality of Stalin” when her husband—son of the famous neurologist Vladimir Bekhterev—was arrested. She was subsequently detained and forced to abandon her three young children. In the midst of this, her living space was confiscated. Writing decades later to the Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the RSFSR, Bekhtereva catalogued in an abrupt and disjointed manner the injustices to which she had been subjected. Her outpouring read: “It is excessively minute to describe the tragedy that I lived through, as a mother, wife and as an honest Soviet person. To put it briefly: jail, camp, separation from

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children, from husband, death of husband in captivity. . . . My apartment was seized.” Focusing on the changing dimensions of her living space, she claimed that after her rehabilitation, her three-room apartment was not returned to her. Consequently, she had to move in with her daughter into an eighteen-square-meter one-room apartment. The situation worsened when her daughter married and had a child, as the occupancy of their room increased to four persons. This further deprived her of “deserved tranquility.”114 L. Sh. Gaitskhoki similarly highlighted a desire to settle down peacefully, rather than elaborating the injustices she had endured. In a 1962 letter to the Leningrad city Party committee, she noted that her husband had been unlawfully arrested during the military purges and had now been posthumously rehabilitated. Her focus then shifted to her current material circumstances. She stated that together with the “moral trauma” she had suffered, decades of working with young children as a kindergarten teacher had sapped her health. Now, she claimed, “there is no place for me to rest, given that I essentially do not have my own corner.”115 Fainberg, who had undergone repression in 1937, also condensed her personal tragedy to its material signifiers. Yet in seeking adequate living space to mend her past, she dramatically invoked the concept of lichnost′. “Perhaps in the presence of peace, air and light I could still be a person of full value [polnotsennyi],” she declared.116 Rehabilitated petitioners who so conflated the receipt of housing with the resurrection of the self were in chorus with Thaw-era autobiographical and fictional accounts of Stalinist repression that emphasized traits like fortitude and overcoming, and focused on the future, rather than the past. According to Polly Jones, this preoccupation with healing pervaded public culture; here strength in character often counterbalanced the horrific elements of personal narratives, which concluded with the ultimate recovery of the individual or protagonist. This triumphant personal ending had a cognate in the broader process of reform, which assured that although the system had sustained some trauma, it was not vanquished.117 What petitioners like Bekhtereva, Gaitskhoki, and Fainberg made amply clear was implicit in all of the housing requests I analyzed, not just the ones composed by rehabilitated persons: in addition to qualitatively improving their daily life, the opportunity to “settle down” would enable them, as well as their family members, to restore or create the sense of place they needed to “move forward” with their lives. Indeed recollections of the past often blurred with current aspirations in relatively depersonalized renderings of physical spaces, as in the most intimately revealing of personal narratives. Both approaches indicated that acquiring sufficient and humane living space embodied hope for a better future, as well as constituted a homecoming in some sense or another.

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Alien Corners, Coffins, and Cages Depicting quotidian circumstances in ways that either conjured up or deliberately mimicked official rhetoric, housing petitions exposed the extent to which the realities of daily life deviated from state visions and professional prescriptions for normal living. They also revealed shortcomings in the broader processes of communist construction, postwar restoration, and post-Stalin restitution. As striking are the ways in which they characterized unfavorable living conditions, mobilizing imagery that further challenged advancement in housing policy, as well as assertions about state concern for the person. While petitioners may have embraced the glorious housewarming scenario conveyed in public culture, they also determinedly demonstrated deficiencies in the purportedly untrammeled movement toward communist byt. They thereby simultaneously validated state objectives and re-presented official assessments of their fulfillment. The local housing and municipal government authorities that verified the problems described in letters of complaint and request also contributed, in part, to critical discourse about housing. In fact, in the majority of cases examined, the conditions that petitioners detailed were confirmed. In “danger of collapse” at any moment, residents at 244-b Vyborg Road, in a suburban settlement of Leningrad, pronounced their home a “house of menace.”118 In October 1960, more than a year after initiating their group petition for better housing, they were compelled to write to Khrushchev to ask him to save them “from death”: their building was resting on the precipice of a large hill, where it had stood for over a century without major repair, and the walls were sinking, drawing the roof downward toward the foundation.119 In a subsequent letter, they reiterated their “calamitous living situation” and asserted that while waiting to be resettled, their home seemed like “both a house and a coffin.”120 The building at 244-b Vyborg Road had been scheduled for demolition in 1959 after the responsible housing administration had proclaimed that its tenants should be removed from the premises “without delay” because “the possibility of misfortune is very great.”121 Instead, it was repeatedly repaired to structurally reinforce it because the lack of alternative living space made it impossible to promptly resettle its residents elsewhere.122 Suggesting that such predicaments were not unusual, Vladimir Bukovsky recalled a similar situation in his memoirs. He noted that following the war, after inspecting his childhood home in Moscow, an official commission deemed it “unfit for human habitation” and the foreboding “TBD” (to be demolished) was subsequently painted on its exterior in large blue letters. The building nevertheless continued to house people for decades thereafter.123 K. M. Aleksandrov proclaimed that in numerous ways, on a daily basis, his room threatened him “either with death or with difficult complications.”124

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Because his communal apartment lacked a kitchen, a dark, windowless passageway was used to accommodate the gas stove and appliances that residents shared. As a consequence, smells and sounds from this “kitchen”—cooking oils and vapors from the stove, as well as the clamor of clanking pans and the swearing of tenants—filtered into his room. The nauseous fumes, in turn, necessitated that he keep his fortochka125 open year-round, thus rendering the heating system ineffective. Furthermore, the apartment he inhabited was located above a cold cellar, and the excessive dampness and water that pooled beneath the floor of his room made his rheumatism intolerable.126 After successive interdepartmental commissions were assigned to investigate his complaints and determine the fitness of his room for habitation, the Leningrad housing administration ordered that its counterpart in the district where his building was located supplement the heating and replace the existing stove in his apartment with a larger, more efficient one. It also scolded Aleksandrov for keeping his fortochka open in the wintertime, thereby thwarting the heating procedures stipulated in regulations for properly maintaining residential premises. Meanwhile, the ispolkom of the Leningrad city soviet, recognizing the severity of his circumstances, concluded that Aleksandrov should be granted alternative living space in due order (it seems he was already registered in a housing queue).127 In another narrative describing housing that was clearly unfit for habitation, one petitioner drew an implicit connection between her home and labor camp accommodations. L. M. Semenova asked in a 1958 letter addressed to the newspaper Izvestia, “When at last will our penal servitude end? You know, we are not murderers, not crooks but rather are living and working by means of honest labor.” Yet, she added, “We . . . are living worse than swine . . . rotting in this slum.”128 Such rhetoric was especially condemnatory amid de-Stalinization and the mass release of individuals from imprisonment and exile. In a subsequent letter—this one to Leningradskaia Pravda—she declared, “It is quite shameful to our communists that in these times, workers and children could be living . . . in such holes.”129 Employing similarly damning imagery, O. G. Maslei marveled that he and his family were “living in such dog-like [sobachie] conditions.”130 Their dwelling in a communal apartment was adjacent to the kitchen, separated from it only by a door that failed to contain the gas vapors emanating from the stove. As a result, he claimed, the noxious fumes were damaging his health and that of his family. In an uncharacteristically amusing piece of correspondence that also conjured up conditions more suited for animals than for human beings, P. E. Kanin compared his dwelling to a “cage” and claimed, “not in the figurative, but in the literal sense.” Kanin and his wife, N. A. Kanina, lived in a room measuring eight square meters. More significant, their mansard dwelling was only 160 centimeters in height, while Kanin himself was 175 centimeters tall. In evidence, he presented with his petition a photograph of himself bent over to prevent his head from

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butting against the ceiling. Kanin claimed that on one occasion when he came home from work, he forgot himself, stood at full height, and hit his head on the ceiling so hard that he lost consciousness.131 Despite the deliberate use of humor (Kanin repeatedly wrote to Kroko­ dil, angling to have his letter published), the situation in which the Kanins found themselves was seriously degrading. Not only was their living space absurdly constrictive; the couple had cobbled it together themselves by tearing down a partition that had been erected to form two separate service rooms. One of these had been granted to Kanina in connection with a position at a housing office that she no longer held. This meant that the Kanins were living illegally in a space reserved solely for employees.132 Thus, the response to their petition for a housing exchange was a fine for the unauthorized use of the premises and as compensation for restoring it to its original dimensions and appearance.133 Memoir literature suggests that the kind of initiative that the Kanins took to create a more livable dwelling out of the space allotted to them was not unusual. For instance, erecting a partition to delineate distinct areas was a strategy employed also by divorced spouses who were forced to continue living together for lack of alternative housing. Stemming from still different motivations, Brodsky claims that he had used “armoires piled high with suitcases” to demarcate the ten square meters or so that he viewed as essential “for the lebensraum of his adolescence” within the room that he shared with his parents.134 Appropriating housing in such novel ways, together with outright seizing additional living space, were concrete manifestations of the yearning for a place of one’s own often expressed in requests to secure better housing. Yet despite the references made to construction policy and communist advancement, the idea of possessing a separate apartment, let alone basking in the privacy that it could provide, remained relatively subtle in housing petitions.135 By contrast, scenes of imagined or anticipated housewarmings depicted in fiction and memoir literature are peppered with a desire to simply enjoy the comforts of home. Complementing petitions that sometimes only implicitly envisioned byt in this way, these published sources spoke emphatically of the broad phenomenon with which scholars have conventionally associated the Thaw—the resurrection of Soviet private life. House and Home Imagined Vladimir Shlapentokh situated the genesis of the “privatization” of Soviet society squarely within the Khrushchev era, conflating it with the “destatization” that occurred after the death of Stalin. In his estimation, the general process of de-Stalinization and the particular mandate to provide separate

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apartments were each pivotal in the regeneration of private life.136 Scholars exploring new themes that emerged in literature from the 1950s through the 1960s placed the beginning of this revival earlier, in the postwar period. Katerina Clark, for example, discerned that already in the late Stalin years, the production-related question “How can a feat be performed?” was being supplanted by the byt-related query “How should one live?”137 The slogan “To each family a separate apartment!” offered the following unambiguous response to the material aspect of this question: in individual housing. That said, the separate apartment was not novel to the Thaw. As noted elsewhere, under Stalin, one-family housing had served as a bonus for state and Party officials and as a reward for model workers.138 In addition, long before Khrushchev inaugurated his massive construction campaign, there had already occurred a conceptual shift in public rhetoric and iconography away from conflating the separate apartment with bourgeois living. As Lynne Attwood demonstrated, glowing descriptions and images of such apartments had graced the pages of popular magazines in the 1930s, bespeaking a new housing ideal for the Soviet people—even if, at the time, it remained a “fantasy” for most of them.139 The separate apartment was further legitimized in late Stalinist culture, which, according to Smith, depicted it as but one component of a carefully planned urban “communal economy” (kommunal′noe khoziastvo).140 Such assessments of Stalinist discourse and imagery regarding one-family housing corroborate the following assertion that Vera Dunham made about a key narrative of middlebrow fiction of the postwar Stalin era: “ ‘Then’ was the period before and after the Revolution, when homeowners were enemies of the proletariat. ‘Now,’ however, the best working people aspire to home ownership themselves.”141 In 1957, when the separate apartment was decreed the material embodiment of this aspiration and possessing a home of one’s own began to shift from fantasy to reality, this ideological formula came to resound in public culture—as especially vividly rendered in housewarming narratives. At the same time, the directive to provide each family its own apartment not only sanctioned private home life; it also signaled revolutionary egalitarianism. Henceforth, individual housing was to be the foundation of daily life for all Soviet citizens—not just for privileged government, Party, and professional personnel, or exceptional workers. These ideas reverberated beyond the Thaw, as evident in Vladimir Monastyrev’s 1965 short story “Naparniki” (Workmates). At first tentatively, the staunchly proletarian protagonist Mishka confides to a workmate that he dreams of buying “a small house” with a “little garden.” He even imagines his wife planting flowers to make it evermore cozy, while he himself “lazily” drinks a bottle of mineral water. But then he hesitates, wondering if such a life is really appropriate for him. After all, he had welded blast furnaces in Magnitogorsk and elsewhere, as well as worked at several major

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building sites. Moreover, he is already eager to begin his next job assignment in western Siberia. Nevertheless, Mishka ends his musing admitting, “I am gathering money for the little house. Second year already.”142 As this fictional hero worker came to conclude, performing great feats of labor and settling down and living well were not mutually exclusive. The protagonist of Anatolii Gladilin’s short story “Bespokoinik” (The restless one) perceives official prescriptions to be far more rigid. Yet unlike Mishka, he is unequivocal in his yearning for a home of his own and for domestic comfort. He unabashedly declares, A person by nature is a proprietor [sobstvennik]. I have always wanted to have my own little house, . . . garden and car. And to not depend on anyone! But the Soviet person does not have the right even to dream about this, for they will publicly declare you a Philistine. Just try to work in a so-called Soviet collective with the label petit-bourgeois!143

Interweaving the motif of post-Stalin atonement with a longing for home, at the end of this fantastical tale, the “restless one” (literally, a spirit of his times) reveals that although he died in 1956, he had been “living” like a corpse since 1950. The latter was the year he had betrayed a respected colleague for “political” reasons—a deed that earned him a promotion and a two-room apartment. Memoir literature also evinces a powerful desire to settle down and enjoy the coziness of a place of one’s own. One scenario that Sally Belfrage depicted features a woman living with her son in a room so small that when the beds were folded out, there was virtually no floor space. Her husband had died in the war, and she remarried when her son was fifteen years old. The marriage failed, however, largely due to the constraints of their living space, something that, ironically, necessitated that the estranged couple continue to live together. She thus became obsessed with finding her own place. Eleven years later, she was still waiting for another apartment, dreaming of a place that she would beautify with pictures and furniture she would make herself. She pondered, “Just my own little room. I’ll come home and feel that I’ve found my nest, I’ll rest and just look at it and love it. It will be my haven.”144 Fyodor and his wife Larissa, acquaintances of Maurice Hindus, were eager to move into new housing for similar reasons. Describing the dwelling that had been allotted them, Larissa stated that although it consisted of only one room, they would now have a kitchen and bathroom all to themselves. “It will be such a delight to have real privacy at last. You have no idea how sick we all are of communal living,” Larissa exclaimed. Fyodor joyfully added, “it’ll be quite a blessing, like starting life anew, and it’s about time we did after all we have endured these many years.” The couple

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had raised two sons and one daughter in one room of an eight-room communal apartment in Leningrad.145 The fictional newlyweds in the novel Posle Svad′by (After the wedding), Tonia and Igor, embody the same anticipation of beginning a new life as they visit the building site of their future home every evening to watch the construction proceed. When they finally move in, the furnishings they possess are humble: an iron bed on loan from their former factory dormitory, a small kitchen table covered with oilcloth, and a wardrobe temporarily doubling as a buffet. Nevertheless, the “squalor” of their furniture cannot spoil the “festive splendor” of their room—“for them the room was enough.” It “presented itself to them as an immense, enchanting palace . . . full of hope and joy. Its walls had not yet heard one quarrel, nor weeping, nor grief. In it, all began over again. . . . Thanks to it, they finally found themselves alone together.”146 Tonia proclaims with joy, “All this is ours, mine. Every square of the parquet is mine.”147 In addition to beginning anew, the intimacy that private space could ensure is also evident early in the novel. Tonia and Igor have just celebrated their housewarming, which is memorialized by the dark spot on the wallpaper left by the spray of champagne and a basket of aster that a friend had brought them to mark the occasion. Told from the vantage point of the newlyweds, the following observations about the physical perimeters of their new dwelling merge with expectations about the impact that their home will have on their future life together: The room had twenty-two square meters. Five meters in length and four [meters and] forty [centimeters] in width. The room had a tall window facing Strikes Avenue, a solid door, painted matte-white, and a radiator for steam heating by the windowsill. But the main thing about it was the walls . . . these four thick, soundproof walls. With their stone front they protected from strange stares and allowed to frolic, fool around, talk all sorts of nonsense, and look each other in the eyes.148

Together with the aspirations that emerged in requests for better housing, such anticipated and imagined housewarmings show that what it meant to live normally could either be simple and universal or complex and specific to the individual—whether a newlywed, a pensioner, or a disabled veteran. The meanings applied to “house and home” could be just as wide ranging. What is clear is that as with the Russian word dom itself, building, house, and home were inextricable from each other. For those inhabiting the old housing stock, the promised separate apartment would provide both the building/house—the bricks and mortar, and the home—something less tangible, conjuring up feelings of comfort, security and a sense of place,

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self, and family. Dom thus signified a place that could harbor an emotional attachment well beyond the physicality of a dwelling.149 Demarcating conditions contrary to prescribed norms—whether in terms of per capita living space, physical and psychological welfare, human dignity, or social accord—petitioners offered a vivid counter-narrative to the brilliant future materializing in the sphere of daily life presented in published reports about massive housing construction. Through dramatic descriptions of dilapidated and overcrowded dwellings, they portrayed “then” (the period before the Revolution) and “now” (socialist advancement, as encapsulated in the ideal housewarming scenario) as one and the same, demonstrating that normal living was long overdue. They concurrently indicted the state and Party for failing to fulfill their promises and showed how little circumstances had changed since the war had ended. That petitioners were so well versed in the rhetoric of “communist construction” and “concern for the person” might be attributed to the fact that these concepts had been manifest in public culture since as early as the postwar Stalin years.150 This is evident in the correspondence surrounding the case of Shiliaev and Konopleva, the tenants who found themselves habitually besieged by students dancing the foxtrot in the red corner above their dwelling. In a 1955 letter addressed to the chair of the ispolkom of the Leningrad city soviet, Konopleva cited an article on healthy living that had appeared in Izvestia the previous year. Outlining circumstances virtually identical to those that Konopleva, her husband, and their fellow residents had to endure, its author invoked the caring proletarian state by insisting that measures be taken to ensure for workers a peaceful domestic life (domashnii byt).151 The concept of state paternalism proliferated during the Thaw, particularly after it was rendered concrete by the 1957 housing decree, which Khrushchev was personally committed to fulfilling. In his memoirs, the premier characterized the disgraceful housing situation that existed immediately after the war as “scandalous” and marveled that the Soviet person, who had sacrificed so much for “the ultimate victory of Communism,” should be expected to live in a “beehive.”152 His policy to provide each Soviet family a separate apartment “with all the conveniences” was intended to rectify this problem, as well as reorder the Soviet material world on egalitarian, socialist terms, in the spirit of the Revolution. This amalgam of humanist sensibilities and ideological constructs was evident in official rhetoric throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Illustrative is the aforementioned piece on the postwar resurrection of the Dachnyi district. Showcasing progress in communist construction, the author of this human-interest story conflated the provision of “good dwellings” with the

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grandiose efforts of the Party to “keep its word.” Yet alongside this robust assertion about the resoluteness of the paternalist state to end the housing crisis, the claim he made about the meaning of home was markedly vague. Invoking the English saying “My home is my castle,” he declared that in the Soviet Union, people say, “more simply, warmly—‘our home.’ ”153 Thus, while the striving for private ownership that the bourgeois “castle” connoted remained contested, what house and home might signify to an individual varied, as the anticipated and imagined longings expressed in housing petitions, fiction, and memoirs suggest. Even when demanding a place of their own, petitioners held objectives that were not distinct from official ones. The fact that they drew connections between their own abnormal living conditions and propagandistic accounts of comfortable and harmonious communist living implies that construction policy and discourse reinforced and validated personal ambitions for decent housing. These included raising healthy children or enjoying retirement after a lifetime of employment or military service, and in some cases, reestablishing normal civilian life or reintegrating into the social body after returning from imprisonment or exile. The continuing adverse living conditions that housing petitions catalogued somewhat reduced each dwelling in the old housing stock to a single type—one evocative of a Soviet “slum,” the term that the foreign correspondent Marguerite Higgins used to characterize the communal apartment block of the 1950s.154 Yet the miniature autobiographies that they incorporated humanized Soviet dwelling by reflecting universal yearnings for space and solitude for personal development, or more simply, for peaceful and dignified living. Such expectations were the substance of the housewarmings imagined by those still inhabiting old housing. Thus, although requests for better living space highlight a degree of continuity from the postwar Stalin era, the aspirations for byt they expressed demonstrate that for state and populace alike, material advancement, ideological victory, and humanity were intricately connected in the construction of the Soviet home of the future.

C H A P T E R 6

CONSTRUCTING SOVIET IDENTITY AND REVIVING SOCIALISM ON THE HOME FRONT

“BESIDES A SUITCASE, I HAVE NOTHING.”1 With this simple utterance, N. I. Dolmant'ev punctuated the extensive vita underpinning the housing request that he boldly submitted to the first deputy of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Frol Kozlov, in December 1958. Dolmant'ev had devoted decades of his life to military service and during World War II, had participated in the defense of besieged Leningrad, as well as the liberation of Ukraine, Moldova, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. His contributions had been rewarded with a host of distinctions, including the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner. But “what is all this for?” he wondered. He had defended his Rodina both at home and abroad, but had yet to experience life. Having sacrificed everything “in the interests of the state” and finding himself with little to show for this, he made it unmistakably clear that he merited more than symbolic honors. What he wanted was a home where he, his wife, and daughter could live in peace and comfort. 2 This was, after all, what the state and Party had promised through glowing portraits of modern housing design, rapid construction, and elated families settling into separate apartments “with all the conveniences,” as well as striking comparisons of everyday life before the Revolution with kommunisticheskii byt. Having dedicated himself to a course of service that had taken him as far from his Leningrad home as Sakhalin Island, Dolmant'ev and his family were residing in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) when he was finally discharged from the military in 1957. Upon returning to his native

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city, he and his family moved in with his mother, into a room measuring less than sixteen square meters, in a densely populated communal apartment. Unable to acquire a meager amount of separate living space for his family of three, he wondered that he did not deserve even so little. 3 The decision of the body that would ultimately decide his fate, the ispolkom of the Leningrad city soviet, did not change. In response to each of his requests, municipal officials laconically declared that Dolmant'ev was ineligible for registration in the housing queue in Leningrad because he had already secured a home here—the very one he had left when he assumed active military duty. Unlike so many others, his was not lost “due to wartime circumstances.”4 The claim that Dolmant'ev had once possessed housing at another Leningrad address might have strengthened his case. However, he could not produce the documents required to prove that he had ever inhabited this other dwelling. 5 At the same time, housing allocation procedures made no allowance for the fact that after an absence of more than two decades, he did not consider the place of his mother to be his home. Yet Leningrad is where he had lived with his parents until he was summoned for military duty, had completed his schooling, and had suffered the deaths of three of his children because of wartime starvation. 6 But these strong emotional ties to Leningrad also seemed to matter little to the city soviet. More puzzling was its failure to recognize that his living space of sixteen square meters was well below the per capita norm for four people. Over the course of his petition, the particulars of how Dolmant'ev was living became subsumed by the details of who he was, what he had accomplished in his life, and what he expected of the state in return. Perhaps he invested great effort in highlighting his record of service because he was aware that his request lacked a solid legal foundation. Nevertheless, in the process, he asserted a sense of self that was inextricable from the system he had loyally served—and as the crux of his appeal indicates, from his housing situation as well. In crafting their letters of complaint and request, petitioners like Dolmant'ev appeared to deliberately manipulate the complex system of privileged social categories and multiple housing queues that existed in the Soviet period. The range of individuals eligible for special consideration on the housing registry or additional living space above the per capita norm included leading workers in the government and Party, in economic enterprises and in social institutions; persons suffering from certain diseases, particularly contagious ones like tuberculosis; scientific employees; those on whom the state had conferred honorary titles; artists, writers, composers, architects, and members of other professions who might conduct their creative work largely at home; individuals enlisted in the armed

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forces, high ranking military personnel and disabled veterans of the war; and physicians practicing in residential buildings.7 Yet resolutions established to facilitate housing distribution for these different groups often proved inconstant, contradictory, or else so rigid as to render the privileges associated with them meaningless—as the experience of Dolmant'ev, an honorably discharged veteran, made evident. Meanwhile, a general, constitutional right to shelter did not exist in the Soviet Union until 1977.8 Even so, Soviet citizens felt entitled to state provision of housing. According to the legal expert John Hazard, the following perception had existed among Russians since the Civil War: The population had grown to expect that their government would supply them with rooms, and this expectation had come to be considered during the first years of the Revolution what might be termed a “right to space.” No laws had ever declared that such a right to space existed, but in the psychology of the people its realization became one of the criteria by which the government was to be judged.9

During the 1950s and 1960s, the publication of housing decrees, details about progress in mass construction, and human-interest stories on praiseworthy individuals who had contributed to building socialism and reaped benefits in the form of wonderful new apartments, no doubt amplified this sense of entitlement rooted in decades of public discourse about state paternalism. It also supplied a framework for petitioners seeking a firm foundation on which to base their appeal for better housing. Dolmant'ev, for example, passionately demanded that the state for which he had fought, the one that now purported to be achieving remarkable advances in the sphere of byt for the benefit of the Soviet person, reciprocate the sacrifices he had made.10 As I show in this chapter, petitioners persevered not only hoping to change their circumstances, but also seeking validation for everything they had personally contributed to society. The continuing housing shortage often denied them satisfaction of their material demands, but official verification of the autobiographical facts they presented in their letters did offer them a mode of authentication. Depictions of duty fulfilled add another dimension to the process of petitioning. Intertwined with assertions of entitlement and rights—alongside references to propagandistic claims about progress—these reveal the contours of Soviet subjectivity and a sense of belonging to the Soviet social body. Although few applied the literal Russian-language equivalent of citizenship (grazhdanstvo), many employed the rhetoric of citizenship. They did so by outlining their value to society and summoning officials to meet the avowed obligation of the regime to ensure their social welfare.

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In this respect, the strategy mobilized by Dolmant'ev to obtain better housing was typical among petitioners. He began one letter by stating that despite the current construction campaign, he had been refused registration in the queue for housing provision. Thus, he continued, all the good that he had achieved in his life went unrecognized. Then, drawing out his point, Dolmant'ev declared that whether struggling against the enemy, defending Leningrad during the Blockade, suffering the death of his children, lying in a hospital wounded, fighting anew after recovering, or losing part of his eyesight and hearing, he thought only of his Rodina, of her flourishing, of her future. He concluded with the pronouncement that he had believed that his native land, in turn, would not forget him.11 The conflation of duties, rights, and welfare with citizenship is not unique to the Soviet Union.12 Reference to the native land, however, reflects an awareness of being “Soviet” in combination with universal conceptions of citizenship. Especially significant among the cases I studied was the manifestation of a sense of belonging to a victorious nation after the Great Patriotic War or World War II. This conjured up a particular notion of Soviet citizenship among both soldiers and civilians seeking to ameliorate their living conditions. According to James Oliver, as in democratic societies, the mere act of writing to persons of authority cast Soviet petitioners as “citizen gatekeepers” tending their own “gates” within the system by articulating their demands and directing them at necessary officials.13 In turn, those at the summit of power summoned local officials to pay attention to the appeals that citizens made. As a whole then, the process of petitioning served to expose (and ideally inhibit) misconduct among lower level agents of the state, as well as to diffuse popular discontent and direct it away from the center to local officials.14 In tending his own gate, Dolmant'ev had approached not only the Leningrad city and different district soviets, but also the editor of the Soviet Army newspaper Krasnaia zvezda, military personnel that included the decorated Colonel General Nikolai Krylov (commander of the Leningrad Military District) and prominent government officials at the Council of Ministers of the USSR.15 To central authority figures, Dolmant'ev complained not only that he was being denied a deserved home in Leningrad, but also that he could not find a single city official willing so much as to take an interest in his case. In his aforementioned letter to Kozlov, for example, he blamed his plight solely on “local powers” and bureaucratic functionaries (chinovniki), thereby explicitly absolving the central government and Party. He also expressed incredulity at their indifference and ineffectiveness—in the Soviet Union no less, “in the most humanitarian state.” It was thus that he had decided to turn to the Kremlin to continue his quest for justice (pravda) and an escape from his intolerable living circumstances.16

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The response from the center seemed to confirm the zabota o cheloveke that the state propounded to possess, as higher-level officials ordered that each grievance be examined and that the results be conveyed to the petitioner who initiated it. That said, Dolmant'ev might not have seen the note that Kozlov had sent to the Leningrad city soviet “personally” asking that he be shown assistance and be registered to secure living space.17 Still, when a soviet official again informed Dolmant'ev that his demand was unfounded, he did so referencing a request he had received via Kozlov.18 At the very least then, Dolmant'ev may have derived satisfaction from knowing that his letter had reached the first deputy of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. The layers of correspondence generated by petitioners seeking better housing and the authorities who responded to their pleas, reflected various forms of entitlement and modes of personal identification, as well as interaction between ordinary individuals and agents of the state at various levels. When it came to popular expectations regarding official replies, references to principles of humanity and social justice figured as prominently as did proclamations about advancements in construction and Communism. In particular, petitioners actively solicited state adherence to a social(ist) contract that they believed to consist of both moral and material elements. Thus emerged a complex portrait of public opinion, one in which criticism of and faith in the regime commingled. Similarly, while asserting personal merit, petitioners linked their own identity to that of the state, thereby legitimating both. Making the Soviet Person: On the Home Front and on the War Front Antithesis and movement—these were two key motifs in public housing culture. The first of these juxtaposed the miseries of daily life for workers renting from exploitative landlords in capitalist countries with the joyous byt of the working masses living in socialist states; the second signified the transition from the dark, crowded, difficult, and unhygienic accommodations of the slums of the tsarist era to the bright separate apartments arising amid the rationally planned mikroraiony of the 1950s and 1960s.19 Apparently drawing on the discourses embedded in these scenarios of the proletarian order coming into being, workers petitioning for better housing placed their overall labor record within a trajectory of industrial development and communist construction. Specifically, they adhered to a template evident in human-interest stories that explicitly depicted the housewarming as a reward for productivity. 20 Such published reports identified the occupation and length of service of new tenants, alongside a selection of their personal achievements. For instance, one human-interest story intro-

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duced the recipient of a new apartment, A. P. Petrov, as a senior production worker who had earned both the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner for his exemplary labor record. Petrov was the head of one of forty families working at the Baltic factory that happened to be celebrating a housewarming at 36 Gavanskaia Street on the occasion of the Twenty-First Party Congress in 1958. 21 Together with newspaper features, decades of public praise and displays of the material benefits bestowed on shock workers and Stakhanovites, no doubt also contributed to the expectation that productivity would be rewarded with recognition and recompense. During the Stalin era, such remuneration took the form of honors conferred at special ceremonies and gifts of scarce or luxurious consumer goods, including housing. 22 At the center of this “moral economy of the gift” lay a narrative of gratitude for good fortune to the Communist Party or its paternal leader. 23 In the 1950s and 1960s, as housing petitions reveal, this scenario was displaced by one of unambiguous reciprocity. The recipients of new housing were often depicted as being as heroic in terms of their contributions to socialist advancement as the state was generous. This is evident in a feature portraying P. A. Batova, a senior employee at a Leningrad cement factory. Over the span of her career, Batova had purportedly produced enough cement for the construction of dozens of buildings, and recently had yielded twenty-two tons in a single hour—well beyond the norm—on a “labor watch” (trudovaia vakhta) orchestrated in honor of the jubilee of Leningrad. It was therefore fitting that she and her son, who had been living in a dormitory (presumably affiliated with the factory where she worked), were also marking this special occasion with their receipt of a new apartment. 24 With their comparatively unsatisfactory outcomes, housing petitions constitute incomplete narratives of reciprocity. The citizens who crafted them nevertheless demarcated what, in their estimation, would comprise the ideal exchange between themselves and the state. For example, the engineer N. I. Postnov presented housing as necessary not only for preserving the health of his family, but also so that he and his wife M. I. Drosina, a kindergarten teacher, might continue “to be useful” to society. At the time, the couple was living together with their teenage son and all three of them were suffering from various ailments for which soaking in water was the prescribed treatment. Postnov thus sought for his family a separate apartment of two rooms equipped with a bathroom—something that their current accommodations lacked. 25 Effectively verifying that Postnov and Drosina would in fact fulfill their pledge, character references provided by colleagues described each as conscientious “at work” and active “at home”: Postnov had participated in professional union and Party organizations, and Drosina—in societal work (obshchestvennaia rabota). 26

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Concluding a letter to Khrushchev with a promise that in return for better housing she would show her appreciation to the state through “selfless labor,” Z. V. Novikova also indicated that fulfilling her request would benefit society as a whole. 27 She and her family (comprised of seven persons in total) had been living in “incredibly difficult conditions” for seventeen years: when they returned to Leningrad in 1946 after having been evacuated from the city, they found their dwelling occupied by others and ended up being housed in appalling conditions. Throughout all of the “unbelievable hardships” they experienced over the years, she and her siblings did not lose their sense of human worth, and from the age of fourteen, they all entered into production and then studied in night schools, and subsequently, institutes. Novikova herself completed “with distinction” both training at a trade school, where she specialized as an electrician, and schooling as a medical attendant; she then concluded her education at Leningrad State University, with a specialty in biochemistry. “And now, when all the opportunities to show my worth are opening up before me,” she stated, “I have to think about how to save my family from death, how not to succumb to successive illnesses, the result of difficult living conditions, rather than occupy myself wholly with my beloved work.” While implying that overcoming adversity had warranted her decent housing, she suggested that the obstacles to productivity that her continuing untenable circumstances posed would signal her demise. With her own future, and the fate of her infirm mother and chronically sick young child hinging upon the resolution of the Leningrad city soviet, should it prove unfavorable, she declared, “I am not going to live, but instead am going to wither away.”28 While some petitioners proposed a scenario of reciprocity in which labor productivity would increase commensurate with improvements in living conditions, others alluded to the incontrovertible privileges associated with simply belonging to the proletariat. A. M. Tsvetkov, for example, requested housing as a “working-person” (chelovek-rabochii) and cited thirty years of labor service, proclaiming, “I live in a Soviet country where the building of the life of the person must be only for the better.” Tsvetkov had lived in Leningrad from 1919 to 1927, when he was conscripted into the army; upon his demobilization in 1948, he learned that he had lost possession of the dwelling he had left behind and therefore moved in with his sister. Now, he claimed, he was old, sick, and losing his strength due to his “very very difficult” living conditions. 29 Alongside petitioners who emphasized that inadequate housing and lack of proper rest were interfering with their work, were those who sought to settle down and enjoy deserved respite after a lifetime of labor service.30 F. Ia. Struchkov expressly invoked official promises that contributions to society would be rewarded in retirement. Struchkov had participated in the

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development of Leningrad since 1930, working throughout the war and afterward, assisting in the restoration of factories in Stalingrad and in the Urals region. The fact that he was a construction worker imbued his case with a special irony, for none of his labors were of benefit to him, personally: he was living in just over twenty square meters in an extended family arrangement comprised of six persons. Writing to the deputy of the State Construction Committee of the USSR in December 1963 and accentuating his production record, he proclaimed, “I gave to the state nearly my entire life and I ask the state to enable me to rest in my old age.”31 In a previous letter, one submitted to the chair of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Leonid Brezhnev, Struchkov declared that all but one member of his family were laboring for the “welfare of the native land” and yet they had no place to live in tranquility. Meanwhile, he had learned of others who had somehow managed to acquire housing after fulfilling a mere five or six years of labor service. Propaganda proliferating at the time reinforced his sense of injustice; he had heard on the radio that those who had worked in the city for a long period would be given priority in the receipt of living space.32 As each of the cases delineated thus far suggests, memories of the Great Patriotic War pervaded housing petitions submitted by workers who either had suffered and survived the horrors of war or had actively engaged in preserving or defending their native land through their labor. The ideal published scenario of reciprocity too spanned the war: the model cement worker Batova had devoted twenty-six years of her life to her factory, as well as defended it during the Blockade.33 Among the petitioners cited thus far, Postnov and his wife Drosina were not only exemplary workers (and citizens); they had also struggled against “the German-fascist aggressors” during the war. 34 Novikova, too young to have been active in the war effort, was nevertheless tremendously affected by it, having experienced the severe dislocation of wartime evacuation, while Struchkov had been involved in construction throughout the war, and subsequently, reconstruction. Tsvet­ kov, who identified himself as a chelovek-rabochii, had served his Rodina in various capacities—in the military for over two decades, and then on the metro. He was therefore particularly indignant that despite his many sacrifices, his family was living in a mere “corner.”35 Drawing on the iconography of the heroic and devoted worker, petitioners expounding their proletarian identity did more than arouse pathos and esteem; they transformed themselves from victims of war to victors. The case of M. I. Maslei is typical in this regard. Her husband had fought on the Leningrad front, was wounded, returned to the front, and eventually died after having become an invalid. Her sons too had contributed to the war effort. One did so while serving in the navy, and the other had fought on the Ukrainian front and suffered shellshock. What Maslei emphasized most

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were her sacrifices in the sphere of labor. For example, in a letter addressed to the Council of Ministers of the USSR, she revealed that she had worked at a factory clinic during the Blockade, had undergone a serious operation, and afterward, returned to complete her work service in order to ensure her pension. Now living together with one of her sons and his wife and child in a room of eighteen square meters, she was requesting a room of her own, specifically one that was soon to be vacated by a neighbor in her communal apartment. She exclaimed rhetorically, “Do I, having given over all for [my] Rodina, really not have the right to ask that this fourteen-meter room be granted to me?”36 Once again highlighting her part in the war effort, in a letter she submitted to Moskovskaia pravda, Maslei recalled that local officials had urged everyone to dedicate all their strength, promising that in turn, “The Rodina will not forget you.” Having answered this summons and worked honestly, even damaging her health in the process, she had earned the “right . . . to a normal life” in retirement.37 As this case illuminates, discourses about identity that emerged in housing petitions—much like the rhetoric surrounding living conditions—demonstrate that addressing wartime and postwar expectations constituted a significant feature of the Khrushchev era. The impact of World War II on the Soviet Union was certainly devastating. The death toll alone is astonishing. According to one estimate, one in seven people from the prewar population of the Soviet Union became a casualty, including about 9,000,000 people in military service (counting persons killed, wounded and missing) and 19,000,000 civilians (among them, individuals who died due to enemy bombings or starvation, or while fighting as partisans).38 If the impact of this tremendous human loss was at all muted by government refusal to publicize accurate statistics, citizens would nevertheless have borne the effects of the Great Patriotic War through some personal experience—whether heeding the call to sacrifice for Rodina mat′ at the war front or in factories, including those that had been relocated to the interior of the country; becoming severed from home or loved ones due to evacuation; losing friends and family members to hunger, illness or enemy fire; suffering the privation of stringent rationing; sustaining some sort of physical or mental trauma; or, ultimately returning to homes destroyed and cities or villages in rubble.39 This accounts for why the war in some way figured into so many of the housing petitions examined, even if it was especially pronounced in those submitted by soldiers, invalidy and their wives or widows. Conveying the impact of World War II on the Soviet psyche, Elena Zubkova noted that soldiers serving at the front and those who eventually returned home demonstrated a civic spirit that incorporated a concrete and pressing sense of purpose, personal responsibility, and belonging.40 Such a feeling infected not only frontoviki (frontline soldiers), but also members of the subsequent “Thaw generation” whose formative years were influenced

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by Khrushchev’s reforms. One member of this cohort, Ludmilla Alexeyeva, highlighted its perception that “a ‘collective’ of faceless people could not have won the war. . . . They acted as citizens. They needed no orders . . . to push themselves to the limit.”41 Similarly, Andrei Sakharov claimed that the war had ingrained in him genuine conviction, in synchronicity with the official slogan “Our Cause Is Just!”42 Alongside general references to the Great Patriotic War, the tendency for petitioners to draw on claims of Leningrad heritage is not surprising, for it was overwhelmingly Leningraders eager to settle down in their native city that generated the correspondence under scrutiny here. According to Lisa Kirschenbaum, the siege of Leningrad—a traumatic event that lasted for well over two years—instilled in residents of the city pride in the epic nature of the Blockade and their responses to it, and made them view themselves as active citizens rather than passive victims—members of a “heroic community.”43 The subsequent glorification of the war created a common point of reference for all citizens. Placing Leningraders in the larger context of Soviet experience, Kirschenbaum elucidated the power of wartime struggle to produce a widespread shift in identity from victim to citizen, and to inspire the belief that the sacrifices made were justified. At the same time, the nascent “war cult had the unintended consequence of perpetuating . . . (unrealized) visions of Soviet citizenship and the Soviet person.”44 Various strands of Soviet subjectivity frequently bisected expressions of local identity in housing petitions. Namely, those who invoked a right to living space in Leningrad through intrinsic connection to this city by birth, or as an adopted resident for having endured the siege, also tended to evoke some more general public persona that had been promoted from the time of the Revolution. Following World War II, the identities that came to be entrenched as “Soviet” included not only worker, but also soldier or veteran—be he or she demobilized, discharged or rendered an invalid—as well as wife or mother of one of these.45 N. F. Prokhorov represented the gamut of universal qualities and specific local and national identities that petitioners presented in asserting entitlement to better housing. In an appeal he submitted to the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR, Prokhorov outlined the unfavorable conditions in which he, his wife, and their two children were living; the poor state of his health as a war invalid who had suffered various traumas at the front; the loss of part of his home after others had assumed the living space his family was forced to leave behind due to evacuation; his contributions to labor since the age of twelve; his membership in a professional union, as well as the Komsomol and then the Communist Party; and his service during the Winter War against Finland in 1939–1940 and the Great Patriotic War, for which he was rewarded with verbal commendations and medals. Pro­ khorov explained that he had “always and everywhere worked honestly

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and conscientiously” and had believed what he had heard on the front throughout the war: “The Rodina will not forget you.”46 He had also made material sacrifices to the war effort, noting in a letter to the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR that his family had donated clothing, a large bronze clock, and copper crockery to a defense fund, helping in every way that it possibly could.47 To top it all, Prokhorov was a Leningrader. Local government and Party officials had grappled with the question of whether to restore dwellings to their prewar inhabitants and return non-Leningraders to their original homes elsewhere ever since the Blockade was lifted at the beginning of 1944 and hundreds of thousands of returnees, as well as newcomers, flooded into Leningrad. They had also contemplated the efficacy of establishing a distinction between chistye (pure) and nechistye (impure) Leningraders. An official decision was made to abstain from such semantics.48 In addition, natives may have received preferential treatment before the amalgamation of the various housing registries in the city—a measure instituted partly to ensure that the distribution of living space would be determined by objective measurements. Yet such persons enjoyed less favor after 1961, when evidence of having lived in Leningrad prior to January 1956 was to become the key determinant of residency.49 Nevertheless, as cases spanning through the 1960s illustrate, Leningraders continued to assert housing claims based on having been born in Leningrad or at the very least, lived here before the war. Similarly, if accommodating individuals who happened to find themselves in Leningrad due to forces beyond their control remained at all convoluted in official parlance, petitioners simplified matters by personally distinguishing between deserving native Leningraders and undeserving newcomers. This was one strategy that T. F. Samodel'nikov employed in his quest for better housing. A longtime Leningrader, Samodel'nikov was living together with his wife and their adult son in a miserable room of only fourteen square meters in an overcrowded communal apartment. Compounding his feeling of degradation was his perception that nearly half of the principal lessees of apartments in Leningrad were individuals who had arrived in the city only after the war, “not having defended it in hard times,” and that moreover, some had better living space than he had, in terms of square meterage.50 His personal relationship to Leningrad proved immaterial, however, as local officials—for an unspecified reason—repeatedly refused him placement in the queue for housing provision. 51 Given his many contributions to Soviet society, Samodel'nikov was indignant that newcomers were suddenly enjoying benefits that he and his wife had earned over the course of their lives. Samodel'nikov had lived in Leningrad from 1922, participated in the restoration of the city after the Civil War and defended it during World War II, even earning the medal “For the Defense of Leningrad.” In addition to serving in the Soviet Army

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for nineteen years, he possessed an exemplary work record. His wife had also endured the Blockade, having contributed to the war effort as a lithographer, and then participated in the reconstruction of Leningrad. And she too had garnered commendations in the form of two medals. 52 Petitioners who could not claim Leningrad heritage, but who nevertheless found themselves living and demanding decent accommodations in this particular city, evoked a broader sense of belonging stemming from general wartime experience. V. S. Svetukhin was one such individual: after spending the entire Blockade in Leningrad, he had no place to return to in his native Kalinin, for his home there had been destroyed and his parents had died. He had ended up staying in Leningrad, first living with his sister and her family, and after he was married, in an apartment that cost him more than his pension afforded him. 53 Lacking a propiska to live in Leningrad, Svetukhin placed his record of service at the forefront of his appeal. Whether approaching municipal institutions, or powerful bodies like the Supreme Soviet and the Council of Ministers of the USSR, he began each of his letters of petition by introducing himself as an “Invalid of the Patriotic War.”54 He then proceeded to reveal that from the age of eighteen he had sacrificed his health for the defense of his Rodina, was seriously wounded in battle—sustaining injuries that led to the amputation of his left arm—and suffered shellshock. In honor of his dedication, he was awarded the Order of Glory. Having fulfilled his duty in battle, he expressly stated in a letter to the chair of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Nikolai Bulganin, that he “deserved” to be provided housing. Underscoring his material claim with a sense of insult and despondency, Svetukhin decried having to now “live and wander without attention in the Soviet Union.”55 He thus indicated his right to be reincorporated into civilian society, as well as what he perceived to be the obligation of the state to tend to his fundamental needs. Though one was a Leningrader and the other, effectively, a displaced person, Samodel'nikov and Svetukhin were both typical of petitioners who showcased wartime experience and an admirable record of military service in their housing request. Whether recounting sacrifices at the front or careers that spanned war and peace, soldiers and veterans sought both praise and pity, citing their achievements and losses. Yet as with all petitioners, their assertions of entitlement to reasonable living conditions were underpinned by demonstrations of urgent material need. To be sure, soldiers and veterans also presented what they understood to be solid legal claims to decent housing. From the conclusion of World War II through the Khrushchev years, decrees emanating from a number of state bodies stipulated that military personnel be offered assistance in securing living space in accordance with their rank, specified terms of service, and discharge or demobilization, or else in association with resolutions to

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reduce the scale of the Soviet armed forces. These, however, could contradict general regulations regarding housing allocation, or alternatively, like them, fluctuate or prove inflexible. For example, decrees stipulating that soldiers and veterans be granted housing after completing a given period of service or tour of duty variably restricted them to doing so in the territory of the District Military Registration and Enlistment Office (Raionnyi voennyi komissariat [RVK]) where they were last stationed, or else from where they had been called into the military—regardless of whether they considered either locale their home. Such was the case with I. G. Petrov. Having fulfilled twenty-six years of military service, he concluded an appeal to the Ministry of Defense of the USSR proclaiming that he had served his Rodina “with faith and truth” and now “by law must be provided living space.” Specifically, he cited a 1953 decree granting housing privileges to officers of the reserves who had served in the Soviet Army for more than twenty-five years. He evidently believed that this resolution obliged the soviet of the Zhdanov district—where he claimed to have resided upon his summons for duty—to extend to him special consideration. 56 Instead, other general housing conventions trumped the rights this decree seemed to confer, while his dire living conditions, which necessitated that his wife and child live elsewhere with relatives, appeared to escape deliberation. Among the factors that disqualified Petrov for housing in the Zhdanov district were the following: he lacked evidence that he possessed any dwelling at all to contribute in a housing exchange here; his place of residence, for which his mother was the principal lessee, was located in the October district, thus further undermining his eligibility for living space in the Zhdanov district; and an interdepartmental commission had deemed his dwelling sufficient in size at twenty-three square meters, and entirely suitable for habitation. 57 He was thereby disqualified even from benefiting from city soviet decrees to restore to demobilized soldiers living space they had lost in Leningrad due to their entry into the military. A. P. Pavlov, an officer of the reserves, found himself in a similarly convoluted situation. Crammed into a dwelling of merely fifteen square meters with his wife and two children, “extreme necessity” finally prompted him to seek assistance from the chair of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Anastas Mikoyan. Pavlov began his appeal by citing a 1960 decree pertaining to those who had served in the army for at least twenty years and were fulfilling additional service.58 Boasting a record of service that spanned from 1939 to 1963, his eligibility for housing privileges in accord with this resolution appeared to be indisputable. Nevertheless, Pavlov was denied any special consideration for a housing exchange in the Kirov district where he was living because various municipal offices had determined—contrary to his own claims—that he had been residing in another one (the Petrodvorets

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district), when he was called to duty. Still, he was granted placement in the general housing queue in the Kirov district.59 Whether motivated by the fact that thousands of other Leningraders remained ahead of him (as of 1961, he was number 9459 for housing allocation), or by the feeling that his rights were being violated, Pavlov detailed for Mikoyan the course of service that he believed merited him and his family decent living space: he had participated in both the Winter War against Finland and the defense of his “native city of Leningrad” during World War II, and he had received numerous commendations from his command unit. Reinforcing the devotion and loyalty that these exhibited, he concluded with the following valediction: “I turn to you as a member of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union], as a soldier having served twenty-four years.”60 The peculiar situations in which Petrov and Pavlov found themselves demonstrate how the mobility that military service demands contributed to undermining the housing requests of discharged or demobilized soldiers. Exemplifying the hindrances that constant relocation could pose to establishing a domicile—as well as further accentuating the housing crisis—was the case of M. M. Tveritinova. This lieutenant had served in the Soviet Army from June 1941 to March 1953, first in Leningrad, then in Germany, and in the Estonian SSR. Because of the latter transfers, Tveritinova did not maintain her living space in Leningrad. Upon returning to the city, she applied for permanent residency and was granted a propiska, as well as placed on the housing registry of the Lenin RVK where she was employed. The soviet of the Lenin district, however, denied Tveritinova housing here because she had apparently been residing in the Dzerzhinskii district when she was summoned for service. The Dzerzhinskii raion soviet confirmed this, but it too refused to provide her housing due to the absence of available living space and the large number of residents already waiting in the queue here. Meanwhile, the ispolkom of the Leningrad city soviet repeatedly failed to render a decision on the case; Tveritinova thus continued “renting a corner” in the Lenin district—at her own expense.61 Perhaps because of the apparent futility of appealing to decrees intended to assist soldiers and veterans in housing matters, like others, Tveritinova focused on delineating her vita of military service when she wrote the chair of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Kliment Voroshilov. Asking the marshal to intervene on her behalf, she proclaimed that she had served in the Soviet Army for twelve years, had spent the entire war “on the Leningrad front,” and had been awarded the medal “For Combat Merits.” Suggesting that such sacrifices conferred greater entitlement than any resolution, she insisted that she had a “full right” to obtain state housing in Leningrad, for had she not heeded the call to duty—something that required her not only to quit her home, but also to temporarily leave behind her then infant child—she would have possessed a dwelling and an order

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in this city. Instead, she found herself paying an unmanageable sum for her current living space and virtually unable to provide for her daughter.62 It was typical of soldiers and veterans to offer a catalog of duties fulfilled so extensive that their narrative of personal entitlement eclipsed references to official decrees. Experience might explain this tendency. Following World War II, resolutions aimed at assisting military personnel in housing matters and providing them with special benefits had been published in the press, explained in speeches and individual consultations, and reproduced in pamphlet form.63 As demonstrated, however, appealing to them could prove useless. The generally paradoxical position of veterans in postwar Soviet society offers another explanation for why petitioners with military credentials were inclined to accentuate their individual sacrifices. In keeping with the wartime practice of touting the contributions that soldiers were making to the war effort, postwar propaganda conveyed the message that veterans had a right to expect material and symbolic compensation for their service. However, as Mark Edele showed, the expression of any feeling of favored status or treatment on their part was discouraged. Essentially, with wartime victory cast as a collective endeavor, no particular group was to be singled out for special consideration.64 Nevertheless, the temporary privileges that veterans had enjoyed in association with their status (at least until mass demobilization was completed in 1948), continuing recognition for their sacrifices in public culture, and “a strong sense of a right to a good postwar life” all combined to create a popular movement.65 Soldiers and veterans petitioning for better housing constituted one strand of this active cohort that, frustrated over the failure of local officials to honor state promises and fulfill the rewards they felt owed to them, resorted to relentlessly approaching central authority figures to acquire decent living space, employment and pensions, as well as access to scarce goods and transportation. Throughout this process, veterans were compelled “to stress their entitlement, advertise their war record, and argue for their membership in the privileged group” in a “constant ritual display of belonging to the category ‘war participant.’ ”66 Yet the sacrifices that soldiers had made during World War II began to be rewarded as such only during the 1960s amid the broad expansion of the Soviet welfare state, while the status of veterans was not legalized until 1978. Also significant, although the “entitlement group” that veterans came to constitute was a social unit, at its core, Edele argued, was “individualized sentiment.” As he discerned, “more often than talking of ‘us,’ veterans talked of ‘me,’ ” signaling that it was individual sacrifice that entitled a person to special status after the war.67 Housing petitions demonstrate that this tendency Edele cited as prominent during the first postwar decade, continued through the 1960s. Indeed in seeking tenable living space, individuals identifying themselves as military personnel projected a sense of self that conjured up a solitary hero who had

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struggled against the enemy on behalf of the collective, personified by Rodina mat′. Such individuality might be explained by the fact that Soviet soldiers varied a great deal in terms of their range and length of service, as well as generation, profession, and ethnicity. The “frontline generation” was the youngest group, whose members had not established a career prior to the war. Then there were those who had a full civilian life and profession to which they could potentially return. There were also career military men or “double veterans” who may have participated in World War I or the Civil War.68 These categories splintered further after World War II, reinforcing the individualistic sentiment that carried through the Khrushchev era. This is evident in petitions that presented invalidnost′ (“disability”) as a basis of entitlement to better housing. Among the soldiers who survived the war, from about 10 to 19 percent came to be officially recognized as “war invalids.” Invalidnost′, in turn, was divided into three types. Group I, the smallest at less than 2 percent, included those who had sustained the most severe physical injuries and were not at all able to work. Group II consisted of individuals with some serious physical challenge (for example, persons who might have suffered the amputation of a limb), who might nevertheless have been able to work with special accommodations. The largest, incorporating nearly 70 percent of invalidy, Group III was comprised of those who had suffered the loss or impairment of one limb or organ, but could work in a regular environment even if this required retraining. Significantly, war invalidy constituted the one category of veterans that retained special treatment (for example, concerning pensions) that would evolve into legal status.69 This accounts for why soldiers who had sustained serious wounds, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, so prominently identified themselves as invalidy.70 In some cases, they presented a balanced portrait of duties fulfilled and injuries endured—much like Svetukhin did. In others, veterans emphasized the physical traumas they bore over the record of service during which they sustained them. This was the case with K. D. Sidorov. In a housing request that he submitted to the Ministry of Defense, Sidorov revealed that he had served in a platoon of submachine gunners and spent the entire war on the front, and that he had been awarded the Order of the Red Star. Yet he both introduced himself and signed his name as “an invalid of the First Group.” Within the body of his letter, he referenced a decree intended to provide supplemental living space to individuals afflicted with certain illnesses; throughout, he opted to outline his physical challenges rather than the heroic exploits that had garnered him commendation. He stated, for example, that having suffered more than a dozen wounds, he was declared “an invalid of the Second Group” but nevertheless managed to work after he recovered; eventually, however, his right side became paralyzed. These details were particularly pertinent to his appeal, for Sidorov was living in a room of twenty square meters with four other persons, in an apartment without a bathroom, on the fifth floor of a building without an elevator.71 Though he had been

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denied a housing exchange by different local bodies, he succeeded in evoking the sympathy of the central authorities; in response to his petition, the offices of the Ministry of Defense sent a letter to the ispolkom of the Leningrad city soviet “very much” asking its chair “to help comrade Sidorov.”72 Physical challenges born of wartime trauma also figured prominently in the housing request submitted by G. P. Isaenkov, as did the notions of reciprocity and settling down expressed by civilian and military petitioners alike. In a February 1963 letter to the Leningrad oblast Party committee, Isaenkov presented himself as a worker with a thirty-three-year labor record, who had spent World War II at the front, was wounded and shellshocked, and continued to suffer from trauma-induced epilepsy. Incorporating his wife into his narrative of entitlement, he added that she, a “longtime industrial worker of the city of Leningrad,” was also ill. Citing the same decree as Sidorov and casting himself as a person whose illness “makes dwelling with others impossible,” he did not want additional living space, but rather a separate apartment so that he would not make others uncomfortable with his seizures and so that no one would bother him.73 Writing a letter to Khrushchev a few months later, Isaenkov claimed, at age fifty-five, “I should still work, I want to work . . . , but tranquility is necessary for me, so that fits of epilepsy do not torment me.”74 In transforming his petition as a war invalid into a gesture of hope to rejoin the collective as an able contributor, Isaenkov appeared to be projecting a distinct thread of postwar Soviet gift culture, one in which the state owed veterans special status and treatment for their service—for which they in turn owed the regime both renewed service and model conduct as Soviet citizens.75 According to Edele, “The official representation of homecoming as the enthusiastic reintegration of the returning heroes into the hard work of building (or rebuilding!) socialism was not infrequently adopted as a self-description by the minority of veterans who took over leading positions all over the country.”76 As the case of Isaenkov indicates, the majority who did not enter leadership roles assumed this same stance. Claiming a solid career as a compressor operator, as well as wartime military service, he aligned himself with workers in general who evoked a narrative of reciprocity, anticipating an amelioration of their living conditions in exchange for their labor. He also expressed a desire to move forward with a life that had been interrupted by war—a prospect that was juxtaposed with descriptions of dilapidated and cramped living space. Alongside veterans and war invalidy eager to return to normalcy and reconstruct their lives were wives and war widows. Those among them who petitioned for better housing asserted a moral right to consideration by association with those who had sacrificed themselves for their Rodina. The wives of invalidy presented the establishment of decent living conditions as a means of restoring the lichnost′ of their husband in a way that imbued housing with a healing function.77 War widows, meanwhile, emphasized

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that a past filled with personal, emotional tribulation, and familial fragmentation had earned them the right to an abundant future. A home would provide the material framework for this, while also serving metaphorically as a monument to a lost loved one. N. I. Liashenko was one war widow who conflated the sacrifices of her husband with her own entitlement to better housing and suggested that granting her request would comprise a most suitable, tangible mode of commemorating her spouse. Inaugurating the 1964 New Year with a letter to the Leningrad soviet, Liashenko began by launching into a reminder that the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Blockade was fast approaching. In connection with this occasion, she claimed, she was inundated by proclamations on the radio and in the newspapers that those who perished during the war defending Leningrad “are not forgotten and are never going to be forgotten, are going to be FOREVER LIVING among us, for whom they gave the most valuable thing, their LIFE.” However, she divulged, “it is not always as you hear on the radio and read in the newspapers.”78 Presenting her own situation in evidence, Liashenko proceeded to highlight the inconsistency between official rhetoric and promises, and the realities of her experience. Her husband was among those who should have been remembered: he had died during the first year of the war, shortly after answering the call to defend his Rodina. She and her son Iurii were fortunate to have survived the war in evacuation in Sverdlovsk and then return to the very same home they had left behind in Leningrad. Their dwelling, however, was a narrow, sunless room of only fourteen square meters in a crowded communal apartment—an arrangement that became especially unbearable for Iurii after a 1958 accident had left him an invalid. Their life would have been different, she asserted, had her husband lived. Shifting from the nascent war cult to the housewarming scenario flourishing in public culture, she noted that two housing units had been constructed since the end of the war at the institute where he had worked as a metallurgical engineer up to his entry into the army; she thus implied that her family should be eligible for living space here.79 In citing the mass housing campaign, Liashenko added to her appeals for honor for the memory of her husband, and for decent housing for her and her son, a reference to state paternalism—another motif she would have encountered in the media. In such a way she not only showcased the contributions of her husband, but as well, rendered herself an embodiment of Rodina mat′, still seeking protection (in the form of shelter) nearly two decades after the war had ended. V. G. Ashevskaia also approached the Leningrad city soviet as a war widow and mother. Summing up the losses and material hardships that qualified her for better housing, in a letter dated January 1959, she introduced herself as “the wife of a deceased fighter pilot” who now lives with his mother. Her husband was born and lived in Leningrad until he began

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his studies, and then died while in service in Germany having served his native land “honestly.” Ashevskaia asserted that without a doubt, he would have hoped that his family was well provided for and did not suffer any sort of “offense.”80 Conjuring up the notion of honoring the dead, this petition—albeit indirectly—recaps two additional themes that surfaced in housing petitions in relation to wartime experience: the broad resonance of the ascendant cult of the Great Patriotic War and the vigor and diversity of postwar Leningrad identity. To elaborate, though the circumstances are unclear, Ashevskaia’s husband died while in military service in 1958, more than a decade after the war had ended, and she herself was from Volkhov (a city in Leningrad oblast), having settled down in Leningrad only in 1957, when she moved in with her mother-in-law and brother-in-law. Furthermore, neither she nor her husband had a propiska to live in Leningrad.81 Thus, not even the intervention of military personnel in the upper echelons of the Ministry of Defense could reverse the determination of the ispolkom of the Leningrad soviet that it was not possible to provide Ashevskaia alternative housing in Leningrad.82 Yet she persisted like many others who found administrative regulations and their own perceptions and expectations to be dissonant. The Spectrum of Political Identities: Party Activists—Rehabilitated Persons The social position and individual claims of workers seeking better housing were unproblematic given that the Soviet state was founded on the proletariat. In the aftermath of the war, the same was true of soldiers and veterans distinguished for their bravery—whether with medals and ribbons, or by some degree of invalidnost′. This was not the case with persons situated along the revolutionary continuum either as Party members engaged in theorizing, ruling and propagandizing the state, or as persons classified as traitors sheared from the glorious movement toward Communism.83 After all, the Terror of the Stalin regime had brutally consumed the most loyal of communists and ordinary citizens alike who happened to find themselves randomly drawn into the “whirlwind” of persecution.84 Although Communist Party membership could confer special privileges in daily life, it had not been intended to do so. Thus, many petitioners embedded their Party status within a narrative of sacrifice for Soviet society, but few presented it as the principal basis of their entitlement to decent housing. The pensioner M. N. Mikhailova, for example, was noticeably laconic in seeking consideration in her housing request as a longtime member of the Communist Party.85 N. I. Orlov followed a similar approach in his appeals. When writing the Leningrad oblast Party committee and the Council of Ministers of

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the USSR, he began each letter “From a Communist since 1937” only to launch into an overview of his labor record, his contributions to his native Leningrad, his loss of housing here during the war, and his egregious living conditions.86 By contrast, M. G. Fediashchin foregrounded Party membership in his housing petition. While boasting decades of service in the navy, in a letter addressed to the newspaper Pravda, he suggested that his sixteen years plus the forty years his father had devoted to the Party warranted them decent living space. Fediashchin and his daughter had ended up living with his sexagenarian parents after his wife died and her relatives challenged his right to the Leningrad dwelling they had inhabited. Asserting a sense of entitlement rooted in political loyalty, he exclaimed with indignation, “I am even a member of the CPSU, as is my father, and he also has a right to normal [in this case, separate from his son and granddaughter] living space.”87 Those who most vigorously identified themselves as Party members appeared to do so not merely in the hope of ameliorating their living conditions. They also acted as witnesses, enlightening senior officials about the appalling circumstances in which descendents of the Revolution and living supporters of the state and Party resided. Essentially, alongside petitioning in their own interest or that of their family, they also highlighted grave shortcomings in the very system to which they had devoted themselves—often in a way that demonstrated continued commitment to the socialist project, of which mass housing provision was the element that pressed them the most. Take the case of N. M. Berezkina. In March 1962, she approached a Party-State Control Commission seeking assistance as “the daughter of someone executed by [General Alexander] Kolchak in 1919 in the city of Omsk.”88 Her father had also served in the early Soviet state security organ, the Cheka, and in the local soviet.89 Yet despite his activism on behalf of the Bolshevik cause and his martyrdom at the hands of the famous White general—an affirmation of unfailing loyalty—she and her family were living in crowded conditions in an old wooden house built in the nineteenth century that a public inspection had determined to be unfit for habitation.90 As a Party member drawing on a lineage of political duty fulfilled, she declared, “It is offensive when we see and hear how the Party and government take care of the families of comrades who perished in battle.”91 The unspoken question here was the very one that Dolmant'ev had so plainly articulated: What was it—in this instance, the Revolution—all for? S. Ia. Shvedova focused on her intense Party work, as well as that of her husband and sister, as entitlement to dignified living conditions for the three of them and for her mother. In a 1963 letter addressed to officials in both the Leningrad city committee and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, she claimed, “If there exists in you so much as one iota of

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Leninist sensitivity toward aged communists and concern about them, then spare some patience and read through my Party confession from beginning to end.”92 Her statement methodically outlined a curriculum vitae characterized by vast and passionate political engagement. Citing the various positions she had held and noting her years of service in each, Shvedova traced her journey from a Komsomol organizer in her youth to a Party member in adulthood, as well as the administrative and leadership roles she had assumed while conducting political work in various communist groups for women and children, in Party organizations, and in the Red Cross. She also noted that during the war, despite hunger and fatigue, “beneath the exploding bombs,” she had served as a police sergeant on night patrol in the Kirov district and then together with her husband, with the occupying forces in Germany from 1946 through 1948. Her efforts were subsequently rewarded with two medals. Although she was now retired, she continued to be involved in social and Party work: she was secretary of a comrades’ court in the housing administration in the Kirov district, and was also active in her local Party-State Control Commission.93 Shvedova also detailed her husband’s equally extensive history of Party activism. After adding that her sister too was a member of the Communist Party, and that her mother suffered from a deformity and had lost her only son (an officer who had died heroically) during the war, Shvedova finally disclosed her point. She stated that “three communists and a mother whose son had given his life for his native land” were now turning to various organizations “with the sole request of their life”: to exchange their one room of twenty-four square meters for two separate rooms, without any increase in overall space, so that they might enjoy the adequate rest each needs in his or her own way. Shvedova concluded by expressing her hope that deputies of the responsible local and central organs of state and Party power would be able resolve this matter, “to at least a little bit improve the living conditions of aged communists, who had devoted all of their conscious life and strength to . . . service to the Party and . . . their Rodina.” She signed her letter, “With a communist greeting!”94 Like other petitioners in general, a determination to continue serving socialism prevailed. Neither personal connections to the Revolution nor active and professed commitment to Communism guaranteed petitioners satisfaction. Instead, material living conditions and most often plain availability in the housing stock appeared to be the principal determinants for granting exchanges. In the case of Fediashchin, the ispolkom of the Leningrad city soviet stated that it was not possible to grant him his request due to the shortage of living space.95 Berezkina, whose horrible living conditions were at least acknowledged by official investigators, found herself in a queue, waiting like many others, until more housing became available.96 Meanwhile,

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Shvedova—whose mother and sister did not appear to be living with her and her husband—was outright refused alternative living space.97 Significantly, some individuals claimed discrimination in housing allocation based on their lack of affiliation with the Communist Party. For example, Kh. F. Shakhmamet'ev, a worker and invalid, stated that after an official at the Kuibyshev district Party committee learned during a personal meeting that he was bespartiinyi (not a member of the Communist Party), the committee labeled his case a “private matter” (chastnoe delo) outside of its jurisdiction; it subsequently informed Shakhmamet'ev that he would not receive a written response to his petition.98 The veteran Isaenkov similarly asserted that when officials discovered that he and his wife were bespartiinye, the tone of the conversation changed. Despite the fact that their appeal for better housing had a firm legal foundation (specifically, a decree intended to supplement the living space of persons suffering from certain illnesses), they were purportedly refused assistance and told that it was impossible to fulfill their request.99 Petitioners who had been categorized as enemies of the people or persecuted by association with such individuals faced a harsher sense of exclusion from the social body and benefits like housing that the state had promised to confer on all Soviet citizens. Returning prisoners and exiles generally felt alienated for having been dispossessed of their freedom, political and civil rights, living space, and employment, and encountered ambivalence toward their homecoming among friends and even close family members, as well as suspicion—and sometimes outright hostility—from the general public.100 The last of these features of the returnee experience is partly attributable to the unprecedented increase in crime that occurred in 1953 when the first wave of offenders was released from the Gulag. This cohort was composed of criminal elements rather than political ones, which the state considered more dangerous. Furthermore, often lacking necessary provisions, housing, and employment, many returnees found themselves living an essentially nomadic life. Consequently, some engaged in criminal activities. Others were shunned because of the notion that prisoners and exiles had become entrenched in an incomprehensible subculture, or had assumed antisocial ideas and beliefs—preconceptions that were not always unfounded.101 Feelings of insecurity stemming from the physical, psychological, and emotional traumas sustained by repression were reflected in housing petitions submitted by individuals undergoing rehabilitation. Especially jarring was their terseness, namely the lack of detail pertaining to the personal impact of persecution. This approach made all the more striking their emphasis on the material aspects of living space—even if these were clearly and boldly cast in a way to assert the fundamental importance of a domicile to (re)building a normal life. For example, when M. A. Zhilinskaia

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asked the Leningrad city soviet to exchange her communal housing for a separate apartment that would enable her to continue her research, as well as peacefully live out her old age, only as an apparent afterthought did she add that officials deliberating her case might also take into consideration the fact that in 1937, her husband had been arrested and executed—though he was “without guilt” (nevinnyi)—and had now been posthumously rehabilitated; she herself had endured much torment during this time.102 Concerning identity, petitioners who had been repressed only infrequently cited the active service roles that workers, soldiers, veterans, invalidy, and Party activists asserted as entitlement to better housing, or the supportive ones that the wives of soldiers and war widows presented in connection with the sacrifices that their husbands had made. The abrupt autobiographies that victims of Stalinism incorporated into their housing appeals, in contrast to the verbose ones that other types of petitioners provided, suggest a degree of anxiety over the public self. In addition, those who now found themselves or their loved ones rehabilitated possessed a unique relationship to the state, one that seemed to prompt them to accentuate in their housing appeals objective factors, including official decrees or appeals to universal notions of moral justness, over subjective ones. The petition of A. I. Komarova illustrates how the narratives of rehabilitated persons precluded proud declarations about duties fulfilled and instead expressed an underlying sense of humiliation. In a 1962 letter to the Leningrad city soviet, Komarova wrote that she was “boundlessly happy” upon obtaining the documents confirming her innocence because until then, she had been relentlessly treated with suspicion. Demonstrating that full “enfranchisement” for her was contingent upon securing living space, she claimed that after receiving official notification in 1957 that her expulsion from Leningrad in 1937 had been unfounded, she immediately initiated the process to exercise her right to register for housing in a special queue for the rehabilitated. After returning to her native city in 1947, she had moved in with her brother. Then, when he exchanged his living space in 1955, she relocated with him. Although she remained there after he married and moved in with his new family, Komarova was not registered on the order as having any rights to this dwelling, nor did she have a propiska. She thus embarked on a struggle to be “legalized” as an inhabitant of Leningrad, divulging that without these markers of belonging, she felt demoralized and apprehensive around others, especially at work.103 In foregrounding her preoccupation with living legally and connecting the fulfillment of her request with reincorporation into society, Komarova drew on the popular perception that housing was a right and that possessing the prescribed per capita norm of nine square meters, an order for the living space that one inhabited, and a propiska for the city within which one resided, were elemental signifiers of citizenship. The Soviet Union, after

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all, was governed by a paternalist state that for decades had endeavored to house the masses and since 1957, had promised to provide each family a separate apartment. In this context, those who had suffered repression might find in the reinstatement, replacement, or provision of living space the restoration of their citizenship. M. A. Kalnina articulated the connection between establishing a home and refashioning herself as a worthy citizen. She was seeking housing in Leningrad after exile had made this city her home: in 1937, her father and brother-in-law were declared “enemies of the people” and she and her sister were dispossessed of their living space. After being forced to leave their home in the Belorussian SSR for Leningrad, they eventually ended up renting housing in one of the outlying districts of the city. Subsequently, due to financial constraints, Kalnina found herself living wherever she could find shelter, including with colleagues and in train stations. Meanwhile, her relations had been posthumously rehabilitated (her father in 1958, and her brother-in-law in 1962), and she had been residing in Leningrad for more than two decades and working there for nearly ten years.104 Frustrated by the repeated denials of her housing request, Kalnina wrote to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR asserting the following: “Based on these circumstances, I am deprived of the most democratic rights and humane way of life [obraz zhizni].” With neither a dwelling nor residency permit—something that excluded her from participating in elections—she continued, “The only thing that I have is work.”105 Thus, she implied, she was reduced to a mere subsistence existence, unable to fully partake in Soviet life. While it was typical of victims of Stalinism to evoke pathos, some asserted moral indignation and challenged officials to right the wrongs of the past. In the course of outlining her personal tragedy, for example, T. F. Fainberg alluded to the moral justness that the Leningrad city soviet would serve in registering her in the housing queue for rehabilitated persons. In 1937, her husband was arrested and “disappeared”; her apartment was confiscated; she was placed first in prison, then in exile; and her son, after initially being taken in by her sister, was sent to live with her in exile, where lack of medical treatment for an unspecified illness resulted in the loss of his sight in one eye. Twenty years later, Fainberg was rehabilitated, but she found herself essentially homeless. Making her life even more difficult, she was now an invalid. Eventually, she and her son ended up residing in a noisy and overpopulated communal apartment, in a room of fifteen square meters, separated from their neighbors by only a thin partition.106 In crafting her appeal to the city soviet, Fainberg stated that her husband had “died tragically” and rhetorically asked, “Can it really be that everything I have undeservedly lived through and lost does not give me the right to an improvement in housing conditions?”107 Later writing to

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Leningradskaia Pravda, she more vehemently employed the position of justice seeker, proclaiming, “I am awaiting salvation!”—which she insisted should amount to more than her meager dwelling, for which she had involuntarily exchanged approximately fifty square meters of living space and fifteen years of her life. What she wanted now was simply to live out her old age in “normal housing conditions” as would be “natural, lawful, and just” (estestvenno, zakonno, spravedlivo). Residing with her son, his wife, and their two children, a separate apartment of her own constituted the embodiment of the “salvation” that she sought.108 V. T. Kochubei, who had been sentenced to exile in 1937, similarly proclaimed his right to justice. Writing to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, he enumerated his many losses due to repression. These included his health, his youth in its prime, his dwelling space, and his human rights. “Now, as they say, it has been found that I am not guilty,” he pronounced, marveling that it was so difficult for him to find “justice” in his old age.109 L. L. Kol' too wondered, “Where is justice?” Like other petitioners who felt tainted by persecution, she sought better housing with a symbolic, as well as a material, agenda: after the posthumous rehabilitation of her husband, she wanted a dwelling measuring eighteen square meters, in exchange for the fifty-two square meters that had been confiscated from her family, and the emotional suffering that she and her children had experienced in connection with the arrest, exile, and death of her husband, as well as their own exile from Leningrad.110 Transcribing justice into a quantitative measurement, the amount of space she requested was the precise per capita norm for two persons—nine square meters each for herself and her son with whom she was living. In sum, those whose sense of belonging to the social body had been severely destabilized or rendered dubious by random repression might have featured the objective aspects of their byt—square meterage—because they were stigmatized by their experience of persecution or because they perceived material indicators as the most persuasive or sure foundation for their housing request. As suggested, they also tended to cite official resolutions that privileged them with a special queue in connection with rehabilitation, namely the Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, dated 8 September 1955.111 Only two years earlier, 1953 had heralded a return to sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost′ (socialist legality), complete with new mechanisms intended to disallow arbitrariness in the realms of legal procedure and state security; these were subsequently renewed in the 1960s through campaigns aimed at ensuring that members of law enforcement—from police officers to judges—adhere to the law.112 This interest in legality had a cognate in housing petitions, which reinforced concern for moral justness—and not only among victims of Stalinism.

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Caring, Competence, and the Socialist Contract in Doubt The letters of complaint and request that an individual might have written over the course of his or her quest for better housing remained quite consistent in terms of content and language, even if they became more desperate in tone over time. At the same time, correspondence directed toward senior state and Party figures tended to include strong critiques of municipal officials. While a request for improved living space was based on some claim to citizenship positioned along a spectrum of identities—worker, veteran, soldier, invalid, war widow, Party member, or unjustly persecuted, blame for the elusiveness of dignified housing was placed on one single antagonist—the local bureaucrat, whether affiliated with a government, Party, housing or some other organization connected in any way with the allocation of living space. Thus, as in accounts about failed housewarmings due to shoddy construction, the poor state of the old housing stock, or defects in repair work, the stereotypically heartless, apathetic, and incompetent functionary served as the scapegoat for shortcomings in housing distribution. His—and occasionally, her—character defects were legion, including callousness, indifference, laxness, carelessness, and ineptitude. The reasons why the Soviet bureaucrat was the object of such intense popular disdain are well known. For one, the tendency among citizens to blame inadequacies in their daily life on proximate powers, rather than on persons serving in the national branches of the government and Party, can be attributed to the fact that local authorities were the ones immediately responsible for providing consumer goods and services (including living space)—even though, ultimately, the investment and distribution priorities that led to adverse conditions were determined at the center.113 As Theodore Friedgut concisely stated, “The local soviet is caught in the middle, charged with implementing policy by the top and expected by the citizen to deliver at least minimal services.”114 It is not surprising then that raw material dissatisfaction figured prominently in negative assessments of the effectiveness and fairness of local officials, as well as their treatment of their constituents.115 Of course, government, Party, and housing officials at the district and city levels were also the ones most visible or accessible to disgruntled citizens. That administrators felt besieged by individuals relentlessly writing to them or seeking to speak to them is indicated in a report compiled by a Party-State Control Commission. Claiming that not all those who submit complaints are objective, and that some effectively “terrorize” housing administration personnel and obstruct their efforts to rectify problems, it suggested that such individuals were more deserving of censure than assistance.116

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In public culture, Krokodil seemed to thrive on lampooning the corrupt and bungling bureaucrat for the amusement of readers. One piece centered on the issue of housing distribution was especially laughable for depicting a distorted scenario in which the ineptitude of a typical functionary inadvertently ended up benefiting the author, who gleefully relayed his experience with officialdom. He began by expressing the joy he had felt upon being assigned a new apartment. Shortly after he and his family moved in and celebrated their housewarming, they received a form letter from their district housing administration stating that their request for an apartment could not be fulfilled. Since receiving this carelessly composed notice, the author sardonically concluded, he occasionally raises his glass “to the sensitivity toward the person” shown by local bureaucrats.117 The ordinary citizens whose housing appeals swelled the archives of the Leningrad city soviet were not so fortunate as to meet with the sort of bureaucratic mishap featured in this account. Instead of producing a fortuitous outcome, their requests to exchange their living space resulted in disappointment. The most authentic element of the satirical piece described was the form letter at the center of it. As the correspondence generated by housing petitions demonstrates, the local officials who determined their outcome typically responded with an otpiska, defined as “a reply for form alone, which meets the requirement that a submission or complaint should receive a response, but gives no indication of what if anything has been done, and no indication of the reasons why a complaint is rejected as groundless.”118 The official communication interspersed with housing petitions usually appeared as half-page fill-in-the-blank forms simply stating that it is “not possible” to satisfy the request in question.119 At certain points throughout a case, some official might have briefly explained why—most often, a shortage of housing, failure to produce a propiska, or possession of sufficient and fit living space. But drawing on such facts did not render local bureaucrats sympathetic, for conventional explanations were perceived as formulaic and therefore, devoid of empathy. Z. V. Novikova succinctly characterized the nature of official otpiski in a letter she sent to Khrushchev after already having approached the following to intervene on her behalf: her district soviet, the Leningrad city soviet, the newspapers Izvestia, Sovetskaia Rossiia and Leningradskaia pravda and a Party-State Control Commission. She claimed that the six responses to her housing appeal that she had ultimately received from the Leningrad city soviet were entirely identical, like “twins.”120 The standardized response is a stereotypical feature of modern bureaucracy. What is significant in the Soviet case as pertains to housing is that the replies to otpiski that petitioners submitted to ever higher central

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authority figures directly challenged assertions about the equitable distribution of living space, state concern for the person, movement toward the radiant future, and the overall benefits of kommunisticheskii byt—much like descriptions of decrepit and overcrowded dwellings did. At the same time, portrayals of local functionaries as uncaring, lazy, incompetent, and even lawless suggested that housing was as much a moral as a material concern. In popular conceptions then, the socialist contract entailed more than the rote reciprocation of personal sacrifices through the amelioration of material circumstances. It also involved the humanism inherent in the housewarming narrative, namely that strand which distinguished the just present times from the abusive, exploitative tsarist past.121 Incorporating common unflattering representations of municipal officials and exemplifying the ineffectiveness and absurdity of the entire housing distribution process, was a surreal case involving two elderly pensioners, who for family reasons, sought to change places with each other: T. I. Iashmanova, who was living in Krasnogorsk, and A. F. Bushma, residing in Leningrad. Intervening on their behalf in a letter to Izvestia, a relative of Iashmanova, M. P. Krylov, launched into a diatribe against housing allocation practices, declaring that instead of completing what would appear to be a simple exchange, “The wheels of bureaucracy, foot-dragging [volokita], callousness, and red tape [kantseliarshchina] spun.” The “old ladies” prepared their documents and waited their turn to speak with officials in person, but none they encountered would plainly explain what they had to do to obtain assistance. Despite all the moral and physical strength they expended, months later, they still had no indication as to when their “ordeal”—their time in “purgatory”—would end. Such was the indifference with which they met, Krylov exclaimed, a far cry from the “sensitivity toward the person” that “they [the press] write about.”122 In the end, the Leningrad city soviet announced that this case would not be examined due to the slipshod manner in which officials in Krasnogorsk had compiled the necessary documents.123 So it seemed that this tale of two women would not end happily. Krylov was typical among petitioners in equating formal standardized replies with heartlessness. Army lieutenant Tveritinova, for example, complained to Marshal Voroshilov that the local organs to which she had repeatedly turned were not helping her, but “rather occupy themselves only with otpiski and do not interest themselves in where a person lives and how, in what conditions.”124 Frustrated with the bureaucratic disregard he had consistently encountered over the course of his petition, in one letter to the Leningrad city soviet, the veteran soldier and worker Samodel'nikov sarcastically exclaimed, “What extraordinary ‘concern’ for the pensioner!”125 Petitioners expected representatives of the state to honor their obligation to care for citizens not just by providing them with decent living conditions

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but also by treating them with respect. Failure to fulfill these responsibilities, it was implied, constituted a shameful breach. The demobilized soldier Iu. T. Moskvichev more clearly articulated the insult he felt due to disgraceful inattention to his case. In a letter he submitted to the chair of a city commission established to provide housing and employment support to officers transferred to the reserves, he accentuated the “foot-dragging and bureaucracy” he encountered in local Leningrad organizations designated to assist those returning from the army in connection with reductions in the military. This experience prompted him to proclaim that city officials were “bloodless” (beskrovnye).126 Moskvichev thus characterized sluggishness in the critical matter of housing allocation as a vice so immoral as to be inhumane. While highlighting the personal failings of municipal officials, petitioners simultaneously associated the denial of their housing request with a broader transgression: hindering the fulfillment of socialist policy. A few months before the 1957 housing decree was issued, S. S. Pilipenko wrote to Bulganin stating that widespread construction should first and foremost improve the living conditions of workers and those inflicted with some sort of illness or impairment—categories that included both him and his wife. “However,” he continued, “local power [vlast′ na mestakh] does not see it this way.”127 Placing their predisposition toward responding with otpiski at the center of his complaint, he further indicted Leningrad bureaucrats in a subsequent letter to Bulganin, declaring, This routine hackneyed formula [shablonnaia shtampovannaia formulirovka], for us, Leningraders, is but a bitter smile, such that the Leningrad ispolkom is conducting large-scale housing construction and practically on a daily basis declares it in the newspapers, yet when talk begins to flow about improving the housing conditions of two workers with tuberculosis, there is a “lack of free available housing.”128

Pilipenko thus presented callousness as an indicator of a far greater problem. Assessments of municipal officials as negligent in distributing living space equitably and in a timely manner persisted through the Khrushchev era, even as construction forged ahead ever more robustly. Some petitioners documented a disconnect between ideals determined on the national level and their realization on the local one. When petitioning state and Party officials of varying ranks, M. A. Edige peppered her housing request with references to propaganda. In one instance, she quoted from the Party program that everything that the Party does is “IN THE NAME OF THE PERSON AND FOR THE WELFARE OF THE PERSON.”129 Underscoring purported concern for the person in identical letters to the first secretary of the Leningrad city Party committee and to the chair

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of the ispolkom of the Leningrad city soviet, Edige warned that if her housing request was not satisfied, she would be forced to turn to national leaders in Moscow, namely, to Khrushchev and Brezhnev.130 In showing how local practice diverged from central state objectives, housing petitions depicted another damning phenomenon: blatant lawlessness. Perceived breaches of legality were characterized as comprising the most egregious manifestation of disregard for the government and Party mandate to provide housing for the masses, and of lack of concern for the person. Implying that illegality was at the root of the unfavorable outcome of his request, the veteran Isaenkov began a March 1963 letter addressed to Pravda stating, “Since [November] 1960, we [he and his wife] have been fruitlessly trying to find truth, justice and adherence to socialist legality [zakonnost′].”131 A month earlier he had informed the Leningrad oblast Party committee that he had tired of the red tape generated by the “simple question” of a housing exchange, which he felt “should be resolved on the basis of the law and the humane handling of the needs of workers.”132 V. I. Chupakhin also referred to law and justice in his demands. In a letter addressed to Khrushchev, he revealed that during the Great Patriotic War, he and his wife had fought Fascism and defended their hero-city of Leningrad, and that their home was destroyed. Though they eventually secured other housing, various repairs had failed to improve it and instead, left them with diminished dwelling space after parts of their building were reconfigured. Even worse was the treatment Chupakhin allegedly received when he approached the chair of his district soviet, S. A. Korsukov. This official had purportedly called him “a swindler, speculator, and fascist” and threatened to evict him from his home and even from Leningrad. Writing to Khrushchev, Chupakhin marveled that he, who had defended his Rodina, would “deserve such an affront.” He added that it is offensive “when a leader of Soviet power—a servant of the people—carries out arbitrary rule and all kinds of lawlessness, so that nowhere is it possible to obtain one’s legal rights.” Then, citing the avowed concern of the government and Party for “the welfare of the working masses” and “the improvement of living conditions,” he again referred to the conduct of Korsukov, asking, “Wherever is justice?”133 Petitioners who conflated perceived heartlessness and mockery with outright illegality implicitly associated the denial of their individual right to better housing with the peril that those who failed to fulfill their request posed to the entire Soviet system. These citizens—much like individuals who touted Party membership—assumed the role of witnesses on behalf of the central state and Party, depicting the officials assigned to improve their living conditions as “remnants of the past.” As such, they illuminated deficiencies in the socialist contract, thereby effectively subverting the image of the Soviet government as the harbinger of kommunisticheskii byt.

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Suggesting the threat to the very identity of the state that her abnormal living conditions posed, in a letter to Voroshilov N. E. Posnova reasoned, “My children live in the Soviet Union, and not in India.” In a letter addressed to Khrushchev, M. P. Smirnova more directly questioned socialist advancement by explaining that the crowded, horribly damp, and cold dwelling in which her family lived was anomalous to the hero-city of Leningrad in terms of its appearance and amenities. As disheartening to her was the fact that she, a model citizen, should have to live in such terrible conditions. Smirnova had joined the Communist Party during the Blockade, spent the war in Leningrad, and earned a medal for her valiant work from 1941 to 1945. In her estimation, the aberration that was her home and her unremunerated life were the fault of her grossly indifferent district soviet. She closed her letter with an affirmation of faith in the system by implying a contrast between local and central authorities. “I know that the Communist Party and the Soviet government trouble themselves about the welfare of working people and about the happy, healthy child,” she stated.134 In a subsequent letter, this one addressed to Voroshilov, Smirnova again wavered between criticism and support. Although rhetorically asking “whether a person can live in such conditions in a Soviet country,” she made her loyalty clear by introducing herself as a communist at the outset. She concluded by once more specifying the individual culprits of her egregious circumstances. Invoking the insipid prerevolutionary bureaucracy portrayed in the nineteenth-century fiction of Nikolai Gogol, she labeled Leningrad city housing officials “Gogolesque, callous functionaries” and “not Soviet people chosen from among the workers.” Emphasizing their insensitivity and ineffectiveness, she told Voroshilov not to bother contacting the Leningrad city soviet, implying that to do so would be futile.135 Having been petitioning for about a year, she intimated that she had accepted the fact that this local body was not going to fulfill her request. Yet Smirnova did not follow the very advice she gave Voroshilov; she herself approached the ispolkom of the Leningrad city soviet at least one more time.136 This begs the following question: If curt, formulaic responses encapsulated for petitioners the heartlessness, incompetence, and even illegalities they experienced in their interactions with local officials, what does the repetitiveness in terms of content, and the cyclical and ritualistic nature of the process of citizen petition–official response demonstrate? And what of the fact that powerful figures seated at the national level in the Ministry of Defense, the Supreme Soviet, and the Council of Ministers of the USSR, or the Central Committee of the CPSU did write their local counterparts and subordinates to intervene on behalf of petitioners? As already suggested, individuals continually appealed to municipal officials because they were the ones assigned to distribute living space from the state housing stock. Unsatisfied, petitioners then directed their request

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to the center, ostensibly in the hope that approaching higher-level authorities might better enable them to attract the attention of lower level ones and finally lead to a favorable resolution. Explaining the general unresponsiveness of local government personnel, Oliver noted that lacking fundamental resources, as well as control over investment in and allocation of goods and services, these officials were unable to fulfill even the most basic obligations they were legally bound to meet, let alone change the conditions that led citizens to complain. They therefore resorted to falsifying reports, claiming to have handled demands that they had actually ignored, curtailing hours of reception, and confounding situations by sending complaints for verification to the same persons against whom citizens had initially launched them—all in an effort to obtain temporary respite, even if at the expense of censure from higher authorities. At the same time, central officials could cast negative assessments of municipal ones as indicators of citizen support for the system as a whole, because they at least demonstrated rigorous participation in it.137 Moreover, criticizing local bureaucrats was a course followed by national officials. Some scholars have interpreted this as a deliberate strategy of the Soviet regime for containing discontent, and for ensuring loyalty toward the central leadership while concurrently discouraging local group allegiances.138 Meanwhile, in responding to the demands of citizens—even if intermediately, through their subordinates—figures at the summit of power nurtured the belief that the process of petitioning was effective. As Oliver claimed, this could contribute to legitimating and increasing support for the regime or else lead citizens to submit further appeals—something that would propagate information and enable the state to acquire a sense of public opinion, while simultaneously shielding it from disruptive public debates on policy issues.139 Indeed the Soviet practice of citizen petition–official response did not constitute a civil society in the conventional sense, for the requests that individuals presented were processed within the system, not by institutions autonomous from the government that might have consolidated their demands and formulated proposals for political action or alternative policies for the leadership to enact.140 Despite its limitations, petitioning afforded Soviet citizens an opportunity to assert themselves through dialogue. The process was therefore as valuable to individuals, personally, as it might have been to the state, politically. Outlining the fundamental parameters of interchange between ordinary citizens and persons of authority, Oliver stated, The citizen is able to vent his grievances and make his wishes known. He may derive some release of hostility merely from seeing the discomfort of local officials as they struggle to meet his demand and suffer the criticism of higher authorities. Even this useless effort may make the regime seem more human and interested in the welfare of the ordinary citizen.141

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There is no evidence that the average petitioner was privy to the censuring of local officials—at least, not beyond a pithy indicator that some central figure had ordered another at the municipal level to reexamine a given case. The ordinary person might also have been unaware of the particulars of the samokritika (self-criticism) in which government employees engaged. For example, the Leningrad city soviet openly (if not publicly) reported callousness, indifference and foot-dragging as persistent problems in responding to correspondence and holding visiting hours. It also specified that although it was not always possible to resolve the matters raised by petitioners—in the case of housing, construction would take years to meet widespread demand—deputies could at least treat their constituents with respect and follow procedural protocol in examining their grievances.142 Social organizations publicly voiced this same assertion when they subjected to reprimand in the local press those who did not. But did such gestures humanize the regime and strengthen or foster continued support for it? The case of N. I. Dolmant'ev offers a concise answer. This veteran presented official policy as incontestable as his own contributions to society, making it amply clear that he backed the central government. As he revealed in a 1958 letter he submitted to the Council of Ministers of the USSR, “I have always glorified and do glorify our party and its wise politics, and I believe in our government.” Equating the state with the nation, he added that he had raised his daughter also to love her Rodina. He therefore blamed his poor living conditions on individual people (namely, Leningrad officials) who delayed measures and denied him, a frontovik, justice befitting a Soviet soldier (sovetskaia soldatskaia pravda).143 Dolmant'ev was typical in faulting local government and Party representatives, both for their personal failure to respond to citizens with concern and civility, and for general shortcomings in housing distribution. Of course, it is possible that even during the Thaw, individuals might have censored themselves to some degree, restricting their criticism to petty bureaucrats for fear of the repercussions even of words that they had no intention of making public. Petitioners only rarely subverted the boundary between criticizing local power and indicting the entire system. Borderline was the following proclamation that Shvedova made in a letter to the first secretary of the Leningrad city Party committee, after a range of municipal officials had failed to satisfy her housing request: “A DANGEROUS SICKNESS, THE NAME OF WHICH IS BUREAUCRATISM, HAS PENETRATED THE PORES NOT ONLY OF THE STATE, BUT ALSO OF THE PARTY APPARATUS.”144 Her own extensive and impeccable record of Party activism served to quell any doubt about her commitment to the regime that this statement might have raised. She had proven herself to be loyal and trustworthy; now she presented herself as a

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concerned citizen preoccupied with the interests of the Party—alongside her housing claim. U. A. Denisov similarly wavered; although he expressed skepticism toward the regime, he effectively suggested that his faith in Party policy could easily be restored by the fulfillment of his demand. Denisov too had encountered a number of unsatisfactory responses from local officials during his quest for better living conditions for himself and his teenage daughter, who was in danger of contracting his tuberculosis because of their close quarters. In a letter he sent to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in November 1961, he announced, “I have already ceased to believe in that which is written in the program of the Communist Party, that there will be a separate apartment for each family, but you know,” he continued, “I am not asking for a separate apartment, but rather am asking . . . for a small little room, in order to protect my daughter from infection from tuberculosis.”145 Other petitioners crossed the boundary between offering a critique of local bureaucracy and damning the regime they felt had disenfranchised them or unjustly cast them aside as unworthy or lowly. Succumbing to despair, these individuals disclosed their personal crisis of belief in the system by depicting how terrible life in the Soviet Union could be.146 L. M. Semenova, for example, wondered why she, her husband, and their “innocent” child should continue living in conditions that she characterized as worse than those in which swine were kept, even though “in the Soviet Union, it is said that everything is for the children.” Semenova claimed that she had sacrificed her health for her society and at the age of twenty-eight was already “rotten” and had no strength left to endure the trials that confronted her each day.147 She thus indicated that her life was being destroyed by circumstances antithetical to the bright communist future that was purportedly being built. G. A. Salakhadinova, living in an inconceivably cramped room of twenty-one square meters with her husband and two children, together with another family of four, similarly expressed cynicism about official policy and revolutionary goals. In a March 1956 letter addressed to the Leningrad city and oblast soviets, she proclaimed that despite all the strength she expended, her children were living in conditions so terrible “that one illness does not even have time to subside before another appears.” Salakhadinova concluded, “This means that my children are not living under a lucky star and for them, there is no bright sunshine of the Communist Party.”148 The correspondence surrounding her petition concluded a few months later, with the matter of her housing unresolved. The persistence of such unfavorable outcomes well into the Khru­ shchev era, despite the mandate to provide each family a separate apartment, meant that Salakhadinova would be far from the last to question

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the good fortune of being been born Soviet that leaders had touted for decades. Isaenkov revealed that his own discontent with the system had led him to engage in a quiet form of civil protest. In a 1963 letter addressed to Pravda, he divulged that “in a fit of despair,” he and his wife had refused to fulfill their civic duty: they did not vote in the elections to their local soviet nor to the Supreme Soviet. Their objective, he admitted, was to attract attention to their case. He explained that after more than two years of trying to exchange their living space, he and his wife, who for long had held hope “that justice was going to triumph,” finally found their moral strength weakening.149 Alongside dissipating faith in the regime and withdrawal from the system there was an even smaller minority of petitioners so discouraged by their circumstances as to suggest emigration or suicide as means of escape from their circumstances. In a letter to the Leningrad oblast soviet, N. I. Perevezentseva—whose work record included stints in East Germany and Siberia—requested to exchange her living space in a factory dormitory for a mere eight or nine square meters for herself, her husband and the child they were expecting so that she need not “turn to another state for help.” Asserting the right of all Soviet citizens to housing, she asked if she herself was somehow not like other Soviet persons, for no one was showing her any concern, even “though they are saying a great deal about caring.”150 In a similar vein, T. M. Patrikeeva wrote Khrushchev in 1964 asking where one might find real concern for those who had earned state assistance. She presented the following tirade: “Who needs this red tape? In the program of the Twenty-Second Party Congress, they say that they strongly observe Soviet law. But oh how it turns out to be in reality. I, a native resident of Leningrad, earlier had my space and now, I have nothing.” She then ranted about those who were not native Leningraders but nevertheless had somehow managed to acquire a separate apartment, something she would not allow herself to even dream about. She continued, Here . . . our fathers died defending the Rodina and Soviet power, and whatever do we have from Soviet power—a kukish.151 . . . What need do we have for such a power. . . . According to the law . . . , we have the right to a separate one-room apartment as invalidy, while employees of the district ispolkom establish their own laws . . . and occupy themselves with arbitrariness and bureaucracy.

She concluded, “If we are not needed in the Soviet Union, then we will have to turn to the embassy of some other state for help, for when we were healthy, we were needed and now that we have become disabled because of labor, our conditions are worsening evermore.”152

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Apparently confronted with the same indifference of local officials, another petitioner, I. S. Semenova, suggested in a lengthy letter addressed to Izvestia that the state should make a law “to execute, or to send us abroad.” She stated that perhaps they would help her somewhere else, asserting that in the Soviet Union, “they do not help as . . . we are not living, but rather we are dragging out a miserable existence and it is better to die immediately than lead it slowly. Such is our life like death.” The fact that she was a longtime worker, while her husband was a war veteran who had become an invalid while serving his military duty, added insult to injury.153 Although their criticisms were uncharacteristically extreme in questioning the foundational values and objectives of the Soviet system, these petitioners employed a devise of classical origins that was common among them: the lament. As Golfo Alexopoulos demonstrated in her examination of 1930s petitions, the Soviet lament typically included a catalogue of misfortunes, hardship and ignorance, and placed the “burden of conscience” on the audience, with the intention of provoking the reader to act.154 Such was the nature of housing petitions of the 1950s and 1960s, though the desolate query “Can it really be?” that so often preceded a statement of injustice was a rhetorical means of asserting that a given situation should not be thus. While castigating local bureaucrats and seeking the attention of officials high and low who might ameliorate their living conditions, petitioners did not lose sight of their self; they continued to stipulate the concrete efforts they had made for their Rodina. Offering a reasonable, justifiable claim to better housing, petitioners characterized officialdom as undermining the social contract and failing to take care of people, let alone rewarding those loyal and valuable citizens who had served in production, at the war front or in Party activism, or else making amends with the families of those who had suffered tragic losses during the Great Patriotic War or the persecution of the Stalin years. Petitioners also firmly placed themselves in the moral right by showcasing their patriotism, honesty, and reliability—essentially presenting themselves as a foil to callous, indifferent, and inept government and Party officials. In such ways, housing petitions had the effect of undermining the altruistic image of a state promising each family its own apartment. Yet save for the most distraught among petitioners, the very practice of writing to officials at various levels constituted a mode of support for the government and Party. The content of letters of complaint and request also validated the regime, for the individual achievements that they claimed were enmeshed with the very development of socialist society. Thus, correspondence surrounding housing petitions does much more than offer evidence to complement established understandings of how the Soviet system worked. Nor does it simply reinforce the notion that it was riddled with defects or devised to perpetuate nachal′stvo (authority), a hierarchy of command transferring blame to proximate powers that

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harkened back to prerevolutionary “naive monarchicism.” Rather, the letters exchanged between individuals seeking better housing and the officials charged with satisfying their request reveal the contours of a tacit concordat between government and populace that was forged during the Revolution and reinforced by the ambitious housing policy of the Khrushchev period. Within the socialist contract, citizens conjoined their individual sacrifices with the radiant future of the collective, while simultaneously presenting their contributions as valuable currency in the realm of state recognition and material reward. In the process, they censured officials who failed to fulfill the roles that they had been assigned within this moral constellation. The relentless letter writing that individuals engaged in to acquire better housing initially appears symptomatic of what Svetlana Boym characterized as the Soviet phenomenon of “graphomania”: an “uncontrollable obsession to write.”155 Yet petitioners were motivated by real, untenable, overcrowded, unhygienic, unhealthy, inconvenient, and alienating living conditions. Here it has been shown that they persisted not only hoping to change their material circumstances, but also to garner validation for their contributions to society. They did so by detailing the duties they had fulfilled on the home or the war front, by citing what they perceived to be legal rights, and by conjuring up notions of justice. This approach was encapsulated in a housing petition submitted by a group of tenants living in various apartments at 11 Il'ich Lane. In a February 1956 letter to the Leningrad public prosecutor (prokuror), they asked “for rights” that had been established for them “as citizens of the Soviet Union.”156 In November that year, they addressed Bulganin and conveyed their resentment that while hundreds of buildings were being erected in Leningrad, they had been living in “abnormal conditions” for fifteen to twenty years. They proclaimed, We are no longer just begging, but rather are screaming: show us assistance and save us from these slums. Nearly all of us are participants of the Great Patriotic War or the Defense of Leningrad. All of us are working and toiling and each is investing all of [his or her] energy and strength at [his or her] given post. Show us at last attention—we earned this by our labor. Not one person is saying this to you, but rather, many simple Soviet people.157

Expressing disappointment and outrage, these residents asserted a sense of lichnost′ innately linked to Soviet citizenship. They also implicitly authenticated the objectives of the regime by insisting that they should be benefiting from state housing construction. Rooted in wartime experience, as well as in long established perceptions about housing allocation, the mode of discourse employed by the tenants

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at 11 Il'ich Lane intensified with the 1957 pronouncement that each family would have its own apartment and the subsequent torrent of publicity on joyous housewarmings. Alluding to or outright repeating official rhetoric that associated housing with revolutionary or wartime promises, recognition for labor or military service, concern for the person and communist construction bolstered individual pleas to come home, settle down or move forward. In concurrently asserting entitlement to reward, repatriation, and restitution by drawing on a broad cache of public identities, petitioners integrated their individual sacrifices into the collective struggle to build industry, to defend against external enemies, to promote Party activism, to raise consciousness, or to nurture healthy children for the Rodina. Together with those who had been unjustly excluded, they conveyed an understanding of belonging to the Soviet social body, which they believed warranted them decent housing—literally, a place in society. The inextricability of the self from the system was particularly striking among the chorus of petitioners demanding a good home because of having been born “Soviet.” The model worker A. A. Chunaev, for example, likened his cramped living conditions to being “literally deprived of rights as a citizen of the Soviet Union.”158 Similarly delineating a connection between housing and citizenship, S. V. Bogdanova, who had lost her home due to wartime circumstances, declared, “Living in the Soviet Union, I want to have my own room, just like citizens do.”159 Yet as these proclamations of a negative nature indicate, even as petitioners fashioned themselves as Soviet in a quest to satisfy their material needs, they did not uncritically internalize or simply regurgitate rhetoric constructed by the regime. Although petitioners appeared to be speaking Bolshevik, the discourses they generated show them insisting that authority figures at various levels enter into dialogue with them.160 Furthermore, by citing official policies pertaining to mass housing, referencing resolutions that had developed over the course of Soviet rule and had come to be conflated with legal rights, and emphasizing fundamental concepts of honesty and fairness, they ventured beyond existential concerns to invoke a concordat. Essentially, in requesting improved living space, petitioners asked that the state and Party honor their part of a tacit socialist contract. They themselves had already fulfilled their part, in full accordance with propaganda that presented the happy housewarming as a reward to veterans, soldiers, workers, and Party members, or else a humane gift to victims of the war. Illustrative is the case of the honorably discharged I. G. Petrov. Writing to the chair of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in 1958, after repeatedly being refused a housing exchange, he questioned the existence of genuine “concern for former servicemen” and despaired, “now I am not needed for anyone.”161 He thereby reiterated the record of military service he had already detailed, positioning himself as worthy of special consideration,

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while also exposing the failure of the regime—more than a decade after the war had ended—to fully repatriate the individuals who had defended it. Like other petitioners, Petrov elaborated on the general field of discourse by relating dignified living conditions to the establishment of broad socialist normalcy, while also exhibiting an individual sense of civic identity that straddled “home” and “work.” In addition to complicating the notion of speaking Bolshevik, housing petitions of the Khrushchev years effaced the boundary between supplicants (seeking justice) and citizens (invoking the rights of public interest) that Sheila Fitzpatrick discerned in correspondence of the 1930s.162 Those who penned them simultaneously presented themselves as subjects of the Soviet state and detailed the duties of citizenship they had fulfilled. At the same time, they did not obscure their personal motives even in letters that could potentially reach public audiences, such as those addressed to newspaper editors. Instead, they demanded justice and invoked rights, though often with a surprisingly modest request for the prescribed per capita norm of living space, merely their own corner of the collectively owned housing stock. Overall, in petitioning various authorities for better housing, individuals were not merely engaging in a purely pragmatic or performative act to manipulate the system for personal gain; they were behaving as “ideological agents.”163 When illuminating the divergence between the ideal that was being propagated in newspapers, magazines and agitation brochures on the one hand, and the failures of the Soviet system in the realm of everyday life on the other, they overwhelmingly cast proximate representatives of state concern for the welfare of the people as undermining what they considered to be an incontrovertible accord between state and society. By rendering officials who were responsible for housing the people on the local level morally accountable for any faltering along the path toward the brilliant future, petitioners intimated that their support for key policies and core values of the regime remained firmly intact. In exposing callousness, indifference, and ineptitude, they portrayed certain individuals as offensive and intolerable remnants of the past, while still hoping for the modern, egalitarian, and prosperous society that was ostensibly coming into being. Ultimately, it was defects in the central command economic system that obfuscated the altruistic nature of socialism, policy objectives, decrees, and categories of privilege in housing allocation; lower level officials simply were not able to satisfy the unceasing surge of requests for housing exchanges directed at them. Presenting a functional explanation of the shortage of living space in the prewar Soviet Union, Mark Meerovich stated, “The deficit of housing was an advantage of power.”164 Offering a comparably sinister evaluation of the late Stalin era, Mark Smith wrote, “people were repressible separate units in vertical relationships, underwritten by deadly violence, inside the housing economy.”165

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This was certainly not the case during the Thaw as those in dire need of additional living space or improved amenities were able to elicit various forms of validation: local administrators and members of interdepartmental commissions assigned to visit and investigate the conditions that petitioners cited usually determined to be accurate both the descriptions of the dreadful state of their dwellings and the dutifully rendered service to the state that they outlined. What is more, figures at the national level at times advocated on their behalf. Although the continuing housing shortage denied petitioners a favorable resolution to their material demands, official responses provided a mode of authentication that brought with it moral satisfaction. They also reconfirmed the socialist contract, as well as the soundness of the foundations of communist construction—even if the structure remained incomplete.

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BEYOND THE HOUSING CAMPAIGN THAT “SHOOK THE WORLD” A friend says to a friend, “I have just written a book.” “What about?”

“Boy meets girl.” “Ah, a story!”

“They fall in love.” “A romance!”

“They get married and find an apartment.” “Ah a fable!”

—Anekdot, circa 1956

“HOW′S LIFE?″ “WHAT ARE YOUR DREAMS?” These are some of the questions that the main characters pose in the opening sequence of the film Cherëmushki as they abandon screen convention to greet their viewers.1 Set against the backdrop of the housing construction boom that had enveloped the Southwestern district of Moscow in the 1950s, this 1963 musical presents Cherëmushki as a “new town”—boasting all sorts of modern conveniences—rising on the foundations of the old Cherrytown. Throughout the film, completed construction, the granting of writs, and the distribution of keys advance the various plotlines. By the end, the recently wed Masha and Sasha quit their respective dormitory and family dwelling to finally live together as a married couple in a separate apartment; the young museum guide Lidochka and her father Baburov move from a building that “should have been renovated years ago” to a cheerful new apartment; the chauffeur Sergei at last musters up the courage to ask the crane operator Lyusya to marry him—after she is granted housing in Cherëmushki, where she happens to work; and Boris, who had spent time away from the capital to help develop the Karakum Dessert in Central Asia, finds a reason to settle down in Moscow: Lidochka, who comes to represent “home” for him.

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Suffused with melodrama, the path to these agreeable endings is not a straightforward one. The film shows, for example, that the housing distribution system is convoluted and tainted by corruption. The senior housing administrator Drebednev personifies such abuse of power as his wife Vava, the quintessential meshchanka, convinces him to usurp the neighboring apartment that had been rightfully allotted to Lidochka and her father, so that she might extend their own apartment to incorporate a boudoir. Eventually, Vava is exposed as a fickle manipulator who is using her husband to further her avarice, and Drebednev as weak and unethical. In the end, Drebednev is demoted for his transgressions, and the apartment designated for Lidochka and Baburov is restored to them. Thus, the ordinary workers for whom Cherëmushki was built in the first place emerge victorious, as its rightful tenants. And although the final scene only implies that Boris and Lidochka will live happily ever after together, the film leaves viewers with the feeling that “life is good” and “dreams are coming true.” However hackneyed it might seem decades later, the fictional Cherë­ mushki captured the exciting possibilities of the actual Cherëmushki in Moscow—and their analogues throughout the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s. These construction sites used prefabricated building materials and the latest industrial methods so as to “faster, better and more economically” yield light, attractive apartment blocks equipped with all the necessary household conveniences. Projected to be adorned with greenery and encircled by shops and cultural amenities, novostroika comprised a fundamental component of the general mandate under Khrushchev to improve the well-being of the Soviet people. Practicalities aside, and indicative of the further convergence of art with life, there was romance in the official ambition to solve the housing crisis and provide each family a separate apartment, to develop a society based on the collective good and to attain Communism—as there was in the popular dream of settling down in a place of one’s own. There was tremendous revelry in champagne-filled housewarmings like the one that Masha and Sasha merrily celebrated with their friends and neighbors. And given the massive construction efforts undertaken during the Khrushchev years, there was irony in the failure of the state to produce sufficient housing. Real stories of “house and home” therefore featured apartment blocks built in record time and shortcomings in the quantity and quality of construction; the granting of writs and bureaucratic bungling in distribution; and happy endings together with newlyweds yearning to move to their own apartment, longtime residents of kommunalki eager to leave their overcrowded dwellings, and veterans and victims of repression longing for their proverbial homecoming. This book has depicted the story of official aims during the Khrushchev period to forge the socialist person, invigorate Soviet society, and build Communism. It has also portrayed the way in which ordinary citizens

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experienced the realities of kommunisticheskii byt and envisioned the ideal, as well as how they identified with the socialist project. As demonstrated, individual interests in many ways corresponded with state objectives. Most apparently, those who had been allotted a new apartment confirmed the brilliance of housing policy and in essence, the justness of the Soviet system. In the realm of daily life, citizens had a stake in well-maintained apartment buildings and attractive courtyards, and therefore voluntarily engaged in drives to renovate and beautify housing complexes, to develop pleasant spaces for leisure, and to ensure tranquility, all in keeping with the prescriptions of Party agitators who vigorously encouraged collectivism “at home, as at work.” And in a variation on this official motto, those who continued to live in the old housing stock coupled their request for a decent home with what was essentially a précis of their work service. Indeed citizens who had yet to receive a separate apartment underscored the moral rightness of their claim to better housing not just by evoking state promises and proclamations about the radiant communist future, but also by situating themselves within the building of Communism as model Soviet citizens. Throughout, I have presented the restructuring of byt as a key signifier of the Thaw. This is not to say that attention to quotidian or consumer needs had been entirely anathema to the industrialization-driven and war-preoccupied Stalin regime, as conveyed by the material rewards heaped on Stakhanovite workers during the 1930s and the rejuvenation of “middle class” domesticity immediately following World War II. 2 The separate apartment too had made its debut during the Stalin years—even if it had not proliferated as part of a rigorous government program. 3 That said, while Stalinist provisions for the good life have been characterized as part of a “retreat” from revolutionary principles and values—a notion with broad implications first broached by Nicholas Timasheff—the same cannot be said of the relatively more bountiful Khrushchev years.4 Already during the war, state and society had experienced a “psychological reorientation” toward everyday concerns. 5 Then after 1953, as Lidiia Brusilovskaia stated in an exploration of culture during the 1950s and 1960s, daily life became “the crucial component of reality that was actively and organically contraposed to the Stalinist cultural project.”6 Brusilovskaia added, “the efficacy of that contraposition increased as the distance between everyday life and political, moral, aesthetic, and other ideals widened.”7 To illustrate, she cited the following verse from a Boris Slutskii poem that Ilya Ehrenburg had ostensibly viewed as expressing “the conspicuous boundary” between Stalinism and post-Stalinism: The age of spectacle is ended. Now comes the age of bread, And a cigarette break is declared For all who once stormed heaven.8

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Brusilovskaia thus depicted Stalin’s death as ushering in an appreciation for ordinary life, as well as buoying the shift from a monoculture to the cultural vibrancy that came to be associated with the 1960s generation (the shestidesiatniki). Without discounting that the Thaw had inaugurated both a significant cultural evolution and widespread interest in daily concerns, this examination of housing—the foundation of byt—has asserted that the burgeoning of separate apartments was not intended to disengage everyday life from political or even aesthetic and moral ideals, or else to provide Soviet society categorical respite. Rather, the communist construction of the 1920s to which the phrase “storming the heavens” refers, the revolutionary import of the quotidian (beyond the assurance of bread), and even the notion of returning to Leninist principles, were all reasserted during the Khrushchev era in such a way as to become entrenched in daily life. This is evident in a series of officious lectures published in 1963 designed to instruct youth audiences on how to achieve communist byt. The compilation began with a piece titled “Characteristics of Leninist Living” and a description of the model Soviet person that Lenin had envisioned: politically literate, educated, kind, cheerful and living a multidimensional life, “as in society, so in [his or her] personal life.”9 As the subsequent lecture indicated, by providing grand buildings with modern amenities and functional interiors, clean streets, and green spaces filled with fresh air, the “city of the future” would foster the development of precisely such individuals, citizens who possessed fine qualities like generosity, who were “proud toilers” of the new society and willing participants in the struggle against the old way of life. At the same time, the ideal city could not be fully realized without individuals eager to join social bodies like house committees and voluntary patrols for the protection of social order, and people generally striving to live “well, amicably and po-kommunisticheski [in a communist manner].”10 Addressing subjects as varied as state housing provision, the organization of domestic space, the development of new roles for women, efforts to eradicate societal “remnants of the past” like alcoholism, and progress in the areas of family life, nutrition and physical fitness, this lecture series projected an extraordinary vision: a society in which the material and the moral worlds of the individual, the social and personal aspects of daily life, and state efforts and popular initiatives operated in symbiosis for the collective good. Emphasizing the centrality of house and home to this comprehensive objective, it has been demonstrated that efforts to coordinate all facets of byt served to mute the paradox inherent in the determination to provide each Soviet family a dwelling of its own within the context of an ideology, a political and economic system, and a society that were fundamentally inimical to consumerist whimsy and individualism. Consequently, experts

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rendered homemaking an aesthetic and moral matter, providing advice on interior design that positioned the fulfillment of norms for décor as reflective of desirable personality traits—implicitly, like the “Leninist” ones touted in agitation brochures. They simultaneously aimed to curb acquisitiveness by eschewing ornate furniture, frivolous embroidered doilies and trite knick-knacks, excessive forms of adornment associated with bourgeois idleness. At the same time, design professionals encouraged the measured consumption of household furnishings and decorative objects that conformed to their conception of functionality: convertible furniture, considered especially suitable for the new small-sized apartment, items made of innovative materials like new forms of plastic, and a modest assortment of folk art from among a wide array that the expansion of light industry was making evermore available. Following their recommendations, experts assured, would contribute to greater aims like liberating Soviet women from undue preoccupation with household concerns, representing the harmonious ethnic diversity of the Soviet Union, and showcasing the modernity of the socialist home. Coupled with interior design, urban planning reinforced the link between personal life and national goals, as well as set the scene for the overall perestroika (restructuring) of byt. In terms of its express purpose, the mikroraion of the 1950s and 1960s was to complement domestic space by providing a healthy and functional neighborhood filled with green spaces and consumer amenities, configured in a radial arrangement that might draw individuals away from the home. In much the same way that the conveniences of the separate apartment were intended to inspire character traits vital for cordial interaction with others, the layout of new housing districts was envisioned to facilitate the advancement of sovetskoe ob­shchestvo. Conjuring up a sense of collectivism, the mikroraion was expected not only to satisfy daily needs, but also to cultivate popular initiatives in shared spaces “around the house”—in tandem with homemaking in good measure. It thus served to further make compatible with socialist ideals aims embedded in housing policy like coziness and consumption that could engender attitudes and conduct antithetical to Communism. More readily apparent than the fashioning of the socialist person at home was the rejuvenation of socialism “there, where the person lives.” Here popular interests corresponded with official resolve to construct an amicable, efficient, and attractive byt. This book has asserted that ordinary citizens were propelled by a sense of proletarian propriety to participate in voluntary campaigns to improve and beautify their daily lives, as well as to write their local newspaper editors to commend neighbors engaged in such pursuits, to reprimand those who abused housing or disturbed the peace, and to clamor for local officials to become more involved in the

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maintenance and renovation of their apartment buildings and courtyards. Such activism (both spontaneous and directed) formed the basis for a civic culture that promoted respect for socialized property, friendly relations among neighbors, and the denunciation of conduct that might endanger the health of the overall social environment. Intertwined with the striving to forge a model Soviet person and invigorate socialism was the determination to achieve Communism—an aspiration implicated in housing policy that was made palpable by novostroika. As demonstrated, housewarming accounts featuring moves into new mikroraiony attested to the soundness of the ideological foundation of the Soviet state, while casting it as a caring paternal entity. At the same time, representations of general advances in byt established a vivid contrast between life during the tsarist order, when the Russian proletariat subsisted in slums, and after the Revolution, when each worker could live in a humane manner, in accordance with Marxist principles and thanks to Leninist decrees. Certainly, the material means to this utopian end were not exclusively communist, for the simplification of architectural design, the incorporation of prefabricated materials, and the industrialization of building techniques typified postwar housing construction throughout Europe and elsewhere.11 The Soviet home thus garnered distinction by the egalitarianism embodied in the decree “To each family a separate apartment!” It was also publicized as reflecting a system in which the proletariat theoretically owned everything, in contrast to the capitalist order in which exploitative private interests denied ordinary workers the comforts of home. Individuals who celebrated a housewarming during the 1950s and 1960s could verify the plenty that socialism offered, while those still anticipating a new apartment could at least partake in the grand restructuring of byt by incorporating into their home novel domestic wares or by participating in neighborhood drives to ameliorate conditions in their timeworn housing complexes. Meanwhile, metal cranes soaring over construction sites evoked the socialist regime vanquishing all remnants of the past in the sphere of daily life, assuring that it would be only a matter of time before everyone would enjoy a separate apartment. There were residents of the old housing stock who were not placated simply because byt was prominent on the official agenda, and who were not prepared to wait patiently to exchange their decrepit and overcrowded living space for a decent dwelling. Insisting on living “normally” now, these citizens petitioned authorities of all kinds who might help them fulfill their claims for better housing. As they did so, they illuminated the divergence between the ideal that was being propagated in newspapers, magazines, and agitation brochures, and the shortcomings of kommunisticheskii byt. That is to say, petitioners did not merely appropriate official rhetoric; rather,

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they traced adverse living conditions back to before the war, presenting continuity in housing. They thus shaped the field of discourse about Soviet private life by placing on the housing agenda the immediate satisfaction of prewar and wartime material expectations, right alongside the attainment of the radiant communist future. Petitioners also provided a portrait of the everyday experiences of individuals inhabiting inadequate dwellings, one that belied officially prescribed norms for per capita living space, comfort, harmonious living, and physical and psychological welfare. They also articulated what house and home meant to them by asserting the imperativeness of reasonable housing to tranquility, personal fulfillment, and longings to raise children in a healthy environment or enjoy retirement after military service or a lifetime of employment—basically, to come home, settle down and move forward with their lives. In thereby indicating the kind of byt that they imagined for themselves, petitioners effectively authenticated a core objective of housing policy: realizing a normal, humane socialist society. The inability of mass construction to meet the unrelenting shortage of living space, as well as the myriad indignities that accompanied life in the old housing stock, partly account for why housing petitions sometimes extended for years on end. However, as I argued in this book, requesting improved living conditions constituted more than merely staking a claim in a housing queue or even an abstract exercise in conflating the resolution of longstanding material hardships with purported state and Party “concern for the person” or the communist future. Those who engaged in this mode of discourse also revealed a sense of self by asserting entitlement to a decent dwelling based on their own proven role in building Soviet society. Abundant in autobiographical details, housing petitions reflected a sense of belonging to the social body. For one, those who penned them presented themselves as loyal and worthy subjects, drawing on a broad cache of public identities linked to Soviet citizenship, including worker, veteran, soldier, and Party member. In addition, they demanded that state officials recognize not only their plight, but also their place in communist construction. Essentially, by outlining their productive service and personal sacrifices in a way that corresponded with propaganda presenting the happy housewarming as a reward for workers and soldiers, and as the realization of revolutionary promises for all those born under the Soviet star, petitioners summoned the state to honor its part of what I have termed the socialist contract. As if to further prompt officials to fulfill their obligations, they also invoked universal conceptions of justice, as well as referenced privileges and resolutions that had developed over decades of Soviet rule. Overall then, by insisting that state representatives enter into dialogue with them, individuals petitioning for better living space revitalized the bond between state and society—another element of the harmonious

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sovetskoe obshchestvo being touted in official rhetoric. At the same time, they rendered local officials responsible for housing distribution as Soviet antiheroes culpable for the failings they encountered along the path toward the anticipated modern, egalitarian, and prosperous society. Lastly, in highlighting the duties to the Soviet Union that they had fulfilled, petitioners manifested a collectivist spirit with a broader impact than popular household initiatives, and over a sustained period of time. In most of the cases scrutinized, the recipients of housing petitions verified the particulars of the living space and the personal history that they catalogued—even if only pro forma. Nevertheless, petitioners usually had to continue to wait to be allotted improved living space. Still, the good life was slowly coming into being, as attested to not only in human-interest stories published in the 1950s and 1960s, but also in memoirs about the Soviet era contemplating those decades in retrospect. In one such account, V. I. Vorotnikov described the mass housing construction that he had witnessed in the city of Kuibyshev in 1957, outlining how coordinated factory, state, cooperative and individual endeavors together had amounted to about 500 apartments, replacing sixteen barracks in that one single year.12 Vorotnikov also noted that the social conditions of workers had concurrently improved and that life had generally become better: residential districts were refurbished, utilities like gas were installed in apartment buildings, shops began filling with produce and goods, and ordinary people started procuring consumer wares like wireless receivers, tape-recorders, televisions, and even cars. During this period of advancement, his own family had moved from the dormitory at the aviation factory where he was working at the time to a two-room apartment, and soon thereafter acquired a television and refrigerator.13 As someone who had ascended to high Party rank, as well as to chair the Council of Ministers and the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, Vorotnikov had an interest in portraying the successes of the Soviet regime. But he did temper his admiration by recognizing that despite the great construction feats launched in 1957 and repeated thereafter, there never seemed to be enough housing in the Soviet Union; that improvements in byt occurred slowly; and that although it was always becoming better, his own life in the 1950s and 1960s was a modest, if definitely good one.14 The same was true of the reflections of S. Z. Ginzburg, a construction engineer with experiences in the Party, the state and various economic bodies. As someone who had lived through the Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II, the stated objective of his memoir was to provide an account of those who had participated in establishing the economic base of the first socialist country. In fact, his recollections sometimes read like a history of Soviet construction, detailing innovations, methods, and statistics related to the building industry—much in the vein of propaganda brochures of the Khrushchev era.15

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Ginzburg did acknowledge shortcomings, namely the design limitations of separate apartment buildings and the fact that they sometimes lacked sufficient amenities. Yet he was determined to challenge the “extremely critical attitude toward construction of the 1950s” that many had since assumed. As he reminded critics, for all their defects, in the context of the acute deficit in living space that confronted the Soviet Union at the time, the buildings it yielded made possible substantial progress toward resolving the housing crisis, providing countless families with their own apartment. He concluded—justifiably—“in this lies their historical significance.”16 Postscript: A Bird′s Eye View of Russian House and Home after Khrushchev State construction did not cease with the ouster of Khrushchev in 1964, but the goal to provide mass housing—much like the objective to achieve Communism—remained underfulfilled throughout the various mutations in policy that occurred under Leonid Brezhnev and later, Mikhail Gorbachev.17 Moreover, several facets of the housing situation evident in the 1950s and 1960s persisted into the decades that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. To be sure, construction continued. For example, in the renamed city of St. Petersburg (Leningrad), between 1991 and 2003, the total housing stock increased from about 55,000,000 square meters of living space to more than 63,000,000, and the average per capita allocation increased from eleven to nearly fourteen square meters—although the quality remained poor.18 More recently, the government of President Dmitry Medvedev (2008– 2012) appeared preoccupied with further expanding the housing stock, maintaining and renovating existing residential buildings, eradicating corruption and bureaucratic barriers to construction, ensuring quality, and developing utilities, as well as providing schools, shops, medical facilities, and cultural amenities, in tandem with new housing. Another striking parallel with the Khrushchev years was continued state assistance in accommodating certain categories of people, namely World War II veterans and individuals in military service, together with those residing in the Far North, victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and citizens deemed of particular value to society, such as young teachers.19 Nor had utopian dreaming ceased. Reminiscent of the objectives encapsulated in the titles of propaganda and agitation brochures of the 1950s and 1960s—“Millions of New Apartments” and “The Housing Problem Will Be Resolved”— the then prime minister Vladimir Putin declared for Russia the goal of increasing construction by 50 percent to 90,000,000 square meters a year by 2015, then to 100,000,000 square meters by 2016, and 140,000,000

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square meters by 2020. 20 In addition to seeking to solve “the eternal housing problem,” Putin expressed his determination to resettle individuals living in dilapidated buildings that had not been renovated for decades. “People should be taken out of such slums!” he exclaimed in a report to the State Duma, adding, “Such houses are impossible to live in; they are a direct hazard to people’s health and safety.”21 Although his fulfillment of these goals, currently as president, remains to be evaluated, striking is his indignation reminiscent of Khrushchev proclaiming that it was scandalous that those who had sacrificed for the construction of Communism should live in “beehives.” Of course, achieving Communism is no longer the target. With privatization, balancing the forces of supply and demand, stabilizing the housing market, as well as improving the overall business environment and attracting investment came to drive the housing situation in Russia—no doubt effectively eclipsing recent grandiose proclamations about dignified living. Although the government has continued to play a role, for example by subsidizing loans and allocating land for residential construction, individuals can no longer depend on state provision. Securing mortgages, borrowing funds, or accruing maternity capital are now the purview of ordinary citizens, even as their options have increased with the development of a rental housing market and unrestrained private construction and ownership. In the meantime, investors and developers determined to reap great profits by building vertically have undertaken the extensive destruction of the low-rise apartment buildings of the Khrushchev period. 22 As business interests and contemporary observers point out when addressing its demise, the khrushchëvka had, from the onset, been assigned a lifespan of a mere twenty-five years. This meager prognosis meant that the first experimental separate apartment blocks built in the 1950s would barely have survived the arrival of Communism that Khrushchev had projected for the year 1980. However, these structures also came to enjoy a fondness after 1991—not unlike other aspects of socialism. When asked by a newspaper correspondent in 2010 to comment about living in Cherëmushki, Muscovites of varying ages acknowledged the high cost of rent, as well as inadequacies in their mikroraion that had been evident also in the Khrushchev years, from a lack of shops to the occasional hooligan. At the same time, accustomed to standardized housing of the 1950s and 1960s, they touted the benefits of their district, including schools, easy access to transportation, green spaces, and quiet—Cherëmushki as it was intended to be.23 Another piece, this one published in 2006 and focusing on elderly residents, highlighted the significance of the separate apartment for those who decades ago had moved into them from communal apartments, cellar dwellings, or barracks; the comments it relayed mirrored the assertions of Vorotnikov and Ginzburg that life at the time was continually improving.24

B E YO N D T H E H O U S I N G C A M PA I G N T H AT “ S H O O K T H E W O R L D ”     2 21

Like the khrushchëvka, the communal apartment too survived the immediate collapse of Communism. According to one figure, in St. Petersburg in 2000, kommunalki still comprised over 9 percent of the apartments in the city, though this was a decrease from nearly 16 percent in 1991. 25 In certain instances, personal preference accounted for this: some individuals inhabiting kommunalki were reluctant to move because their apartments were in the city center, which features optimal proximity to an array of consumer services in the circumstances of a severely strained public transportation system. In addition, the aesthetic of central, historic St. Petersburg possesses great charm.26 Alongside convenience and beauty, the appeals of living communally should not be discounted. As Katerina Gerasimova discerned from personal recollections, individuals moving into a separate apartment who had grown up in a kommunalka or who were elderly “sensed a feeling of loss and uncertainty because now they had no interlocutors who they could talk to about their joys and sorrows, none of the pleasant feeling ‘that somebody is always at home’ and ‘they will always help.’ ”27 In fact, nostalgia for the kommunalka garnered public expression already during the Thaw. This is evident in a 1961 article published in Vechernii Leningrad based on a letter submitted by residents of a communal apartment who were anticipating resettlement. The tenants began by recognizing that sometimes people react to communal dwelling imagining a minimum of ten residents and exclaiming “What a nightmare! Torment. Certainly neither life, nor peace.” Their own apartment housed thirty people in all, of diverse backgrounds (students, factory and office workers, artists), who were soon to be dispersed as their building underwent major renovation. The tenants understood that each of them would be resettled in better, more comfortable apartments—either elsewhere in the same, improved building or in a new one. Nevertheless, they claimed, the prospect made them wistful because they always found themselves among friends in their kommunalka and had become accustomed to one another, sharing their joys and successes, and helping each other as needed. In addition, a dozen or so residents would habitually congregate in the kitchen in the evening to discuss a book or a television program. Even though disputes periodically arose among them, the authors declared, they were requesting to be resettled together at one address, for all one heard was “It’s a pity to part!”28 This idealization of communal living, like the realities of being situated in a prime urban district, persisted into the twenty-first century. 29 Ilya Utekhin, for example, perceived what he termed “Golden Age nostalgia”—a longing for a time of rules and order—as typifying the communal apartment mentality among individuals who had lived in kommunalki since World War II. “There were no deviant drunkards or drug addicts; the apartments were cleaned more often, and people were more honest, and

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theft inside apartments was unlikely,” his conversations with “old dwellers” suggested.30 Such sentiments indicate that some perhaps yearned for the sovetskoe obshchestvo that did not fully materialize, as much as for the positive aspects of communal living remembered. The desire for an orderly society has manifested itself, for instance, in the recent revival of voluntary people’s patrols for the protection of social order. 31 Meanwhile, the occasional subbotnik evinces continued interest in the aesthetic state of neighborhoods and in tending to it through community initiatives. Illustrative is a leaflet distributed by a popular St. Petersburg municipal organization in the spring of 2002. Summoning “friends” “who love their home, who are not indifferent and who are active, and who want to see their courtyard clean and cozy” to participate in a subbotnik beginning at ten in the morning on 20 April, it informed “esteemed residents” that all participants would be provided with work implements and containers for collecting trash.32 Alongside voluntary campaigns, another noteworthy feature of post-Soviet society that has a cognate among the elements of house and home examined in this book is the perseverance of a culture of complaint. A newspaper piece on the subject published in 2002 revealed that writing letters to state authorities, including the president, remained a vigorous pursuit among Russian citizens—one supported by the government, complete with a staff and official procedures for fielding letters, visits, telephone calls, and emails, for responding to common frustrations, and for forwarding petitions to the responsible agencies. Typically broaching social rights, housing was prominent among the issues raised in this popular correspondence.33

NOTES

Introduction 1.  L. Aleksandrova, “Nesostoiavsheesia novosel′e,” Krokodil, 20 February 1957, 13. 2.  This characterization of the Khrushchev period is attributable to Martin McCauley, The Khrushchev Era, 1953–1964 (London, 1995), xii. 3.  N. S. Khrushchov, Forty Years of the Great October Socialist Revolution: Report to the Jubilee Session of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. on November 6, 1957 (Moscow, 1957), 49–50. 4.  For an excellent primer on Soviet housing, see Alfred John Di Maio, Jr., Soviet Urban Housing: Problems and Policies (New York, 1974). On the revolutionary repartition in particular, see A. A. Fedulin, “Revoliutsionnyi ‘zhilishchnyi peredel’ v Moskve (1918–1921 gg.),” Voprosy istorii, no. 5 (May 1987): 180–183; M. N. Potekhin, “Pereselenie petrogradskikh rabochikh v kvartiry burzhuazii (Oktiabr′ 1917–1919 gg.),” Istoriia SSSR, no. 5 (May 1977): 140–144; and T. V. Kuznetsova, “K voprosu o putiakh resheniia zhilishchnoi problemy v SSSR,” Istoriia SSSR, no. 5 (1963): 140–147. The following captures the development of Russian housing from the Revolution through the 1930s: Natal′ia Lebina, “Communal, Communal, Communal World,” Russian Studies in History 38 (Spring 2000): 53–62. The transition from barracks to communal apartment living is traced in Stephen Kotkin, “Living Space and the Stranger’s Gaze,” in Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), 157–197. On house-communes, see S. O. Khan-Magomedvedov, Pioneers of Soviet Architecture: The Search for New Solutions in the 1920s and 1930s, ed. Catherine Cooke, trans. Alexander Lieven (New York, 1987) and Milka Bliznakov, “Soviet Housing During the Experimental Years, 1918–1933,” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, ed. William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble (Cambridge, 1993), 85–148. 5.  The following provide overviews of various types of Soviet housing, considering also their impact on daily life: Lynne Attwood, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia: Private Life in a Public Space (Manchester, 2010) and the previously cited edited volume Russian Housing in the Modern Age. For a comparison of everyday life in communal and separate apartments

2 24    N OT E S TO PAG E S 2– 5

during the 1930s, see Katerina Gerasimova, “The Soviet Communal Apartment,” in Beyond the Limits: The Concept of Space in Russian History and Culture, ed. Jeremy Smith (Helsinki, 1999), 107–130.   6.  On the historical development of the separate apartment, see Steven E. Harris, “The Soviet Path to Minimum Living Space and the Single-Family Apartment,” in Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Washington, DC, 2013), 27–70.   7.  This assessment of the 1956–1960 Five-Year Plan was made by Di Maio, 20–21. The statistics are culled from Timothy Sosnovy, “The Soviet City (Planning, Housing, Public Utilities),” in Dimensions of Soviet Economic Power: Studies Prepared for the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, Part V: The Share of the Citizen (Washington, DC, 1962), 330. The precise figures are as follows: for 1956–1960, 139.7 million square meters planned and 145.6 built (107.9 percent fulfilled), and for 1961, 62.5 planned and 52 built (83.2 percent fulfilled). It should be noted that Soviet sources are problematic because officials tended to overestimate yields in state housing and underestimate those in individual construction. In addition, in calculating the area of housing, they counted not only useable living space (zhilaia ploshchad′, composed of the general living rooms and bedrooms), but also total floor space (obshchaia ploshchad′, including “nonliving space”—nezhilaia ploshchad′—kitchens, bathrooms, entranceways, corridors, pantries, and service areas). The Western experts whose estimates are cited here acknowledged and accounted for such incongruities.  8. See E. Gontmakher and G. Mil′ner, “Zhilishchnaia problema Rossii: Sotsial′nyi aspekt,” Voprosy ekonomiki, no. 11 (November 1991): 77.   9.  D. L. Broner. Zhilishchnyi vopros i statistika (Moscow, 1966), 31. 10. These various reforms are addressed, for example, in William Taubman, Sergei Khrushchev, and Abbott Gleason, eds., Nikita Khrushchev, trans. David Gehrenbeck, Eileen Kane, and Alla Bashenko (New Haven, CT, 2000), and Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957, trans. and ed. Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk, NY, 1998). 11. Timothy Sosnovy, “The Soviet Housing Situation Today,” Soviet Studies XI (July 1959): 2–3. 12. N. G. Dmitriev, Zhilishchnyi vopros. Dva mira—dva podkhoda (Moscow, 1973), 121–122. 13.  A. Z. Vakser, Leningrad Poslevoennyi, 1945–1982 (St. Petersburg, 2005), 91–92. 14. Vakser, Leningrad Poslevoennyi, 76. 15.  Portraits of such dire postwar conditions are provided in the following: Mark B. Smith, Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb, IL, 2010), Karl D. Qualls, From Ruins to Reconstruction: Urban Identity in Soviet Sevastopol after World War II (Ithaca, 2009), and Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System after World War II (Cambridge, 2002). 16.  For an overview of Soviet demographics through the early 1960s, see James W. Brackett and John W. DePauw, “Population Policy and Demographic Trends in the Soviet Union,” in New Directions in the Soviet Economy: Studies Prepared for the Subcommittee on Foreign Economic Policy, Congress of the United States, Part III: Human Resources (Washington, DC, 1966), 593–702. 17. Timothy Sosnovy, “Housing Conditions and Urban Development in the USSR,” in New Directions in the Soviet Economy: Studies Prepared for the Subcommittee on Foreign Economic Policy, Congress of the United States, Part II-B: Economic Performance (Washington, DC, 1966), 550. For more on such demolition, see also pp. 538 and 542, as well as David Cattell, “Comprehensive Consumer Welfare Planning in the USSR,” in Soviet Politics and Society in the 1970s, ed. Henry W. Morton and Rudolf L. Tokes (New York, 1974), 259 note 32. 18.  See, respectively, M. Sapronov et al., “K novym stroitel′nym rubezham. Sdacha kazhdogo doma dolzhna stat′ prazdnikom. Otkrytoe pis′mo stroitelei—udarnikov kommunistiches-

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kogo truda,” Vechernii Leningrad [hereinafter, VL], 23 December 1964, 4, and Donald D. Barry, “The Soviet Union: Housing in the USSR. Cities and Towns,” Problems of Communism 18 (May–June 1969): 2. 19.  Irina H. Corten, Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture: A Selected Guide to Russian Words, Idioms, and Expressions of the Post-Stalin Era, 1953–1991 (Durham, NC, 1992), 26. 20. Willard Smith, “Housing in the Soviet Union—Big Plans, Little Action,” in Soviet Economic Prospects for the Seventies: A Compendium of Papers Submitted to the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States (Washington, DC, 1973), 407–408. Based on a family size of 3.5 persons, Smith determined that out of the 286 apartments per 1,000 people needed in 1971, only 258 (28 units less than required) were available. This was certainly an improvement over earlier shortfalls. For example, in 1959, out of the 286 apartments per 1,000 people needed, there were only 199 (87 units less or a 20 percent deficit). 21.  Jeffrey Brooks, “Socialist Realism in Pravda: Read All about It!” Slavic Review 53 (Winter 1994): 975. 22. Alf Lüdtke, “Introduction: What Is the History of Everyday Life and Who Are Its Practitioners?” in The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, ed. Alf Lüdtke, trans. William Templer (Princeton, 1995), 3–40. 23.  Pivotal among these are Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain; Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge, 1997); and Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999). 24.  These include the monographs by Stephen Bittner, Miriam Dobson, Juliane Fürst, Steven Harris, and Karl Qualls, as well as Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation (Oxford, 2012). 25.  Such works on Soviet housing include Henry W. Morton, “Who Gets What, When and How? Housing in the Soviet Union,” Soviet Studies XXXII (April 1980): 235–259, as well as Gregory D. Andrusz, Housing and Urban Development in the USSR (Albany, 1984); James H. Bater, The Soviet City: Ideal and Reality (London, 1980); Di Maio, Jr., Soviet Urban Housing; and Sosnovy, “The Soviet Housing Situation Today.” 26.  Brumfield and Ruble, Russian Housing in the Modern Age. 27.  See in particular the following articles in the Journal of Design History 10 (1997): Catherine Cooke, “Beauty as a Route to ‘the Radiant Future’: Responses of Soviet Architecture”: 137–160; Victor Buchli, “Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight against Petit-Bourgeois Consciousness in the Soviet Home”: 161–176; and Susan E. Reid, “Destalinization and Taste, 1953–1963”: 177–201. There are other notable works offering insight into the architecture, design, and urban development of the Stalin and Khrushchev eras, including additional ones by Cooke, Buchli, and Reid; these are discussed or referenced throughout this book. Among them is Iurii Gerchuk, “The Aesthetics of Everyday Life in the Khrushchev Thaw in the USSR (1954–64),” trans. Susan E. Reid, in Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe, ed. Susan E. Reid and David Crowley (Oxford, 2000), 81–99. 28.  Several of these articles are cited herein, including ones in the Journal of Design History, the Slavic Review, the Journal of Contemporary History and Cahiers du monde russe. Among the chapters Reid has contributed to edited volumes is “The Meaning of Home: ‘The Only Little Bit of the World You Can Have to Yourself,’ ” in Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia, ed. Lewis H. Siegelbaum (Houndmills, UK, 2006), 145–170. 29.  See Attwood, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia; Smith, Property of Communists; and Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street, cited in full above. 30. Invoking the idea of a familial hearth, anthropologists have presented “house and home” as consisting in a physical structure vital to forming and reproducing the family (in its biological, social, economic and moral guises), to providing shelter and security, to signifying status and to facilitating quotidian rituals like preparing meals, as well as comprising a place of origin and respite that harbors emotional attachment, a sense of identity and memory. See

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Donna Birdwell-Pheasant and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga, “Introduction: Houses and Families in Europe,” in House Life: Space, Place and Family in Europe, ed. Donna Birdwell-Pheasant and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga (Oxford, 1999), 1–35. 31.  Nancy Condee, “Cultural Codes of the Thaw,” in Nikita Khrushchev, 169. 32.  As such, my assessment of the Khrushchev period converges with those of Stephen Bitt­ ner and Miriam Dobson, who examined the shifting position of the cultural intelligentsia and delved into the complex issues surrounding the phenomenon of Gulag returnees. See Stephen V. Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat (Ithaca, 2008), and Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime and the Fate of Reforms After Stalin (Ithaca, 2009). 33.  Ilya Ehrenburg, The Thaw, trans. Manya Harari (Westport, CT, 1956). 34.  Ibid., 151 and 153, respectively. 35.  One strand of new scholarship that explores this matter is that aimed at identifying the characteristics and motivations of “perpetrators.” See Lynne Viola, “The Question of the Perpetrator in Soviet History,” Slavic Review 72 (Spring 2013): 1–23. 36.  “Trud i byt—nerazryvnye chasti kommunisticheskogo obraza zhizni. K godovshchine iiun′skogo plenuma TsK KPSS. Dobrye sosedi, vernye druz′ia,” VL, 15 June 1964, 2. 37.  Deborah A. Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia (New York, 2007). 38.  Demonstrated throughout Communist Morality, this assertion is also encapsulated in the following article: “Irreconcilable Differences: Divorce and Conceptions of Private Life in the Khrushchev Era,” The Russian Review 57 (October 1998): 599–613. 39.  Other key contributions to blurring this distinction are Vladimir Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia (New York, 1989), and Siegelbaum, Borders of Socialism. 40.  Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Durham, NC, 1990). 41.  Consideration for the individual as more than a productive force, which I present as a new course in Soviet society during the Thaw, was first discerned by literary scholars as a motif in fiction of this era. See, for example, Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981), 214–216. 42. Zubkova, Russia after the War, 171. 43.  Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Postwar Soviet Society: The ‘Return to Normalcy,’ 1945–1953,” in The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union, ed. Susan J. Linz (Totowa, NJ, 1985), 129–156. 44.  The notion of normalcy as real, existing socialism—shorn of societal problems and shortcomings in daily life—is informed by Natal′ia Lebina. See N. B. Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn′ Sovetskogo goroda: Normy i anomalii 1920–1930 gg. (St. Petersburg, 1999). In stark contrast, Shlapentokh claimed that Soviet society was “normal” because it was able to function and reproduce itself over many years, much like a healthy organism. Characterizing the Soviet Union as totalitarian, he disputed the assertions of both moralistic anti-communists who designated it as “abnormal” because it was predicated on a supposedly perverted system, and idealists from Leon Trotsky to Andrei Sakharov who deemed it “abnormal” because it did not live up to its ideals. The latter perception converges with the paradigm normality-abnormality evoked by Lebina, and throughout this book. Incidentally, for Shlapentokh, it was the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev that turned the Soviet system into an abnormal hybrid (that is, not a normal totalitarian society)—thus why it could no longer survive, in his estimation. See Vladimir Shlapentokh, A Normal Totalitarian Society: How the Soviet Union Functioned and How It Collapsed (Armonk, NY, 2001), 3–12. 45.  The ascription of national significance to the home, and of class, cultural distinction, ethnicity, tradition, and memory to elements of material culture has been illuminated in a number of scholarly monographs set in diverse contexts. See, for example, George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York, 1985); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the

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Cold War Era (New York, 1988); Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York, 1991); Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley, 1996); and Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (New York, 2003). 46.  George Kennan coined the “container” schema in 1947 in reference to the need to limit Russian expansion. See, for example, Paul A. Chilton, Security Metaphors: Cold War Discourse from Containment to Common House (New York, 1996), 50–51 and 132. 47. May, Homeward Bound, 172. As powerful a metaphor as it was, much as I demonstrate for the Soviet case, the American home reflected an imperfect scenario. As May acknowledged, in reality, the “American family” was segregated along class and racial lines, consumer goods were a surrogate for genuine fulfillment for husbands and wives, and the focus on the domestic realm could engender a sense of atomization—sources of discontent that would erupt by the 1960s. Yet emphasizing popular accommodation with prescriptions for home life in the interim, she asserted that “domestic containment and its therapeutic corollary undermined the potential for political activism and reinforced the chilling affects of anticommunism and the cold war consensus” (ibid., 14). 48.  For overviews of the Kitchen Debate, see Karal Ann Marling, “Nixon in Moscow: Appliances, Affluence, and Americanism,” in As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 242–283 and Walter L. Hixson, “From the Summit to the Model Kitchen: The Cultural Agreement and the Moscow Fair,” in Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York, 1997), 151–183. 49.  Marling, “Nixon in Moscow,” 249 and 278. 50. On the impact of anxiety about nuclear war on US society, see, for example, Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill, 1994). More recent historiography on the United States during the Cold War that has cited a wider range of factors shaping American life after 1945 continues to recognize the significance of fear among them. This is evident in Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert, eds., Rethinking Cold War Culture (Washington, DC, 2001). 51.  See, for example, M. Vilenskii, “Novosel′e,” Krokodil, 28 February 1958, 11. 52.  This shift is delineated in Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Public Opinion and Ideology: Mythology and Pragmatism in Interaction (New York, 1986), 11. 53.  See, for example, the following articles by Susan E. Reid: “Khrushchev Modern: Agency and Modernization in the Soviet Home,” Cahiers du monde russe 47 (January–June 2006): 227–268; “The Khrushchev Kitchen: Domesticating the Scientific-Technological Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary History 40 (April 2005): 289–316; and “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61 (Summer 2002): 211–252. 54.  Nine square meters is the equivalent of just under ninety-seven square feet. 55.  Sosnovy, “Housing Conditions and Urban Development in the USSR,” 544–545. 56.  To illustrate, the following report on complaints submitted to the executive committee of the October district soviet of Leningrad for the first three quarters of 1958 alone cites hundreds of cases of leaky roofs: Tsentral′nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga, f. 9626, op. 1, d. 13, ll. 3–23. The roughly one hundred pages that follow, covering the same timeframe, reveal an identical scenario in thirteen other districts. 57.  Sosnovy, “Housing Conditions and Urban Development in the USSR,” 551. 58. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 224–225. 59. For an elaboration, see Kotkin, “Speaking Bolshevik,” in Magnetic Mountain, 198–237. 60.  John Borneman, After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin (New York, 1991), 79. 61.  In particular, Hellbeck takes issue with the binary that the notion of resistance establishes between the authentic (dissenting) and inauthentic (compliant) self, as well as the insincerity and posturing that this concept intimates. Jochen Hellbeck, “Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia,” Kritika 1 (Winter 2000): 71–96.

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62.  Ibid., 74. For further elaboration on the subjectivizing impact of revolutionary ideology, see Jochen Hellbeck, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts,” The Russian Review 60 (July 2001): 340–359. 63.  Zubkova, “The Social Psychology of the War,” in Russia after the War, 11–19. 64.  See Mark Edele, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War: A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society, 1941–1991 (New York, 2009); Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (Cambridge, MA, 2006); and Zubkova, Russia After the War. On the resonance of the war during the Thaw, see Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Boston, 1990), 28. 65.  Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2001), 17. Exploring the postwar years, Yitzhak Brudny asserted the formation of a Soviet nation-state (sovetskaia natsional′naia gosudarstvennost′) and of a supra-ethnic “Soviet people” (sovetskii narod) during the Khrushchev period. See Yitzhak Brudny, “The Emergence of Politics by Culture, 1953–1964,” in Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991 (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 28–56. Tracing a longer trajectory like Weiner, Juliane Fürst observed the tendency of the early postwar years to hark back to the Revolution, even as they provided the foundation for both the reforms of Khrushchev and the stagnation of the Brezhnev years. Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford, 2010), 20–24. 66.  For a survey of letter-writing throughout Russian history, see the following special issue on the subject edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick: Russian History/Histoire Russe 24 (Spring–Summer 1997). 67. See, for example, Smith, Property of Communists, 171–172; the quotation is on p. 180. 68.  Theodore H. Friedgut, “Citizens and Soviets: Can Ivan Ivanovich Fight City Hall?” Comparative Politics 10 (July 1978): 469. 69. Nancy Ries, Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika (Ithaca, 1997), 84 and 113. 70.  Ibid., 120. 71. Juliane Fürst, “In Search of Soviet Salvation: Young People Write to the Stalinist Authorities,” Contemporary European History 15 (August 2006): 327–345. 72.  Fürst, “In Search of Soviet Salvation,” 337. 73.  James H. Bater and John R. Staples, “Planning for Change in Central St. Petersburg,” Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 41 (2000): 88. 74.  M. D. Filonov and I. D. Kozlov, eds. Leningrad za 50 let. Statisticheskii sbornik (Leningrad, 1967), 117. 75.  Bater and Staples, “Planning for Change in Central St. Petersburg,” 87–89. 76.  On wartime deaths in Leningrad, see Blair A. Ruble, Leningrad: Shaping a Soviet City (Berkeley, 1990), 49 and John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London, 1991), 42. Concerning the destruction of residential buildings in Leningrad during the Blockade, see Edward Bubis and Blair A. Ruble, “The Impact of World War II on Leningrad,” in The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union, 189. 77. Vakser, Leningrad Poslevoennyi, 71. 78.  Siobhan Peeling, “Dirt, Disease and Disorder: Population Re-placement in Postwar Leningrad and the ‘Danger’ of Social Contamination,” in Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945–1950, ed. Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron (Houndmills, UK, 2009), 118–130 (the statistics are from p. 123). 79.  Ibid., 130. 80. Vakser, Leningrad Poslevoennyi, 100. 81.  This notion is borrowed from Frank Biess, “Introduction: Histories of the Aftermath,” in Histories of the Aftermath, ed. Frank Biess and Robert G. Moeller (New York, 2010), 3–4.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 21– 26     2 2 9

82. See, for example, Qualls, From Ruins to Reconstruction, specifically the first three chapters, and Donald Filtzer, “Standard of Living versus Quality of Life: Struggling with the Urban Environment in Russia during the Early Years of Post-War Reconstruction,” in Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention, ed. Juliane Fürst (London, 2006), 81–102.

1. Building a Socialist Home Befitting the Space Age   1.  Blair A. Ruble, “From khrushcheby to korobki,” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, ed. William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble (Cambridge, 1993), 234.  2. Ibid., 232.  3. Harrison Salisbury, To Moscow and Beyond: A Reporter’s Narrative (New York, 1960), 5.   4.  For a sense of Soviet ambitions to probe outer space, see Sue Bridger, “The Cold War and the Cosmos: Valentina Tereshkova and the First Woman’s Space Flight,” in Women in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Melanie Ilic˘, Susan E. Reid and Lynne Attwood (Houndmills, UK, 2004), 226–227.  5. Aleksandr Chakovskii, Dorogi, kotorye my vybiraem (Moscow, 1960), 154.   6.  Stephen V. Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat (Ithaca, 2008), 119.   7.  Albrecht Martiny, “Housing and Construction in the Period of ‘De-Stalinization’: The Change in Construction Policy from 1954 to 1957,” in Politics and Participation under Communist Rule, ed. Peter J. Potichnyj and Jane Shapiro Zacek (New York, 1983), 97; emphasis added.  8. Ibid., 91–104.  9. Ibid., 94–95. 10.  For more on the influence of the central authorities on architectural design during the Thaw, see Catherine Cooke, “Beauty as a Route to ‘the Radiant Future’: Responses to Soviet Architecture,” Journal of Design History 10 (1997): 137–160. 11.  The following proceedings of the Academy of Construction and Architecture exemplify both the obligations assigned to this body and the way in which it responded to issues raised in Communist Party meetings: N. V. Baranov et al., eds., Trudy II Sessii Akademii Stroitel′stva i Arkhitektury SSSR po voprosam zhilishchnogo stroitel′stva, 15–20 maia 1957 g. (Moscow, 1958). 12.  Iu. Arnat, “Novaia arkhitektura i ee trebovaniia,” Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR [hereinafter, D i SSSR], January 1962, 22. 13. Susan E. Reid, “Khrushchev Modern: Agency and Modernization in the Soviet Home,” Cahiers du monde russe 47 (January–June 2006): 229. 14.  The articles in this chapter gleaned from Arkhitektura i stroitel′stvo Leningrada, Stroitel′stvo i arkhitektura Leningrada, and Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, were written by a variety of professionals, including architects, engineers, artists, and sculptors. For more on the “enthusiasts” from the Union of Artists of the USSR who penned the pieces that appeared in D i SSSR, in particular, see Iuliia Karpova, “Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR: Konstruirovanie ofitsial′nogo diskursa o Sovetskom iskusstve i material′noi kul′ture v kontse 1950-kh—nachale 1960-kh godov,” in Konstruiruia “Sovetskoe”? Politicheskoe soznanie, povsednevnye praktiki, novye identichnosti. Materialy nauchnoi konferentsii studentov i aspirantov (14–15 aprelia 2011 goda, Sankt-Peterburg) (St. Petersburg, 2011), 106–114. Available at http://www.eu.spb. ru/images/hist_dep/Constructing_the_Soviet_sbornik.pdf. For a broader sense of the interdisciplinary nature of Soviet design and its practitioners in the 1950s and 1960s, see Raymond Hutchings, “Design as an Institution,” Soviet Science, Technology, Design: Interaction and Convergence (London, 1976), 140–171.

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15.  On the impact of Western ideas on Russian architecture from the nineteenth century on, see William Craft Brumfield, ed., Reshaping Russian Architecture: Western Technology, Utopian Dreams (Cambridge, 1990). 16. A. F. Gol′dshtein, “Teoreticheskie vzgliady F. L. Raita,” Arkhitektura i stroitel′stvo Leningrada [hereinafter, A i S Leningrada], April 1959, 37–39. 17.  Catherine Cooke (with Susan E. Reid), “Modernity and Realism: Architectural Relations in the Cold War,” in Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture and the Decorative Arts, ed. Rosalind P. Blakesley and Susan E. Reid (DeKalb, IL, 2007), 184. 18.  D. G. Gadaskina, “Mebel′ ekonomichnykh kvartir,” A i s Leningrada, January 1958, 34 and 38. 19.  “Parizhskaia vitrina. Variant resheniia otkidnogo stola,” D i SSSR, July 1960, 47. 20.  For an overview of the development of these architectural traits in the West, see Witold Rybczynski, “Style and Substance” and “Austerity,” in Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York, 1986), 173–193 and 195–215, respectively. 21.  Ibid., 203. 22. L. Kamenskii, A. Sipko, and O. Sveshnikov, “Dlia novykh kvartir,” D i SSSR, July 1958, 6. 23.  N. Luppov, “Inter′er—kompleks iskusstv,” D i SSSR, September 1961, 12. 24.  Ibid., 10. 25.  This moniker is borrowed from Reid, “Khrushchev Modern,” 232. 26.  On the use of authoritarian methods—“symbolic violence”—against architects immediately after the death of Stalin, see Martiny, “Housing and Construction in the Period of ‘De-Stalinization,’ ” 87–112. Concerning earlier state and Party incursions into the architectural profession, see Hugh D. Hudson, Jr., Blueprints and Blood: The Stalinization of Soviet Architecture, 1917–1937 (Princeton, 1994). 27.  Iurii Gerchuk, “The Aesthetics of Everyday Life in the Khrushchev Thaw in the USSR (1954–64),” trans. Susan E. Reid, in Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe, ed. Susan E. Reid and David Crowley (Oxford, 2000), 82–84. 28.  Susan E. Reid, “Destalinization and Taste, 1953–1963,” Journal of Design History 10 (1997): 177. 29.  Vera Chubakova, “Khochu byt′ schastlivoi,” in Khochu byt′ schastlivoi. Povesti (Moscow, 1963), 268–272. 30.  “V chest′ XX s″ezda KPSS. Stroiku vedut kompleksnye brigady,” Vechernii Leningrad [hereinafter, VL], 9 January 1956, 1. 31.  “Prochti i rasskazhi tovarishchu. Polozhenie o brigadire v stroitel′stve,” Stroitel′, 23 July 1957, 2. 32. “Den′ stroitelia,” Stroitel′, 11 July 1956, 1. 33.  Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, trans. and ed. Strobe Talbott (Toronto, 1974), 86. 34.  I. Smetanin, “Khorosho byt′ stroitelem. Tebe, liubimaia Rodina!” VL, 28 June 1958, 2. 35.  “Tebe chelovek! Sem′ia, postroivshaia gorod,” VL, 22 September 1962, 1. 36.  On the earlier representations of male workers, see Victoria E. Bonnell, “Iconography of the Worker in Soviet Political Art,” in Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley, 1997), 20–46. For more on “The Making of Stakhanovites,” see Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (Cambridge, 1988), 145–157. 37.  I thank Eugénie Zvonkine for sharing these observations from her research, as well as the following unpublished paper in which she outlines them: “En découvrant le vaste monde, la beauté du chaos.” 38.  Donald Filtzer, “Women Workers in the Khrushchev Era,” in Women in the Khru­ shchev Era, 31. 39.  The female worker as helpmate to her male counterpart constituted the first incarnation of the woman worker in Bolshevik iconography. See Bonnell, “Representation of Women in Early Soviet Posters,” in Iconography of Power, 64–99. 40.  “N. A. Bogomolova, brigadir maliarov,” VL, 15 January 1964, 2.

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41.  Lynne Attwood, “Celebrating the ‘Frail-Figured Welder’: Gender Confusion in Women’s Magazines of the Khrushchev Era,” Slavonica 8 (November 2002): 161 and 163. 42.  E. G. Strzhalkovskii, “Novye formy organizatsii zhilishchnogo stroitel′stva v Leningrade,” A i s Leningrada, March 1959, 2. 43.  For an overview of stipulations for Soviet housing design and construction from the Khrushchev through Gorbachev years, see Ruble, “From khrushcheby to korobki,” 232–270. 44.  On the first housing construction assembly enterprise in the Soviet Union, see A. A. Sizov, “Pervyi domostroitel′nyi kombinat vstupil v stroi,” A i s Leningrada, March 1959, 5–8. 45.  Cherëmushki (Cherrytown), directed by Gerbert Rappaport (USSR, 1963). 46. Salisbury, To Moscow and Beyond, 5. 47.  “V chest′ 40-letiia Velikogo Oktiabria. Kollektiv tresta No. 3 dosrochno zakanchivaet montazh krupnopanel′nykh domov v 122-m kvartale na Shchemilovke. Etazh za sem′ dnei,” VL, 22 July 1957, 1. 48.  B. D. Fedortsov and T. B. Chirkova, “O nekotorykh nedostatkakh tipovykh proektov zhilykh domov s malometrazhnymi kvartirami,” Stroitel′stvo i arkhitektura Leningrada [hereinafter, S i a Leningrada], January 1961, 18. 49.  A. A. Liubosh, “Navstrechu III Vsesoiuznomu s″ezdu arkhitektorov. Nekotorye itogi tvorcheskoi deiatel′nostu Leningradskikh Arkhitektorov,” S i a Leningrada, November 1960, 1. 50.  Arnat, “Novaia arkhitektura i ee trebovaniia,” 22–23. 51.  O. A. Ivanova and A. V. Makhrovskaia, “Voprosy kompozitsii zhilogo mikroraiona,” A i s Leningrada, April 1959, 10–14; N. P. Gladkii and V. E. Romanov, “Vnutrikvartal′noe ozelenenie,” S i a Leningrada, July 1960, 7–10; and V. Kamenskii, “Navstrechu vyboram v sovety. Pust′ bol′she budet schastlivykh novoselii,” VL, 15 January 1963, 2. 52.  Kamenskii, “Navstrechu vyboram v sovety,” 2. 53.  See, for example, L. L. Shreter, “Novyi mikroraion na prospekte Engel′sa,” A i s Leningrada, March 1959, 28. 54.  O. A. Ivanova, “Novye tendentsii v ozelenenii zhilykh territorii,” S i a Leningrada, August 1964, 11. 55.  O. A. Ivanova, “Sistema zelenykh nasazhdenii Leningrada,” A i s Leningrada, February 1957, 27–32, and Shreter, “Novyi mikroraion na prospekte Engel′sa,” 28–30. 56.  Cited in Gladkii and Romanov, “Vnutrikvartal′noe ozelenenie,” 7. 57.  Ivanova, “Novye tendentsii v ozelenenii zhilykh territorii,” 11–15, and Gladkii and Romanov, “Vnutrikvartal′noe ozelenenie,” 7–10. 58. Ibid. 59.  Iu. Shass, “Dom—eto malen′kii gorod. Zametki arkhitektora,” VL, 27 April 1964, 2. 60.  On this phenomenon in the broader European context, see Donna Birdwell-Pheasant and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga, “Introduction: Houses and Families in Europe,” in House Life: Space, Place and Family in Europe, ed. Donna Birdwell-Pheasant and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga (Oxford, 1999), 20. 61.  A. Chekalov, “O kompozitsii inter′era,” D i SSSR, February 1962, 19. 62. O. Baiar, “Sovety khudozhnika. Dekorativnye predmety v kvartire,” D i SSSR, July 1959, 47. 63.  E. Krimmer, “V nashikh kvartirakh dolzhny byt′ krasivye veshchi. Nashi molchalivye druz′ia,” VL, 1 June 1960, 3. 64.  E. Barklai, “Spetsial′noe khudozhestvenno-konstruktorskoe biuro. Reportazh. Slovo imeet . . . Otdel zhilogo inter′era,” D i SSSR, November 1963, 13. 65. E. Ustinov, “Svoimi rukami,” D i SSSR, September 1960, supplement; O. Tanus, “Iskusstvo riadom s toboi. Abazhury,” D i SSSR, September 1961, 43–45; M. Shvetsova, “Sdelaite sami,” Rabotnitsa, November 1960, 30; “Polezny sovety,” Rabotnitsa, November 1956, 31; and V. Golovina, “Tsveti na balkone,” Rabotnitsa, April 1962, 31. 66.  “Polezny sovety,” 31. 67.  Aleksandr Vysokovskii, “Will Domesticity Return?” trans. Carl Sandstrom, in Russian Housing in the Modern Age, 284. The chronic problems of construction defects and consumer goods shortages are addressed in greater detail in chapter 2 and chapter 4, respectively. 68.  Kamenskii et al., “Dlia novykh kvartir,” 6.

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69.  Deborah A. Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia (New York, 2007), 14. 70.  Catriona Kelly, “Appendix 5, Table I: Publication of Advice Literature, 1950–1970: Titles per annum,” in Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford, 2001), 403. 71.  Ruble, “From khrushcheby to korobki,” 244. 72.  M. Chereiskaia, “Uiut,” Rabotnitsa, June 1960, 24. 73.  Ibid., 25. 74.  Victoria de Grazia, “Introduction,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria de Grazia, with Ellen Furlough (Berkeley, 1996), 1–11. The articles in this collection by Leora Auslander, Erika Rappaport, and Belinda Davis are illustrative of these various conceptions of women in modern western societies, as is the following monograph: Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley, 2001). 75. B. Bitekhtin, “Ekonomicheskii kommentarii. Na vystavke i na proizvodstve,” D i SSSR, January 1963, 20. 76. Gadaskina, “Mebel′ ekonomichnykh kvartir,” 34; B. Neshumov, “Sovety khudozhnika. Kak rasstavit′ mebel′,” D i SSSR, February 1959, 46; and A. Belov and L. Voloshinov, “Dlia nashikh kvartir. Est′ vozmozhnost′ uvelichit′ vypusk malogabaritnoi mebeli,” VL, 23 September 1960, 2. 77.  A. Pavlinskaia, “Nas dolzhny okruzhat′ krasivye veshchi,” VL, 3 April 1959, 2. 78.  V. Etenko, “Tsvet vashei komnaty,” D i SSSR, July 1960, 26. 79.  See, for example, B. Merzhanov, “Shkafy-peregorodki v kvartire,” D i SSSR, May 1964, 23–25, and I. V. Gol′verk and A. P. Shcherbenok, “Planirovka i oborudovanie novykh ekonomichnyk kvartir,” A i s Leningrada, February 1958, 8–10. 80.  Baiar, “Sovety khudozhnika. Dekorativnye predmety v kvartire,” 45–47. 81.  See, for example, L. Kamenskii, “Mebel′ vashei kvartiry,” D i SSSR, January 1961, 45; I. Rabotnova, “O vyshivke,” D i SSSR, August 1961, 48; M. Medvedev, “Raby veshchei,” VL, 16 September 1960, 2; and Z. Supishchikova, “Chtoby bylo uiutno,” Rabotnitsa, November 1961, 29. 82.  Kamenskii, “Mebel′ vashei kvartiry,” 45. 83.  A. Saltykov, “O khudozhestvennom vkuse v bytu,” Rabotnitsa, July 1959, 26–28. 84.  N. Lazareva, “Veschchi rasskazyvaiut,” Rabotnitsa, April 1964, 27 and I. Voeikova, “Uiut—v prostote,” Rabotnitsa, October 1964, 31. 85.  Leonid Leonov, “Krasota vospityvaet,” D i SSSR, January 1959, 9–10. 86.  For more on the transformation of the decorative arts during the Khrushchev period, see Gerchuk, “The Aesthetics of Everyday Life in the Khrushchev Thaw,” 93–99. 87.  V. Savitskaia, “Dve vystavki litovskii SSR,” D i SSSR, August 1964, 7. 88.  Rabotnova, “O vyshivke,” 45–46; Z. Supishchikova, “Chtoby bylo uiutno,” Rabotnitsa, November 1961, 29; I. Suvorova, “Na urovne plokhogo rynka,” D i SSSR, June 1962, 46–47; and I. Voeikova, “Uiut—v prostote,” 31. 89.  See the patterns provided on pp. 50–54 of the August 1961 issue of D i SSSR. 90.  N. Maksimova, “Izdeliia iz plastmassy,” D i SSSR, April 1961, 41–45. 91.  A. Drabkin, “Krasivoe sosedstvuiut s nekrasivym,” D i SSSR, February 1962, 36–37. 92.  A. Piletskii, “Khudozhestvennoe konstruirovanie. Pribory mebel′,” D i SSSR, March  1964, 24–25. 93.  A. Gol′dshtein, “Zelen′ v kvartire,” D i SSSR, May 1959, 46. 94.  Ibid., 46–47, and A. Gol′dshtein, “Sovety khudozhnika. Srezannye tsvety v kvartire,” D i SSSR, August 1959, 46–47. 95.  A. Volodin, “S dumoi o sovetskom cheloveke. Na vystavke malogabaritnoi mebeli,” VL, 5 September 1959, 1. 96.  Julie Hessler, “Cultured Trade: The Stalinist Turn Towards Consumerism,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London, 2000), 196–197.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 4 6 – 51     2 3 3

97.  I. Kriukova and S. Temerin, “Iskusstvo v byt. Tri nereshennykh voprosa,” D i SSSR, September 1961, 2. 98. “Na stroikakh, predpriiatiiakh i v proektnykh organizatsiiakh. Oborudovanie i oformlenie kvartir i obshchestvennykh zdanii. Lektsii i konsul′tatsii khudozhnikov i arkhitektorov,” S i a Leningrada, January 1961, 38. 99.  See Victor Buchli, “Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight against Petit-Bourgeois Consciousness in the Soviet Home,” Journal of Design History 10 (1997): 164. 100. Iu. E. Shass, “O tvorcheskoi napravlennosti v zastroike zhilykh kvartalov Leningrada,” A i s Leningrada, April 1959, 20. 101.  M. I. Lifanov, “O byte pri kommunizme,” in Za kommunisticheskii byt, ed. M. I. Lifanov (Leningrad, 1963), 53. 102.  Ivanova and Makhrovskaia, “Voprosy kompozitsii zhilogo mikroraiona,” 10–14. 103.  See, for example, V. G. Sinitsyn, Byt epokhi stroitel′stva kommunizma, 2nd ed. (Cheliabinsk, 1963), 56, 60–62; Lifanov, “O byte pri kommunizme,” 79; and N. G. Dmitriev, Cheloveku nuzhen dom (Moscow, 1965), 3–4. 104. I. Grechnev and G. Bregin, “V gostiakh u novoselov,” Kirovskii rabochii, 4 July 1962, 1. 105. “Novosely,” VL, 10 October 1959, 1. 106.  N. P. Krasnov et al., Dom i byt (Moscow, 1962), 3. 107. “Korotkie rasskazy; nash konkurs. Po-domashnemu,” Krokodil, 10 February 1962, 10. 108.  V. Farmakovskaia, “Nuzhna povsednevnaia zabota o liudiakh,” Stroitel′, 7 May 1963, 2. 109.  K. Kantor, “Iskusstvo v proizvodstve. Oformlenie zavoda—podlinnoe tvorchestvo,” D i SSSR, June 1963, 27–28. 110. M. Berezhnov and M. Gatchinskii, “Trud i byt—nerazryvnye chasti kommunisti­ cheskogo obraza zhizni. Dlia sebia, dlia vsekh,” VL, 20 July 1963, 2. 111.  Richard Stites, “Man to Machine,” in Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, 1989), 145–164. 112.  For a brief overview of the “culture of production” (kul′tura proizvodstva) in the 1930s, see Catriona Kelly and Vadim Volkov, “Directed Desires: Kul′turnost′ and Consumption,” in Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881–1940, ed. Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd (Oxford, 1998), 296–297. On the merging of materialism with productivity, see Siegelbaum, “Stakhanovites in the Cultural Mythology of the 1930s,” in Stakhanovism, 210–246. 113.  Ia. Shagalin, “Trud i krasota,” D i SSSR, October 1961, 10. 114.  Evgenii Fedorov, “O bol′shom chelovecheskom schast′e,” VL, 14 February1956, 2. 115.  Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), 47. 116.  Mark B. Smith, “Part One: From Sacrifice to Paradise,” in Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb, IL, 2010), 23–136. 117.  Martiny, “Housing and Construction in the Period of ‘De-Stalinization,’ ” 89. 118.  See, for example, Cooke, “Beauty as a Route to ‘the Radiant Future,’ ” 137–160. 119. N. B. Lebina, “Zhil′e: Kommunizm v otdelnoi kvartire,” in Obyvatel′ i reformy. Kartiny povsednevnoi zhizni gorozhan v gody NEPa i khrushchevskogo desiatiletiia, by N. B. Lebina and A. N. Chistikov (Saint Petersburg, 2003), 186. 120.  Reid, “Destalinization and Taste,” 177–201, esp. pp. 178 and 192. 121.  For a concise overview of Soviet nationalities theory and policy under Khrushchev, see Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, “The Dilemma of Nationalism in the Soviet Union,” in The Soviet Union under Brezhnev and Kosygin: The Transition Years, ed. John W. Strong (New York, 1971), 121–125. 122.  Raymond G. Stokes, who makes this argument regarding the design and production of plastic consumer goods in East Germany, informs this assertion. See Stokes, “Plastics and the New Society: The German Democratic Republic in the 1950s and 1960s,” in Style and Socialism, 75.

2 3 4     N OT E S TO PAG E S 51– 6 0

123.  Julian Cooper, “The Civilian Production of the Soviet Defence Industry,” in Technical Progress and Soviet Economic Development, ed. Ronald Amann and Julian Cooper (New York, 1986), 39. The entire chapter (pp. 31–50) outlines the civilian activities of the Soviet defense industry. On assimiliatsiia in particular, see p. 42. 124.  For more on the kitchen debate see Karal Ann Marling, “Nixon in Moscow: Appliances, Affluence, and Americanism,” in As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 242–283 and Walter L. Hixson, “From the Summit to the Model Kitchen: The Cultural Agreement and the Moscow Fair,” in Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York, 1997), 151–183. 125.  Marling, “Nixon in Moscow,” 242–283. 126.  On the American dream home during the Cold War, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988), 152–153. 127.  Arnat, “Novaia arkhitektura i ee trebovaniia,” 22. 128.  Susan E. Reid, “Who Will Beat Whom? Soviet Popular Reception of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959,” Kritika 9 (Fall 2008): 890–900 (the quotations are on p. 891 and p. 900, respectively).

2. Foundations   1.  Ivan Shapovalov, “Vse bol′she novoselov!” Vechernii Leningrad [hereinafter, VL], 3 January 1962, 2.   2.  Other metaphors for his leadership that Khrushchev favored were those of an orchestra and a ship which, unlike that of a battle, evoke harmony and accord. See Nancy Condee, “Cultural Codes of the Thaw,” in Nikita Khrushchev, ed. William Taubman, Sergei Khru­ shchev, and Abbott Gleason, trans. David Gehrenbeck, Eileen Kane, and Alla Bashenko (New Haven, 2000), 173.   3.  Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, trans. and ed. Strobe Talbott (Toronto, 1974), 93.   4.  Helena Goscilo, “Luxuriating in Lack: Plenitude and Consuming Happiness in Soviet Paintings and Posters, 1930s–1953,” in Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style, ed. Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko (London, 2009), 54.   5.  Balina and Dobrenko, “Introduction,” in Petrified Utopia, xxi.  6. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981), 38.  7. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 105.  8. “Prazdnik stroitelei,” VL, 10 August 1957, 1.   9.  N. B. Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn′ Sovetskogo goroda. Normy i anomalii, 1920–1930 gg. (St. Petersburg, 1999). 10.  N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhenskii, Azbuka kommunizma. Populiarnoe ob″iasnenie programmy Rossiiskoi kommunisticheskoi partii bol′shevikov (Petrograd, 1920), 273–276. 11.  D. Sokolov, “S novosel′em, druz′ia!” VL, 28 April 1962, 1. 12.  A. Itigin, “Tvoi zemliaki, Leningradets. Podari liudiam schast′e,” VL, 9 October 1964, 3. 13.  “O razvitii zhilishchnogo stroitel′stva v SSSR. Postanovlenie Tsentral′nogo Komiteta KPSS i Soveta Ministrov SSSR,” VL, 2 August 1957, 1–2. 14.  D. Sokolov, “V chest′ 40-let. Velikogo Oktiabria. Bol′shoe novosel′e,” VL, 25 October 1957, 1. 15. See, for example, I. Grechnev and G. Bregin, “V gostiakh u novoselov,” Kirovskii rabochii, 4 July 1962, 1. 16.  VL, 6 March 1964, 1. 17.  E. Perovskii, “Novosel′e,” Stroitel′, 11 August 1962, 2. 18.  See for example, “Gorodskoe khoziaistvo Leningrada v tret′em godu semiletki,” VL, 20 January 1961, 4. 19.  “Segodnia za Narvskoi zastavoi,” VL, 3 February 1962, 2.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 61– 6 5     2 3 5

20. A. Durandina, “Glazami starozhila,” Proletarskaia pobeda, 11 February 1957, 2. That this piece on the Moscow district appeared a few months before the 1957 housing decree demonstrates a degree of continuity in the trope “then versus now.” On “communist construction” and other ideas and reforms of the Khrushchev era with precursors in the Stalin period, see A. V. Pyzhikov, “Sovetskoe poslevoennoe obshchestvo i predposylki khrushchevskikh reform,” Voprosy istorii, no. 2 (2002): 33–43. 21.  The objective of refurbishing and greening the territory surrounding prewar housing to eliminate the contrast between old and new districts, is detailed, for example, in O. A. Ivanova, “Novye tendentsii v ozelenenii zhilykh territorii,” Stroitel′stvo i arkhitektura Leningrada [hereinafter, S i a Leningrada], August 1964, 11. 22.  A. Demidkin et al., “Eta zadacha nam po plechu,—tak govoriat stroiteli Leningrada,” VL, 10 August 1957, p. 2. 23.  M. Vasil′ev, “Chtoby liudiam zhilos′ eshche luchshe,” VL, 22 April 1958, p. 2 24.  Thomas C. Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism: The Press and the Socialist Person after Stalin (Bloomington, IN, 2005), 61. 25. See, for example, N. Grigor′ev, Zhilishchnaia problema budet reshena (Moscow, 1963), and A. I. Shneerson, Chto takoe zhilishchnyi vopros (Moscow, 1959). 26. “Zhilishchnoe-stroitel′stvo v SSSR,” in Zhilishchnoe stroitel′stvo v SSSR. Moskva. Leningrad. Kiev (Moscow, 1963), 3–16. 27. Ibid. 28.  “I zhizn′ khorosha, i zhit′ khorosho,” Rabotnitsa [newspaper], 18 August 1960, 2. 29. M. Lifanov, “O byte pri kommunizme,” in Za kommunisticheskii byt, ed. M. I. Lifanov (Leningrad, 1963), 57. 30.  Evgenii Fedorov, “O bol′shom chelovecheskom schast′e,” VL, 14 February1956, 2. 31.  N. G. Dmitriev, Zhilishchnyi vopros. Dva mira—dva podkhoda (Moscow, 1973). 32.  Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Public Opinion and Ideology: Mythology and Pragmatism in Interaction (New York, 1986), 15. 33.  Ibid., 11. 34.  A. V. Ikonnikov, “Voprosy teorii arkhitektury. Formirovanie prostranstva v sovremennoi arkhitekture,” S i a Leningrada, March 1960, 36. 35.  M. Terent′ev, Milliony novykh kvartir (Moscow, 1957), 97. 36.  D. Sokolov, “Predprazdnichnoe novosel′e,” VL, 26 April 1958, 2. 37.  Susan E. Reid, “The Khrushchev Kitchen: Domesticating the Scientific-Technological Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary History 40 (2005): 296. 38.  Sally Belfrage, A Room in Moscow (New York, 1958), 47. 39. See, for example, “Beseda s direktorom Nauchno-issledovatel′skogo instituta zhi­ lishcha B. R. Rubanenko. ‘Bystro, deshevo, dobrotno!’ ” Rabotnitsa, September 1957, 1–3; E. Barklai, “Spetsial′noe khudozhestvenno-konstruktorskoe biuro. Reportazh. Slovo imeet . . . Otdel zhilogo inter′era,” Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR [hereinafter, D i SSSR], November 1963, 13; M. Smirnova, “O veshchakh, kotorye nam sluzhat. Zametki chitatelei. Tam budet udobnee,” VL, 20 November 1959, 2; TASS, “Dlia nashego byta,” VL, 11 February 1961, 5; and “Dlia vas, zhenshchiny! Beseda s direktorom Pavil′ona luchshikh obraztsov Vsesoiuznoi Torgovoi Palaty I.I. Gordeevym,” Rabotnitsa, November 1959, 22. 40.  “Dlia vas, zhenshchiny!” 22. 41. Ibid. 42.  See, for example, R. Blashkevich, “Novaia mebel′ dlia kukhni,” D i SSSR, August 1962, 25. 43.  A. Cherepakhina, “Vasha domashniaia masterskaia,” Rabotnitsa, October 1959, 32. 44.  For discussions of this phenomenon in postwar French and US society, see, respectively, Claire Duchen, “Occupation Housewife: The Domestic Ideal in 1950s France,” French Cultural Studies 2 (February 1991): 1–11, and Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988). 45. This is encapsulated in Melanic Ilic˘, “Women in the Khrushchev Era: An Overview,” in Women in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Melanie Ilic˘, Susan E. Reid and Lynne Attwood

2 3 6     N OT E S TO PAG E S 6 5 –70

(Houndmills, UK, 2004), 5–28. As a whole, this collection explores the status and experience of, as well as attitudes toward, women in work, religion, the home, and the international arena. 46.  Reid, “The Khrushchev Kitchen,” 306. 47.  See, for example, Smirnova, “O veshchakh, kotorye nam sluzhat,” 2. 48.  Reid, “The Khrushchev Kitchen,” 299. 49.  V. G. Sinitsyn, Byt epokhi stroitel′stva kommunizma, 2nd ed. (Cheliabinsk, 1963), 147. 50.  P. Kozhanyi, “Pis′ma chitatelei. Domovaia kukhnia,” Rabotnitsa, May 1958, 29. 51.  S. Shatrov, “Vsled za skazkoi!” Krokodil, 20 February 1959, 2. 52. Ibid. 53.  See V. Presnova et al., “Uluchshit′ obsluzhivanie v stolovoi,” Rabotnitsa, 14 April 1956, 2. 54.  Reid, “The Khrushchev Kitchen,” 294. For more on public dining and consumer culture, see Oksana Zaporozhets and Iana Krupets, “Sovetskii potrebitel′ i reglamentirovannaia publichnost′. Novye ideologemy i povsednevnost′ obshchepita kontsa 50-kh,” in Sovetskaia sotsial′naia politika. Stseny i deistvuiushchie litsa, 1940–1985, ed. E. R. Iarska-Smirnova and P. V. Romanov (Moscow, 2008), 315–336. 55. G. D. Andrusz, “Housing Ideals, Structural Constraints and the Emancipation of Women,” in Home, School and Leisure in the Soviet Union, ed. Jenny Brine, Maureen Perrie and Andrew Sutton (London, 1980), 20. 56.  A. Riabushin, “Sotsiologiia byta i khudozhnik. Zhilishche novogo tipa,” D i SSSR, February 1963, 5 and 7. 57.  The shortcomings in design, defects in construction and inadequacies in urban planning conveyed in published commentary mirror those broached in meetings of builders and brigadiers, workers and managers of building trusts and industries related to construction, and members of municipal government and Party committees. One meeting of such interested parties, held in Leningrad in 1959, concluded that the following were essential to improving housing construction: affording greater attention to planning the proximity of everyday services to apartment houses; raising the quality of building materials and construction work; insisting upon the accountability of engineers and construction workers; intensifying the mechanization of the construction trade; and encouraging socialist competition in building, as well as supporting construction brigades. See, for example, Tsentral′nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga [hereinafter, TsGA SPb], f. 25, op. 80, ed. khr. 138. 58.  Bor. Egorov, “Malaia statistika,” Krokodil, 10 September 1963, 2. 59.  M. Bekher, “Nevziraia na litsa. Poselilis′—proslezilis′,” Proletarskaia pobeda, 17 April 1962, 2. 60.  D. Sokolov, “Nazyvaem adresa brakodelov. Obzor pisem,” VL, 21 March 1961, 2. 61.  See, for example, V. Svetlov, “Chitateli nam pishut. Remont . . . posle remonta,” VL, 23 September 1957, 2 and A. Bobin, “Brakodely,” VL, 6 September 1958, 2. 62.  S. Radin, “Chitateli kritikuiut, predlegaiut, rasskazyvaiut. Nedodelki s garantiei,” VL, 27 November 1962, 2. 63.  B. Iudin, “Lozhka degtia,” Krokodil, 30 June 1960, 10–11. 64.  Unsigned, “Obsuzhdaem, razdumyvaem, sporim. . . . Kakoi dol′zhna byt′ novaia kvartira? Ekonomichno, dobrotno, v korotkie sroki sooruzhat′ zhilye doma,” VL, 10 July 1961, 2. 65.  “V novoi kvartire, v novom dome,” VL, 17 August 1961, 2. 66.  M. Lifanov, “O byte pri kommunizme,” 49. 67.  M. Lanskoi, “Pozdravliaem i priglashaem,” Krokodil, 20 December 1959, 5. 68. Mikhail Edel′, “Krokodil′skoe obozrenie. Balada o vodoprovode,” Krokodil, 20 January 1961, 2. 69.  E. Tsugulieva, “Domovoi iz giprograda,” Krokodil, 30 June 1961, 12. 70.  M. P. Sokolov, “O kharaktere planirovki i zastroiki zhilykh raionov,” S i a Leningrada, June 1961, 5. For further discussion of possible solutions to the anomie of prefabricated block panel construction, see, for example, M. P. Sokolov, “Proektirovanie zhilykh mikroraionov,” S i a Leningrada, July 1960, 8–12.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 70 –76     2 37

71.  Ikonnikov, “Voprosy teorii arkhitektury,” 36. 72. Subtitled S Legkim parom! (Have a nice sauna), this 1975 film was directed by Eldar Ryazanov. 73.  “Korotkie rasskazy. Nash konkurs. Standartnyi epizod,” Krokodil, 28 February 1962, 4. 74.  See, for example, N. Latis, “Chitateli rasskazivaiut, predlagaiut, kritikuiut. 40 domov i—ni odnogo magazina,” VL, 18 March 1963, 2. 75.  Willard S. Smith, “Housing in the Soviet Union—Big Plans, Little Action,” in Soviet Economic Prospects for the Seventies: A Compendium of Papers Submitted to the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States (Washington, DC, 1973), 417. 76.  See, for example, A. Smetannikov and M. Zvezdochkin, “Iz pochty Vechernego Leningrada. V pervykh etazhakh,” VL, 19 January 1960, 2. 77.  A. Anufirev et al., “ ‘Gde oni, magaziny?’ sprashivaet novosël. Bystree rasshiriat′ torgovliu na Maloi Okhte,” VL, 14 March 1962, 2. 78. Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (Berkeley, 1978), 270. 79.  Natalya Baranskaya, “A Week Like Any Other,” in A Week Like Any Other: Novellas and Stories, trans. Pieta Monks (Seattle, 1990), 1–62. 80. Timothy Sosnovy, “Housing Conditions and Urban Development in the USSR,” in New Directions in the Soviet Economy: Studies Prepared for the Subcommittee on Foreign Economic Policy, Congress of the United States, Part II-B: Economic Performance (Washington, DC, 1966), 552. 81. Gertrude E. Shroeder, “Retail Trade and Personal Services in Soviet Cities,” in The Contemporary Soviet City, ed. Henry W. Morton and Robert C. Stuart (Armonk, NY, 1984), 210. 82.  Irina H. Corten, Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture: A Selected Guide to Russian Words, Idioms, and Expressions of the Post-Stalin Era, 1953–1991 (Durham, NC, 1992), 64, 74, 33, 42, and 88. 83.  M. Medvedev, “Tysiachi novoselii. Fel′eton,” VL, 6 October 1963, 4. 84.  Victor Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism (Oxford, 2000), 87. 85.  Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, 2000), 83–84. 86.  Ibid., 93. 87.  Ehd. Arenin, “Rasskazy o liudiakh nashego goroda. Stroitel′—eto zvuchit gordo,” VL, 15 August 1958, 2. 88.  On the Stalin era, see Brooks, “The Economy of the Gift: ‘Thank You, Comrade Stalin, for a Happy Childhood,’ ” in Thank You, Comrade Stalin! 83–105. 89.  Fedorov, “O bol′shom chelovecheskom schast′e,” 2. 90.  Vladimir Paperny, “Men, Women, and the Living Space,” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age, ed. William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble (Cambridge, 1993), 149–170 (esp. 149). 91.  Susan E. Reid, “Who Will Beat Whom? Soviet Popular Reception of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959,” Kritika 9 (Fall 2008): 862–864. 92.  M. P. Sokolov, “O kharaktere planirovki i zastroiki zhilykh raionov,” 6. 93.  On these and other characteristics of satire throughout modern Russian history, see Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, 1962), 16; Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York, 1964), 72–73; and Leonard Feinberg, The Satirist: His Temperament, Motivation, and Influence (Ames, IA, 1963), 41. 94.  Steven E. Harris, “The Politics of Complaint,” in Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Washington, DC, 2013), 267–299. 95.  Mark B. Smith, Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb, IL, 2010), 126. 96.  As chapter 5 demonstrates, the same dichotomy in terms of content existed between published and unpublished commentary on problems in the old housing stock.

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  97.  Henry W. Morton, “What Have Soviet Leaders Done about the Housing Crisis?” in Soviet Politics and Society in the 1970s, ed. Henry W. Morton and Rudolf L. Tokes (New York, 1974), 163.  98. Alexander Werth, Russia under Khrushchev (New York, 1961), 168.   99.  B. A. Grushin, Chetyre zhizni Rossii v zerkale oprosov obshchestvennogo mneniia. Zhizn′ 1-ia. Epokha Khrushcheva (Moscow, 2001), 128. 100.  Ibid., 129. 101. Corten, Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture, 42. 102.  Here I am borrowing from the title of the autobiography of the artist Al′fred Mirek, Krasnyi mirazh (Red mirage), which covers the years 1917 to 1960. The subtitle—Kak my verili v mify i lozh′ (How we believed in the myths and lies)—constitutes a more explicit indictment of the Soviet years. Nevertheless, Mirek concedes his own “belief in a bright future” during the Thaw, however blind (in his estimation) it may have been. See Mirek, Krasnyi mirazh: Kak my verili v mify i lozh′. Vospominaniia i razdum′ia (1917–1960) (Moscow, 2000), 213. 103.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 343, l. 425. 104. Shlapentokh, Soviet Public Opinion and Ideology, 128. 105.  Based on surveys of teachers, factory workers, medical professionals, transportation employees and pharmacists, the findings relayed in this and the preceding two paragraphs are gleaned from Iurii Aksiutin, Khrushchevskaia ‘ottepel′’ i obshchestvennye nastroeniia v SSSR v 1953–1964 gg. (Moscow, 2004), 329–344. 106.  See, for example, TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 48, l. 174. 107.  For a detailed account and analysis of the uprising, see Vladimir A. Kozlov, Mass Uprisings in the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the Post-Stalin Years, trans. and ed. Elaine McClarnand MacKinnon (Armonk, NY, 2002), 224–287. 108. Harrison E. Salisbury, To Moscow—And Beyond: A Reporter’s Narrative (New York, 1960), 38. 109.  Ibid., 8.

3. Interior Spaces  1. Daniil Granin, Posle svad′by. Roman (Leningrad, 1959), 8–9.   2.  V. I. Vorotnikov, Takoe vot pokolenie . . . (Moscow, 1999), 130 and 175.  3. Peter Corrigan, The Sociology of Consumption: An Introduction (London, 1997), 100 and 106.   4.  For more on this, see chapter 1 in this book.   5.  The distinction between taste as a hierarchical concept and style as a democratic one is borrowed from Ruth Madigan and Moira Munro, “ ‘House Beautiful’: Style and Consumption in the Home,” Sociology 30 (February 1996): 41.   6.  Victor Buchli, “Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight against Petit-Bourgeois Consciousness in the Soviet Home,” Journal of Design History 10 (1997): 162.  7. Ibid., 170.  8. Granin, Posle svad′by, 8–9.  9. Ibid., 18. 10. Deborah A. Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia (New York, 2007), 4–7. For more on the concept of communist morality, see the chapter “Communist Morality and Notions of Private Life.” With regard to household decoration, Field asserts—contrary to the argument here—that during the Khrushchev period, there was greater emphasis on modernity and hygiene than on the moral implications of taste. Ibid., 17. 11.  M. I. Lifanov, Bor′ba za ukreplenie sotsialisticheskogo byta (Leningrad, 1956), 4. 12.  Ibid., 4. 13.  Ibid., 23–36. 14.  The focus here is on character traits, rather than on activities that build character. See chapter 4 for more on the relationship between communist morality and socialist activism.

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15.  N. P. Krasnov et al., Dom i byt (Moscow, 1962), 3. 16. See, for example, Jules David Prown, “The Truth of Material Culture: History or Fiction?” in History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, ed. Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery (Washington, DC, 1993), 13, and Leora Auslander, “Beyond Words,” American Historical Review 110 (October 2005): 1023. 17.  Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Durham, NC, 1990), 4. 18. Granin, Posle svad′by, 9. 19.  See G. Bocharov, “Abazhury,” Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR [hereinafter, D i SSSR], April 1960, 35. 20.  Prown, “The Truth of Material Culture,” 1. 21.  This notion of the “textualization” of objects, with a focus on discursive representations of material culture, is borrowed from Auslander, “Beyond Words,” 1023–1024. 22.  A. Chekalov, “O kompozitsii inter′era,” D i SSSR, February 1962, 20. 23.  N. Lazareva, “Veshchi rasskazyvaiut,” Rabotnitsa, April 1964, 27. 24.  Susan E. Reid, “Destalinization and Taste, 1953–1963,” Journal of Design History 10 (1997): 188–189. This is not to say that homemaking did not afford women an opportunity to express their individuality, as illustrated elsewhere in this chapter by their appropriation of both professional discourse and domestic space. 25.  See, for example, Victoria de Grazia, “Introduction,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria de Grazia, with Ellen Furlough (Berkeley, 1996), 1–11. 26.  For a broader analysis of poshlost′ and a detailed history of the concept in Russian thought, see Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 34 and 41–66. 27.  Unsigned, “Teleperedacha. Dlia vas zhenshchiny,” Krokodil, 20 February 1960, 9. 28.  Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge, 1992), 135–136. 29. “Raz″iasnenie tovarishchu zastenchivomu,” Krokodil, 20 January 1960, 2. Incidentally, this accounts for the mascot of the magazine: a bold (red) crocodile with sharp teeth and a pitchfork, armed and ready to “cut up” and “root out” anomalies in Soviet society. According to one reader addressing both magazine and mascot, “As I understand it, you have a pitchfork in your hands and a Party card in your pocket.” “V poriadke otcheta, ili moi tost pered chitateliami,” Krokodil, 30 December 1960, 2. That said, although Krokodil followed official directives, like other popular publications, it welcomed input from its readership, soliciting from them letters and short stories, as well as advice on what to publish. See, for example, “Moi novogodnii tost,” Krokodil, 30 December 1964, 2. 30.  Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 252–255 and 266–268, and Robert H. Zieger, “The Paradox of Plenty: The Advertising Council and the Post-Sputnik Crisis,” Advertising and Society Review 4 (2003), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/asr/v004/4.1zieger.html. 31. See Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988), 148. 32.  See, for example, Vadim Volkov, “The Concept of Kul′turnost′: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London, 2000), 210–230 (esp. p. 216); Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Becoming Cultured: Socialist Realism and the Representation of Privilege and Taste,” in The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992), 218; and Dunham, In Stalin’s Time, 22. 33.  This definition is drawn from Dunham, In Stalin’s Time, 19–20, and Boym, Common Places, 34 and 66–73. 34.  Nikolai Dement′ev, Moi Dorogi. Povest′ (Leningrad, 1958), 19, 72, and 77. 35.  Ibid., 13. 36.  Vera Chubakova, “Khochu byt′ schastlivoi,” in Khochu byt′ schastlivoi. Povesti (Moscow, 1963), 311.

24 0    N OT E S TO PAG E S 8 9 – 97

37.  Ibid., 313. 38.  N. Golubev, “Rasskaz. Modern terrakotovogo tsveta,” Krokodil, 10 May 1962, 12. 39. Vladimir A. Kozlov, Mass Uprisings in the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the Post-Stalin Years, trans. and ed. Elaine McClarnand MacKinnon (Armonk, NY, 2002), 80. 40.  Varvara Karbovskaia, “Simochka,” Krokodil, 10 July 1958, 5. 41.  Susan E. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61 (Summer 2002): 219. 42.  Vasily Pavlovich Aksenov, “Na polputi k lune,” in Na polputi k lune. Kniga rasskazov (Moscow, 1966), 152. 43.  V. Romanovskaia, “Moi sosedi,” in Nachalo puti. Rasskazy, ed. V. S. Bakinskii et al. (Leningrad, 1960), 177. 44.  Aleksandr Volodin, Fabrichnaia devchonka (Leningrad, 1957), 5. 45.  For further insight into “visiting” (obshchenie) and other practices related to Russian hospitality, see Dale Pesman, “Like the Trojan Horse’s Gut: Hospitality and Nationalism,” in Russia and Soul: An Exploration (Ithaca, 2000), 150–169. 46.  A. Platonova, “Storozhika,” Rabotnitsa, May 1961, 28. 47. Ibid. 48.  S. Shatrov, “Stolik na pauch′ikh nozhakh,” Krokodil, 10 September 1962, 13. 49.  According to Vera Dunham, culturedness functioned “to encode the proper relationship . . . between mores and artefacts.” Dunham, In Stalin’s Time, 22. 50. Volodin, Fabrichnaia devchonka, 5. 51.  On adultery and communist morality, see Field, Private Life, 69. 52.  Katerina Clark, “The Khrushchev Years,” in The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981), 210–233 (esp. p. 231). 53.  On the association of women with the domestic sphere from the late tsarist period through the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, see Lynne Attwood, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia: Private Life in a Public Space (Manchester, 2010). 54. The male and female types outlined here are certainly not exclusively “Soviet.” Humorous parallels can be found, for example, in French popular culture, as evident in the 1958 Jacques Tati film Mon Oncle. 55.  Elena Zdravomyslova and Anna Temkina, “The Crisis of Masculinity in Late Soviet Discourse,” trans. Liv Bliss, Russian Studies in History 51 (Fall 2012): 13–34. For a summary of interpretations of the “derogation of men in the Soviet family,” see Elena Stiazhkina, “The ‘Petty-Bourgeois Woman’ and the ‘Soulless Philistine’: Gendered Aspects of Everyday Life from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s,” trans. Liv Bliss, Russian Studies in History 51 (Fall 2012): 83. This is not to say that Soviet men played no role whatsoever in the home. For example, where the cultural upbringing of their children was concerned, educational experts advised fathers to inculcate in them kul′turnost′, help them with their homework and take them on excursions; mothers, meanwhile, were assigned to instill in them norms of etiquette. Deborah A. Field, “Mothers and Fathers and the Problem of Selfishness in the Khrushchev Period,” in Women in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Melanie Ilic˘, Susan Reid and Lynne Attwood (Houndmills, UK, 2004), 101. 56.  Stiazhkina, “The ‘Petty-Bourgeois Woman,’ ” 63–97. 57.  Chubakova, “Khochu byt′ schastlivoi,” 314. 58.  Ibid., 345. 59.  Shatrov, “Stolik na pauch′ikh nozhakh,” 12–13. Of course, such “incidents” can be construed as commentary on the poor quality of consumer wares, as much as on male incomprehension or wifely browbeating. 60.  Mikh. Edel′, “Divan,” Krokodil, 20 April 1958, 12. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 192. 64. Boym, Common Places, 33–35 (the quotations are on p. 34 and p. 35, respectively). 65.  Ibid., 35–36.

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66. Karen Kettering, “ ‘Ever More Cosy and Comfortable’: Stalinism and the Soviet Domestic Interior, 1928–1938,” Journal of Design History 10 (1997): 126. 67.  On the 1930s, see Kettering, “ ‘Ever More Cosy and Comfortable,’ ” 127–128, and Boym, Common Places, 38–39. The revival of coziness during the postwar Stalin era is the focus of Dunham, In Stalin’s Time. 68. M. Lifanov, “O byte pri kommunizme,” in Za kommunisticheskii byt, ed. M. I. Lifanov (Leningrad, 1963), 78. Although male pronouns are used here, the universal person is implicit. 69.  Victor Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism (Oxford, 2000), 59. 70.  See, for example, I. V. Gol′verk and G. N. Mindlin, “Novym kvartiram—sovremennuiu mebel′,” Stroitel′stvo i arkhitektura Leningrada, February 1960, 36. On the transformation of the furniture industry during the Khrushchev period, see Iurii Gerchuk, “The Aesthetics of Everyday Life in the Khrushchev Thaw in the USSR (1954–64),” trans. Susan E. Reid, in Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe, ed. Susan E. Reid and David Crowley (Oxford, 2000), 90–93; and Blair A. Ruble, “From khrushcheby to korobki,” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, ed. William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble (Cambridge, 1993), 232–270. 71.  For illustrations from the unpublished sources noted, see Steven E. Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Washington, DC, 2013), 231–235 and 278–286. 72.  See, for example, V. Zhgun, M. Gorshkov, F. Sokolovskii, and Ia. Pashkov, “U nas est′ vozmozhnosti pokonchit′ s ‘mebel′nym golodom,’ ” Vechernii Leningrad [hereinafter, VL], 9 August 1957, 2, and “Univermag ‘grosh tsena,’ ” Krokodil, 20 January 1958, 6–7. 73.  A. Golub, “Idilliia byla narushena . . . ,” Krokodil, 30 January 1960, 6–7. 74.  Vit. Alenin and B. Ol′gin, “Suchki i zadorinki,” Krokodil, 10 June 1957, 13. 75.  Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford, 2001), xxiii. 76.  Eliane Jacquet, High Heels in Red Square (New York, 1961), 17. 77.  David Mace and Vera Mace, The Soviet Family (Garden City, NY, 1963), 163–165. 78. This notion of de jure versus de facto ownership is borrowed from Aleksandr Vysokovskii, who makes this distinction in the following discussion of the Gorbachev-era restructuring of housing ownership. Aleksandr Vysokovskii, “Will Domesticity Return?” trans. Carl Sandstrom, in Brumfield and Ruble, Russian Housing in the Modern Age, 275–277. 79. Sophie Chevalier, “The French Two-Home Project: Materialization of Family Identity,” in At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space, ed. Irene Cieraad (Syracuse, NY, 1999), 83–94 (esp. pp. 86–90). 80.  Marshall MacDuffie, The Red Carpet: 10,000 Miles through Russia on a Visa from Khrushchev (New York, 1955), 296–297. 81.  Apparently, at times during the Soviet period, icons and pictures of saints were officially condoned—provided they were properly labeled, for example, as “A Relic of the Eighteenth Century” or “A Family Heirloom.” Joseph Novak, The Future Is Ours, Comrade: Conversations with Russians (Garden City, NY, 1960), 23. 82. Ibid. 83.  Svetlana Boym, “The Archeology of Banality: The Soviet Home,” Public Culture 6 (Winter 1994): 275. 84.  Anders Aman, “Architecture and Ideology: Discussion and Conclusion,” in Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era: An Aspect of Cold War History (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 239–259. 85.  Vysokovskii, “Will Domesticity Return?” 283. 86.  Olga Matich, “Remaking the Bed: Utopia in Daily Life,” in Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment, ed. John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich (Stanford, 1996), 59–78. 87.  On Russian writers of the late tsarist and early Soviet periods, see Amy C. Singleton, No Place Like Home: The Literary Artist and Russia’s Search for Cultural Identity (Albany, 1979), 117–118. The notion that a preoccupation with material objects or a fixation on daily

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life would corrupt cultural, spiritual, and ethical development was also a popular one that persisted throughout the Soviet period. See Pesman, “Like the Trojan Horse’s Gut,” 50. 88. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time, 3–23. 89.  Ibid., 15–18 and 21. 90. Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street, 253–265. 91. Lifanov, Bor′ba za ukreplenie sotsialisticheskogo byta, 18. 92. A. Pashkevich and K. Evdokimov, “Bol′shoi razgovor o kul′ture byta sovetskogo cheloveka,” VL, 20 September 1960, 2.

4. Liminal Places   1.  The following vividly traces this trajectory from “kitchen culture” to dissent: Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Boston, 1990).  2. Maurice Hindus, The Kremlin’s Human Dilemma: Russia after Half a Century of Revolution (Garden City, NY, 1967), 105.   3.  This assertion is central to Vladimir Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia (New York, 1989).   4.  The concern that individuals would assume this “antiquated precept” was voiced, for example, by G. A. Kurovskii, Dom, v kotorom my zhivem (Kuibyshev, 1963), 15.  5. Hindus, The Kremlin’s Human Dilemma, 104.  6. Ibid., 105.  7. S. Kruzhkov and A. Pereslavtsev, Kommunisticheskie vzaimootnosheniia—v byt! (Moscow, 1963), 8.   8.  Oleg Kharkhordin, “Reveal and Dissimulate: A Genealogy of Private Life in Soviet Russia,” in Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy, ed. Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar (Chicago, 1997), 358.  9. Ibid., 359. 10.  Ibid., 360. 11. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, “Introduction,” in Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia, ed. Lewis H. Siegelbaum (Houndmills, UK, 2006), 1–21. 12.  N. B. Lebina, “Zhil′e: Kommunizm v otdel′noi kvartire,” in N. B. Lebina and A. N. Chistikov, Obyvatel′ i reformy. Kartiny povsednevnoi zhizni gorozhan v gody NEPa i khru­ shchevskogo desiatiletiia (Saint Petersburg, 2003), 194. 13.  These and numerous other elements of communal apartment life are superbly conveyed in the video tours and photographs posted on the website compiled by Ilya Utekhin, Alice Nakhimovsky, Slava Paperno, and Nancy Ries: “Communal Living in Russia: A Virtual Museum of Everyday Life,” http://kommunalka.colgate.edu/index.cfm. 14.  See chapter 3 in this book. 15.  Similarly, Mark Smith asserted that the mikroraion was designed to alter consciousness and create a communist “paradise”—an ideological orientation that distinguished the housing district of the Khrushchev years from both that of the Stalin era (the kvartal) and that in the capitalist West. Mark B. Smith, Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb, IL, 2010), 117. 16.  A. Kuchinskaia and R. Mustafina, “Chitateli nam pishut. Khorosho v nashem dome,” Vechernii Leningrad [hereinafter, VL], 15 September 1956, 2. 17.  This assertion about popular input in Soviet newspapers draws on Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 70. 18.  G. Semenov, et al., “Riadom s novymi domami. Reid rabkorov gazet Vechernii Leningrad, Turbostroitel′ i Znamia truda po Kalininskomu raionu,” VL, 23 January 1957, 2. 19. M. Lifanov, “O byte pri kommunizme,” in Za kommunisticheskii byt, ed. M. I. Lifanov (Leningrad, 1963), 51.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 110 –113     24 3

20.  Aleksandr Tsukerman, Dom v kotorom my zhivem (Syktyvkar, 1964), 3. The various activities discussed in the current chapter were evident also in rural areas. See, for example, A. A. Morev, V druzhnoi sem′e. Rasskaz o rabote obshchestvennogo domovogo komiteta (Donetsk, 1962). 21.  The label “parasite” was applied not only to unemployed persons, but also to individuals active in the illegal economy, as well as ones belonging to youth subcultures and religious sects. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Social Parasites: How Tramps, Idle Youth, and Busy Entrepreneurs Impeded the Soviet March to Communism,” Cahiers du monde russe 47 (January–June 2006): 377–408 (esp. pp. 389–390). 22.  See, for example, M. L. Itkin, “Obshchestvennye nachala v ideologicheskoi rabote,” in Velikoe desiatiletie v zhizni partii i sovetskogo naroda (1953–1963 gg.). Materialy XXII Nauchno-issledovatel′skoi konferentsii, eds. I. I. Maslov and V. A. Mitrofanov (Moscow, 1964), 78–82. 23.  The following especially well illustrates the convergence of different types of activism: M. Isakov, “Navstrechu vyboram v Verkhovnyi Sovet SSSR. V etom dome—agitpunkt,” VL, 13 January 1962, 1. 24.  David T. Cattell, Leningrad: A Case Study of Soviet Urban Government (New York, 1968), 65. 25.  The campaign against religion that Khrushchev conducted was a mass phenomenon. For an outline of its many facets, see Mikhail V. Shkarovskii, “The Russian Orthodox Church in 1958–1964,” trans. Liv Bliss, Russian Studies in History 50 (Winter 2011–2012): 71–95. 26.  Lifanov, “O byte pri kommunizme,” 79. 27.  Alfred John Di Maio, Jr., Soviet Urban Housing: Problems and Policies (New York, 1974), 166–168. For more extensive treatments of the functions of house committees and their interactions with both official housing bureaus and a range of popular social bodies, see I. P. Prokopchenko, “Domovye komitety i ikh aktiv,” in Obshchestvennye organizatsii v zhilishchnom khoziaistve (Moscow, 1966), 13–44, and V. N. Litovkin and V. P. Balezin, Obshchestvennye domovye komitety (Moscow, 1962). 28.  Thomas C. Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism: The Press and the Socialist Person after Stalin (Bloomington, IN, 2005), 70. On the role of the early Soviet press in guiding the behavior of readers, see the introduction (esp. pp. 7, 18 and 19). 29.  Simon Huxtable, “A Compass in the Sea of Life: Soviet Journalism, the Public, and the Limits of Reform after Stalin, 1953–1968” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 2012), 260–261. 30.  Huxtable, “A Compass in the Sea of Life.” Central to his dissertation as a whole, this assessment is especially vividly illustrated in all of its complexity in the chapter titled: “ ‘The Reader Is Not an Icon’: From the Reader-Citizen to the Reader-Consumer,” 234–279. 31. E. Vistunov, “Vse temy khoroshi . . . ,” in Segodnia v nashem gorode . . . Gazete Vechernii Leningrad—70 let, comp. M. N. Gurenkov (Leningrad, 1987), 345–346. 32.  Christine G. Varga-Harris, “Green Is the Colour of Hope? The Crumbling Façade of Postwar Byt through the Public Eyes of Vecherniaia Moskva,” Canadian Journal of History XXXIV (August 1999): 193–219. 33.  M. Gatchinskii, “Prishli frontoviki . . . ,” in Segodnia v nashem gorode . . . , 334. 34. Lenoe, Closer to the Masses, 235–237. 35.  Vistunov, “Vse temy khoroshi . . . ,” 345–346. 36.  Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, 2000), 7. 37.  Huxtable, “A Compass in the Sea of Life,” 63. For more on socialist legality, see chapter 6 in this dissertation. 38. For an illustration of this process in action—in this case involving reader concerns about dangerous, icy conditions—see Komissarov et al., “I zimoi na ulitsakh goroda dolzhno byt′ chisto. Reid rabkora gazety Vechernii Leningrad,” VL, 29 January 1959, 2, and “Chitateli nam pishut. Po sledam nashikh vystuplenii. ‘I zimoi na ulitsakh goroda dolzhno byt′ chisto,’ ” VL, 12 March 1959, 2.

24 4    N OT E S TO PAG E S 114 –119

39.  Illustrative are the following reports compiled by the executive committee of the Leningrad city soviet, with which Vechernii Leningrad was affiliated: Tsentral′nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga [hereinafter, TsGA SPb], f. 7384, op. 37, d. 1278, 1305, 1343, 1372, 1396. 40. Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! 17. 41. These figures are not unproblematic. For instance, the addition is incorrect for the totals provided for 1959: the numbers, based on a monthly breakdown, actually add up to 13,063 letters received and 3,608 published. See TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 1372, l. 55 for the totals, and ll. 1, 6, 12, 19, 27, 32, 36, 40, 45, 50, 55 for the monthly figures. It should also be acknowledged that the summaries for 1961 through 1964 were missing from these files. 42.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 1278, ll. 35–36. 43.  Ibid., l. 37. 44. M. Iakovleva, “Blagoustroistvo goroda—delo vsekh Leningradstev. Bystree navesti chistotu i obraztsovyi poriadok na ulitsakh, vo dvorakh. Vsemu etomu otsenka—bespechnost′,” VL, 14 May 1956, 2. 45. Ibid. 46.  See, for example, TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 1278, l. 58 and TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 1305, ll. 14–15. 47. Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism, 45. Letters from readers, which could command the attention of high state and Party officials, were similarly approached as “opinion polls” during the Stalin era. See Lenoe, Closer to the Masses, 70–71. 48. “Segodnia—Den′ sovetskoi pechati. Pozhelaniia nashikh chitatelei,” VL, 5 May 1958, 2. 49.  See, for example, Maurice Hindus, House without a Roof: Russia after Forty-Three Years of Revolution (Garden City, NY, 1961), 36. 50.  N. Kochergina et al., “A kak u vas vo dvore? Rabkorovskii reid gazety Vechernii Leningrad,” VL, 31 January 1962, 2. 51. Iu. E. Shass, “O tvorcheskoi napravlennosti v zastroike zhilykh kvartalov Leningrada,” Arkhitektura i stroitel′stvo Leningrada, April 1959, 20. 52.  See Iu. Arnat, “Novaia arkhitektura i ee trebovaniia,” Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, January 1962, 22. 53.  P. Khromova et al., comp., Uchit′sia, rabotat′ i zhit′ po-kommunisticheski (Moscow, 1963), 4. 54.  See, for example, V. G. Sinitsyn, Byt epokhi stroitel′stva kommunizma, 2nd ed. (Cheliabinsk, 1963), 56 and 60–62, and N. G. Dmitriev, Cheloveku nuzhen dom (Moscow, 1965), 3–4. 55.  D. Sokolov, “V pokhod za chistotu i blagoustroistva. Kto zapozdal—vesna ili domovye rabotniki?” VL, 14 April 1960, 1. 56.  L. Maksimov and T. Chernov, Khoziaeva svoego doma (Kemerovo, 1963), 10. 57. A. Kitkov, “Sozdadim obshchestvennye remontnye druzhiny!” VL, 22 September 1962, 2. 58.  Susan E. Reid, “The Meaning of Home: ‘The Only Bit of the World You Can Have to Yourself’,” in Borders of Socialism, 155. 59.  V. Egorov, A. Vykov, and V. Novokreshchenov, “Tvoia kvartira, tvoi dom. Za chistotu i poriadok v rodnom gorode,” VL, 13 August 1962, 2. 60.  A. Dashkin, “Iz pochty Vechernego Leningrada. O tekh, kto ne berezhet zhil′ia,” VL, 18 January 1961, 2. 61.  T. Kruzhkova et al., “Soderzhat′ v obraztsovom poriadke zhilishchnyi fond goroda. ‘V dome my ne prosto zhil′tsy, a khoziaeva,’ ” VL, 23 October 1959, 2. 62.  “Pravila pol′zovaniia zhilym pomeshcheniem,” in Zhilishchno-bytovye voprosy. Sbornik rukovodiashchikh materialov, comp. V. V. Ovchinnikov and P. G. Zhuk (Moscow, 1964), 103–107. Approved by the Soviet of Ministers of the RSFSR in October 1962, these regulations drew on earlier iterations for its content. See, for example, T. D. Alekseev, comp., Zhilishchnye zakony. Sbornik vazhneishikh zakonov SSSR i RSFSR, postanovlenii, instruktsii i prikazov po zhilishchnomu khoziaistvu po sostoianiiu na 1 noiabria 1957 goda, 3rd ed. (Moscow, 1958).

N OT E S TO PAG E S 119 –124     24 5

63.  See Theodore H. Friedgut, “Citizens and Soviets: Can Ivan Ivanovich Fight City Hall?” Comparative Politics 10 (July 1978): 462, and Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life, 26. 64.  M. Zorin et al., “V svoem dome—my khoziaeva! Zhiltsy svoimi rukami proizvodiat remont zhilogo fonda, blagoustraivaiut dvory,” VL, 6 June 1961, 2. 65.  Kruzhkova et al., “Soderzhat′ v obraztsovom poriadke,” 2. 66.  Siobhan Peeling, “Dirt, Disease and Disorder: Population Re-placement in Postwar Leningrad and the ‘Danger’ of Social Contamination,” in Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945–1950, ed. Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron (Houndmills, UK, 2009), 120. 67.  Ibid., 123 and 131. 68.  Ibid., 123 and 131–132. 69.  Ibid., 119. 70.  Despite the added hardship of the Blockade, the experience of Leningrad during World War II and its aftermath mirrored that of other cities that had suffered the ruin of their urban infrastructure. On the challenges of postwar reconstruction throughout the Soviet Union, see Smith, “Reconstruction and Its Legacies, 1944–1950,” in Property of Communists, 25–58, and Donald Filtzer, “Attenuated Recovery: The End of Rationing, Housing and Health,” in Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System after World War II (Cambridge, 2002), 77–116. Focusing on Sevastopol, the following offers an intensive local perspective on the same issues: Karl D. Qualls, “Wartime Destruction and Historical Identification,” in From Ruins to Reconstruction: Urban Identity in Soviet Sevastopol after World War II (Ithaca, 2009), 11–45. 71.  Such expectations were not restricted to matters of housing. See James H. Oliver, “Citizen Demands and the Soviet Political System,” American Political Science Review 63 (June 1969): 470. 72.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 1372, ll. 36–37. 73.  See, for example, B. Smirnov and M. Varfolomeeva, “Chitateli nam pishut. Korotki signaly,” VL, 8 February 1957, 2; M. Gatchinskii, “Novosël, dom i dvor,” VL, 16 August 1960, 2; “Vozle vashego doma. Obzor pisem chitatelei,” VL, 11 July 1963, 2; and TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 1396, l. 7. 74.  Iu. Krugliakov, “O rekonstruktsii starykh zhilykh domov,” VL, 3 January 1958, 2. 75.  Huxtable, “A Compass in the Sea of Life,” 250. 76.  M. I. Lifanov, Bor′ba za ukreplenie sotsialisticheskogo byta (Leningrad, 1956), 20. Although male pronouns are used here, the universal person is implicit. 77.  Ibid., 23–24. 78.  A. Naiman, “Voskresnik,” in Nachalo puti. Rasskazy, ed. V. S. Bakinskii et al. (Leningrad, 1960), 155. 79.  M. Berezhnov and M. Gatchinskii, “Tvoi dom rodnoi. Goriachee slovo kommunista,” VL, 3 January 1963, 2. 80.  Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle—My Life as a Dissenter, trans. Michael Scammell (New York, 1978). For more on the unpleasant and even threatening aspects of communal living, see N. B. Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn′ Sovetskogo goroda. Normy i anomalii, 1920–1930 gg. (St. Petersburg, 1999), 196–199; Katerina Gerasimova, “The Soviet Communal Apartment,” in Beyond the Limits: The Concept of Space in Russian History and Culture, ed. Jeremy Smith (Helsinki, 1999), 123; and Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999), 47–49. 81. A. Pashkevich and K. Evdokimov, “Bol′shoi razgovor o kul′ture byta sovetskogo cheloveka. Initsiativa i opyt partiinykh organizatsii. Vot ona, sovetskaia Okhta,” VL, 20 September 1960, 2. 82.  Lifanov, “O byte pri kommunizme,” 79. 83.  M. Gatchinskii, “Novoe stuchitsia v dom,” VL, 14 March 1960, 2. 84.  Although the extent of this practice has not been widely studied, there is evidence that municipal officials sometimes responded to the pressures of the housing crisis by repurposing separate apartments as small kommunalki or as multigenerational dwellings. For insight into this phenomenon, see Steven E. Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Washington, DC, 2013), 125–126.

24 6     N OT E S TO PAG E S 124 –13 0

85.  Gatchinskii, “Novoe stuchitsia v dom,” 2. 86.  V. Tkachenko, “Sornaia trava,” VL, 18 November 1964, 3. 87. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 143. 88.  Tkachenko, “Sornaia trava,” 3. 89.  Maksimov and Chernov, Khoziaeva svoego doma, 10–14. 90. Lifanov, Bor′ba za ukreplenie sotsialisticheskogo byta, 22. 91.  “Obzor pisem. P′ianits i khuliganov—k otvetu!,” VL, 15 September 1960, 2. 92. Kurovskii, Dom, v kotorom my zhivem, 7. 93.  Brian La Pierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw (Madison, 2012). On the legal provisions noted, see pp. 28–31 and 81; on the variety of offences included under the rubric “hooliganism,” see pp. 105–108; and on the assessment that hooliganism was endemic in Soviet society during the 1950s and 1960s, see p. 19, as well as the introduction (pp. 3–16). 94.  Harold J. Berman and James W. Spindler, “Soviet Comrades’ Courts,” Washington Law Review 38 (Winter 1963): 895. At the height of their activity, 52,000 people staffed 5,580 comrades’ courts in Moscow alone. See Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia (Berkeley, 1999), 285. 95.  For an overview of the mandates and modus operandi of these patrols, which boasted about 2.5 million members organized into 80,000 patrol units within only a year of their establishment in 1959, see La Pierre, “Empowering Public Activism: The Khrushchev-Era Campaign to Mobilize Obshchestvennost′ in the Fight against Hooliganism,” in Hooligans in Khru­shchev’s Russia, 132–167. 96.  W. W. Kulski, The Soviet Regime: Communism in Practice, 4th ed. (Syracuse, NY, 1963), 177–179, and Prokopchenko, “Domovye komitety i ikh aktiv,” 147–165. 97. Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia, 283. In some respects, published sources mirrored unpublished ones in their portrayals of the impact of comrades’ courts on interactions between neighbors. For depictions drawn from the latter, see Deborah A. Field, “Apartment Life and Its Challenges to Privacy,” in Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia (New York, 2007), 27–37. 98. Kulski, The Soviet Regime, 177–179, and Prokopchenko, “Domovye komitety i ikh aktiv,” 147–165. 99. Ibid. 100.  See, respectively, Berman and Spindler, “Soviet Comrades’ Courts,” 842–910, and La Pierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia, 148. 101. Kulski, The Soviet Regime, 177–179; Prokopchenko, “Domovye komitety i ikh aktiv,” 147–165; and La Pierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia, 147. 102.  V. Dubrovin, “Pis′ma s kommentariiami. Pust′ budet stydno! . . . ,” VL, 27 April 1961, 2. 103.  M. Gatchinskii, “Vysokuiu kul′turu—v byt. Tvoi sosedi,” VL, 10 April 1961, 2. 104.  D. Ol′khovskaia, “Ubezhdat′ i prinuzhdat′,” VL, 18 November 1960, 2. 105. Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual, 110–117. 106. Morev, V druzhnoi sem′e, 11. 107.  Ibid., 21–22. 108.  Joseph Novak, The Future Is Ours, Comrade: Conversations with Russians (Garden City, NY, 1960), 34. The more sinister functions of housing managers are vividly rendered in the 1920s play Zoikina Kvartira by the fictional character “Aliluya.” See Mikhail Bulgakov, Zoyka’s Apartment: A Tragic Farce in Three Acts, trans. Nicholas Saunders and Frank Dwyer (Lyme, NH, 1996), 91–147. 109. Kulski, The Soviet Regime, 151. 110.  N. Gerasimova, “Na moral′nye temi. Zhestkost′,” VL, 16 May 1962, 2. 111. Ibid. 112.  Dubrovin, “Pis′ma s kommentariiami,” 2. 113.  Miriam Dobson, “The Redemption Mission,” in Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime and the Fate of Reforms after Stalin (Ithaca, 2009), 133–155.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 131–13 4     247

114.  For more on these facets of the 1961 Party Program, see ibid., 207–213. 115.  La Pierre, “Empowering Public Activism: The Khrushchev-Era Campaign to Mobilize Obshchestvennost′ in the Fight against Hooliganism” and “The Rise and Fall of the Soft Line on Petty Crime,” in Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia, 132–167 and 168–199, respectively. The second of these chapters presents the police truncheon as symbolizing the hard line, which included an increase in coercion and violence, as well as rising courtroom convictions. 116.  The shared spaces in which individuals were mobilized or “activated” on the pretext of socialist enthusiasm might also have served as sites for subversive discussions. Sarah Davies demonstrates the potential for this divergent reading through her analysis of notes compiled by informants who had eavesdropped on conversations, jokes and gossip exchanged in the expressly public space of bread lines during the Stalin era. See Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge, 1997). 117.  Lynne Attwood, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia: Private Life in a Public Space (Manchester, 2010), 219–240. This might be explained by the view of spousal relations as a “family matter.” See La Pierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia, 85. 118.  This assertion is informed by the characterization of late socialist modes of ritual delineated by the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak. See, for example, “Soviet Hegemony of Form: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2003): 480–510. 119.  Interviewee Natalya Aleksandrovna Belovolova, in Donald J. Raleigh, Russia’s Sputnik Generation: Soviet Baby Boomers Talk about Their Lives (Bloomington, IN, 2006), 67. This “code” was also widely disseminated via popular publications. See, for example, the inside cover of the January 1962 issue of Rabotnitsa. 120.  V. Lisovskii, “Na moral′nye temy. Sorniaki v kvartirakh,” VL, 5 August 1963, 2. 121.  La Pierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia, 190. 122.  S. Druzhinina, “Iz pochty Vechernego Leningrada. Khuliganov—k otvetu,” VL, 3 June 1960, 2. 123. Brian La Pierre, “Private Matters or Public Crimes: The Emergence of Domestic Hooliganism in the Soviet Union, 1939–1966,” in Borders of Socialism, 199; and Fitzpatrick, “Social Parasites,” 394–395. 124. This periodization is elaborated in Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1932 (Oxford, UK, 1982). 125.  For illustrations, see Richard Stites, “We: The Communist Future,” in Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, 1989), 167–222; A. N. Chistikov, “Razvlecheniia v epokhu diktatury proletariata,” in Obyvatel′ i reformy, 125–127; and Stephen V. Bittner, “Green Cities and Orderly Streets: Space and Culture in Moscow, 1928–1933,” Journal of Urban History 25 (November 1998): 22–56. 126.  Varga-Harris, “Green Is the Colour of Hope?” 203–205. The following 1954 compilation details specific initiatives undertaken by activists to plant flowers and trees, and to create places for rest and play in residential courtyards, touting the results of their endeavors and offering practical suggestions for those inclined to follow their example: M. I. Rachevskaia, ed., Nash dvor (Moscow, 1954). 127. Smith, Property of Communists, “Reconstruction and Its Legacies, 47–50. 128.  By 1966, there were about 4,000 house committees in the Russian Republic, composed of hundreds of thousands of activists. Prokopchenko, “Domovye komitety i ikh aktiv,” 13–14. 129.  For an overview of the earlier volunteer “society women,” see Rebecca Balmas Neary, “Domestic Life and the Activist Wife in the 1930s Soviet Union,” in Borders of Socialism, 107–122. 130.  Friedgut, “Citizens and Soviets,” 462. 131. Sinitsyn, Byt epokhi stroitel′stva kommunizma, 219. On this theme during the Revolution, as well as campaigns of the 1920s for communist morality that included efforts to eradicate drinking and smoking, see Stites, “Godless Religion,” in Revolutionary Dreams, 101–123. 132.  S. Altunin, “Dom—tvoi, beregi ego!,” VL, 26 February 1963, 1. 133.  Lenoe, “Agitation, Propaganda and the NEP Mass Enlightenment Project,” in Closer to the Masses, 11–45.

24 8     N OT E S TO PAG E S 13 4 –14 0

134.  Altunin, “Dom,” 1. 135.  “K godovshchine iiun′skogo Plenuma TsK KPSS. . . . V otnosheniiakh, v sem′e, v bytu . . . ,” VL, 29 May 1964, 2. 136. Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism, 19. 137. On the distinction between propaganda and agitation, see Lenoe, Closer to the Masses, 26–29. 138.  Pashkevich and Evdokimov, “Bol′shoi razgovor o kul′ture byta,” 2. 139.  Berezhnov and Gatchinskii, “Tvoi dom rodnoi,” 2. 140. V. Shorin, “Obshchestvennii smotr kachestva stroitel′stva. Pust′ kazhdaia kvartira raduet novoselov. Zhivi i raduisia!” VL, 21 September 1963, 2.

5. The Quest for Normalcy 1. Tsentral′nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga [hereinafter, TsGA SPb], f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 48, ll. 161–63. 2.  Underlined in the original, apparently by the signatories, and then in red pencil, likely by the recipients. TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 48, l. 157. 3.  One square meter is roughly ten square feet. 4. TsGA SPb, f. 9626, op. 1, d. 291, l. 150. State inspectors verified the deficiencies in major repairs that the tenants had catalogued and ordered that they be rectified by 10 April 1962. Ibid., ll. 148–149. 5.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 8, ll. 2–4. 6.  Mark B. Smith, Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb, IL, 2010), 94. 7.  David T. Cattell, Leningrad: A Case Study of Soviet Urban Government (New York, 1968), 144–145. 8.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 8, l. 8. 9.  See chapter 2 in this book. 10. Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957, trans. and ed. Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk, NY, 1998), 102. 11.  See chapter 4 in this book. 12. Smith, Property of Communists, 19 and 141–144. 13.  Ibid., 34. 14.  See, for example, Iu. Alekssev, “Pansionat na kliukve,” Krokodil, 30 April 1960, 13; E. Tsugulieva, “Vosemnadtsataia vaza Aleksandry Sergeevny,” Krokodil, 10 February 1961, 12; Ia. Arkad′ev, “Karmanologiia,” Krokodil, 20 July 1961, 6; and S. Pushkov, “Predsedatel′skaia ulitsa,” Krokodil, 20 November 1964, 4. 15. Smith, Property of Communists, 108. 16. Ibid. 17.  For decrees and resolutions pertaining to individual and cooperative housing, see V. V. Ovchinnikov and P. G. Zhuk, comp., Zhilishchno-bytovye voprosy. Sbornik rukovodiashchikh materialov (Moscow, 1964), 43–74. 18. For more on the construction and operation of housing cooperatives, see Smith, Property of Communists, 163–165, and Alfred John Di Maio, Jr., “The Cooperative Housing Movement,” in Soviet Urban Housing: Problems and Policies (New York, 1974), 175–198. Incidentally, cooperative housing construction, which peaked in 1966, appears to have been somewhat of an elite phenomenon, favoring members of the intelligentsia with a greater base of capital and resources. Its more popular counterpart, “people’s construction” (narodnaia stroika), was initiated by industrial workers in 1955, but for various reasons petered out by the end of the decade. See Steven E. Harris, “Class and Mass Housing,” in Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Washington, DC, 2013), 154–187. 19.  Single women, who were disproportionate among the unmarried population of the Soviet Union after World War II, had particular difficulty finding decent living space because

N OT E S TO PAG E S 14 0 –14 8    249

they were largely discounted in policy formulation. The separate apartment, for example, was initially conceptualized as the ideal dwelling for a rigidly delineated family of one couple plus two children. Lynne Attwood, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia: Private Life in a Public Space (Manchester, 2010), 155–158. 20.  V. Lisovskii, “Na moral′nye temy. Sorniaki v kvartirakh,” Vechernii Leningrad [hereinafter, VL], 5 August 1963, 2. 21.  Vera Panova, Kak pozhivaesh′ paren′? P′esa v dvukh chastiakh (Moscow, 1962). 22.  Iurii Trifonov, “Obmen,” in Rasskazy i povesty (Moscow, 1971), 10–65. 23.  V. Boronin and V. Ivanov, “Iazychniki,” Krokodil, 10 April 1961, 6. 24.  N. Vasil′ev et al., “Reid Vechernego Leningrada. Posetitel′ prishel v ispolkom . . . ,” VL, 9 February 1962, 2. 25. See M. Medvedev, “Postoialnyi dvor Madam Karoliny,” Krokodil, 30 September 1959, 10. 26.  V. Kozlov, “Ne shutki radi. Zolotaia komnata,” VL, 12 April 1957, 4. 27.  M. Novikova, “Spekulianty zhilploshchad′iu,” VL, 13 March 1956, 2. 28. Michael Alexeev, “The Effect of Housing Allocation on Social Inequality: A Soviet Perspective,” Journal of Comparative Economics 12 (June 1988): 228–234. 29. Vasil′ev et al., “Reid Vechernego Leningrada,” 2. 30.  See, for example, TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 8, ll. 26–41. 31.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 41, d. 763, ll. 1–13. For quantitative and qualitative assessments of the work of housing administrations and bureaus fielding oral and written complaints and requests, see TsGA SPb, f. 9626, op. 1, d. 13. 32.  Henry W. Morton, “Who Gets What, When and How? Housing in the Soviet Union,” Soviet Studies XXXII (April 1980): 237 and 242. 33.  For an overview of the debates surrounding this amalgamation, and its implications for both citizens and municipal officials, see Harris, “The Waiting List,” in Communism on Tomorrow Street, 111–153. 34.  The matter of eligibility and the establishment of various registries conjure up questions about priority in housing allocation. For more on this, see chapter 6. See also Christine Varga-Harris, “Forging Citizenship on the Home Front: Reviving the Socialist Contract and Constructing Soviet Identity during the Thaw,” in The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: A Social and Cultural History of Reform in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Polly Jones (London, 2006), 101–116. 35.  See, for example, E. Akulina, “Poriadok polucheniia zhiloi ploshchadi,” Rabotnitsa [newspaper], 9 February 1961, 2. 36.  Mikh. Edel′, “Rasskaz. Moglo byt′ khuzhee,” Krokodil, 10 August 1960, 6. 37. Ibid. 38.  The maneuverable housing stock was reserved precisely for contingencies like having to relocate tenants lacking alternative housing arrangements while extensive repairs were conducted on their home. 39. M. Filatov, “Po sledam odnogo pis′ma. Kochevniki iz kvartyry No. 43,” VL, 30 November 1961, 2. 40.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 48, l. 161. 41.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2095, l. 325. 42.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 343, l. 102. 43.  Ibid., ll. 99–101. 44.  Donald Filtzer, “Standard of Living versus Quality of Life: Struggling with the Urban Environment in Russia during the Early Years of Post-War Reconstruction,” in Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention, ed. Juliane Fürst (London, 2006), 81–102. 45.  The issues and complex procedures involved in determining the housing rights of wartime evacuees and reassigning their living space after World War II are outlined in Rebecca Manley, “ ‘Where Should We Resettle the Comrades Next?’ The Adjudication of Housing Claims and the Construction of the Post-War Order,” in Late Stalinist Russia, 233–246, and

2 5 0     N OT E S TO PAG E S 14 8 –152

Donald G. Leitch, “Soviet Housing Administration and the Wartime Evacuation,” American Slavic and East European Review IX (October 1950): 180–190. 46.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2065, l. 391. 47.  Ibid., l. 385. 48.  Ibid., l. 382. 49.  See, for example, Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street, 126. 50.  A. Volodin, “Dom na oboronnoi,” VL, 25 February 1963, 1. 51.  On the various official and popular themes that permeated Soviet public culture during World War II, see Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, “ ‘Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families’: Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War II Propaganda,” Slavic Review 59 (Winter 2000): 825–847 and Aileen G. Ranbow, “The Siege of Leningrad: Wartime Literature and Ideological Change,” in The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union, ed. Robert W. Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch (Urbana, IL, 2000), 154–170. 52. “Invalid of the First Group” refers to a category that included individuals unable to work because of severe physical injuries. For more on the classification of war invalidy, see chapter 6. 53.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 46, ll. 61 and 63. 54.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 48, l. 174. 55.  N. G. Dmitriev, Cheloveku nuzhen dom (Moscow, 1965), 3. 56. Timothy Sosnovy, “The Soviet Housing Situation Today,” Soviet Studies XI (July 1959): 4–6. 57.  Henry W. Morton, “What Have Soviet Leaders Done about the Housing Crisis?” in Soviet Politics and Society in the 1970s, eds. Henry W. Morton and Rudolf L. Tokes (New York, 1974), 173. 58.  M. Terent′ev, Milliony novykh kvartir (Moscow, 1957), 97. 59.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 341, ll. 470–71. 60.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2095, l. 42. 61.  Ibid., l. 37. 62.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 633, ll. 199–207. 63.  See chapter 1 in this book. 64.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2083, l. 89. 65.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 343, l. 151. 66. See, for example, Dmitriev, Cheloveku nuzhen dom, 4. On the different meanings associated with the term lichnost′ and its development throughout Russian history, see Derek Offord, “Lichnost′: Notions of Individual Identity,” in Constructing Russia in the Age of Revolution: 1881–1940, ed. Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd (Oxford, 1998), 13–25. 67.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 46, l. 118. 68.  Ibid., l. 135. The precise nature of Koskin’s physical challenges is unclear. The correspondence regarding his case (ll. 110–145) reveals that he is able to carry out light physical labor. One document, for example, cites him as a cafeteria employee. 69.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 46, l. 61. 70.  Anna Krylova, “ ‘Healers of Wounded Souls’: The Crisis of Private Life in Soviet Literature, 1944–1946,” Journal of Modern History 73 (June 2001): 307–331. 71.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 47, ll. 50–51. 72.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 41, d. 766, l. 363. 73.  The first quotation is from Katerina Gerasimova, “The Soviet Communal Apartment,” in Beyond the Limits: The Concept of Space in Russian History and Culture, ed. Jeremy Smith (Helsinki, 1999), 126, and the second is from Katerina Gerasimova, “Public Privacy in the Soviet Communal Apartment,” in Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, ed. David Crowley and Susan E. Reid (Oxford, 2002), 223. 74. Natalya Baranskaya, Stranstvie bezdomnykh. Zhizneopisanie (Moscow, 1999), 11. For additional portraits of communal apartment life, see Natal′ia Lebina, “Communal, Communal, Communal World,” Russian Studies in History 38 (Spring 2000): 53–62; Gerasimova, “The Soviet Communal Apartment,” 107–30; and Svetlana Boym, “The Archeology of Banality: The Soviet Home,” Public Culture 6 (Winter 1994): 266.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 15 3 –161     2 51

75. “Obzor pisem. P′ianits i khuliganov—k otvetu!” VL, 15 September 1960, 2. See chapter 4 for a discussion of the ways in which such situations were cast as hindrances to constructing communist society in the domestic realm. 76. For a foray into the subject of spousal abuse, which remains understudied in the field of Soviet history, see Lynne Attwood, “Personal Tales,” in Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia, 219–240. 77.  Elena Kononenko, “Obuzdat′ p′ianits! (Po pismam chitatelei),” Rabotnitsa, September 1964, 23–24. 78.  Given the hostile relationship between the protagonist and his meddlesome neighbor, it is ironic that the thief in the story turns out to be not a resident of the kommunalka where the theft had occurred, but rather a housing committee activist in another apartment in the building. Anatolii Gladilin, “Domovoi ZhEKa No. 13 (Detektiv po-sovetski),” in Bespokoinik. Rasskazy raznykh let (Moscow, 1992), 177–231. 79.  “Korotkie rasskazy; nash konkurs. Pis′mo iz raia,” Krokodil, 10 March 1962, 4–5. 80.  Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York, 1986), 454. 81. Ibid. 82.  Ibid., 455. 83.  A. Luk′ianova, “Chitateli rasskazivaiut, predlagaiut, kritikuiut. Spasibo vam sosedi,” VL, 23 February 1963, 2. 84.  Vera Chubakova, “Sosedi,” in Moia vesna (Leningrad, 1958), 139–149. 85.  Deborah Ann Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia (New York, 2007), 32–37; the quotation is on p. 35. 86.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 46, ll. 191, 203, 209–10, 219 and 221. 87.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 633, l. 45. 88.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 343, ll. 43–44. 89.  Ibid., l. 45. 90.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 635, ll. 114–115. 91.  M. Gatchinskii, “Vysokuiu kul′turu—v byt. Tvoi sosedi,” VL, 10 April 1961, 2. 92.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 47, l. 16. 93.  Ibid., l. 30; capital letters are in the original. 94.  Ibid., l. 16. 95.  Ibid., l. 18. 96.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a., d. 46, ll. 172 and 181. 97.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 41, d. 766, l. 216. 98. Ibid. 99.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 41, d. 765, l. 362. 100.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 633, l. 81. 101.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 41, d. 766, ll. 61–96. The Leningrad city court granted Anna the right to the living space that she had requested partly because witnesses testified that she and her children, together with her husband and mother-in-law, had in fact lived together as a family. See ll. 85–87. 102.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2083, l. 16. For a glimpse into the wartime phenomenon of frontline families, see Mark Edele, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War: A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society, 1941–1991 (New York, 2008), 71–74. 103.  Sally Belfrage, A Room in Moscow (New York, 1958), 49. 104.  David K. Willis, Klass: How Russians Really Live (New York, 1985), 62–63. 105.  TsGA SPb, f. 9803, op. 1, d. 87, ll. 74–75. 106.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 1004, l. 32. The complexities surrounding the restitution of housing after repression are encapsulated in Nanci Adler, The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System (New Brunswick, NJ, 2002), 152–155. 107.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 1004, l. 33. 108.  Ibid., l. 154. 109.  Ibid., l. 153. 110.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 341, ll. 498–513. 111.  Ibid., l. 512 and l. 504, respectively.

2 52     N OT E S TO PAG E S 161–16 6

112.  Ibid., l. 508 and l. 512, respectively. 113.  The process of rehabilitation was convoluted and operated in fits and starts. As Nanci Adler demonstrated, rehabilitation was a multifaceted phenomenon encompassing release, the restoration of rights, the repudiation of a conviction, reinstatement into the Communist Party, and the issuing of a spravka (a certificate of proof of rehabilitation)—though not all of these were necessarily conferred upon an individual victim of repression, or at least, not at once. For example, there were prisoners released in the 1950s who did not obtain a spravka until the 1990s, while others never received such a document. Meanwhile, the number of rehabilitations granted declined markedly by 1964 and although Mikhail Gorbachev resumed the process in 1987, millions of applications for rehabilitation continued to be submitted even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. See Adler, The Gulag Survivor, 26–34. 114.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 635, l. 87. 115.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 41, d. 765, l. 185. 116.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 633, l. 77. 117. Polly, Jones, “Memories of Terror or Terrorizing Memories? Terror, Trauma and Survival in Soviet Culture of the Thaw,” Slavonic and East European Review 86 (April 2008): 346–371. 118.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 41, d. 760, l. 209. 119.  Ibid., ll. 188–190. 120.  Ibid., l. 192. 121.  Ibid., l. 210. 122.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 46, l. 212. 123.  Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle—My Life as a Dissenter, trans. Michael Scammell (New York, 1978), 86. 124.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2095, l. 264. 125.  This refers to a small pane set within a larger window that can be opened to allow fresh air into a room. 126.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2095, l. 263. 127.  Ibid., ll. 224–225. 128.  Ibid., l. 324. 129.  Ibid., l. 318. 130.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 47, ll. 144 and 146. 131.  Ibid., ll. 74–76. 132.  On the Soviet housing stock reserved for service employees (for example, maintenance workers), see Di Maio, Soviet Urban Housing, 117–118, and N. G. Dmitriev and S. N. Rozanov, Spravochnik po zhilishchnym voprosam (Moscow, 1963), 117. 133.  See TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 47, l 64. 134. Brodsky, Less Than One, 474–476. 135.  Although it was not discernible in the discourse that I examined, the executive committee of the Leningrad city soviet reported a shift at the end of the 1950s in the character of housing petitions—from straightforward applications for living space to appeals to exchange “smaller for larger living space, from the old stock to new buildings, and from semi-basement accommodations to well-equipped apartments.” Unfortunately, unlike other matters pertaining to housing distribution, the ispolkom did not quantify this change. Nevertheless, that this body would detect this kind of transformation is indicative of a rise in popular expectations. TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 8, l. 3. 136.  Vladimir Shlaptentokh, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia (New York, 1989), 14. 137.  Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981), 190. 138.  See, for example, Harris, “The Death and Resurrection of the Single-Family Apartment,” in Communism on Tomorrow Street, 55–68. 139. Attwood, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia, 134–35. 140. Smith, Property of Communists, 42–45.

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141. Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Durham, NC, 1990), 48. 142.  Vladimir Monastyrev, Dvoe u ruch′ia (Krasnodar, 1965), 170. 143. Anatolii Gladilin, “Bespokoinik,” in Bespokoinik, 85. Written in 1957, this story was denied publication in the Soviet Union, despite efforts on the part of Gladilin to revise it. Only after he immigrated to France in 1967 was he able to finally secure its publication, first with a German press. See Gladilin, “Bespokoinik,” 53, and the brief biography at the end of the collection Bespokoinik (not paginated and unsigned, it was presumably written by the editors, Viktoriia Shokhina and Aleksandr Nikishin). 144. Belfrage, A Room in Moscow, 48–49. 145.  Maurice Hindus, House without a Roof: Russia After Forty-Three Years of Revolution (Garden City, NY, 1961), 30–31. 146.  Daniil Granin, Posle svad′by. Roman (Leningrad, 1959), 5–7. 147.  Ibid., 8. 148.  Ibid., 5. 149. The universality of these fundamental material and metaphysical aspects of the home are evinced in anthropological research. See Donna Birdwell-Pheasant and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga, “Introduction: Houses and Families in Europe,” in House Life: Space, Place and Family in Europe, ed. Donna Birdwell-Pheasant and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga (Oxford, 1999), 1–35. 150.  Indicating more extensive continuity, Karl Qualls ascertained that “concern for the individual” had been the basis of Soviet architecture for decades. Karl D. Qualls, From Ruins to Reconstruction: Urban Identity in Soviet Sevastopol After World War II (Ithaca, 2009), 85. 151.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2095, l. 42. 152.  Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, trans. and ed. Strobe Talbott (Toronto, 1974), 87. 153.  Volodin, “Dom na oboronnoi,” 1. 154.  Marguerite Higgins, Red Plush and Black Bread (Garden City, NY, 1955), 33.

6. Constructing Soviet Identity and Reviving Socialism on the Home Front 1. Tsentral′nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga [hereinafter, TsGA SPb], f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 46, l. 192. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4.  See for example, ibid., l. 212. 5.  Ibid., l. 208. 6.  Ibid., l. 203. 7. The following publication provided Soviet officials with instructions for distributing living space in accordance with the different needs and various privileges of citizens: G. Makarov, Uchet nuzhdaiushchikhsia v zhiloi ploshchadi i poriadok ee raspredeleniia (Moscow, 1967). For a broad overview of the process of housing allocation, see Alfred John Di Maio, Jr., Soviet Urban Housing: Problems and Policies (New York, 1974), 117–131. 8.  Mark B. Smith, Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb, IL, 2010), 151. 9.  John N. Hazard, Soviet Housing Law (New Haven, CT, 1939), 8. 10.  See, for example, TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 46, l. 205. 11.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 46, l. 205. 12. This characterization of citizenship is informed by the sociologist T. H. Marshall, who chronicled an evolution from duties to rights, and delineated the development of three different aspects of citizenship over the course of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries:

2 5 4     N OT E S TO PAG E S 174 –179

civil (entailing the rights to liberty, free speech and due process of the law), political (involving the right to participate in the exercise of political power and elections), and social (the right to welfare). T. H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” in Class, Citizenship, and Social Development: Essays (Garden City, NY, 1965), 71–134. 13.  James H. Oliver, “Citizen Demands and the Soviet Political System,” American Political Science Review 63 (June 1969): 465. Appropriating the concept of gatekeeper from David Easton, Oliver challenged the perception at the time that citizens in Soviet society, unlike those in democratic countries, were not encouraged to express their demands, and that this limited the number of individuals who did, as well as the significance of their efforts. On how Easton conceptualized gatekeepers and distinguished between citizens in democratic systems and those in “dictatorial” ones, see David Easton, “The Input of Demands,” in A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York, 1965), 37–149. 14.  Oliver, “Citizen Demands and the Soviet Political System,” 466. 15.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 46, ll. 203–204. 16.  Ibid., ll. 193–194. 17.  Ibid., l. 189. 18.  Ibid., l. 187. 19.  See chapter 2 in this book. 20.  Although petitioners active in the workforce did not threaten to quit their jobs for a lack of housing, poor living conditions were a serious factor in the shortage and high turnover of labor in postwar Soviet society. See Donald Filtzer, “The Labour Shortage,” in Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization: The Consolidation of the Modern System of Soviet Production Relations, 1953–1964 (Cambridge, 1992), 59–91. 21.  D. Sokolov, “V novye kvartiry. Za deviat′ mesiatsev vvedeno v stroi 426 tysiach kvadratnykh metrov zhiloi ploshchadi,” Vechernii Leningrad [hereinafter, VL], 8 October 1958, 1. 22.  Lewis H. Siegelbaum, “Stakhanovites in the Cultural Mythology of the 1930s,” in Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (Cambridge, 1988), 210–246. 23.  Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, 2000), 83. 24.  S. Zhitelev, “Khronika iubileinykh dnei,” VL, 19 June 1957, 1. 25.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 635, l. 42. 26.  Ibid., l. 43 and l. 44, respectively. 27.  TsGA SPb, f. 9803, op. 1, d. 87, ll. 74–75. 28.  Ibid., l. 80. 29.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 46, ll. 32–33 (for the quotations) and l. 40 (for the biographical details). 30.  The material aspect of this desire for a tranquil retirement is discussed in greater detail in chapter 5. 31.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 633, ll. 44–45. 32.  Ibid., ll. 47–48. 33.  Zhitelev, “Khronika iubileinykh dnei,” 1. 34.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 635, l. 42. 35.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 46, ll. 32–33 and 40. 36.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 47, ll. 156–157. 37.  Much to her consternation, the neighboring room that Maslei had hoped to acquire was assigned to the district police force to serve as its administrative headquarters. Ibid., l. 138 and l. 147. 38.  John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (New York, 1991), 41–42. 39.  The multifaceted experience of evacuation powerfully encapsulates the loss, hardship, and dislocation that Soviet citizens encountered on the home front during World War II. See Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca, 2009).

N OT E S TO PAG E S 179 –18 5     2 5 5

40. Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957, trans. and ed. Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk, NY, 1998), 11–19. 41.  Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Boston, 1990), 28. 42.  Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, trans. Richard Lourie (New York, 1990), 40–41. 43. Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 52–56. 44.  Ibid., 5–10; the quotation is on p. 13. For a broad overview of the development of the cult of the Great Patriotic War, see Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York, 1995). 45.  This indicates common modes of identification among petitioners in Leningrad and those in other parts of the Soviet Union. See Erik Kulavig, “ ‘Give Us Decent Homes!’ ” in Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev: Nine Stories about Disobedient Russians (Houndmills, UK, 2002), 41–51. 46.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 41, d. 760, ll. 288–289. 47.  Ibid., l. 273. 48.  Siobhan Peeling, “Dirt, Disease and Disorder: Population Re-placement in Postwar Leningrad and the ‘Danger’ of Social Contamination,” in Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945–1950, ed. Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron (Houndmills, UK, 2009), 130–131. 49.  Steven E. Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Washington, DC, 2013), 136–137. 50.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 41, d. 766, ll. 282–283. 51.  Ibid., ll. 279–280. 52.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 41, d. 766, l. 293. 53.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2083, l. 120. On the system of benefits established for Soviet pensioners, see Stephen Lovell, “Soviet Russia’s Older Generations,” in Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Stephen Lovell (Houndmills, UK, 2007), 214–223. As Lovell demonstrated, the position of retirees in Soviet society was diminished not only by the inadequacy of state pensions, but also by the general emphasis in public culture on the young, strong, and vigorous worker. 54.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2083, ll. 120, 116 and 113, respectively. 55.  Ibid., l. 113. 56.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 46, ll. 102–103. 57.  Ibid., ll. 93, 105, and 108–109. For an overview of the provisions of the decree to which Petrov referred, see ll. 98–99. 58. TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 635, l. 140. This resolution obliged the Council of Ministers of each union republic and the ispolkom of local soviets to confer priority in housing distribution to officers and soldiers serving beyond the statutory period of service who had been discharged or transferred to the reserves. For further details, see V. V. Ovchinnikov and P. G. Zhuk, comp., Zhilishchno-bytovye voprosy. Sbornik rukovodiashchikh materialov (Moscow, 1964), 139. 59.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 635, l. 145. 60.  Ibid., l. 141. 61.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2083, ll. 177–190. 62.  Ibid., l. 187. 63.  Robert Dale, “Rats and Resentment: The Demobilization of the Red Army in Postwar Leningrad, 1949–1950,” Journal of Contemporary History 45 (January 2010): 114–115. 64.  Mark Edele, “Introduction: Consequences of the War,” in Soviet Veterans of the Second World War: A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society, 1941–1991 (New York, 2008), 3–20. 65.  Edele, “Entitlement Community,” in Soviet Veterans, 185–214; the quotation is on p. 15.

2 5 6     N OT E S TO PAG E S 18 5 –19 0

66.  Ibid., 186. On the postwar needs of returning soldiers and state efforts and failures to meet them, see Edele, “Welcome to Normalcy,” in Soviet Veterans, 39–54. 67. Edele, Soviet Veterans, 186 and 12, respectively. 68.  Ibid., 13–14. 69.  Ibid., 81–82 and 84. 70.  War veterans, together with their dependents and survivors, were foremost among special invalidy—a broad category that included also individuals inflicted with congenital defects and those who had suffered workplace injuries. For an overview of Soviet policy concerning disabled persons and the range of material benefits that the state promised to bestow on them (medical care, therapy, job training, pensions, and special accommodations), see Bernie Madison, “Programs for the Disabled in the USSR,” in The Disabled in the Soviet Union: Past and Present, Theory and Practice, ed. William O. McCagg and Lewis Siegelbaum (Pittsburgh, 1989), 167–198. 71.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 1006, l. 51. Sidorov referenced instruction No. 27/15 of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) of the USSR and of the People’s Commissariat of Health of the RSFSR, 13–19 January 1928. 72.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 1006, l. 50. 73.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 343, l. 451. This statement is essentially ad verbatim a quotation from the resolution. See Ovchinnikov and Zhuk, Zhilishchno-bytovye voprosy, 135. 74.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 343, l. 425. 75. Edele, Soviet Veterans, 18 and 35. 76.  Ibid., 7–8. 77.  Healing constituted a theme in housing petitions, as in postwar fiction, each of which featured war invalidy in ways that aroused compassion, as well as feelings of responsibility and regret for the overall loss of human potential. It is worth noting that in both letters penned by ordinary citizens and in literary works, wartime trauma was typically cast as a male phenomenon. On these various motifs in literature, see Vera S. Dunham, “Images of the Disabled, Especially the War Wounded, in Soviet Literature,” in The Disabled in the Soviet Union, 151–164, and Anna Krylova, “ ‘Healers of Wounded Souls’: The Crisis of Private Life in Soviet Literature, 1944–1946,” Journal of Modern History 73 (June 2001): 307–331. 78.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 635, l. 14; capital letters are in the original. 79. Ibid. 80.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 47, ll. 50–51. 81.  Ibid., l. 54 and l. 55. 82.  Ibid., l. 53. 83.  Returning prisoners of war who had been unjustly persecuted as traitors during the postwar Stalin era did not appear among the petitions examined. For an overview of their position in Soviet society early in the Thaw, see Miriam Dobson, “POWs and Purge Victims: Attitudes towards Party Rehabilitation, 1956–1957,” Slavonic and East European Review 86 (April 2008): 328–345. 84.  I am borrowing this apt metaphor from Eugenia Ginzburg’s memoir of Stalinist repression, Journey into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward (San Diego, CA, 1995). 85.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 341, l. 470. 86.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 48, l. 114 and l. 109, respectively. 87.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2065, ll. 287–288. 88.  Party-State Control Commissions were bodies assigned to monitor government officials and administrators in local organizations, institutions, and enterprises to ensure best practices and adherence to legal norms. Before 1962, there were both Commissions of Party Control, attached to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and Commissions of State Control, attached to the Council of Ministers of the USSR. In 1962, the two types of commissions were combined into a system of organs of Party-State Control. See David T. Cattell, Leningrad: A Case Study of Soviet Government (New York, 1968), 47.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 19 0 –197     2 57

89.  TsGA SPb, f. 9626, op. 1, d. 291, l. 106. 90.  Ibid., l. 104. 91.  Ibid., l. 107. 92.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 343, l. 373. 93.  Ibid., ll. 373–374. 94.  Ibid., ll. 374–375 and l. 377. 95.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2065, l. 285. 96.  TsGA SPb, f. 9626, op. 1, d. 291, l. 107. 97.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 343, ll. 367 and 369. 98.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 633, l. 112. 99.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 343, l. 441. 100.  For an elaboration of the myriad hardships and complications that victims of Stalinist repression experienced as they sought reintegration into their former lives and into society as a whole, see Stephen F. Cohen, “The Victims Return,” The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin (Exeter, NH, 2010), 57–86 and Nanci Adler, The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System (New Brunswick, NJ, 2002). 101. Miriam Dobson, “Returnees, Crime, and the Gulag Subculture,” in Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime and the Fate of Reforms after Stalin (Ithaca, 2009), 109–132. As Steven Harris demonstrated, general resentment toward individuals formerly excised from society—whether as “enemies of the people” or members of purportedly hostile nationalities—extended also into the realm of housing queues. Here returnees met not only with discomfort over their reintegration, but also with accusations of opportunism when they made demands on the state. Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street, 129–130. 102.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 343, l. 151. 103.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 341, ll. 503–504. 104.  Ibid., ll. 189–190. 105.  Ibid., l. 176. 106.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 633, l. 73. 107.  Ibid., l. 79. 108.  Ibid., l. 68. 109.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 1004, l. 154. 110.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 41, d. 759, l. 257. 111.  See, for example, the cases of A. S. Leitenen and E. I. Koval′skaia in TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 633, ll. 13–20 and TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 47, ll. 189–202, respectively. 112. Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 24–25 and 184. 113.  Oliver, “Citizen Demands and the Soviet Political System,” 469. 114.  Theodore H. Friedgut, “Citizens and Soviets: Can Ivan Ivanovich Fight City Hall?” Comparative Politics 10 (July 1978): 467. 115.  As a relevant aside, one group of Soviet émigrés who were interviewed about their experiences with different bureaucracies most negatively evaluated those responsible for the allocation of living space, namely the housing departments of local soviets. Zvi Gitelman, “Working the Soviet System: Citizens and Urban Bureaucracies,” in The Contemporary Soviet City, ed. Henry W. Morton and Robert C. Stuart (Armonk, NY, 1984), 226–232. 116.  TsGA SPb, f. 9626, op. 1, d. 23. 117.  See I. Bezuglov, “Sluchitsia zhe takoe. . . . Zapozdalaia chutkost′,” Krokodil, 10 February 1960, 9. For more on published, satirical depictions of local bureaucracy, see Christine Varga-Harris, “An Unimaginable Community? Satirists, Citizens and Bungling Bureaucrats Tackle the Soviet Housing Question, 1956–64,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Slavists, Quebec City, PQ, Canada, 25–27 May 2001. 118. Nicholas Lampert, Whistleblowing in the Soviet Union: Complaints and Abuses under State Socialism (London, 1985), 125. 119.  Completing a variety of forms appeared to be an essential component of the process of housing distribution. For a sampling of these, including a basic application for housing, a

2 5 8     N OT E S TO PAG E S 197– 2 0 4

survey for determining the condition of a given dwelling and a certificate confirming registration for the receipt of living space, see S. N. Rozantsev, V. S. Berenson, and T. F. Khrenov, comp., Upravlenie zhilishchnym khoziaistvom. Kratkii spravochnik dlia rabotnikov domoupravlenii, zhilishchno-ekspluatatsionnykh kontor, zhilishchnykh kontor, zhilishchno-kommunal′nykh otdelov (Moscow, 1965), 80–85. 120.  TsGA SPb, f. 9803, op. 1, d. 87, l. 74. 121.  Indignation over violations of dignity and human rights had roots in the revolutionary experience, as evident in the ways that workers (particularly skilled ones like printers) related to their employers during the late tsarist era. See Mark D. Steinberg, Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867–1907 (Berkeley, 1992), 110–122. 122.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 343, ll. 177–178. 123.  Ibid., l. 174. 124.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2083, l. 187. 125.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 41, d. 766, l. 269. 126.  Ibid., l. 130. 127.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2067, l. 259. 128.  Ibid., l. 255. 129.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 343, l. 93; capital letters are in the original. 130.  Ibid., l. 94 and l. 92, respectively. 131.  Ibid., l. 440. 132.  Ibid., l. 452. 133.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2067, ll. 324–325. 134.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2070, l. 28 and ll. 123–124, respectively. 135.  Ibid., l. 113. 136.  Ibid., l. 105. 137.  Oliver, “Citizen Demands and the Soviet Political System,” 468–469. 138.  See, for example, Raymond A. Bauer, Alex Inkeles and Clyde Kluckhohn, How the Soviet System Works: Cultural, Psychological and Social Themes (Cambridge, MA, 1956), 81, and Zubkova, Russia after the War, 74–87. 139.  Oliver, “Citizen Demands and the Soviet Political System,” 472–473. 140.  Ibid., 467 and 475. 141.  Ibid., 475. 142. See, for example, TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 8. Control commissions documented the same problems while overseeing the examination of complaints and requests by the executive committees of district and city soviets, as well as by housing offices. Producing detailed reports, they calculated the number of complaints and requests received during a given period of time by a specific administrator or office, how many were resolved satisfactorily and in what length of time, how many remained unresolved, the extent to which complaints were forwarded to the same individuals against whom they were initially directed, and the number of repeat complaints—including how many of these subsequently led petitioners to convey their grievances to higher state and Party bodies. See, for example, TsGA SPb, f. 9626, op. 1, d. 13 and TsGA SPb, f. 9626, op. 1, d. 53. 143.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 46, ll. 204–205. 144.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 343, l. 375; capital letters are in the original. 145.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 41, d. 765, l. 291. 146. Doubt—commingled with the sense of entitlement and unrelenting hope for the future depicted in this chapter—was certainly not restricted to housing petitions, nor was it novel to the Thaw. As confessional letters written by Soviet youth reveal, feelings of frustration and faith, and of being both a valued member of society and utterly superfluous to it, competed with each other also during the Stalin era. See Juliane Fürst, “In Search of Soviet Salvation: Young People Write to the Stalinist Authorities,” Contemporary European History 15 (August 2006): 338–343.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 2 0 4 – 213     2 59

147.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2095, ll. 324–325. 148.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2070, l. 174 and l. 177. 149.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 343, l. 440. 150.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 41, d. 759, l. 341. 151.  Kukish is a figurative gesture of derision or contempt—usually in response to refusal to comply with some request—made by extending a clenched fist with the thumb placed between the index and adjacent fingers. 152.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 42, d. 633, ll. 26–27. 153.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 46, l. 64. 154. Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936 (Ithaca, 2003), 115–122. 155. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 168. 156.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2065, l. 391. 157.  Ibid., l. 382. 158.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2083, l. 90. 159.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2083, l. 90 and l. 16, respectively. 160.  The brainchild of Stephen Kotkin, the concept “speaking Bolshevik” is defined and discussed in the introduction to this book. 161.  TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37a, d. 46, l. 99. 162.  Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s,” Slavic Review 55 (Spring 1996): 103–104. 163. This notion of “ideological agency” is informed by Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck, “Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin’s ‘Magnetic Mountain’ and the State of Soviet Historical Studies,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44 (1996): 456–463. 164.  Mark Grigor′evich Meerovich, Kvadratnye metry, opredeliaiushchie soznanie. Gosudarstvennaia zhilishchnaia politika v SSSR, 1921–1941 gg. (Stuttgart, 2005), 10. 165. Smith, Property of Communists, 45.

Conclusion 1.  Cherëmushki (Cherrytown), directed by Gerbert Rappaport (USSR, 1963). 2.  On Stalinist consumer culture, see, for example, Jukka Gronow, Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia (Oxford, 2003), and David L. Hoffmann, “Mass Consumption in a Socialist Society,” in Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca, 2003), 118–145. 3.  This matter is detailed in Lynne Attwood, “The Retreat from New byt,” in Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia: Private Life in a Public Space (Manchester, 2010), 107–122. 4.  Nicholas S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York, 1946). 5.  Elena Zubkova, “The Social Psychology of the War,” in Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957, trans. and ed. Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk, NY, 1998), 11–19 (the quotation is on p. 18). Where housing was concerned, this reorientation was manifested in growing official resolve, already during postwar reconstruction, to provide separate apartments, as well as in the drive by local officials to resuscitate their damaged cities from wartime rubble. See Mark B. Smith, “Reconstruction and Its Legacies, 1944–1950,” in Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb, IL, 2010), 25–58 and Karl D. Qualls, “Accommodation: Bringing Life to the Rubble,” in From Ruins to Reconstruction: Urban Identity in Soviet Sevastopol after World War II (Ithaca, 2009), 85–123. 6.  Lidiia Brusilovskaia, “The Culture of Everyday Life during the Thaw (Metamorphoses of Style),” trans. Liv Bliss, Russian Studies in History 48 (Summer 2009): 16.

26 0    N OT E S TO PAG E S 213 – 2 21

7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9.  R. Maksimova, “Cherty Leninskogo byta,” in Za kommunisticheskii byt, ed. M. I. Lifanov (Leningrad, 1963), 38. 10.  M. I. Lifanov, “O byte pri kommunizme,” in Za kommunisticheskii byt, 47–48. 11.  One example of this is the utilitarian building that dominated postwar reconstruction in West Germany, where housing policy differed from the Soviet model due to the injection of Marshall Plan funding, as well as the determination, in the aftermath of Nazism, to project democracy. See Jeffry M. Diefendorf, In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II (New York, 1993), 55–66. Also pertinent is the chapter “The Housing Problem,” 108–150. 12.  V. I. Vorotnikov, Takoe vot pokolenie . . . (Moscow, 1999), 159. 13.  Ibid., 174–175. 14.  Ibid., 159, 174–175. 15.  S. Z. Ginzburg, O proshlom—dlia budushchego (Moscow, 1986), 3. 16.  Ibid., 343. 17. On Soviet housing after the Khrushchev period, see Blair A. Ruble, “From khru­ shcheby to korobki,” and Aleksandr Vysokovskii, “Will Domesticity Return?” trans. Carl Sandstrom, both in Russian Housing in the Modern Age, ed. William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble (Cambridge, 1993), 232–270 and 271–308, respectively; and Attwood, “The Brezhnev Years” and “The Gorbachev Era: The End of Socialist Housing Policy,” both in Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia, 180–199 and 200–218, respectively. 18. James H. Bater, “Central St. Petersburg: Continuity and Change in Privilege and Place,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 47 (2006): 10. 19.  The details provided here about contemporary Russian housing are from the following speeches of Vladimir Putin, transcribed on the website Archive of the Official Site of the 2008–2012 Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin: “Prime Minister Vladimir Putin Holds a Meeting in Kirov on Housing Construction in the Regions,” 3 February 2011, http://premier.gov.ru/eng/events/news/14037/; “Prime Minister Vladimir Putin Delivers His Report on the Government’s Performance in 2011 to the State Duma,” 11 April 2011, http:// premier.gov.ru/eng/events/news/18671/; and “Prime Minister Vladimir Putin Chairs a Meeting on Housing Construction in the Town of Istra,” 16 April 2012, http://premier.gov.ru/eng/ events/news/18697/. 20. See M. Terent′ev, Milliony novykh kvartir (Moscow, 1957) and N. Grigor′ev, Zhi­ lishchnaia problema budet reshena (Moscow, 1963). 21. “Prime Minister Vladimir Putin Delivers His Report on the Government’s Performance in 2011 to the State Duma.” 22.  See, for example, Lidia Okorokova, “The Irony of Cheryomushki,” Moscow News, 30 August 2010, http://www.themoscownews.com/local/20100830/188014610.html; Evgenia Ivanova, “End in Sight for ‘Khrushchyovki’ Houses,” St. Petersburg Times, 24 February 2007, http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=22745; and Dan Shea, “5-Story ‘Paradise’ Meets the Wrecking Ball,” Moscow Times, 12 September 2006, http:// www.themosdcowtimes.com/stories/2006/09/003.html. 23.  Okorokova, “The Irony of Cheryomushki.” 24.  Shea, “5-Story ‘Paradise’ Meets the Wrecking Ball.” 25.  Bater, “Central St. Petersburg,” 11. 26.  James H. Bater and John R. Staples, “Planning for Change in Central St. Petersburg,” Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 41 (2000): 89. The decline in the number of remaining kommunalki during the 1990s is attributable to privatization. This process allowed for the sale of individual rooms in communal apartments by residents themselves, as well as the auctioning off of kommunalki by the city administration or their possession by private developers. Although the mode of dispersal could vary, tenants were often relocated in one and the same way—to buildings in outlying city districts. See ibid., 87–91.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 2 21– 2 2 2     261

27.  Katerina Gerasimova, “The Soviet Communal Apartment,” in Beyond the Limits: The Concept of Space in Russian History and Culture, ed. Jeremy Smith (Helsinki, 1999), 129. 28.  N. Egiazorova, et al., “U nas v kommunal′noi kvartire . . . ,” Vechernii Leningrad, 12 May 1961, 2. 29.  On popular affection for old districts, see Bater, “Central St. Petersburg,” 21. 30. Ilya Utekhin, “Filling Dwelling Place with History: Communal Apartments in St. Petersburg,” in Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities, ed. Blair A. Ruble and John J. Czaplicka (Washington, DC, 2003), 102. 31.  Michael Schwirtz, “Russian Volunteers Keep Eye on Citizens, and the Police,” New York Times, 25 March 2009, A8. 32.  Although I was pleased to receive this invitation, I must confess that I did not participate in the initiative; thus I can only wonder about the turnout. 33.  Judith Ingram, “Russians Put Their Faith in Letters to Putin,” St. Petersburg Times, 17 May 2002, 2–3.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources Archival Sources To clarify their contents for the reader, I have grouped together archival materials from the Central State Archive of St. Petersburg by topic. Tsentral′nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga (TsGA SPb)

Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Soviet

Surveys of letters received by the editors of Vechernii Leningrad Fond 7384, opis′ 37, dela 1278, 1305, 1343, 1372 and, 1396 Materials related to reception at the executive committee of the Leningrad city Soviet (analyses of complaints and requests received, and reports on the operation of visiting hours) Fond 7384, opis′ 37a, delo 8 Fond 7384, opis′ 41, delo 763 Complaints and requests concerning the allocation, exchange, or improvement of living space, as well as registration for housing, together with responses to them Fond 7384, opis′ 37, dela 759, 766, 2065, 2067, 2081, 2083, and 2095 Fond 7384, opis′ 37a, dela 46 and 47 Fond 7384, opis′ 42, dela 341, 343, 633, 635, and 1006 Complaints and requests concerning registration for the allocation of living space for the rehabilitated, together with responses to them Fond 7384, opis′ 42, delo 1004

26 4     B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Complaints and requests concerning living space, repair, renovation, and rent, together with responses to them Fond 7384, opis′ 37, dela 760 and 2070 Fond 7384, opis′ 37a, delo 48 Fond 7384, opis′ 41, delo 765

Leningrad City Committee of the Communist Party Stenographic records of meetings of managers of Leningrad construction trusts and of the Main Leningrad Construction Administration (Glavleningradstroi) (May and December 1958) Fond 25, opis′ 76, edinitsy khraneniia 365 and 398 Stenographic record of a general city meeting of Leningrad builders and employees of enterprises manufacturing construction materials, as well as planning organi­ zations (April 1959) Fond 25, opis′ 80, edinitsa khraneniia 138 Stenographic record of a meeting of active members of the Leningrad Party organi­ zation (June 1960) Fond 25, opis′ 80, edinitsa khraneniia 320

Leningrad Party-State Control Commission Inspection of the examination of letters, complaints, and requests at the district and city levels in Leningrad Fond 9803, opis′ 1, dela 87 and 89

Soviet/State Control Commission of the Soviet of Ministers of the RSFSR, Leningrad Section Requests and complaints, together with correspondence pertaining to them Fond 9626, opis′ 1, delo 291 Inspection of requests and complaints received by the State Control Commission and by newspaper editors Fond 9626, opis′ 1, delo 297

Soviet/State Control Commission of the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR Inspection of the examination of letters, complaints, and requests at the district and the city levels in Leningrad Fond 9626, opis′ 1, dela 13 and 53

Tsentral′nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Kinofotofonodokumentov Sankt-Peterburga (TsGA KFFD SPb) Newspapers, Periodicals and Magazines Arkhitektura i stroitel′stvo Leningrada Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR

B I B L I O G R A P H Y     26 5

Kirovskii rabochii Krokodil Rabotnitsa [magazine] Rabotnitsa [newspaper] Stroitel′ Stroitel′stvo i arkhitektura Leningrada Svetlana Proletarskaia pobeda Vechernii Leningrad

Works Published by Soviet State, Party and Professional Bodies, and by US Government Offices Alekseev, T. D., comp. Zhilishchnye zakony. Sbornik vazhneishikh zakonov SSSR i RSFSR, postanovlenii, instruktsii i prikazov po zhilishchnomu khoziaistvu po sostoianiiu na 1 noiabria 1957 goda, 3rd ed. Moscow: Izdatel′stvo Ministerstva kommunal′nogo khoziaistva RSFSR, 1958. Babenko, A. Tam, gde my zhivem. Iz opyta raboty ulichnogo komiteta. Volgograd: Volgogradskoe knizhnoe izdatel′stvo, 1963. Baranov, N. V. et al., eds. Trudy II Sessii Akademii Stroitel′stva i Arkhitektury SSSR po voprosam zhilishchnogo stroitel′stva, 15–20 maia 1957 g. Moscow: Gosu­ darstvennoe izdatel′stvo literatury po stroitel′stvu, arkhitekture i stroitel′nym materialam, 1958. Broner, D. L. Zhilishchnyi vopros i statistika. Moscow: Izdatel′stvo “Statistika,” 1966. Bukharin, N., and E. Preobrazhenskii. Azbuka kommunizma. Populiarnoe ob″iasnenie programmy Rossiiskoi kommunisticheskoi partii bol′shevikov. Petrograd: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo, 1920. Dimensions of Soviet Economic Power: Studies Prepared for the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, Part V: The Share of the Citizen. Wash­ ington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1962. Dmitriev, N. G. Zhilishchnyi vopros. Dva mira—dva podkhoda. Moscow: Mos­ kovskii rabochii, 1973. ——. Cheloveku nuzhen dom. Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1965. Dmitriev, N. G., and S. N. Rozanov. Spravochnik po zhilishchnym voprosam. Mos­ cow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1963. Eremeev, T. V., and F. P. Potashnikov, comp. Zhilishchno-bytovye voprosy. Sbornik postanovlenii i instruktsii. Moscow: Izdatel′stvo VTsSPS, Profizdat, 1960. Filonov, M. D., and I. D. Kozlov, eds. Leningrad za 50 let. Statisticheskii sbornik. Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1967. Grigor′ev, N. Zhilishchnaia problema budet reshena. Moscow: Moskovskii rabo­ chii, 1963. Khromova P. et al., comp. Uchit′sia, rabotat′ i zhit′ po-kommunisticheski. Moscow: Gosmestpromizdat, 1963.

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Khrushchov, N. S. Forty Years of the Great October Socialist Revolution: Report to the Jubilee Session of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. on November 6, 1957. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957. Krasnov, N. P. et al. Dom i byt. Moscow: Izdatel′stvo ministerstva kommunal′nogo khoziaistva RSFSR, 1962. Kruzhkov, S., and A. Pereslavtsev. Kommunisticheskie vzaimootnosheniia—v byt. Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1963. Kurovskii, G. A. Dom, v kotorom my zhivem. Kuibyshev: Kuibyshevskoe knizhnoe izdatel′stvo, 1963. Lifanov, M. I., ed. Za kommunisticheskii byt. Leningrad: Obshchestvo po ras­ prostraneniiu politicheskikh i nauchnykh znanii RSFSR, Leningradskoe otdele­ nie, 1963. ——. Bor′ba za ukreplenie sotsialisticheskogo byta. Leningrad: Obshchestvo po ras­ prostraneniiu politicheskikh i nauchnykh znanii RSFSR, Leningradskoe otdele­ nie, 1956. Litovkin, V. N., and V. P. Balezin. Obshchestvennye domovye komitety. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo iuridicheskoi literatury, 1962. Makarov, G. Uchet nuzhdaiushchikhsia v zhiloi ploshchadi i poriadok ee raspredeleniia. Moscow: Profizdat, 1967. Maksimov, L., and T. Chernov. Khoziaeva svoego doma. Kemerovo: Kemerovskoe knizhnoe izdatel′stvo, 1963. Maslov, I. I., and V. A. Mitrofanov, eds. Velikoe desiatiletie v zhizni partii i sovet­ skogo naroda (1953–1963 gg.). Materialy XXII Nauchno-issledovatel′skoi konferentsii. Moscow: Ministerstvo vysshego i srednego spetsial′nogo obrazovaniia RSFSR, Moskovskii avtomobil′no-dorozhnyi institut, 1964. Morev, A. A. V druzhnoi sem′e. Rasskaz o rabote obshchestvennogo domovogo komiteta. Donetsk: Donetskoe knizhnoe izdatel′stvo, 1962. New Directions in the Soviet Economy: Studies Prepared for the Subcommittee on Foreign Economic Policy, Congress of the United States, Part II-B: Economic Performance and Part III: Human Resources. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1966. Ovchinnikov, V. V., and P. G. Zhuk, comp. Zhilishchno-bytovye voprosy. Sbornik rukovodiashchikh materialov. Moscow: Izdatel′stvo VTsSPS, Profizdat, 1964. Prokopchenko, I. P. Obshchestvennye organizatsii v zhilishchnom khoziaistve. Mos­ cow: Izdatel′stvo literatury po stroitel′stvu, 1966. Rachevskaia, M. I., ed. Nash dvor. Moscow: Izdatel′stvo Ministerstva kommunal′− nogo khoziaistva RSFSR, 1954. Rozantsev, S. N., V. S. Berenson, and T. F. Khrenov, comp. Upravlenie zhi­ lishchnym khoziaistvom. Kratkii spravochnik dlia rabotnikov domoupravlenii, zhilishchno-ekspluatatsionnykh kontor, zhilishchnykh kontor, zhilishchnokommunal′nykh otdelov. Moscow: Izdatel′stvo literatury po stroitel′stvu, 1965. Shneerson, A. I. Chto takoe zhilishchnyi vopros. Moscow: Izdatel′stvo VPSh, 1959. Sinitsyn, V. G. Byt epokhi stroitel′stva kommunizma, 2nd ed. Cheliabinsk: Chelia­ binskoe knizhnoe izdatel′stvo, 1963.

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Soviet Economic Prospects for the Seventies: A Compendium of Papers Submitted to the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1973. Terent′ev, M. Milliony novykh kvartir. Moscow: Profizdat, 1957. Tsukerman, Aleksandr. Dom v kotorom my zhivem. Syktyvkar: Komi knizhnoe izdatel′stvo, 1964. Verizhnikov, S. M. Gorod, Dom, Kvartira. Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1967. Zazerskii, E. Ia., comp. Tam, gde chelovek zhivet. Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1962. Zhilishchnoe stroitel′stvo v SSSR. Moskva. Leningrad. Kiev. Moscow: Sostroiiz­ dat, 1963.

Memoirs, Travel Accounts, and Source Collections Alexeyeva, Ludmilla, and Paul Goldberg. The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era. Boston: Little Brown, 1990. Baranskaya, Natalya. Stranstvie bezdomnykh. Zhizneopisanie. Moscow: Tipografiia OAO “Vneshtorgizdat,” 1999. Belfrage, Sally. A Room in Moscow. New York: Reynal and Company, 1958. Brodsky, Joseph. Less Than One: Selected Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. Bukovsky, Vladimir. To Build a Castle—My Life as a Dissenter. Translated by Michael Scammell. New York: Viking, 1978. Ginzburg, Eugenia. Journey into the Whirlwind. Translated by Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1995. Ginzburg, S. Z. O proshlom—dlia budushchego. Moscow: Izdatel′stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1986. Gunther, John. Inside Russia Today. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958. Gurenkov, M. N., comp. Segodnia v nashem gorode . . . Gazete Vechernii Lenin­grad—70 let. Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1987. Higgins, Marguerite. Red Plush and Black Bread. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955. Hindus, Maurice. The Kremlin’s Human Dilemma: Russia after Half a Century of Revolution. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967. ——. House without a Roof: Russia after Forty-Three Years of Revolution. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961. Ioffe, N. A. Vremia nazad. Moia zhizn′, moia sud′ba, moia epokha. Moscow: TOO “Biologicheskie nauki,” 1992. Jacquet, Eliane. High Heels in Red Square. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Win­ ston, 1961. Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich. Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament. Translated and edited by Strobe Talbott. Toronto: Little Brown, 1974. MacDuffie, Marshall. The Red Carpet: 10,000 Miles through Russia on a Visa from Khrushchev. New York: W.W. Norton, 1955. Mace, David, and Vera Mace. The Soviet Family. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963.

26 8    B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Mirek, Al′fred. Krasnyi mirazh: Kak my verili v mify i lozh′. Vospominaniia i razdum′ia (1917–1960). Moscow: “Gotika,” 2000. Novak, Joseph. The Future Is Ours, Comrade: Conversations with Russians. Gar­ den City, NY: Doubleday, 1960. Sakharov, Andrei. Memoirs. Translated by Richard Lourie. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. Salisbury, Harrison. To Moscow and Beyond: A Reporter’s Narrative. New York: Harper and Row, 1960. Vorotnikov, V. I. Takoe vot pokolenie . . . Moscow: ZAO “Print-Servis,” 1999. Werth, Alexander. Russia under Khrushchev. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961. Willis, David K. Klass: How Russians Really Live. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985.

Literary Works and Films Aksenov, Vasily Pavlovich. Na polputi k lune. Kniga rasskazov. Moscow: Izdatel′stvo “Sovetskaia Rossiia,” 1966. Bakinskii, V. S. et al., eds. Nachalo puti. Rasskazy. Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1960. Baranskaya, Natalya. A Week like Any Other: Novellas and Stories. Translated by Pieta Monks. Seattle: Seal Press, 1990. Bulgakov, Mikhail. Zoyka’s Apartment: A Tragic Farce in Three Acts. Translated by Nicholas Saunders and Frank Dwyer. Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1996. Chakovskii, Aleksandr. Dorogi, kotorye my vybiraem. Moscow: Sovetskii pisa­ tel′, 1960. Cherëmushki. Directed by Gerbert Rappaport. USSR, 1963. Chubakova, Vera. Khochu byt′ schastlivoi. Povesti. Moscow: Izdatel′stvo “Sovet­ skaia Rossiia,” 1963. ——. Moia vesna. Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1958. Dement′ev, Nikolai. Moi Dorogi. Povest′. Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1958. Ehrenburg, Ilya. The Thaw. Translated by Manya Harari. Westport, CT: Green­ wood Press, 1956. Gladilin, Anatolii. Bespokoinik. Rasskazy raznykh let. Moscow: Nezavisimyi al′manakh “Konets veka,” 1992. Granin, Daniil. Posle svad′by. Roman. Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1959. Ironiia sud′by, ili S Legkim parom! Directed by Eldar Ryazanov. USSR, 1975. Mon Oncle. Directed by Jacques Tati. France, 1958. Monastyrev, Vladimir. Dvoe u ruch′ia. Krasnodar: Krasnodarskoe knizhnoe izdatel′stvo, 1965. Panova, Vera. Kak pozhivaesh′ paren′? P′esa v dvukh chastiakh. Moscow: Otdel rasprostraneniia dramaticheskikh proizvedenii VUOAP, 1962. Trifonov, Iurii. Rasskazy i povesty. Moscow: Izdatel′svto “Khudozhestvennaia lit­ eratura,” 1971. Volodin, Aleksandr. Fabrichnaia devchonka. Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo “Iskusstvo,” 1957.

B I B L I O G R A P H Y     269

Secondary Sources Adler, Nanci. The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002. Aksiutin, Iurii. Khrushchevskaia “ottepel′” i obshchestvennye nastroeniia v SSSR v 1953–1964 gg. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004. Alexeev, Michael. “The Effect of Housing Allocation on Social Inequality: A Soviet Perspective.” Journal of Comparative Economics 12, no. 2 (June 1988): 228–234. Alexopoulos, Golfo. Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Aman, Anders. Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era: An Aspect of Cold War History. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. Amann, Ronald, and Julian Cooper, eds. Technical Progress and Soviet Economic Development. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Andrusz, Gregory D. Housing and Urban Development in the USSR. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984. Archive of the Official Site of the 2008–2012 Prime Minister of the Russian Federa­ tion Vladimir Putin. http://archive.premier.gov.ru/eng/. Attwood, Lynne. Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia: Private Life in a Public Space. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. ——. “Celebrating the ‘Frail-Figured Welder’: Gender Confusion in Women’s Mag­ azines of the Khrushchev Era.” Slavonica 8, no. 2 (November 2002): 159–177. Auslander, Leora. “Beyond Words.” American Historical Review 110, no. 4 (Octo­ ber 2005): 1015–1045. ——. Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France. Berkeley: University of Califor­ nia Press, 1996. Balina, Marina, and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds. Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style. London: Anthem Press, 2009. Barber, John, and Mark Harrison. The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II. New York: Longman, 1991. Barry, Donald D. “The Soviet Union: Housing in the USSR. Cities and Towns.” Problems of Communism 18, no. 3 (May–June 1969): 1–11. Bater, James H. “Central St. Petersburg: Continuity and Change in Privilege and Place.” Eurasian Geography and Economics 47, no. 1 (2006): 4–27. ——. The Soviet City: Ideal and Reality. London: Edward Arnold, 1980. Bater, James H., and John R. Staples. “Planning for Change in Central St. Peters­ burg.” Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 41, no. 2 (2000): 77–97. Bauer, Raymond A., Alex Inkeles, and Clyde Kluckhohn. How the Soviet System Works: Cultural, Psychological and Social Themes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956. Berman, Harold J., and James W. Spindler. “Soviet Comrades’ Courts.” Washington Law Review 38, no. 4 (Winter 1963): 842–910. Biess, Frank, and Robert G. Moeller, eds. Histories of the Aftermath: The Legacies of the Second World War in Europe. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010.

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Birdwell-Pheasant, Donna, and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga, eds. House Life: Space, Place and Family in Europe. Oxford: Berg, 1999. Bittner, Stephen V. The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. ——. “Green Cities and Orderly Streets: Space and Culture in Moscow, 1928–1933.” Journal of Urban History 25, no. 1 (November 1998): 22–56. Blakesley, Rosalind P., and Susan E. Reid, eds. Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture and the Decorative Arts. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007. Bonnell, Victoria E. Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Borneman, John. After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Bowlt, John E., and Olga Matich, eds. Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Boym, Svetlana. “The Archeology of Banality: The Soviet Home.” Public Culture 6, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 263–292. ——. Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Brine, Jenny, Maureen Perrie, and Andrew Sutton, eds. Home, School and Leisure in the Soviet Union. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980. Brooks, Jeffrey. Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. ——. “Socialist Realism in Pravda: Read All about It!” Slavic Review 53, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 973–991. Brudny, Yitzhak. Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Brumfield, William Craft, ed. Reshaping Russian Architecture: Western Technology, Utopian Dreams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Brumfield, William Craft, and Blair A. Ruble, eds. Russian Housing in the Modern Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Brusilovskaia, Lidiia. “The Culture of Everyday Life during the Thaw (Metamor­ phoses of Style).” Translated by Liv Bliss. Russian Studies in History 48, no. 1 (Summer 2009): 10–32. Buchli, Victor. An Archaeology of Socialism. Oxford: Berg, 2000. ——. “Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight against Petit-Bourgeois Conscious­ ness in the Soviet Home.” Journal of Design History 10, no. 2 (1997): 161–176. Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Burton, Antoinette. Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Cattell, David T. Leningrad: A Case Study of Soviet Urban Government. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968.

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Chilton, Paul A. Security Metaphors: Cold War Discourse from Containment to Common House. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Cieraad, Irene, ed. At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981. Cohen, Stephen F. The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag after Stalin. Exeter, NH: Publishing Works, 2010. Cooke, Catherine. “Beauty as a Route to ‘the Radiant Future’: Responses to Soviet Architecture.” Journal of Design History 10, no. 2 (1997): 137–160. Corrigan, Peter. The Sociology of Consumption: An Introduction. London: Sage, 1997. Corten, Irina H. Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture: A Selected Guide to Russian Words, Idioms, and Expressions of the Post-Stalin Era, 1953–1991. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. Crowley, David, and Susan E. Reid, eds. Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc. Oxford: Berg, 2002. Dale, Robert. “Rats and Resentment: The Demobilization of the Red Army in Post­ war Leningrad, 1949–1950.” Journal of Contemporary History 45, no. 1 (Janu­ ary 2010): 113–133. Davies, Sarah. Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. De Grazia, Victoria, ed., with Ellen Furlough. The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Di Maio, Alfred John, Jr. Soviet Urban Housing: Problems and Policies. New York: Praeger, 1974. Diefendorf, Jeffry M. In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Dobson, Miriam. Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime and the Fate of Reforms after Stalin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. ——. “POWs and Purge Victims: Attitudes towards Party Rehabilitation, 1956–1957.” Slavonic and East European Review 86, no. 2 (April 2008): 328–345. Duchen, Claire. “Occupation Housewife: The Domestic Ideal in 1950s France.” French Cultural Studies 2, part 1 (February 1991): 1–11. Dunham, Vera S. In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990. Easton, David. A Systems Analysis of Political Life. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965. Edele, Mark. Soviet Veterans of the Second World War: A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society, 1941–1991. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Fedulin, A. A. “Revoliutsionnyi ‘zhilishchnyi peredel’ v Moskve (1918–1921 gg.).” Voprosy istorii, no. 5 (May 1987): 180–183. Feinberg, Leonard. The Satirist: His Temperament, Motivation, and Influence. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1963. Field, Deborah A. Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia. New York: Peter Lang, 2007.

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INDEX

Academy of Construction and Architecture, 25 – 26 Aksenov, Vasily, 90 alcohol abuse, 83, 129, 153 – 54, 214, 221 Aleksandrov, K. M., 163 – 64 Alexeyeva, Ludmilla, 180 Alexopoulos, Golfo, 206 All-Union Conference of Builders, 25, 28 All-Union Scientific-Research Institute for Technical Aesthetics, 46 Aman, Anders, 103 American National Exhibition, 14, 51 – 52, 75 Angarsk, 34 apartments. See communal apartments; separate apartments Arkhitektura i stroitel′stvo Leningrada, 47 Ashevskaia, V. G., 151, 188 – 89 assembly enterprises, 30 – 34. See also construction industry Astrakhan, 68 Attwood, Lynne, 7 – 8, 30, 166 Avtovo district (Leningrad), 44

Balina, Marina, 54 Baranskaya, Natalya, 71 – 72, 152, 156 bathrooms, 2 – 3, 34, 58, 97, 108 – 9, 124, 152 – 53, 159, 167, 176 Batova, P. A., 176, 178 bedrooms, 2, 28, 37, 44, 70 Bekhtereva, Z. V., 161 – 62 Belfrage, Sally, 167 Berezkina, N. M., 190 – 91 beskvartir′e (without an apartment), 5 bespartiinye (not a Party member), 192 Bittner, Stephen, 25 Blockade, 20, 120, 136, 148, 160, 174, 178 – 82, 188 Bogdanova, S. V., 159, 208 Boitsov Lane (Leningrad), 141, 143 Boksitogorsk, 69 Bolsheviks, 1, 16, 55, 104, 190, 208 bookshelves, 28, 37, 39 – 40, 52, 99 Borders of Socialism, 108 Borneman, John, 16 Borovaia Street (Leningrad), 136 – 38, 147 Boym, Svetlana, 97, 102, 124, 207

28 0     I ndex

Brezhnev, Leonid, 48, 51, 70, 72, 106, 141, 178, 200, 219 Brodsky, Joseph, 154 – 55, 165 Brooks, Jeffrey, 5, 74, 113 – 14 Brusilovskaia, Lidiia, 213 – 14 Buchli, Victor, 74, 82, 98 Buck-Morss, Susan, 97 Builders’ Day, 29, 31, 55 Bukovsky, Vladimir, 123, 163 Bulganin, Nikolai, 182, 199, 207 Bushma, A. F., 198 byt (everyday life) domashnii byt (domestic life), 169 early Russian ideas, 103 gender roles, 71 housing foundations, 214 interior design representations, 37, 46, 66, 85, 103 intimate relations, 108 kommunisticheskii byt (communist living), 62, 108, 129, 171, 198, 200 – 201, 213, 216 living space needs, 150, 195, 216 official agenda, 216 old housing depictions, 146 perestroika (restructuring), 215 petition references, 17, 163, 165, 170, 216 – 17 progress pace, 218 published discourse, 12 reform scheme, 97 – 98, 102 – 3 socialism, 75 – 76, 175, 214 superficial accoutrements, 11 Thaw effects, 83, 102, 213 – 14 working masses, 175 Capitalism, 14 – 15, 51 – 52, 56, 61 – 63, 75, 85, 97, 135, 216 Central Committee (Communist Party), 58, 65, 190, 201 central heating, 16, 34, 36, 60, 68, 97, 130 Central Statistical Administration, 67 chairs, 27 – 28, 37, 52, 96, 103 Cherëmushki, 33, 79, 211 – 12 Cherëmushki district (Moscow), 33, 72, 76, 79, 211 – 12, 220 Cherepovets, 34

Chernobyl, 219 Chevalier, Sophie, 101 Chunaev, A. A., 208 Chupakhin, V. I., 200 citizenship, 18 – 19, 122, 173 – 75, 193 – 96, 201, 207, 217 Civil War, 173, 181, 186, 218 Clark, Katerina, 94, 166 Cold War, 7, 14, 18, 28, 52, 56, 63 – 64 common rooms, 3, 12, 91 common spaces (mesta obshchego polzovaniia), 12, 22, 105, 107 – 10, 114 – 21, 124, 127 – 35, 152, 156, 164, 213, 216 communal apartments (kommunalki) alienating living arrangements, representations, 138 – 39, 152, 209 bathrooms, 152 – 53, 156 common spaces (mesta obshchego polzovaniia), 2, 108 – 10, 124, 127, 131, 152, 156, 164 cooperation among residents, 123 – 24, 132, 152 – 53 crowded conditions, 4, 127, 131, 152 – 53, 157, 172, 181, 188, 212 distrust levels, 154 – 55 habitual interaction, 11, 124 – 25, 154 interior design, 38, 64, 152 – 53, 156 – 57 longevity, 221 origins, 2 privacy concerns, 131, 152, 156 – 57 psychological effects, 139, 150 – 53, 158 public depictions, 152 – 53 redeeming interactions, 154 – 56 social/personal convergence, 108, 124, 131 Communism belief in, 78 – 79, 109, 130 Capitalism comparisons, 14 – 15, 62 – 63, 75 citizen provisions, 13, 54, 122 Communist Party influence, 15, 58, 61 – 62, 66, 74 – 75, 111, 134, 166, 176, 189 – 92, 203 – 4, 217 consumer culture, 7, 15, 65 – 66, 78, 90

I ndex    281

kommunisticheskii byt (communist living), 62, 108, 129, 171, 198, 200 – 201, 213, 216 Komsomol, 91, 94, 122, 126, 180, 191 living conditions, effect on, 54, 83 morality, 10 – 11, 14 – 15, 18 – 19, 83, 90, 104, 109, 127, 130 – 31 petitioning rationalization, 189 – 92, 203 – 6, 217 po-kommunisticheski (in a communist manner), 109, 214 property rights, 8, 139 separate apartments, role of, 7 – 15, 47, 51 – 56, 63 – 64, 77, 117, 123, 134, 212 – 13 comrades’ courts (tovarishcheskie sudy), 111, 126 – 29, 132 Condee, Nancy, 53 construction industry All-Union Conference of Builders, 25, 28 assembly enterprises, 30 – 34 brigade structure, 29, 134, 147 Builders’ Day, 29, 31, 55 conveyor belts, 4, 31 – 32 dolgostroi (delayed construction), 72 – 73 gender roles, 30 – 31 labor organization, 29 Leningrad revitalization, 30, 50, 219 media coverage, 30, 33 – 34, 57 modernization, 7, 28 – 34, 212, 216 narodnaia stroika (people’s construction), 12 novostroika (new construction), 7, 13, 15, 34, 47, 55, 59, 64, 74 – 77, 109, 124, 212, 216 patriotic duty, 53 – 55 prefabricated materials, 21, 31 – 32, 37, 62, 117, 212, 216 value recognition, 29 – 30, 57 Western influences, 26 – 27 Cooper, Julian, 51 corridors, 12, 70, 108, 110, 124, 127, 132, 135 Corrigan, Peter, 81 – 82 Corten, Irina, 72

Council of Ministers of the USSR, 25, 58, 160, 171, 174 – 75, 179 – 80, 182, 195, 201 courtyards, 11 – 12, 26, 35 – 36, 107 – 10, 113 – 24, 127, 133 – 35, 213, 216, 222 cupboards, 39, 64, 89, 96 curtains, 43, 58, 64, 82, 97, 101, 159 Dachnyi district (Leningrad), 148, 169 – 70 Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, 27 Denisov, U. A., 204 D′iachenko, F. T., 148 – 49 dining facilities, 7, 28, 61, 72, 89, 92 – 93, 99, 101 District Military Registration and Enlistment Office (RVK), 183 Dobrenko, Evgeny, 54 Dobson, Miriam, 130 Doctor Zhivago, 9 dolgostroi (delayed construction), 72 – 73 Dolmant′ev, N. I., 156, 171 – 75, 190, 203 domashnii byt (domestic life), 169 dom-kommuny (house-communes), 2 domovaia kukhnia (house kitchen), 65 – 66 dormitories, 15, 38, 91 – 92, 140, 144, 176, 205, 218 Dorogi, kotorye my vybiraem, 24 – 25, 79 – 80 Drosina, M. I., 176, 178 Dunham, Vera, 13, 84, 104, 166 Dzerzhinskii district (Leningrad), 184 Edele, Mark, 185 – 87 Edige, M. E., 147, 199 – 200 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 9 – 10, 213 elevators, 31, 108, 187 Engels, Friedrich, 61 – 62 entitlement, 17 – 20, 161, 173 – 76, 180 – 85, 188 – 90, 193, 208, 217 Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), 171, 184

28 2     I ndex

Fainberg, T. F., 158, 162, 194 – 95 Fediashchin, M. G., 190 – 91 feuilletons, 5, 9, 67 – 68, 76, 86, 99, 103, 112, 114, 145 – 46 Field, Deborah Ann, 11 – 12, 38, 83, 156 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 13, 209 Five-Year Plan, 2 – 4, 50, 98, 133 folk wares, 7, 43, 51, 64, 215. See also interior design France, 62, 101 Friedgut, Theodore, 18 – 19, 133 – 34, 196 furniture architectural style reflections, 39 bookshelves, 28, 37, 39 – 40, 52, 99 chairs, 27 – 28, 37, 52, 96, 103 coordinating characteristics, 39, 41, 46 cupboards, 39, 64, 89, 96 discrete zones, 2 – 3, 82 gender implications, 96 – 97 kombinirovannaia (convertible) furniture, 39 – 40, 44 lampshades, 11, 37, 84, 86 – 87, 96 – 97, 101 manufacturing shortcomings, 99 – 100 master narrative role, 81 – 82 moderation emphasis, 39, 41 – 42 sektsionnaia (sectional furniture), 39, 44, 96 sofabeds, 39 – 40, 44, 89 space considerations, 38 – 39, 99 tables, 27, 37, 41, 64, 91 – 93, 103, 108, 156 television sets, 39, 41, 44, 58, 70, 88, 90, 101, 106, 218 See also interior design Fürst, Juliane, 19 Furtseva, Ekaterina, 65 Gagarin, Yuri, 24 Gaitskhoki, L. Sh., 162 garantiinyi pasport (guarantee certificates), 67 – 68 gardens, 35 – 37, 48, 61, 108, 115, 166 – 67

Gatchinskii, M., 112 Gavanskaia Street (Leningrad), 176 Gerasimova, Katerina, 152, 221 Germany, 20 – 21, 178, 184, 189, 191, 205 Ginzburg, S. Z., 218 – 20 Gladilin, Anatolii, 154, 167 Glavleningradstroi, 137 Gogol, Nikolai, 201 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 219 Gorky, Maxim, 102 Goscilo, Helen, 54 Great Patriotic War, 17 – 18, 134, 174, 178 – 80, 189, 200, 206 – 7 Grecheskii Avenue (Leningrad), 119 – 20 Groznyi, 70 guarantee certificate (garantiinyi pasport), 67 – 68 Gulag, 192 hallways, 70, 108 Harris, Steven, 7 – 8, 12 Hazard, John, 173 Hellbeck, Jochen, 17 Higgins, Marguerite, 170 Hindus, Maurice, 106 – 7, 167 hooliganism, 83, 98, 121, 125 – 26, 131 – 32, 153, 220 house kitchen (domovaia kukhnia), 65 – 66 housewarming (novosel′e), 1, 5, 10, 15, 17, 54 – 59, 63, 67 – 76, 107, 124, 134, 138, 148, 165 – 66, 168, 175, 198, 217 housewife (khoziaika), 64 humaneness (gumannost′), 130 Hungary, 9, 171 Huxtable, Simon, 111, 122 Iashmanova, T. I., 198 interior design appliances, 14, 27, 37, 44 – 46, 51 – 52, 64 – 65, 69, 90, 99, 110, 117, 164 bathrooms, 2 – 3, 34, 58, 97, 108 – 9, 124, 152 – 53, 159, 167, 176 bedrooms, 2, 28, 37, 44, 70

I ndex    28 3

bookshelves, 28, 37, 39 – 40, 52, 99 byt (everyday life) representations, 37, 46, 66, 85, 103 central heating, 16, 34, 36, 60, 68, 97, 130 chairs, 27 – 28, 37, 52, 96, 103 common rooms, 3, 12, 91 communal apartments (kommunalki), 38, 64, 152 – 53, 156 – 57 communism goals, 130 curtains, 43, 58, 64, 82, 97, 101, 159 decorative excesses, 11, 82, 88 – 89, 109, 215 dining facilities, 7, 28, 89, 92 – 93, 99, 101 discrete zones, 2 – 3, 82 exhibitions, 44, 46, 99 – 100 folk wares, 7, 43, 51, 64, 215 functionality, 36 – 39, 41, 43, 85, 98, 215 gender roles, 11, 14, 38, 41, 52, 64 – 66, 95 – 97, 215 hallways, 70, 108 homemaking role, 85 – 90, 94 – 95, 104, 214 – 15 instructional literature, 37 – 39, 41, 43 – 44, 99, 101 kitchens, 2 – 3, 29, 34, 36 – 37, 58, 60, 64 – 66, 108, 136 – 37, 167 kul′turnost′ (culturedness), 87 – 96, 102, 104 malaia arkhitektura (small architecture), 39 meshchanstvo (middle class lifestyle), 87 – 95, 98, 104 moral foundation, 82 – 85 personalization, 36 – 38, 85, 101 – 2 plastics use, 43 – 44, 46, 51, 215 plumbing, 16, 61, 69, 118, 137, 145, 148 published representations, 84 – 95, 99, 101 socialism influence, 27 – 28, 82 – 84 space optimization, 16, 27 – 28, 38 – 39, 99, 150, 194 – 95 specialized art journals, 98 Thaw, effects of, 50 – 51, 83 – 84

wallpaper, 29 – 30, 37, 43, 58, 145, 168 water supply systems, 16, 20, 35, 60, 69, 120, 148 well-being role, 39, 83 – 85, 150 See also furniture International Women’s Day, 57 invalidy (disabled persons), 149, 151, 180, 182, 186 – 87, 192, 196, 205 – 6 Ironiia sud′by (The Irony of Fate), 70 Isaenkov, G. P., 77, 187, 192, 200, 205 ispolkom (executive committee), 137, 144, 146, 149, 164, 169, 184, 189 – 91, 199 – 201, 205 Izvestia, 112, 164, 169, 197 – 98, 206 Jacquet, Eliane, 101 Jones, Polly, 162 Journal of Design History, 6 Kak pozhivaesh′, paren′?, 140 – 41 Kalnina, M. A., 194 Kanin, P. E., 164 – 65 Kanina, N. A., 164 – 65 Kelly, Catriona, 99, 101 Kettering, Karen, 98 Kharkhordin, Oleg, 108, 129 Kharkov, 69 Khilimok, E. G., 58 khoromy (mansions), 140 khoziaika (housewife), 64 Khrushchev, Nikita antisocial elements stance, 131 architectural demands, 6, 25 – 28, 33, 35, 41, 50 – 51, 75, 102 – 3 consumer culture transformations, 7 – 8, 15, 104, 107 foreign policy, 9 horizontal surveillance, 129 house committees, 133 housing policies, 2, 4 – 6, 9, 13, 33, 52 – 55, 72, 75, 107, 138 – 40, 169, 180, 207 interior design viewpoints, 98 Kitchen Debate, 14, 51, 75 labor relations, 29 leadership metaphors, 53 – 54

28 4     I ndex

Khrushchev, Nikita (continued) media coverage, 112, 114, 123, 138, 146 memoirs, 169 moral codes, 132 – 34 propaganda campaigns, 61, 218 separate apartment construction, 2, 4, 33, 77, 212 technology goals, 52 urban forms, 6, 56, 140 See also Thaw khrushchëvka (five-story apartment building), 34, 220 – 21 Kiev, 4, 48 Kirov district (Leningrad), 183 – 84, 191 Kirschenbaum, Lisa, 180 Kitchen Debate, 14, 51, 75 kitchens, 2 – 3, 29, 34, 36 – 37, 58, 60, 64 – 66, 108, 136 – 37, 167 Kochubei, V. T., 160 – 61, 195 Kol′, L. L., 195 Kolchak, Alexander, 190 Kolosov, Serafim Aleksandrovich, 1, 5, 16 Kolpinskaia Street (Leningrad), 149 Komarova, A. I., 161, 193 kombinirovannaia (convertible) furniture, 39 – 40, 44. See also furniture kommunalki. See communal apartments kommunisticheskaia nravstvennost′ (communist morality), 10 – 11, 14 – 15, 83, 90, 109 kommunisticheskii byt (communist living), 62, 108, 129, 171, 198, 200 – 201, 213, 216 Komsomol, 91, 94, 122, 126, 180, 191 Koroteyev, Dmitry, 10 Kotkin, Stephen, 16 Kozlov, Frol, 171, 175 Krokodil, 1, 48, 66 – 68, 70, 86 – 87, 99, 140 – 41, 145, 148, 154, 165, 197 Krylov, M. P., 198 Krylov, Nikolai, 174 Krylova, Anna, 151 Kuibyshev (city), 125, 218

Kuibyshev district (Leningrad), 128, 192 kul′turnost′ (culturedness), 87 – 96, 102, 104 La Pierre, Brian, 126, 130 lampshades, 11, 37, 84, 86 – 87, 96 – 97, 101 Lapidus, Gail, 71 Le Corbusier, 26 Lebina, Natal′ia, 55 Lenin, Vladimir, 61, 74 – 75, 101 – 2, 111 Leningrad aesthetic reorganization, 48, 61 Avtovo district, 44 City Housing Administration, 121 city soviet, 137 – 38, 143 – 44, 147, 164, 172, 177, 184, 187 – 89, 193 – 94, 197, 201 – 2 complaint venues, 113, 118 – 19, 121 – 22 construction revitalization, 30, 50, 219 Dzerzhinskii district, 184 Glavleningradstroi, 137 green spaces, 35, 118 – 19 housing stock, 4, 20 – 21, 119, 137 – 38, 144, 150, 207, 219 Kirov district, 183 – 84 Kuibyshev district, 128, 192 Malaia Okhta district, 53, 71 Narva Gates district, 60 population patterns, 20 – 21, 120, 181 Shchemilovka Street, 33 – 34, 58, 76 social contamination, 121 St. Petersburg renaming, 219 technical innovation, 21, 50 Vechernii Leningrad, 33 – 34, 55, 58 – 59, 69, 111 – 16, 121, 123, 127 – 28, 140, 148, 197, 221 voluntary organizations, 111 – 14, 119 – 21 wartime destruction, 4, 20 – 21, 120, 148, 180 Zhdanov district, 183 Leningrad State University, 177

I ndex    28 5

Leningradskaia pravda, 112, 164, 195, 197 Liashenko, N. I., 188 lichnaia zhizn′ (personal life), 47 – 48, 106, 108, 158, 214 – 15 lichnost′ (selfhood), 110, 151 – 52, 158, 162, 187, 207 MacDuffie, Marshall, 102 Mace, David/Vera, 101 – 2 Magnitogorsk, 50 malaia arkhitektura (small architecture), 39. See also interior design Malaia Okhta district (Leningrad), 53, 71 Markosov, D. B., 160 Marling, Karal Ann, 14, 87 Marx, Karl, 61 – 62, 111, 134, 216 Maslei, M. I., 178 – 79 Maslei, O. G., 164 Matich, Olga, 103 May, Elaine Tyler, 14, 87 May Day, 56 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 57, 97, 106 Medvedev, Dmitry, 219 Meerovich, Mark, 209 meshchanstvo (“middle class lifestyle”), 87 – 95, 98, 104 mesta obshchego polzovaniia (common spaces), 12, 22, 105, 107 – 10, 114 – 21, 124, 127 – 35, 152, 156, 164, 213, 216 Mikhailova, M. N., 150, 189 Mikoyan, Anastas, 183 – 84 mikroraiony (micro-districts), 6, 35 – 36, 44, 47, 71, 76, 103, 134, 175, 215 – 16, 220 Minstry of Defense, 183, 186 – 87, 189, 201 Monastyrev, Vladimir, 166 – 67 montazhnik (building assembler), 53 Moscow, 21, 24, 44, 48, 67, 110, 160 Moskovskaia pravda, 179 Moskvichev, Iu. T., 199 narodnaia stroika (people’s construction), 12

Narva Gates district (Leningrad), 60 New Economic Policy, 134 Nixon, Richard, 14, 51 Novak, Joseph, 102 Novikova, Z. V., 160, 177 – 78, 197 Novocherkassk, 78 novosel′e (housewarming), 1, 5, 10, 15, 17, 54 – 59, 63, 67 – 76, 107, 124, 134, 138, 148, 165 – 66, 168, 175, 198, 217 novosely (new settlers), 5, 56 – 58 novostroika (new construction), 7, 13, 15, 34, 47, 55, 59, 64, 74 – 77, 109, 124, 212, 216. See also construction industry Obmen, 141 obshchaia komnata (common room), 3, 9, 12 obshchestvennye sovety (social soviets), 111 obshchestvennyi (social), 107 – 8 obshchestvo (society), 107 – 8 ocherki (sketches), 112 – 14 October Revolution, 1, 5, 8 – 9, 17 – 18, 54 – 56, 58, 78, 98, 134, 138, 169, 180 Oliver, James, 174, 202 Order of Glory, 182 Order of Lenin, 171, 176 Order of the Red Banner, 171, 176 Order of the Red Star, 186 Orlov, N. I., 189 – 90 osobniaki (private residences), 140 otdel′naia kvartira. See separate apartment Ottepel′, 9 – 10 Paperny, Vladimir, 75 parks, 35 – 36, 63 Patrikeeva, T. M., 205 Pavlov, A. P., 183 – 84 Pavlova, M. E., 158 Peeling, Siobhan, 21, 120 Perevezentseva, N. I., 205 petitioning alienating living arrangements, descriptions, 138 – 39, 152, 178

28 6     I ndex

petitioning (continued) autobiographical details, 17 – 18, 138, 145, 170, 173, 193, 206, 217 bureaucratic deficiencies, 196 – 202, 206, 209 byt (everyday life) references, 17, 163, 165, 170, 216 – 17 citizenship rhetoric, 173 – 75, 193 – 96, 201, 207, 217 Communist Party status, 189 – 92, 203 – 6, 217 correspondence procedures, 16, 137 – 38, 172 – 75, 189 – 90, 197, 201 – 2, 206 eligibility, 144 – 45, 171 – 72, 183 entitlement sentiment, 17 – 20, 173 – 76, 180 – 85, 188 – 90, 193, 217 hardship exposure, 16 – 17, 136 – 38, 152 – 54, 174, 177, 190, 201, 206 housing exchange bureaus, 141, 143, 196 – 97 invalidy (disabled persons) basis, 149, 151, 178 – 80, 182, 186 – 87, 192, 196, 205 – 6 labor claims, 150 – 51, 175 – 80, 196, 217 lawlessness, 200, 208 lichnost′ (selfhood) concerns, 151 – 52, 158, 162, 187, 207 normalcy seeking, 15, 147 – 50, 156 – 58, 187, 195, 217 otpiski (formal replies), 121, 197 – 99 progress rhetoric, 77, 173, 202, 216 – 17 proletariat privileges, 177 – 78 reciprocity narratives, 173, 176 – 78, 187, 198 rehabilitation narratives, 192 – 95 socialism, 18 – 20, 148 – 49, 175, 198 – 201, 207 – 8, 217 speaking Bolshevik, 16, 208 – 9 special considerations, 172 – 73, 208 – 9 submissions, 137 – 38, 141, 143 timeframe, 16, 137, 144 volume, 137 war service references, 148 – 49, 178 – 89, 196, 200, 203, 206 – 8, 217 widows, 187 – 89, 193, 196

Petrov, A. P., 176 Petrov, I.  G., 183 – 84, 208 – 9 Pikalevo, 69 Pilipenko, S. S., 199 Pimenov, Yuri, 77 playgrounds, 34, 115, 117 plumbing, 16, 61, 69, 137, 145, 148 po-kommunisticheski (communist manner), 109, 214 Posnova, N. E., 201 Postnov, N. I., 176, 178 Pravda, 112, 190, 200, 205 Prokhorov, N. F., 180 – 81 proletarian propriety, 11 – 12, 85, 109, 114, 118 – 21, 126, 130, 215 proletariat, 9, 14, 22, 51, 56 – 59, 63, 97, 104, 118, 130, 166, 177 – 78, 189, 215 – 16 propaganda campaigns, 5, 58, 61, 111, 131, 134 – 35, 147, 170, 173, 178, 185, 208 – 9, 218 propiska (residency permit), 141, 144, 182, 184, 189, 193, 197 Putin, Vladimir, 219 – 20 Rabotnitsa, 38, 41, 62, 64 – 65, 91, 153 Reed, John, 55 Reid, Susan, 7, 15, 51 – 52, 64 – 65, 118 reidy (inspections by social groups), 111 Ries, Nancy, 19 Riga, 48 Rodina (native land), 74, 149, 174, 178 – 83, 186 – 88, 200, 203 – 6 roofs, 9, 16, 30, 137, 145 Ruble, Blair, 24 Rudnyi, 34 Russian Housing in the Modern Age, 6 Russia’s Sputnik Generation, 132 Rybczynski, Witold, 27 Rybkina, I. P., 151 – 52 Sakharov, Andrei, 180 Salakhadinova, G. A., 204 Salavat, 34 Salisbury, Harrison, 24, 33, 79 Samodel′nikov, T. F., 181 – 82, 198 Savishkin Street (Leningrad), 115

I ndex    287

sektsionnaia (sectional furniture), 39, 44, 96. See also furniture Semenova, I. S., 149, 151, 206 Semenova, L. M., 147, 164, 204 separate apartment (otdel′naia kvartira) collectivism orientation, 7, 10, 15, 26, 48, 56, 104, 109 – 10, 117 – 19, 123 – 24, 130 – 32, 213 – 15 common spaces (mesta obshchego polzovaniia), 12, 22, 105, 107 – 10, 114 – 21, 124, 129, 132 – 34, 213, 216 communism goals, 7 – 15, 47, 51 – 56, 63 – 64, 77, 117, 123, 134, 212 – 13 consumer amenities, 3, 7, 71 – 72, 79, 98, 215, 219 functionality, 10 – 11, 34 – 35, 103 gender roles, 8, 11, 14 – 15, 38, 52, 64 – 66, 71 – 72 housewarming (novosel′e), 1, 5, 10, 15, 54 – 59, 63, 67 – 76, 107, 124, 134, 138, 148, 165 – 66, 168, 175, 198, 217 landscaping, 34 – 36, 107, 109, 133 – 35, 213, 215 media coverage, 5, 61 – 62, 67, 103, 109, 111, 131, 138, 215 modernization, 34 – 35, 56, 60, 103 origins, 2, 7 privacy gained, 106 – 8, 165 – 67 psychological benefits, 36, 76, 104, 107, 168 – 69, 213 revolutionary ideals, 54 – 55, 106 – 7, 117 – 18 service networks, 7, 47, 62 – 63, 71 – 72, 79 socialism influence, 11 – 12, 26 – 28, 54 – 56, 62, 102, 104, 110, 166 societal benefits, 107 – 10, 119 – 20, 125 – 26, 133, 215 – 16 supply shortage, 4 – 5, 103 – 4, 144, 150, 173, 212, 217 voluntary activities, 107 – 9, 111 – 12, 117 – 20, 123, 131, 215, 222 See also interior design; petitioning Serpukhovskaia Street (Leningrad), 156 Sevastopol, 4

Seven-Year Plan, 137 Shakhmamet′ev, Kh. F., 156, 192 Shapovalov, Ivan, 53 Shchemilovka Street (Leningrad), 33 – 34, 58, 76 Shifrina, F. A., 157 Shlapentokh, Vladimir, 63, 106 – 7 Shostakovich, Dmitry, 33 Shvedova, S. Ia., 190 – 92, 203 Sidorov, K. D., 186 – 87 Smirnova, M. P., 201 Smith, Mark, 7 – 8, 12, 18, 50, 139, 166, 209 socialism aesthetics, 7 byt, 75 – 76, 175, 214 interior design, role in, 27 – 28, 82 – 84 media coverage, 61 petitioning role, 18 – 20, 148 – 49, 175, 198 – 201, 207 – 8, 217 prescriptions, 109, 150 separate apartments, role in, 11 – 12, 26 – 28, 54 – 56, 62, 102, 104, 110, 166 standards of living, 58, 109 superiority, 51 – 52 testimonials, 15, 61 Thaw, effects of, 139 socialist contract, 23, 196 – 200, 207 – 10, 217 sofabeds, 39 – 40, 44, 89 Solov′ev, Iu. A., 158 Solov′eva, Anna Trofimovna, 158 – 59 Sopin, Fëdor, 74 Sovetskaia Rossiia, 147, 197 sovetskoe obshchestvo (Soviet society), 107 – 9, 114 – 16, 122, 124 – 25, 130, 133 – 34, 215, 218, 222 Soviet identity, 7, 13, 18 – 20, 175, 179 – 80, 193, 201, 209 Sputnik, 24, 28, 75 St.  Petersburg, 220 – 21. See also Leningrad stairwells, 11, 30, 108 – 10, 115, 127, 131, 134 Stakhanovite movement, 49, 176, 213

28 8     I ndex

Stalin, Joseph architectural trends, 6, 27 – 28, 35, 41, 50 – 51 cult of personality, 3, 50, 110, 213 death, 13, 63, 165, 214 personal indebtedness, 74 predeterminism, 94, 213 private values, 104 repressive tactics, 9 – 10, 14, 123, 213 resource diversions, 2 separate apartments, 2, 166 Terror, 3, 10, 160, 189 urban forms, 6 worker recognition, 176 Stalingrad, 4, 29 State Construction Committee of the USSR, 178 State Housing Construction Committee, 77 Stroitel′stvo i arkhitektura Leningrada, 75, 99 Struchkov, F. Ia., 156, 177 – 78 subbotniki (Saturday voluntary work campaigns), 107, 111, 123, 222 Sullivan, Louis, 26 Sumgait, 34 Supreme Soviet, 25, 29, 178, 181 – 84, 194 – 95, 201, 205 Sushkov, A.D., 127, 130 Sverdlovsk, 48, 160, 188 Svetukhin, V. S., 182, 186 tables, 27, 37, 41, 64, 91 – 93, 103, 108 Tallinn, 44 Taylorism, 49 television sets, 39, 41, 44, 58, 70, 88, 90, 101, 106, 218 teremki (towers), 140 Tereshkova, Valentina, 24, 73 Thaw architectural trends, 25 – 28, 50, 103 byt (everyday life) restructuring, 83, 102, 213 – 14 censorship, 203 housing needs, 9 – 10, 25, 50, 54, 63, 75, 210 illiberal measures, 8 – 9 individual welfare, 9 interior design, effect on, 50 – 51, 83 – 84

media coverage, 111 – 16, 135 private values, 104, 165 – 66 socialism revival, 139 See also Khrushchev, Nikita Tikhvin, 69 Timasheff, Nicholas, 213 Tipanov Street (Leningrad), 117 tovarishcheskie sudy (comrades’ courts), 111, 126 – 29, 132 Tsvetkov, A.M., 177 – 78 Tveritinova, M. M., 184, 198 Twentieth Party Congress, 66, 83 Twenty-First Party Congress, 176 Twenty-Second Party Congress, 205 Ukraine, 43, 171, 178 Union of Artists, 27, 86 United Nations, 102 United States, 13 – 14, 26 – 27, 51 – 52, 62, 75, 87 Utekhin, Ilya, 221 Vecherniaia Moskva, 112 Vechernii Leningrad, 33 – 34, 55, 58 – 59, 69, 111 – 16, 121, 123, 127 – 28, 140, 148, 197, 221 Vera Mukhina Higher College of Art and Industry, 46 Vilnius, 44, 48 Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture, 72 Vorkuta, 110 Voroshilov, Kliment, 90, 184, 196, 201 Vorotnikov, V. I., 218, 220 voskresniki (Sunday voluntary work campaigns), 111, 122 – 24 Votkinsk, 67 Vyborg Road (Leningrad), 163 vzaimozameniaemost′ professii (interchangeability of professions), 29 wallpaper, 29 – 30, 37, 43, 58, 145, 168 water supply systems, 16, 20, 35, 60, 69, 120, 148 Wedding on Tomorrow Street, A, 77 Week Like Any Other, A, 71 – 72 Weiner, Amir, 18 Werth, Alexander, 76

I ndex    28 9

Willis, David, 159 Wolfe, Thomas, 111 World War I, 186 World War II, 2, 4, 13, 18, 60, 62, 98, 133, 136, 148, 171, 174, 179 – 82, 185 – 86, 213, 218 – 19 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 27

zabota o cheloveke (concern for the person), 13, 18, 55, 150, 175 Zhdanov district (Leningrad), 183 Zhigalev, G. A., 157 Zhilinskaia, M. A., 151, 192 – 93 Zieger, Robert, 87 Zubkova, Elena, 138, 179