In his recent ethnographic history of the Nivkhi of Sakhalin Island, Bruce Grant employs the “Soviet House of Culture” as a metaphor of cultural construction and the “hybrid identities produced by the Soviet state.”Bruce Grant, In the Soviet House of Culture (Princeton, 1995), xi. Yuri Slezkine's rendition of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as a communal apartment (kommunalka), where each national group had its own room but shared the kitchen, bathroom, and corridors, serves a similar metaphorical purpose, enabling the reader to envision the complexities of superstate–nationality interaction in more familiar spatial terms.Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53 (1994):414–52. For the USSR as a “superstate,” see Moshe Lewin, Russia/USSR/Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate (New York, 1995). Both the communal apartment and the house, or palace, of culture were venerable Soviet institutions. Each was the product of the reimagining of sociability in the wake of the October Revolution, representing different types of imagined communities that only subsequently assumed material reality. The communal apartment has been the subject of novels (both utopian and dystopian), film, song, painting, economic and cultural history, and several (absurdist) exhibits.For the treatment of the communal apartment as “the cornerstone of the now disappearing Soviet civilization,” see Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 121–67, quotation on 123. See also Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1989), 200–4, 213–19; and Albrecht Martiny, Bauen und Wohnen in der Sowjetunion nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin, 1983), 20–24, 138–58. The avant-gardist artist Ilya Kabakov has made the kommunalka the subject of paintings and exhibits. See 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, UK, 1993), 232–33; and Dina Vierny et al., Fondation Dina Vierny-Musee Maillol (Paris, 1995), 128–29. By contrast, little attention has been given to palaces of culture or to the less grandiloquently titled workers' clubs.Western scholarship on workers' clubs and palaces of culture has been limited to the formative decade of Soviet power and the post-Stalin decades. In addition to articles by John Hatch cited below, see Gabriele Gorzka, “Proletarian Culture in Practice: Workers' Clubs, 1917–1921,” in Essays on Revolutionary Culture and Stalinism, ed. John W. Strong (Columbus, OH, 1990), 29–55; and Anne White, De-Stalinization and the House of Culture: Declining State Control over Leisure in the USSR, Poland and Hungary, 1953–89 (London, 1990).
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Jun 1, 2023
Alyssa A Vigliotti 
