The Khrushchev Kitchen: Domesticating the Scientific-Technological Revolution

In the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, the Khrushchev regime launched an intensive campaign to build mass housing. This period, known as The Thaw, is generally regarded as one of liberalization in comparison to the preceding Stalin era. Moreover, the proposed new housing, promising separate, one-family flats to replace the communal apartments and barracks in which most urban dwellers lived, seemed to offer the possibility of a ‘private’ home life. The Khrushchev flat, in particular its small kitchen, subsequently became mythologized as the heart of an ideology-free zone of sincerity where one could shut the door on the public realm and its values. This article proposes that, far from falling outside the domain of public discourse, the new flat — and, above all, the kitchen, along with the labour it accommodated and the lone female worker it presupposed — was a central site for the linked projects of modernization and the construction of communism. However, with its complex mixture of functions, the kitchen was also the site where the contradictions of Khrushchev-era design and centrally-planned production became most evident. Far from a paragon of rational socialist planning, the kitchen could become a microcosm of its dysfunction.