Susan E. Reid

The Khrushchev Kitchen: Domesticating the Scientific-Technological Revolution:

In the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, the Khrushchev regime launched an intensive campaign to build mass housing. This period, known as The Thaw, is generally regarded as one of liberalization in comparison to the preceding Stalin era. Moreover, the proposed new housing, promising separate, one-family flats to replace the communal apartments and barracks in which most urban dwellers lived, seemed to offer the possibility of a ‘private’ home life. The Khrushchev flat, in particular its small kitchen, subsequently became mythologized as the heart of an ideology-free zone of sincerity where one could shut the door on the public realm and its values. This article proposes that, far from falling outside the domain of public discourse, the new flat — and, above all, the kitchen, along with the labour it accommodated and the lone female worker it presupposed — was a central site for the linked projects of modernization and the construction of communism. However, with its complex mixture of functions, the kitchen was also the site where the contradictions of Khrushchev-era design and centrally-planned production became most evident. Far from a paragon of rational socialist planning, the kitchen could become a microcosm of its dysfunction.

All Stalin's Women: Gender and Power in Soviet Art of the 1930s

This article will examine how the representation of gender in Soviet art during the second and third Five-Year Plans articulated relationships of domination in Stalinist society. Using female characters to stand for “the people” as a whole, painting and sculpture drew on conventional gender codes and hierarchy to naturalize the subordination of society to the Stalinist state and legitimate the sacrifice of womens needs to those of industrialization. The prevalence of female protagonists was closely connected with the promotion of the Stalin cult: women modeled the ideal attitude of “love, honor, and obedience.” As the triumph of conservative aesthetic hierarchies paralleled the restoration of traditional gender roles, I ask how women artists were to operate in these conditions.

The Meaning of Home: “The Only Bit of the World You Can Have to Yourself”

When Izvestiia introduced its new “home and family” page in July 1959, the editors set out from the start what the Soviet attitude to home and family was not. it was not the bourgeois conception of the sanctity of family bonds, as expressed in the aphorism “my home is my castle.” In the Communist Manifesto, they reminded readers, Marx and Engels had exposed the bourgeois ideal of the private sphere as a smokescreen that propped up the capitalist system. By giving the oppressed worker respite, it made him oblivious to his fundamental state of alienation. But “only socialism, by removing from human relations everything that is dirty and mercenary, born of centuries of private-property piggery, brings purity, contentment and happiness to the family of the worker.”1

The Soviet Art World in the Early Thaw

Taylor and Francis Ltd CTTE_A_158993.sgm 10.1080/ hird Text 0952822 (pri t)/1475-5297 (online) Or ginal Article 2 06 & Francis 000Ma ch 2006 Themes that are loud, important themes, Vital themes that pay well, You ruined me, important themes, Complex themes, and advantageous. Had I not painted you I would not suffer now, I would have lived my whole life in clover. Topical themes are ruining me, Saleable themes and banal.1

Cold War binaries and the culture of consumption in the late Soviet home

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to challenge Cold War binaries, seeking a more nuanced understanding of popular experience of change in the Soviet Union’s last decades. This was a period of intensive modernization and rapid transformation in Soviet citizens’ everyday material environment, marked by the mass move to newly constructed housing and by changing relations with goods. Design/methodology/approach – To probe popular experience and changing meanings, the paper turns to qualitative, subjective sources, drawing on oral history interviews (Everyday Aesthetics in the Modern Soviet Flat, 2004-2007). Findings – The paper finds that qualitative changes took place in Soviet popular consumer culture during the 1960s-1970s, as millions of people made home in new housing amid the widespread media circulation of authoritative images representing a desirable modern lifestyle and modernist aesthetic. Soviet people began to make aesthetic or semiotic distinctions between functionally identical goods and we...

Photography in the Thaw

In 1961 the president of the USSR Union of Journalists and chief editor of Pravda, Pavel A. Satiukov, proclaimed:In our days the role of photojournalism has grown immeasurably. Photography now occupies a place of honor in newspapers and journals, and we apply new, high standards to photographs, regarding them as a political document truthfully reflecting the life of our people constructing Communism, and at the same time as works of art.1

Consumption and Everyday Culture After Stalin: Guest Editor's Introduction

With the emergence of a new consumer culture in postsocialist Russia and other parts of the former bloc, the study of consumer culture under the ancien regime of state socialism has become a lively area of research.

Cold War Cultural Transactions: Designing the USSR for the West at Brussels Expo ’58

Abstract Focusing on the Cold War Expo in Brussels in 1958, this article takes the metaphor of “design diplomacy” as a lens through which to explore the dilemmas of Soviet exhibition planners charged with designing a modern image of the USSR at the World Fair. Seeking ways to represent the advantages of socialism to foreign, especially Western, publics, the exhibition organizers began to question established Soviet tradecraft in the production of mass exhibitions, concluding instead that if the USSR was to make itself understood by the capitalist “other,” it must adopt, selectively, the idiom of its audience and interlocutor. The Soviet “self” was constituted in relation to two main “others”: the USA, whose pavilion was adjacent to the Soviet one; and the anticipated public, about whom the Soviet designers knew little. As in diplomatic transactions, the art of persuasion demanded negotiation and compromise, resulting in a degree of transculturation and cross-fertilization.

Art for the Soviet home

As an intensive housing construction drive in the late 1950s began to provide separate apartments for millions of Soviet citizens, aesthetic experts envisioned the Soviet home as a potential site for the display of works of art and for amateur aesthetic production. In the context of de-Stalinization, reformist artists and aestheticians committed to the liberalization and modernization of Soviet artistic criteria, promoted the value of amateur art and even of home decorating in the formation of the new person who would live under communism. They also pressed for affordable art and craft to be made available to ordinary people for their new homes. Thereby they would dwell in their new apartments surrounded by beauty in their everyday lives, and would thus, the experts argued, be brought closer to communist consciousness. Moreover sales of art to individual citizens would provide an alternative income stream to fund artists’ production. The possibility of private art consumption would therefore free artists to some extent from their reliance on state commissions and from the strict stylistic and thematic norms and hierarchies of Socialist Realism as established under Stalin.