Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room by Malaia Kateryna;

Author:Malaia, Kateryna;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press

Just like the rest of a post-Soviet apartment, the spaces of hygiene adapted to the new times, new understanding of cleanliness, and new aesthetic ideas. Unlike the previous period, post-Soviet spaces of hygiene obtained a new social quality that was not previously recognized by the Soviet media—they demonstrated status and economic standing, no less than the rest of the apartment. The introduction of sanitary blocks into the world of domestic interior aesthetics in the 1990s may have been similar in nature to the establishment of kitchens in the Soviet imagery of the 1960s, when kitchens stopped being perceived as solely utilitarian and outside aesthetic judgement (see chapter 3). The bathroom and the toilet room shifted from a domestic unshowable to the last frontier in the celebration of extreme wealth: post-Soviet nouveau riche were anecdotally claimed to admire golden toilets,15 equally as a cash overflow extravaganza of the early 1990s and a subversive commentary on the previous absence of the toilet from the public imagery. If a toilet was not made of solid gold, it had to at least have a golden rim, like in an apartment for a “respectable” person, as shown in the 1994 inaugural Russian issue of Salon inter’er design magazine.16

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