Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores professional visions for everyday life in a developed socialist society and investigates how the aesthetic ideals could have been imagined even amidst the seeming sclerosis of the last two Soviet decades. It considers how Soviet professionals wrote and thought about everyday spaces and objects. The book focuses on three spheres of everyday life: the urban residential area, the home and goods for household consumption. The book traces how professionals from a variety of disciplines – from architecture to the social sciences – echoed this move away from Khrushchev’s proto-communism during the 1970s and 1980s, interrogating and contesting the high-modernist interventionism into everyday life that had defined Khrushchev’s byt reform. It also considers the major trends and themes of developed socialism and traces the Party’s political and theoretical agenda for social and economic control in a technologically advanced and urbanised society.