When Russia initiated the war in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, numerous multi-story, multi-apartment prefabricated houses became targets of bombardment, highlighting not only a ruthless assault on civilians but also serving as symbolic testaments to the enduring nature of the (post) Soviet space, which has undergone minimal transformation since its construction. However, within these structures, significant internal changes have transpired—an aspect explored in Kateryna Malaia's work, Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room. The book endeavors to comprehend the post-Soviet metamorphosis by scrutinizing the evolution of everyday life, with a particular focus on the residential domain.
Malaia's portrayal of the collapse of the USSR unveils both enduring continuities and profound transformations. Rather than adopting the traditional grand narrative of the end of state socialism and the emergence of democratic political systems and neoliberal economics, Malaia proposes an alternative narrative focused on the period from 1985 to the mid-2000s, examining the change in everyday life. While Soviet infrastructure persisted, the domestic spaces of urban dwellers assumed symbolic significance in their transition to post-Soviet residents. Malaia investigates the experiences of Soviet and post-Soviet city residents as they met housing challenges and profound social disruptions from the late 1980s to the 2000s.
The post-USSR era spanning two decades witnessed a notable surge in urban apartment renovations. Malaia illustrates how individuals, constrained by limited residential mobility, reshaped their homes, establishing new lifestyles characterized by spatial privacy. Remodeled interiors emerged as tangible expressions of social identity, supplanting outdated Soviet symbols of prosperity. By interweaving narratives of home improvement, self-reinvention, the decline of state socialism, and the tangible experiences of change, Malaia constructs a comprehensive portrait of this transformative period. Her objective is to comprehend lived experiences of change through their spatial dimension. Malaia subtly reveals that while the exteriors of large prefab panel houses remained unchanged, significant yet identical processes occurred on a mass scale inside them. She chooses to deconstruct the apartment, considered a formative product of socialist state engineering, social knowledge within the communist state, and a personal internal enclave.
The book's chapters are therefore organized around domestic practices and present a room-by-room analysis, encompassing remodeling, sleeping, eating, hygiene, and socializing. Malaia astutely observes that when examining domestic practices instead of room outlines, common themes of post-Soviet change, such as the emergence of private bedrooms, expansion of the kitchen, new bathroom standards, or the convergence of socializing and eating spaces within the home, become apparent. These processes, explained through specific concepts such as “evroremont,” the imagined European standard, are well connected to collective desires, economic changes of late Soviet period perestroika, and the opened borders after 1990.
Advocating for similarities across the former Soviet empire and the post-Soviet space, this study relies on interviews and fieldwork primarily conducted in Kyiv and Lviv, Ukraine. Malaia demonstrates that it is an effective method to write a history of the post-Soviet transformation while avoiding Russian sources and cases. She argues convincingly that it is crucial not to study the Soviet Union solely through the lens of Russia: “Limiting research related to the Soviet Union to Russia alone not only generates an inaccurate view of the Soviet and post-Soviet reality but also perpetuates the problematic perception of the Russian Federation as the normative locus for the entire post-Soviet region” (22).
Malaia adeptly combines academic precision, anthropological detail, and a vivid narrative, enabling both scholars and a broader audience to comprehend the processes of apartment transformation, their causes, and outcomes. However, a documentary fact requires clarification: Malaia references the well-known set of documents that regulated Soviet construction, “Sanitary Norms and Rules,” but the correct form should be “Construction Norms and Rules” (Stroitel'nye Normy i Pravila, or SNiP). While this does not fundamentally alter the existence of a stringent regulatory mechanism, maintaining documentary accuracy is imperative.
During the composition of this book, Malaia observed that the historically complete remodeling boom concluded in the early 2000s, leading her to assert that the post-Soviet period was drawing to a close. However, it was the revanchist Russian invasion of Ukraine that brutally demonstrated the end of the post-Soviet era. Consequently, the book serves as a historical account of the past. Functioning as a narrative of historical change through the lens of everyday life, Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room explores the significance of the home amid a dynamically changing world.
