Abstract

 
 
 The Soviet state created mass-housing to reshape the city and everyday life itself. This paper examines the spaces and objects of mass-housing to examine the relationship between residents, the state and objects within Soviet everyday life. Approaching the study of everyday life in the Soviet Union from the early 1920s to the late 1980s via the spaces of mass-housing can offer a tangible approach to a way of life that might otherwise seem strange or uncanny. This paper uses ethnographic analysis by drawing on scholarly sources along with five historical photographs. The mass housing spaces of the kommunalka and later khrushchyovka served as places of push and pull. The state attempted to expand the public realm while residents simultaneously tried to create privacy and individuality. Within the interior, the Red Corner and the commode were embodiments of contradictions between modernization and tradition. Despite the state’s efforts, commodity fetishism lingered at the core of everyday life. Within Soviet everyday life, mass-housing spaces and objects can be useful to illustrate the changing yet stagnant relationship between residents and the state.
 
 
Highlights
Looking back from a contemporary western capitalist consumerist perspective to everyday life in Soviet Russia can bring to mind a certain strangeness of grey and drab apartment blocks
This paper will use an ethnographic approach by combining scholarly sources of Soviet masshousing life with historical photographs
Everyday objects placed in the Red Corner took on charged meanings that pushed towards a modern Soviet byt
Summary
Looking back from a contemporary western capitalist consumerist perspective to everyday life in Soviet Russia can bring to mind a certain strangeness of grey and drab apartment blocks. Some of the most concrete and unique aspects of everyday Soviet life are found within these spaces and objects of mass-housing. This paper will explore the contradictions of everyday life in Soviet mass-housing through looking at the spaces and objects, relationships between residents, the state and objects. The state’s new socialist byt and uiut meant reshaping material culture to meet the needs and ideals of the Soviets. In this process, there were efforts to avoid meshchanstavo or a petit-bourgeois lifestyle which were considered distasteful and incompatible with new Soviet. The desires for revolutionary byt, uiut and meshchanstavo meant the Soviets “would need to be ‘antihome’” In this new approach to byt there would be new massinghousing and material culture but no homes
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