ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses iconography of Soviet everyday life with a picture of a Stalinist domestic idyll as represented by Laktyonov's programmatic painting "Moving to the New Apartment". Any discussion of everyday culture is inevitably anachronistic; it raises issues of continuity and change in the national self-definition and daily practices in Russia, from prerevolutionary to post-Soviet times, when privatization became a buzz word. Beginning in the late 1920s and especially during Stalin's times, the communal apartment became a major Soviet institution of social control and a form of constant surveillance. The new byt, one of the early Russian revolutionary dreams, was based on the complete restructuring of both time and space. The partition is the communal apartment's central architectural feature. Made of plywood and oddly positioned, the partition marks the intersection between the public and private spheres within a communal dwelling. The communal apartment was always an exemplary metaphor for Soviet communality, official and unofficial.
