ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the aesthetics of everyday life in the spheres of architecture, design and decorative applied arts. It discusses the aesthetic disillusionment with orthodox functionalism that professionals experienced during the last Soviet decades. The chapter elaborates on these aesthetic shifts by investigating the new aesthetic paths that emerged amongst professionals in the decades between the Khrushchev period and collapse. As professionals became increasingly disillusioned with pure functionalism, they appealed to human, social and cultural aspects of material culture to orient their work. A new generation of architects and designers rebelled against the dehumanised monotony of functionalism and embraced emotionality, decorativeness, historicism and eclecticism. The shifts described in this chapter, which began in the late 1960s and gained traction during the 1970s, were the precursors to a kind of aesthetic which, by the 1980s, had many similarities to postmodernism. In their writings, however, professionals explicitly referred to the emerging aesthetic paradigm as Socialist Realism. This chapter considers how these different labels – postmodernism and Socialist Realism – apply to socialist aesthetics of the 1970s and 1980s and illustrates the fundamental congruencies between the postmodern and Socialist Realist aesthetic paradigms.
