The hidden meanings of Destined to be Happy exhibition - The Interview with Irina Korina
10 January 2017 | By
09 January 2017 | By
Inside the Picture: Installation Art in Three Acts - by Jane A. Sharp
19 November 2016 | By
Conversations with Andrei Monastyrski - by Sabine Hänsgen
17 November 2016 | By
Thinking Pictures | Introduction - by Jane A. Sharp
15 November 2016 | By
31 October 2016 | By
Tatlin and his objects - by James McLean
02 August 2016 | By
Housing, interior design and the Soviet woman during the Khrushchev era - by Jemimah Hudson
02 August 2016 | By
Dressing the Soviet Woman Part 3: "Are Russians Women?" Vogue on Soviet Vanity - by Waleria Dorogova
18 May 2016 | By
Dressing the Soviet Woman Part 1 - by Waleria Dorogova
13 May 2016 | By
Eisenstein's Circle: Interview With Artist Alisa Oleva
31 March 2016 | By
Mescherin and his Elektronik Orchestra - by James McLean
13 January 2016 | By
SSEES Centenary Film Festival Opening Night - A review by Georgina Saunders
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Nijinsky's Jeux by Olivia Bašić
28 July 2015 | By
Learning the theremin by Ortino
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Impressions of Post- Soviet Warsaw by Harriet Halsey
05 May 2015 | By
Facing the Monument: Facing the Future
11 March 2015 | By Bazarov
'Bolt' and the problem of Soviet ballet, 1931
16 February 2015 | By Ivan Sollertinsky
Some Thoughts on the Ballets Russes Abroad
16 December 2014 | By Isabel Stockholm
Last Orders for the Grand Duchy
11 December 2014 | By Bazarov
Rozanova and Malevich – Racing Towards Abstraction?
15 October 2014 | By Mollie Arbuthnot
Cold War Curios: Chasing Down Classics of Soviet Design
25 September 2014 | By
Walter Spies, Moscow 1895 – Indonesia 1942
13 August 2014 | By Bazarov
'Lenin is a Mushroom' and Other Spoofs from the Late Soviet Era
07 August 2014 | By Eugenia Ellanskaya
From Canvas to Fabric: Liubov Popova and Sonia Delaunay
29 July 2014 | By Alex Chiriac
My Communist Childhood: Growing up in Soviet Romania
21 July 2014 | By Alex Chiriac
Monumental Misconceptions: The Artist as Liberator of Forgotten Art
12 May 2014 | By Rachel Hajek
28 April 2014 | By Rachel Hajek
An Orgy Becomes a Brawl: Chagall's Illustrations for Gogol's Dead Souls
14 April 2014 | By Josephine Roulet
KINO/FILM | Stone Lithography Demonstration at the London Print Studio
08 April 2014 | By Alex Chiriac
24 March 2014 | By Renée-Claude Landry
Book review | A Mysterious Accord: 65 Maximiliana, or the Illegal Practice of Astronomy
19 March 2014 | By Rosie Rockel
Leading Ladies: Laura Knight and the Ballets Russes
10 March 2014 | By Bazarov
Exhibition Review | Cash flow: The Russian Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale
03 March 2014 | By Rosie Rockel
24 February 2014 | By Ellie Pavey
Guest Blog | Pulsating Crystals
17 February 2014 | By Robert Chandler Chandler
Theatre Review | Portrait as Presence in Fortune’s Fool (1848) by Ivan Turgenev
10 February 2014 | By Bazarov
03 February 2014 | By Paul Rennie
Amazons in Australia – Unravelling Space and Place Down-Under
27 January 2014 | By Bazarov
Exhibition Review | Siberia and the East, fire and ice. A synthesis of the indigenous and the exotic
11 December 2013 | By Nina Lobanov-Rostovsky
Shostakovich: A Russian Composer?
05 December 2013 | By Bazarov
Marianne von Werefkin: Western Art – Russian Soul
05 November 2013 | By Bazarov
Chagall Self-portraits at the Musée Chagall, Nice/St Paul-de-Vence
28 September 2013 | By Bazarov
31 July 2013 | By Richard Barling
Exhibition review | Lissitsky — Kabakov: Utopia and Reality
25 April 2013 | By Richard Barling
Exhibition review | Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: The Happiest Man
18 April 2013 | By Richard Barling
02 August 2016 | By
'Khrushchyovka' apartments in construction, 1962
It can be safely assumed that despite the re-opening of the ‘women question’ under Khrushchev, a gap existed between the rhetoric and promises made by the regime and the reality for Soviet women. Looking at Khrushchev’s housing reforms and related ideological programmes is a fascinating way to approach the position of women in Soviet society. Khrushchev’s plans to provide each family with its own apartment, signalling a radical break from the Stalin era, were bound to have profound implications for women; the domestic realm was traditionally viewed as a female concern.
Khrushchev’s ambitious housing programme was launched with the 1959 Seven Year Plan, promising to build 15 million new urban apartments, distributed on the principle ‘one family, one flat’. This transition from communal to separate-apartment living was accompanied by a complete break in style, denouncing Stalinist architecture and decoration. Khrushchev instead turned to
Modernism and the partial rehabilitation of Constructivism, favouring the modernist maxims of ‘less is more’ and ‘function over form’; homes were to be functional and austere, using modern, efficient construction methods and materials. Khrushchev’s prediction that full communism would be achieved by 1980 demanded all citizens internalised communist morality, achieved through the rationalisation and regulation of their daily life (byt), consumption and desires. The most efficient path to such regulation was to penetrate the domestic realm, ensuring the ‘correct’ communist values were enacted behind closed doors. As the domestic realm was traditionally seen as the female domain, it was women who felt the effects of Khrushchev’s policies most fully.
An interior design manual from 1962 showcases space saving kitchen units
Women were advised against decorative clutter; silk scarves, vases of paper flowers, perfume bottles and other ‘knick-knacks’ which allegedly created the effect of ‘vulgar, dismal coziness’ and were to be avoided at all costs. Instead, women were to be rationalisers and modernisers of the home. Sectional, convertible furniture and new technology was instead favoured, modern in form and functional in design.
As byt became essential to the development of communism, the Soviet Woman’s aesthetic task of furnishing the home became ‘a civic mission of educational and ideological import’. Alongside this important mission, women continued to shoulder the responsibility for housework alone, whilst holding down paid jobs and participating in the public sphere (workplace unions, political and social organisations); otherwise known as ‘the double burden’. Khrushchev’s reforms claimed to relieve women of this; new furniture would supposedly liberate women from household chores, such as dusting and polishing the mass of decorative knick-knacks in vogue during the Stalin era.
New labour saving devices, such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners, were also seen as the practical way of lightening women’s workloads. We can see that although a woman’s workload was supposedly lightened, she was expected to put a huge amount of time and effort into re-making the home in line with new ideological requirements, revealing such homemaking policies to be contradictory in nature. We can also point to a contradiction in the very nature of the ‘separate’ apartment; whilst suggesting a move towards a more private home life, in reality this was not so.
Domestic life was never truly separated from collective concerns; how the Soviet woman chose to furnish her home was very much a public matter.