Communism on Tomorrow Street: The Soviet Union’s Revolution in

Mass Housing after Stalin

Steven E. Harris

George Mason UniversityFebruary 19, 2014

Yurii Pimenov, “Wedding on Tomorrow Street” (1962)

Example of elite, pre-revolutionary housing in St. Petersburg: the Moruzi House, 24/27 Liteinyi prospekt. Source: http://www.sntpeters.com

THE “KOMMUNALKA” – THE COMMUNAL APARTMENT

Floor plan of a contemporary St. Petersburg kommunalka. Each room is accessible off the common central hallway; measurements in feet. Source: http://kommunalka.colgate.edu/cfm/site_map.cfm

THE “KOMMUNALKA” – THE COMMUNAL APARTMENT

Source: http://kommunalka.colgate.edu

The kitchen of a kommunalka.

The long corridor of a kommunalka.

A family drinking tea at the dining room table in their own room. A family’s room served several functions.

“A SEPARATE APARTMENT FOR EVERY FAMILY”

Nikita S. Khrushchev

* Leader of the Soviet Union, 1953-1964

A Khrushchev-era apartment building in St. Petersburg, October 2010. Photographed by the author.

Paris

Brasilía Chicago

Leningrad

Source: James Holston, The Modernist City (Chicago, 1989), 176

Source: Dmitrii Gubin et al., Real’nyi Peterburg (St. Petersburg, 1999), 190-91.

Source: Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 1878-1978 (New Haven, 1979), 262.

Source: Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto (Chicago, 1998), 244.

Floor plans for a four-apartment section in mass housing built under Khrushchev. K. Metel’skii, “Predlozheniia proektirovshchikov MITEPa,” Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 6 (1962); 13.

Ilya Ehrenberg (1891-1967)

author of The Thaw (1954)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)

* author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)

Sectional furniture in a living/dining room. This room was part of a 1959 furniture exhibition in Moscow. Source: N. Luppov, “O vsesoiuznom konkurse na luchshuiu mebel’,” Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, no. 5 (1959): 9.

MOVING TO THE SEPARATE APARTMENT

Yuri Pimenov, “A Lyrical House-Warming”

Source: Rabotnitsa, no. 5 (1967), 10.

Yuri Pimenov, “Wedding on Tomorrow Street” (1962)

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

MASS HOUSING AND THE COLD WAR:THE “KITCHEN DEBATE”

Khrushchev and Nixon at the American Exhibition in Moscow, 1959