Communist Comfort: Socialist Modernism and the Making of Cosy Homes in the Khrushchev Era.

In the Khrushchev Era Soviet Union, housing and homemaking became widely shared preoccupations both for specialist agents of the state and for individual homemakers, as standard, prefabricated apartments were erected on a mass scale. This essay examines a series of tensions and contradictions: between mobilisation and dwelling; between the chiliasm of the official ideology of communism and the process of settling and making home in these new single-family flats; between mass-produced structures and the agency of the individual; and between the prescriptions of the state's agents and the practices of ordinary amateur homemakers, primarily women. Drawing on contemporary press and archival sources, as well as on interviews with women who moved into the newly-built apartments, the article analyses the ways in which, in authoritative discourse and in everyday practice, specialists and amateurs, primarily female homemakers, sought to transcend the antithesis of home comfort and communism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]