Abstract
In a painting of 1952, Aleksandr Laktionov depicted a ‘typical’ (that is, exemplary) Soviet family Moving in to a New Flat (Figure 8.1). The new occupants are surrounded by their belongings — a radio, a plant, a globe, posters and piles of books — all of which speak of the family’s attention to culture and education. Yet before these attributes can be unpacked and put in their places the first question that has to be resolved is where to hang the photo-portrait of Stalin, who, as the personification of the Soviet state, is the provider of this bounty. The flat is large and well appointed, with a high ceiling, double glass doors, quality wallpaper and a parquet floor. The lucky head of household who has received this blessing is a woman. While the absence of a father reflects post-war demographic reality — women outnumbered men by 20 million — it is also symbolic. His rightful place next to mother and son is taken by Stalin’s portrait. The composition is structured on the relation between this focal point and the columnar figure of the woman, who occupies the central, vertical axis of the painting.
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Notes
See J. Guldberg, ‘Socialist Realism as Institutional Practice: Observations on the Interpretation of the Works of Art of the Stalin Period’, in H. Gunther (ed.), The Culture of the Stalin Period (Basingstoke, 1990), pp. 169–70; S. Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1994); and V. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middle-Class Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, 1976), ch. 3. 2 Foreign visitors to the Soviet Union in the 1950s remarked on the incongruous persistence of a bourgeois ideal of comfort in actual Soviet interiors, public and private. See S. R. Rau, My Russian Journey (New York, 1959), p. 5. 3 Dunham, op. cit., p. 41. 4 Ibid., p. 42. 5 On kul’turnost’ - literally ‘culturedness’ — see ibid.; C. Kelly and D. Volkov, ‘Directed Desires: Kul’turnost’ and Consumption’, pp. 22–3, in C. Kelly and D. Shepherd (eds), Constructing Russian Culture (Oxford, 1998), pp. 291–313; Boym, op. cit.; S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Becoming Cultured: Socialist Realism and the Representation of Privilege and Taste’, in The Cultural Front (Ithaca, 1992), pp. 216–37, and Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism (New York, 1999), ch. 4. 6 Dunham, op. cit., p. 42. 7 See, for example, Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), Art into Life: Russian Constructivism, 1914–1932, exh. cat. (Seattle, 1990); N. Lebina, Povsednevnaya zhizn’ sovetskogo goroda: normy i anomalii. 1920/1930 gody (St Petersburg, 1999); A. Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington, 2000); and O. Matich, ‘Remaking the Bed: Utopia in Daily Life’, in J. Bowlt and O. Matich (eds), Laboratory of Dreams (Stanford, 1996), pp. 59–78. 8 See K. Kettering, “Ever more Cosy and Comfortable”: Stalinism and the Soviet Domestic Interior, 1928–1938’, Journal of Design History, vol. 10, no. 2, 1997, pp. 119–36; V. Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism (Oxford, 1999), pp. 177–8; and Boym, op. cit., pp. 35–40. 9 RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 173, 1. 17. See S. Reid, ‘All Stalin’s Women: Gender and Power in Soviet Art of the 1930s’, Slavic Review, vol. 57, no. 1, 1998, pp. 133–73.
See Fitzpatrick, ‘Becoming Cultured’, p. 231; and RGALI , f. 2943, op. 1, ed., khr. 75, I. 10: ‘Obrashchenie k zhenam sovetskikh khudozhnikov i skul’ptorov’ (1936).
Magazines such as Ogonek and Sem’ya i shkola consistently cast the readers of domestic advice as female. See also C. Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to.Yeltsin (Oxford, 2001), pp. 321–93.
The shift in party policy began even before Stalin’s death. See A. Nove, Stalinism and After (London, 1975), pp. 124–8; J. Hessler, ‘A Postwar Perestroika? Towards a History of Private Enterprise in the USSR’, Slavic Review, vol. 57, no. 3, 1998, pp. 516–42.
B. de Jouvenel, ‘The Logic of Economics’, a commentary on A. Nove, ‘Toward a Communist Welfare State?’, both first published in Problems of Communism, January-February 1960. Reprinted in A. Brumberg (ed.), Russia under Khmshchev. An Anthology from Problems of Communism (London, 1962) [Nove, pp. 571–90, Jouvenel, pp. 599–605; this passage, p. 604].
O. Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: a Study of Practices (Berkeley, 1999), p. 300.
Compare P. Hauslohner, ‘Politics before Gorbachev: De-Stalinization and the Roots of Reform’, in A. Dallin and G. Lapidus (eds), The Soviet System in Crisis (Boulder, Colo., 1991), pp. 53–5; and G. Breslauer, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: BuildingAuthority in SovietPolitics (London, 1982).
Compare S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 160, 195.
For further discussion see S. Reid, ‘Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev’, Slavic Review, vol. 61, no. 2, 2002, pp. 211–52; D. Field, ‘Communist Morality and Meanings of Private Life in Post-Stalinist Russia, 1953–1964’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1996; Kelly, Refining Russia, ch. 5; Kharkhordin, Collective, pp. 297–328; and J. Gilison, The Soviet Image of Utopia (Baltimore, 1975).
See R. Hill, ‘State and Ideology’, in M. McCauley (ed.), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism (Basingstoke, 1987), pp. 46–60; J. Scanlan, Marxism in the USSR: a Critical Survey of Current Soviet Thought (Ithaca, 1985); G. Hodnett (ed.), Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Vol. 4: The Khrushchev Years 1953–1964 (Toronto, 1974), pp. 167–264; and Field, ‘Communist Morality’.
E. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 263–7. See also D. Hoffmann and Y. Kotsonis (eds), Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledges, Practices (Basingstoke, 2000).
E. Wilson, Women and the Welfare State (London, 1977), p. 9 (emphasis in original). See also pp. 29, 36.
On Khrushchev’s image as protector of women and children, see S. Reid, Khrushchev in Wonderland: the Pioneer Palace in Moscow’s Lenin Hills, 1962, Carl Beck Papers, no. 1606 (Pittsburgh, 2002), p. 12.
N. Zhukov, ‘Vospitanie vkusa’, Novyi mir, no. 10, 1954, pp. 159–76; ‘Tribuna chitatelya. 0 vospitanii vkusa’, Novyi mir, no. 2, 1955, pp. 247–54; A. Saltykov, ‘0 khudozhestvennom kachestve promyshlennykh tovarov’, Sovetskaya torgovlya, no. 9, 1954, pp. 22–31.
Editorial, ‘Aktual’nye voprosy estetiki v svete novoi Programmy KPSS’, Voprosy filosofii, no. 9, 1962, pp. 3–14; see also S. Reid, ‘Destalinization and Taste’, Journal ofDesign History, vol. 10, no. 2, 1997, pp. 177–202.
S. Rappoport, Tvorit’ mir po zakonam krasoty (Moscow, 1962), pp. 8, 64–6. See also N. Dmitrieva, 0 prekrasnom (Moscow, 1960).
‘Pervyi vsesoyuznyi s’ezd sovetskikh khudozhnikov’, Iskusstvo, no. 3, 1957, p. 14; Karl Marks, Iz rannykh proizvedenii (Moscow, 1956).
Authoritative examples include A. Saltykov, 0 khudozhestvennom vkuse v bytu (Moscow, 1959); the new design journal founded in 1957, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR; RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 2979; and Moskovskii khudozhnik, nos 10–11, June 1959. For further detail, see Reid, ‘Destalinization and Taste’; and Iu. Gerchuk, ‘The Aesthetics of Everyday Life in the Khrushchev Thaw in the USSR (1954–64)’, in S. Reid and D. Crowley (eds), Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford, 2000), pp. 81–99. See also V. Buchli, ‘Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight against Petit-Bourgeois Consciousness in the Soviet Home’, Journal of Design History, vol. 10, no. 2, 1997, pp. 161–76.
N. S. Khrushchev, 0 shirokom vnedrenii industrial’nykh metodov, uluchshenii kachestva i snizhenii stoimosti stroitel’stva (Moscow, 1955).
V. Dunham, ‘The Changing Image of Women in Soviet Literature’, in D. Brown (ed.), The Role and Status of Women in the Soviet Union (New York, 1968), p. 68; D. Field, ‘Irreconcilable Differences: Divorce and Conceptions of Private Life in the Khrushchev Era’, Russian Review, vol. 57, no. 4, 1998, pp. 599–613.
Nove, Stalinism and After, p. 130; M. Field, ‘Workers (and Mothers): Soviet Women Today’, in Brown, Role and Status, pp. 7–56; M. Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union (New York, 1989), pp. 139–60; G. Browning, ‘Soviet Politics: Where are the Women?’ in B. Holland (ed.), Soviet Sisterhood: British Feminists on Women in the USSR (London, 1985), pp. 207–36; G. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 225–31.
‘Rech’ tovarishcha N. S. Khrushcheva’, Pravda, 15 March 1958; W. Tompson, Khrushchev: a Political Life (Basingstoke, 1995), p. 201.
For example, G. Kulikovskaya, ‘Pronikayushchaya v zvezdy’, Ogonek, no. 11, 8 March 1959, p. 11.
See for example, the Women’s Day address from the CC CPSU: ‘Rabotnitsam i kolkhoznitsam, deyatelyam nauki, tekhniki, prosveshcheniya, literatury, iskusstva, zdravookhraneniya, vsem sovetskim zhenshchinam!’ Pravda, 8 March 1958; E. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade (Bloomington, 1997); Gorsuch, Youth, ch. 5; L. Edmondson, ‘Women’s Emancipation and Theories of Sexual Difference in Russia, 1850–1917,’ in M. Liljestrom, E. Mantysaari and A. Rosenholm (eds), Gender Restructuring in Russian Studies (Tampere, 1993), pp. 39–52; and F. Bernstein, “The Dictatorship of Sex”, in Hoffmann and Kotsonis, Russian Modernity, pp. 138–60.
See also D. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization (Cambridge, 1992), p. 178 and passim.
V. Bil’shai, ‘Kto pray: V. I. Nemtsov ili E. Nilova?’ Literaturnaya gazeta, 10 January 1959.
Browning, ‘Soviet Politics’, p. 232.
O. Kharkhordin, ‘Reveal and Dissimulate: a Genealogy of Private Life in Soviet Russia’, in J. Weintraub and K. Kumar (eds), Public and Private in Thought and Practice (Chicago, 1996), pp. 333–63. On the antithesis of byt and bytie (existence) see Boym, Common Places, pp. 29–32.
Bronfenbrenner, op. cit., pp. 112–16; and Deborah Field’s chapter in this volume.
O. Kuprin, Byt — ne chastnoe delo (Moscow, 1959).
A. Showstack Sassoon, ‘Introduction’, in Sassoon (ed.), Women and the State: the Shifting Boundaries of Public and Private (London, 1992 [1987]), p. 32.
A. Vul’f, ‘Protiv nedootsenki domovodstva’, Sem’ya i shkola, no. 8, 1961, p. 47.
D. Koenker in discussion, AAASS annual convention, Pittsburgh 2002. Compare J. Heilbeck’s argument that the ‘private’ space of a diary served as a ‘technology of the self’, a site where the author worked on himself to produce and articulate a social being. J. Hellbeck, ‘Self-Realization in the Stalinist System’, in Hoffmann and Kotsonis, Russian Modernity, p. 229.
Yu. Trifonov, The Exchange; transl. E. Proffer, in Yu. Trifonov, The Long Goodbye: Three Novellas (Ann Arbor, 1978), pp. 17–19. On the normative concept of zhil’ploshchad’ (living space) and on housing in general, see essays by V. Papernyi and S. Kotkin in W. Brumfield and B. Ruble (eds), Russian Housing in the Modern Age (Cambridge, 1993); and Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, ch. 4.
V. Panova, ‘Vremena goda’, Novyi mir, no. 11, November 1953, pp. 3–101, and no. 12, December 1953, pp. 62–158.
Hodnett, Resolutions, p. 230; S. Strumilin, ‘Mysli o giyadushchem’, Oktyabr; no. 3, 1960, p. 141; T. Sosnovy, ‘The Soviet Housing Situation Today’, Soviet Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, July 1959, pp. 6, 13; G. Andrusz, ‘Housing Ideals, Structural Constraints and the Emancipation of Women’, in J. Brine, M. Perrie and A. Sutton (eds), Home, School and Leisure in the Soviet Union (London, 1980), pp. 3–25; and see S. Harris, ‘Recreating Everyday Life: Building, Distributing, Furnishing and Living in the Separate Apartment in Soviet Russia, 1950s–1960s’, unpublished PhD dissertation University of Chicago, 2003.
See Y. Kotsonis, ‘Introduction: a Modern Paradox — Subject and Citizen in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Russia’, in Hoffmann and Kotsonis, Russian Modernity, pp. 1–16.
V. Khazanova, ‘Arkhitektura v poru “Ottepeli”’, in V. Lebedeva (ed.), Ot shestidesyatykh k vos’midesyatykh. Voprosy sovremennoi kul’tury (Moscow, 1991), p. 77.
D. Birdwell-Pheasant and D. Lawrence-Zuniga, House Life: Space, Place and Family in Europe (Oxford, 1999), p. 28; and I. Cieraad, At Home: an Anthropology ofDomestic Space (New York, 1999).
Cited in L. Abramenko and L. Tormozova (eds), Besedy o domashnem khozyaistve (Moscow, 1959), pp. 3–4.
See ‘Summary of XXI (extraordinary) Party Congress’, Soviet Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 1959, p. 90; P. Hanson, Advertising and Socialism: the Nature and Extent of Consumer Advertising in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia (Basingstoke, 1974), pp. 7–8, 72.
D. Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: a History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).
Field, ‘Communist Morality’, p. 41; and Kelly, Refining Russia, ch. 5.
Abramenko, Besedy, p. 4; ‘Ob uyute v obstanovke kvartiry’, in ibid., pp. 7–56; M. Chereiskaya, ‘Zametki o khoroshem vkuse’, in R. Saltanova and N. Kolchinskaya (eds), Podruga (Moscow, 1959), p. 220; E. Nikol’skaya, ‘Uyut i obstanovka v dome’, Sem’ya i shkola, no. 11, 1958, pp. 46–7; E. Nikol’skaya, ‘Blagoustroistvo zhilishcha’, Sem’ya i shkola, no. 1, 1958, pp. 42–4. See also Buchli, ‘Khrushchev, Modernism’, pp. 161–76; Reid, ‘Destalinization and Taste’, pp. 177–202; and Gerchuk, ‘Aesthetics of Everyday Life’, pp. 81–99.
I. Luppov, ‘Novym zdaniyam — novyi inter’er’, in N. Matveeva (ed.), Iskusstvo i byt (Moscow, 1963), p. 14; Field, ‘Communist Morality’.
See Saltykov, 0 khudozhestvennom vkuse v bytu; Mil’vi Kartna-Alas, ‘Iskusstvo i byt’, Ogonek, no. 25, 19 June 1960, pp. 20–2; Ol’ga Bayar, ‘Sdelaem kvartiru udobnoi i uyutnoi’, Sovetskaya zhenshchina, no. 7, 1956, pp. 47–8; O. Bayar and R. Blashkevich, Kvartira i ee ubranstvo (Moscow, 1962); Nikol’skaya, ‘Blagoustroistvo zhilishcha’, pp. 42–4; Nikol’skaya, ‘Uyut’, pp. 46–7; Z. Krasnova, ‘Khoroshii vkus v ubranstve zhil’ya’, Sem’ya i shkola, no. 1, 1960, pp. 44–5; and A. Bryuno, ‘Vasha kvartira’, Sem’ya i shkola, no. 10, 1960, pp. 46–7.
RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 2979, I. 54: ‘Problemy formirovaniya sovremennogo stilya v sovetskom izobrazitel’nom iskusstve’.
I. Zhvirblis, ‘Doma s privideniyami’, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, no. 6, 1962, pp. 43–5; N. Voronov, ‘Ob iskusstve, meshchanstve i mode’, Sem’ya i shkola, no. 3, 1962, pp. 14–16; G. L’vov, ‘Osteregaites’ poshlosti — borites’ za khoroshii vkus!’ Moskovskii khudozhnik, nos 10–11, June 1959; M. Taraev, ‘Pervyi vserossiiskii sezd khudozhnikov’, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, no. 9, 1960, p. 3; M. Gordeev, ‘Protiv bezvkusitsy. Poshlost’ iz anodirovannogo alyuminiya’, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, no. 1, 1962, p. 44; I. Suvorova, ‘Na urovne plokhogo rynka’, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, no. 6, 1962, p. 46; O. Aizenshtat, ‘Neuvazhenie k plastmasse’, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, no. 1, 1962, pp. 46–7; Yu. Gerchuk, ‘Dostovernost’ i pravda’, Tvorchestvo, no. 10, 1965, p. 3.
D. and V. Mace, The SovietFamily (London, 1963), p. 161.
Even in magazines with mixed readership such as Ogonek, features on domestic arrangements addressed the reader as female: for example, N. Svetlova, ‘Tvoi dom’, Ogonek, no. 3, 11 January 1959, pp. 14–16.
Compare E. Carter, How German is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (Ann Arbor, 1997), p. 50; M. Nolan, Visions of Modernity (Oxford, 1994), ch. 10.
Compare R. Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother, 2nd edn (London, 1989), pp. 70–101.
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© 2004 Melanie Ilič, Susan E. Reid & Lynne Attwood
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Reid, S.E. (2004). Women in the Home. In: Ilič, M., Reid, S.E., Attwood, L. (eds) Women in the Khrushchev Era. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523432_9
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