Description
Book SynopsisTaking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room investigates what happens to domestic spaces, architecture, and the lives of urbanites during a socioeconomic upheaval. Kateryna Malaia analyzes how Soviet and post-Soviet city dwellers, navigating a crisis of inadequate housing and extreme social disruption between the late 1980s and 2000s, transformed their dwellings as their countries transformed around them. Soviet infrastructure remained but, in their domestic spaces, urbanites transitioned to post-Soviet citizens.
The two decades after the collapse of the USSR witnessed a major urban apartment remodeling boom. Malaia shows how, in the context of limited residential mobility, those remodeling and modifying their homes formed new lifestyles defined by increased spatial privacy. Remodeled interiors served as a material expression of a social identity above the poverty line, in place of the outdated Soviet signifiers of well-being. Connecting home improvement,
Trade Review
Most valuable is...the detailed description of the structures, uses, and problems with late-Soviet apartments, and the attendant social adaptations and cooperation required to live in such limited space where one's 'bedroom' was simultaneously the family living room, entertainment center, and dining room, and one's kitchen was often but a galley. Malaia adds significantly to the depiction of everyday life...for this transitional period
* Russian Review *
