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Download fileMakeshift modernity: DIY, craft and the virtuous homemaker in new Soviet housing of the 1960s
journal contribution
posted on 2015-11-04, 12:29 authored by Susan ReidIn cities across the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and early 1960s, new
housing developments of plain five-storey apartment blocks mushroomed
thanks to an intensive programme for mass industrialised housing
construction launched by the Party-State in 1957. Modern living conditions
were to be created for millions, it was promised, through state planning and
investment in the modernisation of construction, making maximum use of
technology and factory prefabrication in place of bricklaying and other
artisanal methods. Drawing on oral history and material culture, this article
attends to some contradictory, seemingly unplanned and un-modern aspects
of popular agency entailed in producing the modern Soviet environment,
including the role of local improvisation, DIY and manual craft. These were not
necessarily resistant to or subversive of the socialist state’s modernisation
project but had a more complex and ambivalent relation to it, as complementary
or compensatory accommodations that “tuned” universal models to local contingency.
History
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