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Journal of Design History 1997 10(2):161-176; doi:10.1093/jdh/10.2.161
© 1997 by Design History Society
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Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight against Petit-bourgeois Consciousness in the Soviet Home

VICTOR BUCHLI

Sidney Sussex College Cambridge


  Abstract

This article examines the reinvigoration of Modernist design principles under Khrushchev. During this period the concept of design and ethical principles of the earlier Cultural Revolution of the 1920s were pursued anew. Domestic daily life (byt), mass consumption, and the concomitant issues of petit-bourgeois consciousness were reproblematized in a rapidly industrializing post-war society believed to be in its penultimate phase towards full-blown Communism. Specifically, issues concerning the domestic realm and interior design are examined. It is suggested that a series of ‘micro’ changes in the use of domestic space as well as radical changes in architectural planning facilitated the destalinization of Soviet society and the reinvigoration of Modernist Leninist principles structuring design and socialist morality. Consequently, an uneasy accommodation with Stalinera materialist aspirations was facilitated by this revived rationalizing regime of normative principles of taste inspired both by Modernist principles of the Cultural Revolution and the contemporary West.


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