the khrushchev kitchen- domesticating the scientific-technological revolution

http://jch.sagepub.comJournal of Contemporary History

DOI: 10.1177/0022009405051554 2005; 40; 289 Journal of Contemporary History

Susan E. Reid The Khrushchev Kitchen: Domesticating the Scientific-Technological Revolution

http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/40/2/289 The online version of this article can be found at:

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Journal of Contemporary History Additional services and information for

http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts:

http://jch.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

at ALLEGHENY COLLEGE on April 25, 2010 http://jch.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://jch.sagepub.com

http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

http://jch.sagepub.com/subscriptions

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

Susan E. Reid

The Khrushchev Kitchen: Domesticating the Scientific-TechnologicalRevolution

To have a kitchen of one’s own was, for many Soviet families, a dream thatbecame a possibility in the 1960s, thanks to the mass housing campaignlaunched by the Khrushchev regime. On 31 July 1957, the party issued adecree on mass housing construction that would change the life of millions:‘Beginning in 1958 in apartment houses under construction both in towns and in rural places, economical, well-appointed apartments are planned foroccupancy by a single family.’1 The kitchen of the new, one-family flat subse-quently became mythologized as the heart of ‘private’ home life and the privi-leged site of authentic social relations; it was imagined as an ideology-freezone of sincerity and spontaneity where one could shut the door on theduplicities of the public realm and indulge in intimate nocturnal chat.2 Thisarticle argues, however, that far from falling outside the realm of public dis-course, the kitchen was a central site for the linked projects of modernizationand advanced construction of communism in the Cold War context of ‘peace-ful competition’. The design and use of the space of domestic labour and con-sumption were the object of sustained ideological, technological and aestheticattention in the Khrushchev era. The kitchen, along with the labour it accom-modated and the lone female worker it presupposed, was insistently inscribedin the discourses of rationalization and scientific modernization, on whichbasis the imminent transition to communism was to be achieved.3

* * *

Aspects of this research were presented to the workshop ‘Representations of Identity’, Helsinki,23–25 August 2003; the AAASS national convention, Pittsburgh, 2002; the workshop ‘What wasReal Socialism?’, University of Toronto, April 2003; and the conference ‘The Post-War EuropeanHome’, Victoria and Albert Museum, May 2003. I would like to thank Tracy McDonald, AmyRandall and others who contributed ideas and suggestions in these contexts, and above all DavidCrowley and the late Catherine Cooke.

1 The intensive housing drive is directly associated with Khrushchev’s ascendancy. N. Lebina,‘Zhil’e: kommunizm v otdel’noi kvartire’ in N. Lebina and A. Chistikov, Obyvatel’ i reformy:kartiny povsednevnoi zhizni gorozhan (St Petersburg 2003), 175. 2 For example, V. Khazanova, ‘Arkhitektura v poru “ottepeli” ’ in V. Lebedeva (ed.), Otshestidesiatykh k vos’midesiatym. Voprosy sovremennoi kul’tury (Moscow 1991), 81.3 On women and the domestic sphere as a force for modernization in Germany, compare MaryNolan, Visions of Modernity. American Business and the Modernization of Germany (Oxford1994), chap. 6.

Journal of Contemporary History Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA andNew Delhi, Vol 40(2), 289–316. ISSN 0022–0094.DOI: 10.1177/0022009405051554



In the cosmos, socialist science had proved its superiority with the launch ofthe first Sputnik in October 1957. The kitchen, meanwhile — and the condi-tions of women’s work in general — remained the site of the Soviet system’shumiliation and a symbol of its backwardness.4 In the notorious confrontationbetween the superpowers at the American National Exhibition in Moscow1959, it was the state-of-the-art kitchen of the model American home that served Vice-President Richard Nixon as the ideal platform from which tochallenge Soviet state socialism. For if US superiority in the space race andarms race was in doubt, capitalism’s victory in the standard-of-living raceseemed assured.5

These were far from trivial matters to the Soviet regime. As it held, the ulti-mate global victory of socialism was to be achieved through superior livingstandards rather than military might. It was an article of faith — and not onlyof Cold War polemics — that socialism would guarantee the best possible conditions of life for the largest number of people.6 The Khrushchev regimerepeatedly indexed the imminent transition to communism to the achievementof superabundance and unprecedented prosperity, and devoted an extraordi-nary degree of attention to consumption and everyday, domestic life.7

The promised abundance that would win the Cold War for socialism was tobe attained by harnessing the achievements of modern science and technology.‘We stand on the threshold of a new scientific-technological and industrial revolution’, declared Premier Nikolai Bulganin at the July 1956 CentralCommittee plenum.8 The Scientific-Technological Revolution or ‘STR’ was acentral term in official pronouncements of the Khrushchev era, which made it a defining characteristic of socialist modernity. In the postwar world,advanced science and technology were fundamental to the arms and space raceas well as for international prestige. But only the socialist system, founded onscientific principles, it was argued, was capable of fully applying the techno-logical revolution to benefit human life. The Third Party Programme adoptedin 1961 — the definitive ideological statement of the Khrushchev period —identified social progress with scientific and technological progress. It was to

290 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 40 No 2

4 Khrushchev publicly admitted embarrassment that Western perceptions of Soviet life weredominated by the image of downtrodden women engaged in manual labour, and that visitors tookhome the impression of a backward and uncivilized country. ‘Rech’ tovarishcha N.S. Khrush-cheva’, Pravda, 15 March 1958.5 See Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound. American Families in the Cold War Era (New York1988); Cynthia Lee Henthorn, ‘The Emblematic Kitchen. Labor-Saving Technology as NationalPropaganda, the United States, 1939–1959’, Knowledge and Society, 12 (2000), 153–87; idem,‘Commercial Fallout. The Image of Progress and the Feminine Consumer from World War II tothe Atomic Age, 1942–1962’ in A. Scott and C. Geist (eds), The Writing on the Cloud. AmericanCulture Confronts the Atomic Bomb (Lanham, MD 1997), 24–44.6 W. Tompson, Khrushchev. A Political Life (Basingstoke 1995), 266; W. Turpin, ‘Outlook forthe Soviet Consumer’, Problems of Communism, 9, 6 (1960), 36; and J.K. Gilison, The SovietImage of Utopia (Baltimore, MD 1975), 7.7 See S. Reid, ‘Cold War in the Kitchen. Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste inthe Soviet Union under Khrushchev’, Slavic Review, 61, 2 (2002), 212–52.8 N. Sokolova, ‘Masterstvo populiarizatsii’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 24 January 1957.



be achieved through electrification of the whole country, comprehensivemechanization of production, and civilian applications of atomic energy andchemistry.9

Faith in science as a means to speed the transition to communism extendedalso to the newly-rehabilitated social sciences, which were to provide ‘the scientific basis for guiding society’s development’. In the organization of pro-duction, and of social life in general, spontaneous, unregulated practices wereto give way to conscious, codified ones founded on ‘scientific’ analysis.10 ‘At atime when a communist society is being built’, the Programme announced, ‘itis of prime importance that a scientific world outlook be shaped in all workingpeople of Soviet society.’11 A scientifically and technologically literate societywas an important asset in the postwar world, if the Soviet Union was to modernize its civilian industry and also to keep up with the international armsand space race. Moreover, scientific consciousness was proclaimed a definingcharacteristic of the future citizen of communism.

Women were to share in this modernizing process. As will be shown, specialefforts were invested in inculcating scientific consciousness in the ‘housewife’.The ideology of scientific rationality was to penetrate the recalcitrant, ‘uncon-scious’ and unregulated realm of domestic, everyday life — still gendered asfeminine — via the kitchen. But before turning to this matter, the centraltheme of this article, it is necessary to review Soviet attitudes to the kitchenfrom the Lenin era. Although the Marxist commitment to equality was a con-sistent theme in official rhetoric, the party operated in practice with unexam-ined stereotypes of women as irrational and resistant to socialization, alongwith, indeed because of, the kitchen in which a large proportion of their timeand energy was still spent.12

In the Marxist tradition, the source of woman’s backwardness was her con-finement to the home and imprisonment by domestic labour. As Lenin wrote,woman would ‘remain a domestic slave in spite of all liberating laws’ as long

Reid: The Khrushchev Kitchen 291

9 Grey Hodnett (ed.), Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,vol. 4, The Khrushchev Years 1953–1964 (Toronto 1974), 252. 10 Ibid., 246. Compare James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improvethe Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT 1998); D. Hoffmann and Y. Kotsonis,Russian Modernity (Basingstoke 2000).11 Hodnett (ed.), Resolutions, op. cit., 246. 12 See Lynne Viola, ‘Bab’i Bunty and Peasant Women’s Protest during Collectivization’ in B.Farnsworth and L. Viola (eds), Russian Peasant Women (Oxford 1992), 190; Robert A.Feldmesser in discussion with Mark G. Field, ‘Workers (and Mothers). Soviet Women Today’ inD. Brown (ed.), The Role and Status of Women in the Soviet Union (New York 1968), 55; AnneE. Gorsuch, ‘“A Woman is not a Man”: The Culture of Gender in Russia, 1921–1928’, SlavicReview, 55, 3 (1996), 638; Linda Edmondson, ‘Women’s Emancipation and Theories of SexualDifference in Russia, 1850–1917’ in M. Liljeström, E. Mäntysaari and A. Rosenholm (eds),Gender Restructuring in Russian Studies (Tampere 1993), 39–52. Compare Carol Pateman, TheDisorder of Women (Cambridge 1989), 4.



as housework remained isolated labour conducted in the home.13 The solution,for Lenin and Aleksandra Kollontai — as for a series of socialists and feministsbefore them, from the German Social Democrat August Bebel to the Americanfeminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman — lay in the abolition of the individualkitchen.14 It was to be replaced by public dining, socialized housework and col-lective childcare. Only the development of services and new, collective formsof everyday living, would, according to Lenin, ‘in practice be able to liberatewoman, and reduce and eventually annihilate her inequality with man’.15

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, some experiments were made with therestructuring of domestic life through the establishment of communal andkitchen-less dwellings. Ernst May designed housing of this sort for the new‘socialist city’, Magnitogorsk, while Moisei Ginzburg and the Constructivistarchitectural group OSA (Union of Contemporary Architects) developed minimal kitchen niches for the Narkomfin communal house, Moscow, in1930.16 However, the priorities of rapid industrialization in the early 1930swere in conflict with the investment required to transform cooking and child-care from isolated homecrafts into scientifically-organized, socialist serviceindustries. Moreover, beginning with the dissolution of the Zhenotdel (thewomen’s section of the party) in 1930, the Stalinist state retreated from thecommitment to the restructuring of gender roles, the withering away of the family and the emancipation of women. To promote social stability andincrease the birth rate, new legislation in 1936 and 1944 reinstated the familyas the pillar of society and asserted women’s social obligation to reproductionas well as production.17

A British observer of Soviet life, Wright Miller, noted in 1959 that underStalin,

Most Russians needed little encouragement to return to the idea of a stable family life — ifindeed they had ever given it up during the early days of the revolution . . . during the worstyears which came later many spoke of family life as ‘the only bit of the world you can haveto yourself’.18

After the war, the figure of woman, demobilized and restored to her sup-posedly natural, ‘essentially feminine’ preoccupation with her own appear-ance, family and home, became central to the iconography of normalization,which papered over the traumas of Terror, war and dislocation. She — along


13 V.I. Lenin, ‘Velikii pochin. (O geroizme rabochikh v tylu)’, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5thedn (Moscow 1970), vol. 39, 24 (emphasis in the original).14 Such ideas are surveyed by Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution. A History ofFeminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities (Cambridge, MA 1981).15 Lenin, ‘Velikii pochin’, op. cit., 23–4. 16 See Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA 1995),109–20; Victor Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism (Oxford 1999).17 Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society. Equality, Development, and Social Change(Berkeley, CA 1979); Robert Thurston, ‘The Soviet Family during the Great Terror, 1935–1941’,Soviet Studies, 43, 3 (1991), 553–74; M. Ilic! (ed.), Women in the Stalin Era (Basingstoke 2001).18 Wright Miller, Russians as People (London 1960), 150.



with the cosy domesticity over which she presided in literary and visual repre-sentations — was an optimistic symbol of the return to peacetime and con-struction of the future.19

The retrenchment of the Stalin years and the image of the woman-centredhome as a dream of normality left a legacy to the Khrushchev era that wasonly partly addressed.20 The approach of the post-Stalin regime to women’semancipation, the family, housing and the servicing of everyday life was rivenwith contradictions and compromises. These resulted not only from the persis-tence of unexamined assumptions about gender. They also reflected divergentideals among the various agencies involved concerning the forms modern,urban, socialist life should take, which began to surface in the less repressiveclimate of the Thaw. On the one hand, the project of the 1920s to build a ‘newway of life’ was resumed, including the aim to emancipate women fromkitchen slavery. On the other, as will be shown, both the discourse of modernSoviet living and the actual, built form of housing in the Khrushchev era,reconfirmed the individual family home as the site of reproductive labour, andthe housewife as its isolated and unpaid workforce.

Official attitudes to the kitchen during the Khrushchev era need to be under-stood in terms of this contradiction. ‘The Soviet Housewife Needs Help!’declared First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan on a trip to the USA.21

Khrushchev himself paid special attention to ‘women’s problems’, includingdivorce, abortion, childcare and their domestic second shift, from 1956.22 Hewas motivated in part by a commitment to ‘broadening socialist democracy’and to forming the ‘New Soviet Person’ in readiness for the transition to communism which, he repeatedly promised, was imminent. Only by activeparticipation in the sphere of production and public life could a person fullyrealize herself as the integrated, all-round individual who would be a citizen ofcommunism. But, as the party First Secretary recognized, the combined burdenof job, childcare and housework prevented many women from fully engagingin social and political life.23 His preferred approach to the dual task of raisingliving standards and liberating women lay (in accordance with the declared‘return to Leninist norms’) in the expansion of communal services and publicinstitutions such as mass housing, schools, healthcare, and public dining facili-ties. These were promoted under the seven-year economic plan adopted in1959.24 The need for service establishments would be fully met within years,


19 See Vera Dunham, In Stalin’s Time. Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction, rev. edn (Durham,NC 1990), chap. 3; S. Reid, ‘Women in the Home’ in M. Ilic!, S. Reid and L. Attwood (eds),Women in the Khrushchev Era (Basingstoke 2004), 149–76.20 See S. Reid, ‘Masters of the Earth. Gender and Destalinisation in Soviet Reformist Painting ofthe Thaw’, Gender & History, 11, 2 (1999), 276–312.21 G. Zimmerman and B. Lerner, ‘What the Russians Will See’, Look, 21 July 1959, 52–4.22 E.g. ‘Rech’ tovarishcha N.S. Khrushcheva’, op. cit.23 See Field, ‘Workers (and Mothers)’, op. cit., 8. 24 CPSU Central Committee and Council of Ministers Resolution, ‘O merakh po uluchsheniiubytovogo obsluzhivaniia naseleniia’, Sobranie postanovlenii pravitel’stva SSSR (Moscow 1959),article 30, 86–91; Tompson, Khrushchev, op. cit., 200–1.



promised the new Party Programme, and free public dining would be providedat workplaces by the 1970s.25

Thus the threat of extinction loomed once again over the kitchen during theKhrushchev period. According to some utopian projections, reviving those ofthe 1920s, new housing would require, at most, a minimal ‘kitchen niche’ forwarming up pre-prepared meals, as had already been proposed in experi-mental housing of the late 1920s.26 The kitchen in the individual home wouldwither away.

However, a thoroughgoing transfer to communal servicing of life was notyet possible, even if desirable in the long term. Against what was defined astheir rational self-interest, women resisted and distrusted public laundries, forexample. The nearest one was always too far away, there was always a queue,and, ‘How do I know they boil and wash things properly?’27 Efforts to takefood preparation and consumption out of the home also met with only limitedsuccess. As Russian historian Nataliia Lebina notes, ‘The majority of Lenin-grad citizens continued to cook at home in the customary way, occasionallyusing polufabrikaty [semi-prepared foods].’28 A 1967 Soviet sociological studyof the home observed that the development of polufabrikaty and housekitchens (catering facilities serving an apartment block with either take-awayor eat-in meals) had affected the domestic preparation of food but not theform and location of its consumption, and accepted that home dining was likely to remain.29 By the early 1960s the leaders appear to have lost interest inthe public feeding initiative and the number of new house kitchens declinedsharply.30 For a complex of reasons, in which economic priorities and organi-zational factors combined with doubts about quality and the resilience of traditional concepts of good housekeeping, the socialized servicing of everydaylife, Lenin and Khrushchev’s preferred solution to the problem of housework,did not become an effective substitute for the ‘private’ labour of the individual‘housewife’.31 Thus, women’s unremunerated work in the home continued tobe relied upon.


25 Hodnett, Resolutions, op. cit., 232. 26 See S. Strumilin, ‘Mysli o griadushchem’, Oktiabr’, no. 3 (1960), 140–6; A. Riabushin,‘Zhilishche novogo tipa’, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, no. 2 (1963), 5–10.27 Alix Holt, ‘Domestic Labour and Soviet Society’ in J. Brine, M. Perrie and A. Sutton (eds),Home, School and Leisure in the Soviet Union (London 1980), 30.28 Lebina and Chistikov, Obyvatel’, op. cit., 238.29 A.V. Baranov, ‘Sotsiologicheskie problemy zhilishcha’ in A.G. Kharchev et al. (eds),Sotsial’nye problemy zhilishcha (Leningrad 1967), 14. 30 Lebina and Chistikov, Obyvatel’, op. cit., 238.31 Thus the heaviest task, laundry, was returned to the isolation of the home in this period —with or without a washing-machine — as the supply of running hot water became universal andwith the provision of balconies in many new flats, and as communal wash-houses died out.Matthews found that women of lower income were more likely to launder at home, probablybecause the use of services seemed an unwarranted expense compared to the unpaid labour of thewife. Lebina and Chistikov, Obyvatel’, op. cit., 189; Mervyn Matthews, Class and Society inSoviet Russia (London 1972), 104. Services were inadequate, unreliable, too expensive, or thequality too poor. State childcare made children ill, canteens compared poorly with home eating,



In practice, the construction of new housing and the discourse surroundingits inhabitation in the late 1950s and early 1960s directly contradicted themore fundamentalist projections of the atrophy of the family and of kitchen-less dwelling units. True, some planners and ideologues continued to hold deara utopian vision of the home, stripped of the labour of servicing everyday life,and transformed into a space of recuperation, self-development, truly humanactivities and unalienated relations. A few experimental ‘houses of the NewWay of Life’ were also built. But the intensive housing campaign of the late1950s was based not on the model of the communal houses and social con-densers of the 1920s, intended radically to restructure everyday life, but onsmall-scale apartments designed for a single nuclear family.32 Far from render-ing the kitchen obsolete, they provided families with their own dedicatedkitchen space, often for the first time in their lives. As an astute Western com-mentator, Alexander Werth, noted in 1962, ‘All this business about “commu-nal feeding” and “boarding schools for children” seemed in contradiction withthe present tendency to cultivate the family, to give individual flats to everyfamily.’33

If the radical, collective vision of Soviet housing was abandoned, faith in the social effects of properly-designed built space was not. The new one-family apartments, designed according to modern, rational, efficient andindustrial criteria, were supposed to effect a fundamental shift in the waypeople lived. Architecture and design discourse in the 1950s revived a premiseof many twentieth-century, modernist projects for mass housing schemes,including those of Russian Constructivism: ‘social construction’ or the role ofthe material environment in disposing people towards particular behavioursand social relations.34 Moving into their new flats, people were expected toshed, willy-nilly, the last material and mental traces of the past. The massexperience of novosel’e (housewarming) was widely represented as a joyousrite of passage, through which the new Soviet person would emerge, remadeand ready for the transition to communism.35

There was a problem, however. If the material environment determines consciousness, the one-family flat, the standard dwelling unit on which thehousing policy was based, would surely produce a one-family mentality. Muchrhetoric was required to counteract the potentially regressive environmentalinfluence of isolated dwelling. As Khrushchev asserted:


while laundry was ‘washed as if for an enemy’. T. Sosnovy, The Housing Problem in the SovietUnion (New York 1954), 146; citing Sovetskoe stroitel’stvo, no. 8 (1932), 118.

32 On the problems of houses with services, see I. Zhuchok and E. Zuikova, ‘Dom s privi-legiami’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 8 January 1969; on their incompatibility with contemporary socialtrends, see D. Platonov, ‘Sovremennye tendentsii i puti razvitiia perspektivnykh tipov zhilikhzdanii’ in Kharchev, Sotsial’nye problemy, op. cit., 23, 167.33 Alexander Werth, Russia under Khrushchev (New York 1962; reprint Westport, CT 1975),125.34 Khazanova, ‘Arkhitektura’, op. cit., 77.35 See Reid, ‘Women in the Home’, op. cit., 149–76.



It is necessary not only to provide people with good homes, but also to teach them . . . to livecorrectly, and to observe the rules of socialist communality. This will not come about of itsown accord, but is to be achieved through protracted, stubborn struggle for the triumph ofthe new, communist way of life.36

While people might now enjoy the ‘privacy’ (in the sense of spatial seclusion)of their own one-family flat, their homes and how they dwelled in themremained within the realm of public discourse.

A pervasive education campaign began, aiming to inculcate scientific con-sciousness and correct attitudes towards the home, and to introduce modern,conscious organization into domestic labour. Even as it remained ‘women’swork’ located in the family home, the traditionally isolated, unregulated andartisanal labour of housework was to be brought closer to scientific commu-nism. The kitchen must be aligned with the major projects of the era: industri-alization, technological progress, supremacy in the Cold War, and the finaltransition to communism. The rest of this article will discuss four aspects ofthis complex project: household advice; domestic science education; rationalplanning of the kitchen or ‘scientific management’, and the domestication ofthe scientific-technological revolution through the mechanization of house-work. A unifying theme is the irradiation of the home by the Enlightenmentvalues of rationality and science. Key components of the ideology of modern-ity throughout the industrializing world, in the Soviet context they wereascribed particular significance as the foundations of ‘scientific communism’.

Women’s labour in the home seemed particularly resistant to reform because itconsisted of traditional practices passed down the generations from mother todaughter and unconsciously perpetuated. By the postwar period, however, the continual social and demographic upheavals of the twentieth century —urbanization and industrialization, revolutions and war — had done much toloosen the hold of traditional patterns of domesticity.37 Khrushchev’s intensive housing drive accelerated the process of urbanization so that some had to adaptto apartment living. Furthermore, the explicit commitment to providing one-family flats ‘even for newly-weds’ meant that many, for the first time, set uphouse on their own, instead of slotting into an established household run bymother or mother-in-law, or working alongside other women in a communalkitchen.38 These developments created opportunities for specialists and profes-


36 N.S. Khrushchev, O kontrol’nykh tsifrakh razvitiia narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR na1959–1965 gody (Moscow 1959), 55. Cited in I. Abramenko and L. Tormozova (eds), Besedy odomashnem khoziaistve (Moscow 1959), 3–4. See also N. Svetlova, ‘Tvoi dom’, Ogonek, no. 3(11 January 1959), 15. 37 See Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia (Oxford 2001), 320; David Hoffmann, PeasantMetropolis. Social Identities in Moscow 1929–1941 (Ithaca, NY 1994).38 S. Pogodinskii, ‘Vertolet na kukhne’, Sem’ia i shkola, no. 3 (1962), 26–7; Abramenko andTormozova (eds), Besedy, op. cit., 4. In recent interviews conducted by Iuliia Gradskova, womenof this generation recalled that as young women they knew nothing, for example, about pregnancy



sionals to step in with advice and reshape this tradition-bound domain. Theperiod saw a flood of household advice addressed to the khoziaika (housewife),which attempted to inculcate modernized household management practice in ageneration of women struggling under their ‘double burden’. It was notrestricted to magazines addressed primarily to women such as Rabotnitsa(Woman Worker) and Sem’ia i shkola (Family and School). The popular illustrated magazine Ogonek began a women’s page offering household andfashion tips.39 Even the state newspaper Izvestiia began a ‘For Home andFamily’ page in July 1959.40 ‘New books for you, women!’, it announced: ‘Ourpublishers have lately begun to put out more books dedicated to various questions of housekeeping, the correct organization of everyday life and theeducation of good aesthetic taste.’41 Programmes such as ‘For Home andFamily’, ‘The House Where We Live’ and ‘For You, Women’ were also a stapleof the still limited but expanding broadcasting schedule in the new medium oftelevision and projected advice about the home directly into the home.42

The role of the Soviet ‘housewife’, advice emphasized, was not the same asin bourgeois society. If, in the past, a good housekeeper was one who devoted all her time and energy to domestic affairs, a 1959 household companionobserved, the modern Soviet khoziaika also worked outside the home. ‘Now itis no longer possible to do housework as in the olden days, as granny oncetaught. Years have gone by, conditions have changed. And Soviet woman herself, engaged in production, does not want to devote too much time andeffort to housework.’ The rationalization of women’s domestic labour, it con-cluded, was required by her emancipation in Soviet society.43

‘Each family’, the party promised, ‘including young couples, will have awell-appointed flat corresponding to the demands of hygiene and the culturalway of life.’44 The new communist way of life was not only to be cultured andbeautiful. It was also to be hygienic. The emergence of an ideology of hygiene


or infant care. They had learned nothing from their mothers, while the traditional profession ofmidwife, outside the formal medical system, had disappeared. Iuliia Gradskova, personal commu-nication, August 2003. Similarly, in early twentieth-century America, the increasing isolation ofwomen in the home was one factor that rendered them particularly susceptible to ‘expert’ advice.Susan Strasser, Never Done. A History of American Housework (New York 1982), 237.

39 ‘Zhenshchiny, eto dlia vas!’, Ogonek, no. 24 (June 1960). 40 ‘Izvestiia dlia doma, dlia sem’i’, Izvestiia, 11 July 1959.41 ‘Novye knigi dlia vas, zhenshchiny!’, Izvestiia, 27 September 1959. See Deborah Field,‘Communist Morality and Meanings of Private Life in Post-Stalinist Russia, 1953–1964’, PhDdiss. (University of Michigan 1996), 41; Kelly, Refining Russia, op. cit., 351.42 State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), f. 6903 (Gosteleradio), op. 26, d. 391, no.1632; d. 449; d. 468; d. 469, no. 4827. My thanks to Kristin Roth-Ey for pointing me to thissource, to Aleksandr Vatlin for his assistance and to the British Academy for the Small ResearchGrant, ‘The Komsomol as Patron of Cultural Innovation’, under which this aspect of the researchwas conducted. 43 Abramenko and Tormozova (eds), Besedy, op. cit., 4.44 Materialy XXII s’ezda KPSS (Moscow 1962), 390, emphasis added; G. Andrusz, ‘HousingIdeals, Structural Constraints and the Emancipation of Women’ in Brine, Perrie and Sutton (eds),Home, op. cit., 21–2; O. Baiar and R. Blashkevich, Kvartira i ee ubranstvo (Moscow 1962), 6.



has been an aspect of modernization throughout Western societies since thelate nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Supported by scientific discoursesassociating dirt with disease, it represented one of the pervasive and oftenunmarked ways in which modern science penetrated domestic practices.45 Inthe Soviet Union, the normalization of minimal ‘European’ urban standards ofcleanliness had also long been part of the project of ‘catching up with theWest’ and of making former peasants ‘cultured’ — that is, introducing them tomodern, urban ways of living.46 Hygiene had played an important role in thediscourse of the ‘new way of life’ in the 1920s and of kul’turnost’ (literally,cultured-ness) in the 1930s, both of which may be seen as specific Soviet versions of the modernist project that has accompanied advanced industrial-ization.47

Advice concerning microbes, festering produce and the ‘battle with bugs’may have been a response to the objective conditions of overcrowding and theintense pace of urbanization.48 At the same time, it was also an instrument ofthe expanding empire of science and its experts. Soviet discourses on hygienewere reinvigorated in the household advice literature of the 1950s–60s, in linewith the emphasis on science as the source of social progress. As Minister ofHealth S.V. Kurashov declared in an interview for the popular health maga-zine Zdorov’e: ‘Our seven-year plan is the seven-year plan of medics, of thestruggle for the people’s health.’49 Advice was regularly disseminated under theauthority of a professional title: doctor, professor, architect, PhD. On a subjectrelated to that of hygiene, the science of nutrition, Izvestiia printed the obser-vations of one Professor B. Kadykov. The rapid growth of scientific knowledgeabout nutrition had outstripped its dissemination in everyday practice, he


45 See Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt. The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (Oxford 1995); EllenLupton and J. Abbott Miller, The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste. A Processof Elimination (New York 1992).46 Miller, Russians, op. cit., 150; Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis, op. cit.; Kelly, Refining, op.cit., 249–67.47 On attempts during the 1920s to revolutionize the culture of daily life or ‘novyi byt’, see N.Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ sovetskogo goroda: normy i anomalii. 1920/1930 gody (StPetersburg 1999); Svetlana Boym, Common Places. Mythologies of Everyday Life (Cambridge,MA 1994); Olga Matich, ‘Remaking the Bed. Utopia in Daily Life’ in John E. Bowlt and OlgaMatich (eds), Laboratory of Dreams. The Russian Avant-garde and Cultural Experiment(Stanford, CA 1996), 59–78. The representation of hygiene in the home as an active, civic duty inthe 1920s is specifically addressed by Tricia Starks in her doctoral dissertation, chap. 3, ‘ThePrivate Home as Public Concern’. I am indebted to her for allowing me to read this excellent chapter in draft form (2002). On the campaign for ‘kul’turnost’’under Stalin, see C. Kelly and D.Volkov, ‘Directed Desires. Kul’turnost’ and Consumption’ in C. Kelly and D. Shepherd (eds),Constructing Russian Culture (Oxford 1998), 291–313. The state cookery book, first published in1939, sought to modernize food preparation by raising the understanding of nutrition, promotingthe use of canned and preserved foods, as well as fostering awareness of hygiene. It was reprintedmany times in the 1950s. O. Molchanova, D. Lobanov et al. (eds), Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoipishche (Moscow 1952 [1939]), 33.48 See the advice manual addressed to rural women, A. Demezer and M. Dziuba, Domovodstvo(Moscow 1957).49 ‘32 stranichki o zdorov’e’, Izvestiia, 19 July 1959.



argued. Broad propaganda was required to spread rational nutrition to everyhome. The professor accused young housewives of neglecting the rules of foodhygiene; for example, serving up soup or meat that had been reheated threetimes, thereby storing up ‘many unpleasant things for the organism’.50

In addition to advice offered to individual ‘housewives’ by the print media andtelevision, the discipline of domovodstvo — home economics or domesticscience51 — was accorded a central place in the campaign to modernize andrationalize domestic labour under the auspices of Khrushchev’s major educa-tional reform, ‘polytechnicization’.52 The Russian Federation Ministry ofEnlightenment issued a curriculum and textbooks on domestic science, teachers were trained, and architects and designers set to work on designingspecialized facilities in which to teach it.53 Press reports in the late 1950s indi-cate that there was a campaign to expand and systematize formal training in domestic science, and to professionalize a domain formerly left to femaleamateurs in the home: in other words, to foster a shift away from sponta-neous, unregulated practices, based on women’s traditions, towards con-scious, codified, ‘scientific’ ones, informed by medical, pedagogical and otherexperts. This was one channel through which state bodies and specialistsbecame involved in the ‘private’ realm. For Women’s Day 1960, for instance,Ogonek reported on a technical college in Lithuania where girls studied cookery, table service, needlework, kitchen gardening, childcare, hygiene,


50 B. Kadykov, ‘Nakryvaia na stol’, Izvestiia, 11 July 1959; Prof. M. Marshak, ‘Chto vy znaeteo moloke?’, Izvestiia, 29 September 1959.51 My 1975 Russian–English dictionary (A. Smirnitsky) translates domovodstvo only as‘domestic science’, although the term could equally be translated as ‘housekeeping’. Historicalstudies of home economics and domestic science, household rationalization and mechanization inEurope and America include: Strasser, Never Done, op. cit.; Hayden, Grand Domestic, op. cit.;Nolan, Visions, op. cit., chap 6; Lupton and Miller, Bathroom, op. cit.; Hoy, Chasing Dirt, op.cit.; Jennifer Loehlin, From Rugs to Riches. Housework, Consumption and Modernity inGermany (Oxford 1999); Nancy Reagin, ‘Comparing Apples and Oranges’ in S. Strasser, C.McGovern and M. Judt (eds), Getting and Spending. European and American Consumer Societiesin the Twentieth Century (Cambridge 1998), 241–62; and Martina Heßler, Mrs Modern Woman.zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der Haushaltstechnisierung (Frankfurt 2001).52 A. Vul’f, ‘Protiv nedootsenki domovodstva’, Sem’ia i shkola, no. 8 (1961), 47. Domovodstvowas already part of the curriculum in some parts of the Soviet Union, at least in girls’ schoolswhere it was introduced along with single-sex education in the early 1940s. A. Protopopova, ‘Onekotorykh voprosakh vospitaniia zhenskoi molodezhi’, Komsomol’skaia pravda, 3 September1943, 3.53 Plans for two of Khrushchev’s pet projects for shaping the first generation that would liveunder communism — new boarding schools and the Moscow Pioneer Palace (1962) — includedwell-equipped domestic science laboratories and simulated apartments where girls (boys were notmentioned) could learn homemaking skills, hygiene, cookery and the exercise of taste. T.Agafonova, ‘Novye zdaniia dlia novoi shkoly’, Komsomol’skaia pravda, 18 January 1959, 2; Iu.Kotler, ‘Strana krasnykh galstukov’, Sem’ia i shkola, no. 1 (1959), 28–9; Tsentral’nyi munit-sipial’nyi arkhiv Moskvy (Central Municipal Archive of Moscow), f. 959, op. 1, d. 54, l. 15 (information on work of Moscow Pioneer Palace, 1958–63).



preserving and other aspects of domestic science. This College of House-keeping was fully justified, Ogonek reported, by the demand for its graduates,not only to staff the new, improved public services but also as ‘good house-keepers for the Soviet family’.54 ‘A good housewife needs to know in whatorder to wash the dishes, clean pans, and to put them in their place’, observedanother report on the introduction of domovodstvo in Lithuanian schools. InKarelia, where the subject was also introduced in the 1958–59 school year, themothers reportedly envied their lucky daughters: ‘What a shame we weren’ttaught all this.’55

Domestic science lessons were to exert a beneficial influence beyond theschool walls, acting as a means to disseminate modern, socialist norms ofhygiene, efficiency and contemporary good taste into millions of homes.Daughters were expected to go home and correct their mothers’ irrational andatavistic ways: ‘Don’t clean the floor first and then dust, but the other wayround. Now the cleaning is done according to the rules!’ One girl asked hermother to remove a tasteless paper mat from the wall. ‘We don’t know muchabout these things’, the poor woman excused herself. ‘We weren’t taughtthem.’56

Discussions concerning public education in modern, scientific housekeepinglent this traditionally female, amateur domain a new presence in public dis-course and normalized the intervention of professional experts. As one com-mentator concluded, the traditionally female domain of good housekeepinghad risen to a public and even a state affair.57 These discussions did nothing torevalue it as meaningful, fully human labour, however. Identified only as aregrettable necessity that should be minimized, its potential to become a meansof creativity and self-realization was not even entertained. (Indeed, to do sowould constitute a revision of Marxist principles.) At the same time, theyreconfirmed the identification of housework as ‘women’s work’. Moreover,they eroded the sovereignty of the housewife, diminished the authority ofwomen’s traditions, and delegitimated the practical knowledge and expertisethey had gained through experience in favour of the theoretical knowledge andabstractions of scientists, doctors, architects, social scientists and otherauthorities.58


54 V. Borushko, ‘Khoroshie budut khoziaiki’, Ogonek, no. 10 (6 March 1960), 24. 55 G. Sidiakova, ‘Uroki domovodstva v shkole. Nash pervyi opyt’, Sem’ia i shkola, no. 3(1959), 28; N. Khol’m, ‘Uroki domovodstva v shkole. Roditeli dovol’nyi’, ibid.56 Khol’m, ‘Uroki’, op. cit., 28. 57 Vul’f, ‘Protiv nedootsenki’, op. cit., 47. On the ambivalence of this elevation in regard to thepractice of drawing up timetables of the housewife’s day — a widespread modernist means to foster efficiency in the home — see Tag Gronberg, ‘Siting the Modern’, review article, Journal ofContemporary History, 36, 4 (October 2001), 682. Compare Karin Zachmann, ‘A SocialistConsumption Junction. Debating the Mechanization of Housework in East Germany, 1956–1957’, Technology and Culture, 43, 1 (2002), 84.58 On the way expert interventions are based on the devaluation of local knowledge and practi-cal knowledge in favour of scientific simplifications, whereby any attempt to resist is delegitimatedas unscientific or irrational resistance to change, see Scott, Seeing Like a State, op. cit., esp. chap.



This colonization of the home by experts had other imperial dimensions too. Focusing on efforts to extend domestic science education to regions onlysovietized since the war, the central, popular press identified instruction in thescience of housekeeping with the triumphant advance of communism, symbol-ically rendering its expansion an exercise in the consolidation of empire. It wasa twofold mission civilisatrice that served at once the integration of relativelyrecently annexed, geographically peripheral territory into the Soviet project,and the penetration of the last frontier, the site of internal recalcitrance: thebenighted (domestic) interior.59

But, as in other empires, the centre may, in fact, have been learning from the periphery in matters of domovodstvo. Far from being an innovation intro-duced to the Baltic from Russia, as claimed, the reported provision of domes-tic science education was, rather, part of a process of normalization andrestoration of indigenous, pre-war institutions in these westernmost republics.In Estonia, for example, domestic science was already well-established beforethe war. Under the influence of Weimar Germany, it had partaken of themovement for scientific management and kitchen rationalization widespreadin Europe and America.60 Because of their history and geographical location,the Baltic Republics acted as an important model and conduit for modernismin the Khrushchev era. Indeed, Lithuania and Estonia, in particular, were thesource of the most ‘modern and efficient kitchen designs’ in the 1950s and1960s.61 This subject merits further analysis but lies beyond our scope here.What matters in the present context is that the introduction of domesticscience education was represented to the primarily Russian readership of popular magazines such as Ogonek and Sem’ia i shkola as an aspect of the


9. This power relation and the way it renders women and their knowledge subaltern have beenanalysed in relation to the medical and care professions, for example in regard to traditional medicine and midwifery, by Ann Oakley, The Captured Womb. A History of the Medical Care ofPregnant Women (Oxford 1984); A. Showstack Sassoon, Introduction, and Kari Waerness, ‘Onthe Rationality of Caring’, both in A. Showstack Sassoon (ed.), Women and the State. The ShiftingBoundaries of Public and Private (London 1992 [1987]), 32, 207–34; in regard to interior deco-ration by Penny Sparke, As Long As It’s Pink (London 1995); and to architectural practice by thewomen’s design group Matrix, Making Space. Women and the Man-Made Environment (London1984); Susan R. Henderson, ‘A Revolution in the Woman’s Sphere. Grete Lihotzky and theFrankfurt Kitchen’ in D. Coleman, E. Danze and C. Henderson (eds), Architecture and Feminism(Princeton, NJ 1996), 229–30; and Strasser, Never Done, op. cit.

59 James Scott treats ‘High Modernism’– a term that embraces many of the processes describedhere without necessarily subscribing to Marxist teleology — as an instrument of internal coloniza-tion: Scott, Seeing Like a State, op. cit., passim and 378, n. 19. Stephen Kotkin, similarly, notesthat the historical formation of the welfare state and the effort to pacify Europe’s colonies weresimultaneous and mutually reinforcing processes. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, op. cit., 19.60 I am indebted to Kai Lobjakas and Mart Kalm, Tallinn, for conversations on this matter.Personal communications, 2003.61 Comments books for exhibition ‘Iskusstvo v byt’, 1961, Central Moscow Archive ofLiterature and Art (TSALIM), f. 21, op. 1, d. 121, l. 122, l. 125, l. 130; d. 123, l. 131, 137; d. 125,and Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), f. 2329, op. 4, ed. khr. 1391.



civilizing and modernizing mission of sovietization — and its voluntary adop-tion by the grateful recipients — which consolidated communism’s triumphantadvance.

‘Is there such a thing as a science of the home?’ the popular science magazineNauka i zhizn’ (Science and Life) asked rhetorically.62 The ‘science of thehome’, it went on, required empirical data on which to base the correct, ratio-nal organization of the apartment, including statistics on households, surveysof housewives’ attitudes, time budget studies, and detailed analysis of everydayroutines within it. This kind of examination was particularly important in thekitchen. For ‘work in the kitchen is in essence a productive process which hasnot yet come out beyond the walls of the apartment’.63 As Rabotnitsa put it,‘The kitchen is a kind of workshop, and the correct organization of labour init does much to alleviate the domestic labour of the housewife.’64 Themetaphor was typical in aligning the kitchen with the valorized realm of indus-trial production outside the home. Others compared the domestic kitchen to ascientific laboratory, where everything must be immaculately clean, unclut-tered and reduced to essentials.65 Similarly, the cookery room at the LithuanianCollege of Housekeeping was a ‘kitchen-laboratory’, and the food preparationstudied there was an exact science: ‘You see, cookery loves exactness, just asmathematics and physics do’, Ogonek explained.66

To underscore the scientific basis of their recommendations, advice writersreferred to ‘numerous’ (unattributed) empirical studies and systematic analy-ses of the various functions and labour routines for which the kitchen served— washing and drying dishes, waste disposal, washing, drying and ironingclothes — combined with studies of housewives’ attitudes. Popular andspecialist publications printed labour maps charting the trajectory of thehousewife. Scientific analysis of this sort demonstrated that ‘in differentkitchens one and the same task demands different expenditure of time andenergy’.67 In a badly organized kitchen, the housewife had to walk as far as 12kilometres in a day between stove, table, sink, cupboards and refrigerator toserve a family of three or four.68

Such inconvenient kitchen arrangements not only wasted the housewife’stime and energy. They also ‘caused pathological phenomena’, whereby theyreduced her capacity to work. The discourse of the kitchen placed much


62 I. Luchkova and A. Sikachev, ‘Sushchestvuet li nauka o zhil’e?’, Nauka i zhizn’, no. 10(1964), 25. 63 Ibid. 64 A. Cherepakhina, ‘Vasha domashniaia masterskaia’, Rabotnitsa, no. 10 (1959), 32. 65 Abramenko and Tormozova (eds), Besedy, op. cit., 45.66 Borushko, ‘Khoroshie’, op. cit., 24.67 Luchkova and Sikachev, ‘Sushchestvuet li?’, op. cit., 25. 68 Ibid.; B. Merzhanov and K. Sorokin, Eto nuzhno noveselam (Moscow 1966), 66; Baiar andBlashkevich, Kvartira, op. cit., 14.



emphasis on the exhaustion of the housewife and the length of time she had tospend in the domestic workspace in addition to her working day. ‘When shereturns home from work a woman often puts on an apron immediately andsets to work in the kitchen; she prepares food, irons, washes clothes, mends’,Rabotnitsa observed. ‘She wants to do everything as quickly as possible tomake time to read or go to the cinema or sit with the family.’69

To give up work outside the home was not an option, for her labour wasessential both to the national economy and to her self-realization as a fully-rounded person. The way to alleviate the exhaustion of preparing food andreduce the time involved was through thoughtful planning, regulated time-management and rational organization of the workspace and equipment. Theaim was to eliminate disordered or irrational movement in the kitchen so thatevery movement was as efficient and productive as possible: to replace chaos,spontaneity and waste by modern efficiency and conscious order. Adviceappropriated to the kitchen the Taylorist principles of the modern factory:‘The rational arrangement of equipment, and organization of each worker’sspace is directed at economy of time, at producing the maximum quantity ofproducts with reduced effort per unit.’70 Correct positioning of the main itemsof equipment in accordance with the flow of tasks, as on a conveyor belt,could reduce the movements required for a single task from an approximate260–80 steps to a precise 70 steps.71 Since studies showed that the mostfrequent vector of the housewife was between sink, work surface and stove, itfollowed that these items should be positioned in accordance with thesequence of work processes (sorting, cleaning and washing produce, preparingfood and cooking it). The closer together they were, the less she would have towalk and the quicker she would be done.72

Operating with general categories abstracted from reality, designers imposednorms that regulated use and defined the user. Thus, architect A. Cherepakhinaadvised readers of Rabotnitsa that to avoid continuous bending or stretching,‘it is very important that the dimensions of the kitchen furniture correspond tothe height of the housewife’. The housewife was not to be left to decide whatheight best fitted her individually, however. In the same breath, the authorwent on to prescribe a standard height, 85 cm, and a standard gap of 40–50 cmbetween the worktop and the wall-mounted cabinets.73 The correct height ofequipment was supposedly based on the average height of Moscow women,158 cm.74 This optimum level was defined for the entire category ‘women’ anddetermined state production standards, so that furniture enterprises onlyproduced 85 cm-high cupboard units. Sink units and stoves were also of the


69 Cherepakhina, ‘Vasha domashniaia masterskaia’, op. cit., 32. 70 Luchkova and Sikachev, ‘Sushchestvuet li?’, op. cit., 22.71 Ibid., 24; A.B. Bondarenko et al. (eds), Kratkaia entsiklopediia domashnego khoziaistva, vol.1 (Moscow 1959), 313; Merzhanov and Sorokin, Eto nuzhno noveselam, op. cit., 63.72 Baiar and Blashkevich, Kvartira, op. cit., 14.73 Cherepakhina, ‘Vasha domashniaia masterskaia’, op. cit., 32.74 Luchkova and Sikachev, ‘Sushchestvuet li?’, op. cit., 25.



same height — ‘the most convenient for working’ — which made it possible tocreate the level work surface essential to efficiency and hygiene. Standarddimensions of units also made mass production more cost-effective and theiruse was, for this reason, established as a basic principle of furniture and archi-tectural design of the period. Thus the height of kitchen units positioned MrsMoscow Average as the norm, reminding vertically-challenged women of theirdeficiency every time they were forced to stand on tiptoe.75

In the ideal world of planners and advice-givers, the rational plan of thekitchen, designed to facilitate woman’s labour, became a regulator of hermovement within it and directed and disciplined her body. Every interactionbetween the housewife’s body and the space and equipment of the kitchen wasto be subject to routine, rendered industrially efficient. ‘As a result, the con-temporary kitchen turns into a genuine production shop [tsekh], where everymovement is strictly calculated and reduced to a minimum.’76 The housewifewas to operate in this space like a well-tuned machine.


75 The standard height designated as convenient for Moscow woman approximates that pro-posed at the Weißenhofsiedlung in Weimar Germany, and is also exactly that prescribed by ErnstNeufert, based presumably on German women. Soviet diagrams illustrating optimum dimensionsseem to indicate a debt to his Bauentwurfslehre (Architects’ Data) first published in nazi Germany.Ernst Neufert, Bauentwurfslehre (Gütersloh 1936). I am indebted to Alexandra Staub for alertingme to the similarities of Neufert’s prescriptions and their graphic representation to Soviet ones.Soviet illustrators need not have taken these directly from Neufert, however. Such diagrams werecommon currency, e.g. Book of Modern Kitchens. America’s ‘How-to-Do-It’ Guide to NewKitchens (New York 1958), 80–1. 76 Luchkova and Sikachev, ‘Sushchestvuet li?’, op. cit., 25. Compare George Mansell, ‘KitchenCommentary’, Daily Mail Ideal Home Book, 1957 (London 1957), 131.

FIGURE 1Fitting women into their compact kitchens. ‘Advisable distances in the kitchen.’ O. Baiar and R.

Blashkevich, Kvartira i ee ubranstvo (Moscow 1962), 18.




Not only were ‘scientific’ methods to be applied to the home. The visual languagechosen to persuade women to adopt rational planning was also a ‘scientific’ one. Asin the early twentieth century, stop-motion photography — chronophotography(kinogramma) — served as an ‘objective’ means to analyse and persuasively demon-strate the way the arrangement of the kitchen impacted directly on the body of thehousewife. This pair of chronophotographs printed in a manual for people movinginto the new, small-scale, one-family apartments, contrasts the movements involvedin accomplishing the same tasks of preparing food in a rationally-arranged kitchenand a badly-organized one. In the badly-arranged kitchen she has to move around,stretch and bend, whereas in the ‘rational’ kitchen the same task only requires her tomove her upper body. Thus photography defines and optimizes the interactionbetween the woman’s body and her equipment. B. Merzhanov and K. Sorokin, Etonuzhno novoselam (Moscow 1966), 65. I am indebted to Steven Harris for drawingmy attention to this example.

FIGURE 2



Compactness was the key to efficiency. It was also hard to avoid in the ‘eco-nomical’ kitchen of the new, one-family apartments, measuring between 4.5and 6 square metres. In the interest of both ‘labour saving’ and ‘space saving’,free-standing equipment was to be replaced by compact blocks of units alongthe wall, with suspended cabinets above.77 Wall-mounted cupboards had theadded advantages that they did not take up precious floor space, and that theysaved the housewife from having to bend down to reach dishes or ingredi-ents.78 A rack for drying dishes hung over the sink saved time in one of themost wearing domestic tasks — dishwashing.79 At the same time, the compactarrangement of equipment also saved on plumbing and wiring.80 Thus, laboursaving, space saving and economy of connecting to utilities were identified.The small dimensions of the kitchen, imposed by requirements of economyand as a pledge to its future elimination, became a virtue, the source of its efficiency.

The dimensions and plan of the new Soviet kitchen, premised on a singlewoman worker, were a self-fulfilling prophecy; they determined and limitedwho used it and how.81 More than one body in the kitchen and its compactnessbecame inefficient.82 Made to woman’s measure, for an isolated female workerto serve her family, the new kitchen was confirmed as woman’s domesticworkspace and hers alone. The ideology of ‘labour saving’ prominent inrhetoric surrounding the new kitchen masked ways in which the moderniza-tion of housework in practice made ‘more work for mother’. Wall cabinetsmight reduce the amount a housewife had to walk and bend, but rather thansaving her labour, they meant that a task formerly assigned to a child — suchas taking dishes out to lay the table, or washing up and stacking the dishes inthe suspended draining cupboard — was now placed beyond his/her reach.83

The ‘rational’ design of the kitchen naturalized and reproduced the division of labour in the home. New standards for hygiene, household maintenanceand aesthetics of the home, furthermore, created extra responsibilities thatattached to women. They even had to pay attention to their appearance; forslovenliness in the kitchen was a sign of disorderliness.84

Compactness, it should be noted, was also the founding principle of rationalkitchens developed for social housing in many parts of Europe in the 1920sand again in the postwar period. The synergy of ‘labour saving’ and ‘space


77 R. Blashkevich, ‘Novaia mebel’ dlia kukhni’, DI SSSR, no. 8 (1962), 25–7; Svetlova, ‘Tvoidom’, op. cit., 16; Cherepakhina, ‘Vasha domashniaia masterskaia’, op. cit., 32.78 Luchkova, ‘Sushchestvuet li?’, op. cit., 25; Svetlova, ‘Tvoi dom’, op. cit., 16.79 Cherepakhina, ‘Vasha domashniaia masterskaia’, op. cit., 32.80 Baiar and Blashkevich, Kvartira, op. cit., 14.81 Cf. Phil Goodall, ‘Design and Gender’, Block, 9 (1983), 50–8.82 The criticism that its small dimensions precluded two or more people working together wasalso levelled in 1929 at the Frankfurt Kitchen. Henderson, ‘Revolution’, op. cit., 238. 83 Cherepakhina, ‘Vasha domashniaia masterskaia’, op. cit., 32. Cf. Ruth Schwartz Cowan,More Work for Mother, 2nd edn (London 1989 [1st edn 1983]).84 E. Semenova, ‘Doma i na rabote’, Rabotnitsa, no. 10 (1959), 8.



saving’ underpinned what is widely regarded as the historical prototype of themodern fitted kitchen, the small-scale ‘Frankfurt Kitchen’, designed in 1926 byAustrian communist architect Grete Schütte-Lihotzky for Ernst May’s publichousing programme in Frankfurt-am-Main. Schütte-Lihotzky conceived thekitchen as a quasi-industrial site of food production, looking to the most up-to-date transportation of the day, the tiny kitchen galley on express trains, fora model of modern efficiency. ‘The amount of work that is done in restaurant-car kitchens only gets done because the kitchen is so small’, she observed.‘Time-wasting walks are impossible.’85


85 Grete Schütte-Lihotzky, 1927, cited by Karin Kirsch, The Weissenhofsiedlung (New York1989), 26; Peter Noever (ed.), Die Frankfurter Küche von Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (Vienna1999); Henderson, ‘Revolution’, op. cit., 221–53.

FIGURE 3Space-saving kitchen units. O. Baiar and R. Blashkevich, Kvartira i ee ubranstvo

(Moscow 1962), 29.



The principles of the efficient kitchen fostered as part of Khrushchevistmodernization — minimal floor space, level work surfaces including sink andstove, standardized cabinets above and below the counters, and grouping ofunits according to flow of work processes — were neither new nor specific tosocialism.86 They were, rather, an instance of the selective reconciliation withinternational modernism that took place in Soviet art and design in this period. The reassessment extended to Russia’s own indigenous variant,Constructivism, suppressed since the 1930s. In his famous intervention onarchitecture in 1954, Khrushchev had indicated that a critical reassessment ofits legacy could help re-establish Soviet construction on an industrial basis.87

Furthermore, the roots of the efficiency ideology at work in the Soviet dis-course of the Khrushchev kitchen can also be traced ultimately to Americancapitalism, whether directly or mediated through earlier and recent Europeanassimilations, including Russian ones. Soviet design and advice literature ofthe late 1950s–60s has clear echoes of Christine Frederick’s ‘scientific manage-ment’ which applied to ‘household engineering’ Taylorist management prin-ciples appropriated from industry. In the 1920s and 1930s Frederick’s bookHousehold Engineering: Scientific Management in the Home (1915) wastranslated into a number of European languages and interpreted throughEuropean household efficiency ideologues such as Paulette Bernège and ErnaMeyer.88 It was highly influential on the conception of ‘labour-saving’ kitchensin Europe (including the Baltic States) as well as America in the 1920s.89 Theideology of labour efficiency and of industrial-style rationalization in the homealso entered Russian and Soviet discourse and design practice at that time, aspart of the campaign for the new way of life. It was one aspect of broaderenthusiasm for Taylorism and Fordism, which was shared by Lenin and capi-talists alike, seeming to transcend differences of political ideology.90

The Khrushchev kitchen was founded, then, on common principles ofmodern industrial planning such as also underpinned the development of theAmerican fitted kitchen, promoted at the American National Exhibition in1959 as the embodiment of the American dream. This convergence beliesassertions that ‘ideological irreconcilability’ with the capitalist camp would


86 Kirsch, Weissenhofsiedlung, op. cit., 26; Irene Cieraad, ‘“Out of My Kitchen!” Architecture,Gender and Domestic Efficiency’, The Journal of Architecture, 7 (Autumn 2002), 270–2.87 N.S. Khrushchev, O shirokom vnedrenii industrial’nykh metodov, uluchshenii kachestva isnizhenii stoimosti stroitel’stva (Moscow 1955), 24–5.88 Cieraad, ‘“Out of My Kitchen!”’, op. cit., 264.89 Ibid.; Nolan, Visions, op. cit., chap. 6. A British publication which seems to be the source ofa number of the Khrushchev-era prescriptions cited above (and even of their precise formulation),acknowledged America as the source of ‘many of the good ideas in the modern kitchen’. Mansell,‘Kitchen Commentary’, op. cit., 131–5. 90 Charles S. Maier, ‘Between Taylorism and Technocracy. European Ideologies and the Visionof Industrial Productivity in the 1920s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 5, 2 (April 1970),27–63; Scott, Seeing Like a State, op. cit., 99; Rainer Traub, trans. Judy Joseph, ‘Lenin andTaylor. The Fate of “Scientific Management” in the (Early) Soviet Union’, Telos, 34 (Fall 1978),82–92; Nolan, Visions, op. cit.



continue in spite of peaceful co-existence and economic competition. Indeed,American models were closely studied by Soviet designers and planners.Nevertheless, the American dream kitchen was far from compact and had toomany appliances to be affordable on a mass scale in Soviet conditions.Moreover, it was ideologically inappropriate, designed not for the workingwoman, but to frame the middle-class ‘professional housewife’. It was her surrogate domain to compensate for her lack of a place in the public arena.91

Contradicting the officially-espoused commitment to equality and emancipa-tion of women, this opened an angle from which to dismiss the unaffordablemodel as one with which the Soviet Union would not even try to ‘catch up andovertake’. As a construction engineer wrote in the comments book at theAmerican exhibition in Moscow, referring to the fully-automated Whirlpool‘Miracle Kitchen’ shown there: ‘In the “miracle kitchen” a woman is just asfree as a bird in a miracle cage. The “miracle kitchen” shown at the exhibitiondemonstrates America’s last word in the field of perfecting obsolete forms ofeveryday living which stultify women.’92

While the American housewife was represented in the thrall of her manypossessions, the most radical advocates of the scientific kitchen in the SovietUnion claimed its austere, standard form as a liberation. One such, G.Liubimova (in an article that makes a rare and telling reference to Schütte-Lihotzky as well as to the Russian Constructivists), justified proposals to equipnew flats with standard, fully-fitted kitchens in spite of the added cost to thestate, because ‘a rationally-organized interior enables a certain . . . “automa-tion” of domestic processes, . . . the person is not distracted and gets lessexhausted’. Furthermore, ‘in an apartment equipped according to scientificallyworked-out norms, when using the objects a person does not fix attention onthem, does not fetishize things, and this has an educational significance’.93

Standardization of utilitarian routines and domestic fittings would thus havethe added advantage of combating the regressive influence of the nuclearhousehold and of the increased availability of consumer goods.94 This concern


91 Marietta Shaginian, ‘Razmyshleniia na amerikanskoi vystavke’, Izvestiia, 23 August 1959.Christine Frederick’s spacious kitchen schemes were not determined by shortage and economies ofspace but only of labour. See Gronberg, ‘Siting the Modern’, op. cit., 685, n. 10; Ruth Oldenziel,‘The “Idea” America and the Making of “Europe” in the Twentieth Century’, discussion paper,European Science Foundation Workshop, Stockholm, April 2002.92 S. Iatsenko, construction engineer, 19 August 1959. National Archives, Washington DC(NARA), RG 306 1043, box 11 (viewers’ comments on American National Exhibition, Moscow1959). Translation modified. 93 G. Liubimova, ‘Ratsional’noe oborudovanie kvartir’, DI SSSR, no. 6 (1964), 15. Note thatthis is published ‘for discussion’ and is more radical than most. It takes the Marxist, neo-Productivist line that would be institutionalized in the All-Union Research Institute of TechnicalAesthetics, VNIITE, of which the author became a member after it was founded in 1962. 94 The author saw off possible objections that it would prevent the manifestation of individual-ity, protesting that this would find full expression in the aesthetics of the interior decoration.Liubimova, ‘Ratsional’noe oborudovanie kvartir’, op. cit., 16.



to forestall fetishism marks a key difference in principle between the idealKhrushchev kitchen and its better-known American counterpart.

Scientific management and rational spatial planning were a means of bringingsocialist industrial organization and standardization, labour discipline, amodern work tempo and a communist consciousness into the home. Scientificmanagement alone was not enough, however. For, as Khrushchev put it at theJune 1959 Central Committee plenum, ‘highly productive labour is possibleonly on the basis of technological progress’.95 Technology was the source ofthe abundance on which the transition to communism would be based; it was‘the wings of the seven year plan’.96 In line with the Cold War claim that onlythe socialist system could harness the technical revolution to improving humanlife, celebrations of Soviet successes in space exploration linked them topromises that advanced technology would also enter people’s everyday life.Science and technology must be applied to all aspects of life, through mecha-nization and automation. Scientific progress was ‘all to make people’s life easier, increase productivity of labour and beautify everyday life’.97

The media represented the unprecedented rapidity of scientific advance andpenetration of technology into everyday life as a defining characteristic ofsocialist modernity. Sem’ia i shkola illustrated this axiom with a domesticexample: ‘In popular journals of the early thirties you can find science fictionstories about . . . television. And in two or three decades it has not onlybecome a reality but has entered everyday life.’98 It was via the kitchen that the Scientific-Technological Revolution would most directly enter the every-day life of every Soviet citizen. The campaign to transform the recalcitrant, ‘private’ sphere of the home into a site for the everyday encounter with tech-nology would begin at its heart, the hearth.

The domestication of the Scientific-Technological Revolution took tworelated forms: first, consumer applications of major investment in the chemi-cals industry and development of new synthetic materials under the seven-yearplan;99 and second, the introduction of technology into the home through


95 ‘Za dal’neishii pod’em proizvoditel’nykh sil strany, za tekhnicheskii progress vo vsekhotrasliakh narodnogo khoziaistva. Rech’ tov. N.S. Khrushcheva na plenume TsK KPSS, 29 June1959’, Izvestiia, 2 July 1959, 1–3; ‘S novoi energiei — za velikie dela’, Izvestiia, 3 July 1959.96 L. Kaganov, ‘Tekhnika — kryl’ia semiletki’, Mestnaia promyshlennost’ i khudozhestvennyepromysli, no. 5 (1961), 3.97 For example, an editorial celebrating Yuri Gagarin’s space flight in the trade journalMestnaia promyshlennost’ was followed immediately by two features on the introduction of newtechnology into manufacturing industries to enable them to produce more consumer goods morequickly. Kaganov, ‘Tekhnika’, op. cit., 3–6; and S. Iofin, ‘Luchshe ispol’zovat’ oborudovanie’,Mestnaia promyshlennost’ i khudozhestvennye promysli, no. 5 (1961), 7–8. Science was also ‘thestandard bearer’ of the All-Union Exhibition of Economic Achievements. Z. Khiren, ‘Smotrvelikikh svershenii’, Ogonek, no. 7 (8 February 1959), 26–7.98 R. Podol’nyi, ‘Tekhnika nastupaet’, Sem’ia i shkola, no. 12 (1959), 11.99 Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (Harmondsworth, rev. edn 1982), 354–5.



increased production of electrical appliances. Both visions — the plastic homeof the future and the automated utopia of the electric home — played animportant role in the representation of the bright, communist tomorrow as itwas being prepared in the present day. I shall look briefly at the latter, theElectric Home.100

The vision of the Electric Home was conceived in the global, Cold War con-text, in which ‘atoms for peace’ were to resolve the contradiction between theliving-standards race and the arms race.101 The exploitation of new sources ofelectricity, including nuclear energy, was central to the 1959 plan.102 Electricitycould now come to the aid of the Soviet housewife, struggling under her double burden. As usual, the idea was attributed to Lenin; he had ‘dreamed ofa time when “electric lighting and electric heating will free millions of ‘domes-tic slaves’ from the need to waste three-quarters of their life in the stinkingkitchen”’.103 Thanks to the party’s concern for women, Rabotnitsa promised,the best scientists, scholars, engineers and constructors had been deployed todevelop new domestic appliances.104 Household technology, or ‘engineering ofhousekeeping’, would now take over much of women’s labour in the home.‘Washing-machines, vacuum cleaners, electric floor-polishers, and all kinds ofkitchen machines for paring vegetables, beating egg whites and who knowswhat else are being produced’, Sem’ia i shkola reported.105 If the miracle ofspace travel had been made possible by the EVM (computer), the ‘UKM’ oruniversal kitchen machine (a form of food processor) brought the Scientific-Technological Revolution into the kitchen.106

The 1959 plan promised, along with improved public services, to increaseproduction of consumer goods, specifically including household goods andappliances ‘to lighten the labour of housework’.107 A resolution of Octoberthat year fleshed out these promises with detailed figures for the production ofrefrigerators, sewing-machines, washing-machines, and spare parts for kitchenappliances, as well as enamel cookware, kitchen utensils, household chemicals,televisions and radios, and furniture.108 The ensuing flood of discussions of


100 Investment in chemicals and synthetics was promoted as having a direct benefit for women,from perfume to plastic tableware. See Reid, ‘Cold War’, op. cit., 228–35.101 On the electric home at Brussels ’58 see Marietta Shaginian, Zarubezhnye pis’ma (Moscow1964), 80–1; Fredie Floré and Mil de Kooning, ‘The Representation of Modern Domesticity in theBelgian Section of the Brussels World Fair of 1958’, Journal of Design History, 16, 4 (2003),319–40.102 Nove, Economic History, op. cit., 354–5; Summary of XXI Party Congress, Soviet Studies11, 1 (1959), 100.103 Podol’nyi, ‘Tekhnika nastupaet’, op. cit., 10.104 ‘Dlia vas, zhenshchiny!’, Rabotnitsa, no. 11 (1959), 22.105 Podol’nyi, ‘Tekhnika nastupaet’, op. cit., 10; ‘Dobrotnye, krasivye veshchi — v nash byt!’,Izvestiia, 16 October 1959.106 Podol’nyi, ‘Tekhnika nastupaet’, op. cit., 10.107 Abramenko and Tormozova (eds), Besedy, op. cit., 3–4.108 CPSU Central Committee and Council of Ministers Resolution, ‘O merakh po uvelicheniiuproizvodstva, rasshireniiu assortimenta i uluchsheniiu kachestva tovarov kul’turno-bytovogo



consumer goods represented the resolution as a gift to women that bore witness to the party and government’s concern for their wellbeing. ‘For you,women!’, Rabotnitsa enthused, illustrating an article on the resolution withpictures of happy women examining the decoration on enamel pots. ‘Ourwomen are especially grateful’, it went on. ‘Electrical automatic and semi-automatic appliances and machines alleviate and simplify the domestic labourof millions of women, save them much energy, and allow them to get


naznacheniia i khoziaistvennogo obikhoda’, Sobranie postanovlenii pravitel’stva SSSR, op. cit.;‘Bol’she, dobrotnee, krasivee!’ and S. Kuvykhin, ‘Kachestvo, eshche raz kachestvo’, both inIzvestiia, 23 October 1959.

FIGURE 4‘Vacuum cleaners and their applications.’ A.B. Bondarenko et al. (eds), Kratkaia entsiklopediiadomashnego khoziaistva, vol. 2 (Moscow 1959). The different models of Soviet vacuum cleanerillustrated reference the space age in their styling or in their names. The uppermost one is called

Raketa or rocket.



acquainted with culture and art and pay more attention to their children’supbringing.’109

Electrification of housework would thus enable women to become fully-rounded, cultured individuals, fit for communism. Household engineeringwould bring the wonder of modernity, the technological revolution, into thevery heart of the home and into the heart and mind of the housewife. ‘Tech-nology, with each triumph, makes new demands on man’, Sem’ia i shkoladeclared. ‘And not only in production. In one’s own home the person becomesmore and more a universal operator and tuner [naladchik] of a variety ofmechanisms.’ Soon these would be run by timers and small electronic com-putational devices, and one would no longer speak of ‘doing’ housework butof ‘running’ it.110 The housewife would turn into a lab-coated operator runningthe kitchen from a computerized control panel, as seen at the AmericanNational Exhibition in Moscow. According to another author, ‘The develop-ment of domestic technology . . . while lightening domestic labour, at the sametime creates wide opportunities for familiarizing children with contemporarytechnology, for developing in them sound, hygienic habits and concern forcleanliness and culture in everyday life.’111 ‘A wonderful generation of youngpeople is growing up in our country, a generation that loves technology andhas subjugated it.’ Machines in the home would not only make houseworkmore efficient, and liberate the housewife for active participation in politicaland economic life; regular use of new technology would also modernize itsusers, inculcating the scientific consciousness requisite for the transition tocommunism.112

The modernization and socialization of domestic, everyday life were, as wehave seen, to begin in the kitchen. Rational planning of her domestic work-space would rationalize the housewife’s movements and align her with scienceand modern, industrial organization, while use of the new household tech-nology would transform her into a citizen fit for the heroic age of space flight,computers and atomic energy. The kitchen — and women’s labour in it —were thus integrated with the wider progress of Soviet society towardsmodern, rational, scientific organization, on which basis the transition tocommunism would soon be effected and the Cold War won. No mere stage forthe minor dramas of family life, the kitchen was to be an agent of progress.Moreover, as we have seen, the rationalization of housework and moderniza-tion of the kitchen were promoted as a means to emancipation; women’s timeand energy were to be freed up for more valued, social and productive work,and they would become all-rounded, self-possessed individuals, fully partici-pating in the construction of communism.


109 ‘Dlia vas, zhenshchiny!’, Rabotnitsa, no. 11 (1959), 22.110 Podol’nyi, ‘Tekhnika nastupaet’, op. cit., 11.111 Vul’f, ‘Protiv nedootsenki domovodstva’, op. cit., 47.112 Ibid.; Podol’nyi, ‘Tekhnika nastupaet’, op. cit., 11.



Yet the emancipation promised by the new Soviet kitchen was to beachieved without fundamental alteration in the gender structures of everydaylife. Moreover, like many other aspects of the modernist mission to makepeople live better, the rationalization of the domestic realm can be seen less asa means to freedom and self-possession than as a further source of oppressionand alienation. For all its benefits, it subjected women to additional demandsand new regimes. The de-legitimation of tacit knowledge, discarding women’spractical expertise acquired and passed down over generations, laid their oncesovereign domain open to intervention.113

The story remains to be told of how Soviet people in practice arranged andused their kitchens, obeyed, negotiated or ignored the norms that were soinsistently promulgated. Numerous obstacles lay in the path of even the mostzealous convert. The Scientific-Technological Revolution failed to march triumphant into people’s homes, not — or not necessarily — because peopleresisted it, but because of Soviet economic realities. Washing-machines andother appliances remained scarce status symbols, unobtainable for those lacking privilege and connections.114 Nor did available kitchen equipment necessarily conform to the standardized norms essential to the creation of acompact, rational and hygienic workspace. The refrigerator types approved byGosplan, the state planning authority, for example, were based on the propor-tions of ‘Anglo-Saxon Woman’. They protruded 7 cm above the standardheight for kitchen units, 85 cm, allegedly derived from Mrs Moscow Averageor more generally ‘Central European Woman’, thereby disrupting the con-tinuous work surface advocated in all the advice literature.115 Might not suchfailings have been surmounted in the Soviet system of central state planning?For surely its main advantage was the ability to implement a single standard?In the mismatch of one ostensibly coterminous kitchen surface with anotherlay the discontinuities of an entire economy. Its failure to implement norms inthe field of kitchen design is indicative of the problems of co-ordinationamong a proliferation of bureaucracies and institutes, often under the auspicesof several ministries responsible for different aspects of production. Thekitchen, with its complex mixture of functions, where the products of variousindustries and services came together in a single small space, was the sitewhere such contradictions became most palpable. Commented a viewer of anexhibition of new furniture models for the modern flat: ‘We master theCosmos, but are totally unable to master furniture using contemporary


113 Thus recent anthropological studies have found evidence of resistance to the efficiently-organized, technologically-equipped modern kitchen. In Sicily, for example, ‘new forms of thekitchen were perceived almost as an assault on women’s dominance within the domestic sector aswell as on sociality among women’. D. Birdwell-Pheasant and D. Lawrence-Zúñiga, House Life.Space, Place and Family in Europe (Oxford 1999), 23 and chap. 5. 114 See Matthews, Class, op. cit., 84; Holt, ‘Domestic Labour’, op. cit., 29–30.115 ‘Nesereznoe otnoshenie k ser’eznym dokumentam’, Tekhnicheskaia estetika, no. 3 (1964), 8;K. Zhukov, ‘Tekhnicheskaia estetika i oborudovanie kvartir’, Tekhnicheskaia estetika, no. 2(1964), 1.



materials [such as] plastics.’116 Far from being a paragon of rational socialistplanning, the kitchen could become a microcosm of its dysfunction.

But perhaps the failures also gave inhabitants a stake in the new rationaldwelling by requiring them to resort to DIY, adaptation and resourcefulness,to invest their own handiwork and know-how? Schütte-Lihotzky’s famousFrankfurt Kitchen and similar models in the 1920s–30s, conceived andinstalled as an industrially mass-produced, standard unit in which every detailwas ordained by the architect, were criticized in their day for being overdeter-mined. They left too little to chance and to the individual resident: ‘All youhave to do is use it properly.’117 There was little scope for what James Scottcalls ‘mutuality’, that is, for the occupant to negotiate with the architecturalgivens and imprint her individual habits and tastes upon them. Thus they lacked the element which, according to Scott, can redeem the sterileauthoritarianism of modernist utopias with their unwavering faith in thepower of science and progress to make people live better and society functionsmoothly.118

Whatever the architects’ aspirations, in practice this kind of overdetermin-ism represented a limited problem in the Soviet Union. Fully-fitted kitchenswere rarely installed in the new flats built under Khrushchev; for reasons ofeconomy and speed, only minimal equipment was provided. The Khrushchevkitchen was not a factory-made unit in the way that the Frankfurt kitchen was,but required a large element of reciprocal effort from its occupants, dependingon their readiness to follow the ubiquitous advice, and on their resourcefulnessand skills to find, build and install the equipment themselves. Acknowledgingthe failings of the system, domestic advice often reflected this situation, beingof a directly practical nature: to help the occupant construct or adapt cabinets,and install the recommended devices themselves.119

The compact and standardized kitchen, equipped with electric devices andhygienic surfaces, should be understood as one of the key symbols of Khrush-chevism and a demonstration of the will to extend the Scientific-TechnologicalRevolution into the ‘private’ domain of domestic everyday life. Its failure tomaterialize, however, marked the limits of the Soviet order’s ability to imposeits version of modern living on its citizens.


116 TSALIM f. 21, op. 1, d. 123, l. 106.117 Sociologist Ludwig Neundörfer, cited by Henderson, ‘Revolution’, op. cit., 238. 118 On the way state simplifications clash with local complications compare Scott, Seeing Like aState, op. cit. In spite of this criticism, tenants did find ways to customize their Frankfurt Kitchens.See views of such kitchens in use in the 1990s. Noever, Die Frankfurter Küche, op. cit., 46. CompareDaniel Miller, ‘Appropriating the State on the Council Estate’, MAN, 23, 2 (1988), 353–72.119 E.g. Irina Voeikova, ‘Vasha kvartira’, Rabotnitsa, no. 9 (1962), 30. Some specialists (notablythe more radical neo-Constructivist ones around VNIITE) regretted that so much was left to thetenant and pressed for a more thoroughgoing standardization of the government-issue domesticinterior.



Susan E. Reidlectures on visual arts in the Department of Russian and Slavonic

Studies, University of Sheffield. She has published widely on variousaspects of Soviet and post-Soviet visual culture. She is the editor,

with David Crowley, of Style and Socialism. Modernity and MaterialCulture in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford 2000), and SocialistSpaces. Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (Oxford 2002).

She has also edited, with Melanie Ilic! and Lynne Attwood, Womenin the Khrushchev Era (Basingstoke 2004).




the khrushchev kitchen- domesticating the scientific-technological revolution

Documents