"Morphology of a Soviet Apartment: Field Research" - this is a photograph of five Moscow apartments with the preserved furnishings of the 60s - 70s, interviews taken from their owners, and the best samples of furniture from Soviet apartments made in the GDR, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR … The purpose of the exhibition is to promote two ideas. First: the objective world of modernism in the middle of the 20th century is beautiful. Second: you need to know and love your past.
Excellent signs of the sixties interior (low armchairs, oval coffee tables, floor lamps, wardrobes on spaced tapered legs) for most of us are "squalor", "scoop", "trash" that has a place in the trash heap. They are being carried to the trash heap. Dozens of these items perish every day. But real rubbish is what happy owners furnish their apartments with instead of discarded old things. After all, it is now believed that good design is exclusive and expensive, and if you are not rich, you are forced to use uncomfortable, ugly and quickly breaking things. And in the 60s, cheapness was an integral part of what was called good design. In addition, the interior of the apartment is a cast of family history. The items stored in it are monuments of family history. It seems to the authors of the exhibition that our common habit is completely, to the concrete skeleton, to cleanse the apartment of all the marvelous archeology that has been accumulating there for decades, and, having carried out a "European-style renovation" or "design", settle in it like homunculi after an atomic explosion, as if we did not have no history, no ancestors, no childhood.
We would like to take this part of everyday history out of the dark zone of total denial, remove the taboo on it. It seems to us that then for the first time we will clearly see it and see: the objects that were designed by Eames, Ero Saarinen, George Nelson, Arne Jacobsen, Finn Juhl, Jens Quistgard, Joe Ponti; and the Soviet objective world of the late 50s - early 70s are similar in style and meaning, and if we love one thing, we will certainly love another.
Curator: Artem Dezhurko
Photos: Alexey Naroditsky
Texts: Yulia Bogatko, Artem Dezhurko
Graphics: Anton Aleinikov
Thank you for your help: Anna Nikitina and Oleg Kovalev (Smartballs workshop), Ambartsum Kesyan, Margarita Dezhurko, Anna Malakhova, Nina Frolova.
Ksenia Apel
art history teacher
We moved in in 1972. By that time, it was already a separate four-room apartment allocated from the communal apartment. The kitchen is still separated from the neighbors by a cardboard partition. The apartment went to my grandfather for his achievements in the field of atomic energy, and he was the only male owner in this house. Somehow from the very beginning it turned out that this was a house, not an apartment. At least three generations have always lived here, there have always been animals and many guests. And all the women of the family brought their husbands to the house. As the grandmother says, "there would be girls, and the boys jump."
Now I live here with my husband and daughter, my mother, her husband, grandmother and a dog. Accordingly, there are three housewives in the house, and it is technically very difficult to direct any repair or cleaning actions. Nothing is ever thrown out here. I remembered, for example, in the middle of the night that I needed to iron a surgical gown for my husband-doctor for tomorrow - what should I, bother someone in search of an iron or ironing board? No, we have four irons, two boards, several folding beds, two refrigerators … Anything can come in handy.
In order to have something to feed the numerous guests, my grandmother once started collecting porcelain-faience, which was never in short supply in the Soviet Union. And these porcelain impressions, apparently, influenced the choice of my profession: I study the history of porcelain as an art critic. Everyone who visits this house for a long time contributes to its arrangement: my husband is responsible for the musical accompaniment of life, my mother's past husband composed enchanting intricacies of electrical wires, the current one and she herself, chemists, are testing new surfaces on accessible surfaces of the house, as well as on our dog. paint and varnish coatings. The only thing that we managed to update in the apartment was to make repairs in the room, which has now gone to my daughter. Although her childhood is basically the same as mine: my friends and I rode our bicycles along the corridor, imagining that we were trolleybuses, building houses under tables and playing hide and seek, so that no one found anyone for hours. And there was also a feeling of endless tea, hum and noise. There was a period when nine people constantly lived in the apartment, not to mention the guests who could fall at any moment. The daughter gets a lot from this coexistence of different norms of life, the arrangement of thoughts.
Valentina Semenova
Pensioner
Like many houses in the triangle between Leninsky Avenue, Vernadsky Avenue and 26 Baku Commissars Street, ours is a cooperative. The area can be said to be elite - most of the houses are from institutes or departments, besides, it is close to the metro; has its own theater "In the South-West" and good enough shops. Therefore, the atmosphere here is intelligent, not proletarian and very calm.
My husband was an oil economist, traveled a lot abroad - to India, Bulgaria, Vietnam, Algeria, so we did not live poorly and after an Algerian business trip we were able to join a cooperative and buy a three-room apartment on installments for seven thousand rubles. My son and husband and I moved in as soon as the house was built: in 1970.
I remember that we tried to be in time until May, so as not to "toil" later. We brought almost all the furniture and things from the old apartment: it was also a cooperative, but a two-room one, which we bought in 1963 and immediately completely furnished.
At the new place, they decided not to change anything, although in the 70s the walls were already in fashion. We liked our Romanian Living Room suite - sideboard, wardrobe, sofa, armchairs, coffee table. The kitchen is also old. We only bought a bedroom, since we didn't have a bedroom in the previous apartment.
When my son grew up, we made a dining room out of his room, because it is very important for me to receive guests not in cramped quarters. Usually there are many of them. On my birthdays, I set the table four times: first we celebrate with children, then with colleagues and students - I worked at school as a teacher of Russian and literature, - then with friends of my youth, with whom we have been together since 1943, and, finally, with neighbors.
The things that are in this apartment could themselves tell a lot about our family: paintings on the walls - gifts from students, oriental masks, figurines and panels - from my husband's business trips, I collect Gzhel myself, icons - in the tradition of my parents. Books, however, are few - I lost my eyesight a long time ago, and we stopped buying them. And so we have a lot of good subscriptions and rare autographed books. Even now, when my husband died ten years ago, and I began to see and walk poorly, I am not left alone - my grandchildren and friends are constantly calling and coming.
Alexey Kulkov
Lecturer at the Institute of Mechanics of Moscow State University
The fact that an apartment could be "obtained" is a Soviet myth. Our apartment appeared with us only because my father, who served at the Research Institute of Meteorology, was lucky enough to go to Egypt in the late 60s to build the Aswan Dam. In addition to the money we earned, we borrowed something else and were able to make the first contribution to the apartment cooperative - one and a half thousand rubles. I remember how we went to see how our house was being built. And then, by lot, we got an apartment on the eleventh floor, and my parents and sister and I moved here in 1972. I was seven years old. The cooperative was called "Quartet" and consisted of shareholders of four organizations: Moscow University and three research institutes. Like us, members of the cooperative and later neighbors were Sergei Averintsev and Arkady Strugatsky.
It was an experimental series of three identical houses designed by the architect Stamo. For the first time there was a freight elevator in the house. But later they were not reproduced in exactly the same form - a large staircase was considered inappropriate. But it was remembered by everyone who at least once watched "The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!" - the Moscow story was filmed in the first house, and the Leningrad story was filmed in the third. I remember well the work on the episode "We need to drink less" under our windows, where the heroes trample in the snow, kicked out of the apartment.
At that time, the area was still very unsettled. But on the other side of Vernadsky Avenue until the Olympics there was a real village, with chickens and cows. I spent most of my time there after school.
Since for the next ten years, parents paid a share for an apartment, and this is 50-60 rubles a month, at that time it was a lot of money, we lived in poverty. They had only the most necessary and ordinary things. And all this has remained unchanged to this day, we have never done any repairs.
Everything is still convenient for me and everything suits me. I buy a new one only if the old one breaks down and cannot be repaired, and all the furniture, utensils, appliances, mezzanines, switches, a chandelier in the nursery with a locomotive, stove, sink, doors - everything is native. Everything serves well, why change something? Repairs are a lot of problems and not obvious improvements. Well, maybe I'm thinking of replacing the washing board with a washing machine.
