“Khrushchevka” by Natalia Lebina: a guide to a Soviet apartment

The publishing house “New Literary Review” has published a new book by the famous researcher of everyday life, Natalia Lebina, “Khrushchevka” – a guide to everyday life of the 1950s–1960s, designed as a journey through an average Soviet apartment.

Text: Igor Gulin

Natalia Lebina begins her book with a deliberate anachronism: the word “Khrushchevka” has become a meme, that is, in a sense, a dehistoricized concept. It sounds prejudiced, almost contemptuous. Hearing it, we understand perfectly well what kind of building is meant. We are talking about flimsy five-story block buildings with small, not very comfortable apartments, leaking ceilings, a shared bathroom, ugly furniture made of chipboard, and excellent audibility regarding the neighbors’ activities and fun. Now, at least in big cities, Khrushchev buildings are becoming an endangered species; they are being demolished for new high-rise buildings and almost no one feels sorry for them. So we forget how revolutionary the mass housing construction started in the mid-1950s was. Objectively speaking, it was the five-story buildings (and not, say, the space program) that turned out to be the main thing that remained to people from the era of Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev’s buildings became scattered throughout the Soviet Union as a monument to the second General Secretary.

This is not the first time Natalia Lebina has told the everyday story of the thaw. In the last 30 years, her works “Everyman and Reforms” (co-authored with Alexander Chistikov), “Man and Woman: Body, Fashion, Culture”, “Everyday Life in the Age of Space and Corn” have been published; The books Encyclopedia of Platitudes and Passengers on the Sausage Train also contain many passages devoted to the 1950s and 1960s. In general, in “Khrushchevka” there is a lot of material that was well worked out by her, but it is organized here according to a new principle – around not a topic, but a place. Throughout the book, Lebina moves from the neighborhood to the courtyard, from the courtyard to the entrance, from there to the apartment, moving through the rooms: kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom. Thus, public life, the heyday of which was marked by the thaw, turns out to be behind the scenes, in the center is private life in all its diversity: from sublime conversations in the kitchen to the very grotesque bodily bottom (Lebina devotes many pages to the practices of urination and defecation, this chapter is called “ Havanna” – this is how the combined bathroom was mockingly called against the backdrop of Soviet-Cuban friendship).

The housing policy of the Khrushchev era was part of a larger de-Stalinization program. Its task is to overcome the property (and to some extent, class) stratification that began in the 1930s and became completely obvious in the last years of the Stalin era, which, of course, was never openly recognized. On the one hand, luxurious housing in high-rise buildings and other buildings of the Stalinist Empire style, in which the bureaucratic and cultural elite lived: with crystal chandeliers, lush furniture, extensive libraries, a separate dining room, servants and a desktop “Book about tasty and healthy food.” On the other hand, there were communal apartments and barracks, in which – sometimes five or more people per room – the majority of the population huddled. The Khrushchevs arise against this double background. This is perhaps the most visible manifestation of real socialist politics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

However, Lebina repeatedly emphasizes that the birth of the Khrushchev era should be perceived in an international context. Affordable mass housing is being built throughout Europe in the post-war era. Lebina compares the texts of Vasily Aksenov, Denis Dragunsky, Anatoly Rybakov with the novels of Elsa Triolet, Heinrich Böll and John Brain (a popular representative of the English “young angry” in the Union) and discovers that the life of poor residents of new standardized houses in the USSR, France, Germany, Britain was arranged in an unusually similar manner.

This life is colored by euphoria from the long-awaited acquisition of your own space. The best document of this delight is the operetta “Cheryomushki,” written by Dmitry Shostakovich with lyrics by Vladimir Mass and Mikhail Chervinsky (as well as the film of the same name by Herbert Rappaport), which, despite all its grotesqueness, quite convincingly captures what poetic happiness a change in living conditions can bring. At the same time, this is a cramped life, filled with a lot of inconveniences and troubles, often frustrating. Especially for residents of their own wooden houses, who were forcibly relocated to five-story buildings when former villages turned into urban areas, but for everyone else too. As Lebina writes, Soviet housing policy was guided by the “N–1” principle, that is, there should always be one less room than there are people: parents are forced to sleep with small children, older children with grandmothers. There is space, but it is always a little short.

This ambivalence, as well as the special unprepossessing charm of Khrushchev, is best captured by art, so among Lebina’s favorite sources are novels, films, poems by Yevtushenko, paintings by Yuri Pimenov, the main poet of the new regions in Soviet painting. There is also an analysis of building regulations, price lists of furniture and grocery stores (a couple of pages are devoted to milk in triangular bags) and other bureaucratic documentation, but Lebina tries to defuse this with jokes. Another subject of her particular tender interest are cartoons from the Krokodil magazine, dedicated to the everyday prejudices of new settlers and minor oversights in the work of builders. In general, “Khrushchevka” bears little resemblance to an academic work. This is a popular work – something like an attraction, a little trip to the Soviet Union.

Natalia Lebina. Khrushchevka: Soviet and non-Soviet in the space of everyday life. M.: New Literary Review, 2024

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