In Search of "Ordinary" Russia: Everyday Life in the NEP, the Thaw, and the Communal Apartment

Ekaterina Iur´evna Gerasimova, "Sovetskaia kommunal´naia kvartira kak sotsial´nyi institut: Istoriko-sotsiologicheskii analiz (na materialakh Leningrada, 1917-1991)" [The Soviet Communal Apartment as a Social Institution: A Historico-Sociological Analysis (Based on Leningrad Materials, 1917-1991)]. Candidate of Sciences diss., European University in St. Petersburg, 2000.

Nataliia Borisovna Lebina and Aleksandr Nikolaevich Chistikov, Obyvatel´ i reformy: Kartiny povsednevnoi zhizni gorozhan v gody nepa i khrushchev-skogo desiatiletiia [The Ordinary Person and Reforms: Sketches of Urban Dwellers' Everyday Lives under the New Economic Policy (NEP) and in Khrushchev's Decade]. 340 pp. St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003. ISBN 586007364X.

Mark Grigor´evich Meerovich, Ocherki istorii zhilishchnoi politiki v SSSR i ee realizatsii v arkhitekturnom proektirovanii (1917-1941 gg.) [Essays on the History of Housing Policy in the USSR and Its Realization in Architectural Planning (1917-1941)]. 214 pp. Irkutsk: Izdatel´stvo Irkutskogo gosudar-stvennogo tekhnicheskogo universiteta, 2003. ISBN 5803801402.

Il´ia Utekhin, Ocherki kommunal´nogo byta [Essays on Communal Living]. 215 pp. Moscow: OGI, 2001. ISBN 5942820023.

Living a "normal" life and being an "ordinary person" in the former Soviet Union were difficult, if not impossible, tasks. Particularly in the 1930s, when the regime was most active in transforming its citizens through industrialization, urbanization, collectivization, and political indoctrination and terror, the most ordinary aspect of everyday life in the eyes of many citizens was its extraordinary nature.¹ At first, pre-revolutionary Russia was the point of reference for many Soviet citizens dreaming of a lost "normal" life, but it was Western life that came to represent "normality" for many citizens in the late Soviet era.² With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, an alternative system to life in the West disappeared; and most saw the transition to Western democracy and capitalism--and, therefore, "normality"--as a foregone conclusion.³ As we now know, the end of communism in the Soviet Union has not been followed by such an unproblematic transition, and remnants of the Soviet past live on well after the regime's collapse. Take, for example, the communal apartment, which was for both Soviet citizens and outside observers a chief example of the "abnormal" condition of the Soviet everyday that made life so difficult. What are we to make of its survival into the post-Soviet era?

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, scholarship on the communal apartment has changed our understanding of its place in Soviet history. No longer seen as merely an aberration of presumably universal notions of modern domestic life and privacy that helped distinguish the Soviet Union from the West, the communal apartment has been reinterpreted by the literature reviewed in this essay in the following ways: as a central foundation of a typical Soviet citizen's everyday life, social relations, and values; as the unintended product of ideological programs aimed at transforming the everyday; as the outcome of massive housing shortages brought on by war, revolution, and the industrialization drive; as the state's all-purpose tool for exerting ideological, social, and economic control over its citizens; and, ultimately, as a space to which some residents have unexpectedly clung, claiming it as their own after the Soviet Union's collapse. Having thus made the communal apartment the form of housing most commonly associated with Soviet history, where has the literature left that other form of Soviet housing, the single-family separate apartment, which dominated the urban landscape in the postwar era of Soviet history?

Recent studies by Russian scholars shed light on these and other questions about everyday life and housing. In their detailed...