American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History by William Craft Brumfield;Blair A. RubleReview by: John E. BowltThe Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), p. 529Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/308871 .

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Reviews 529

William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble, Eds. Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Woodrow Wilson Center Series. 322 pp. Illustrated. $90.00 (cloth).

For many reasons, this is an unusual book. Here is a complex, yet elusive topic-"housing"-- that calls for both a working definition of residential space and a philosophical explication of private and public perimeters. The time-frame (from ca. 1880 to the present) is also a rich and intricate one in the history of Russian architecture and design, for it witnessed Russia's acceptance and elaboration of many artistic dialects, often in conflict with one another, from Art Nouveau to Socialist Realism. Moreover, Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History brings together papers by scholars of various disciplines, attitudes, and methodologies-from Robert Edelman's factual descriptions to Vladimir Paperny's concep- tual antiphonies of Culture One (1920s) vs. Culture Two (1930s), from Stephen Kotkin's concentrated case study to Judith Pallot's statistical analyses. In the face of these potential dangers, Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History emerges as a remark- able success, enlightening and eminently readable.

Brumfield and Ruble have brought together nine essays that investigate specific subjects related to the general issue of housing during late Imperial and Soviet Russia: the Russian peasant house (Edelman), the new designs for private houses and apartment blocks before the October Revolution (Brumfield), early Soviet housing (Milka Bliznakov), the personal interactions in Soviet living space (Paperny), housing in Magnitogorsk (Kotkin), the Soviet countryside (Pallot), the tenements of the 1950s onwards (Ruble), and a fascinating com- mentary on the Russian concepts of "private space," "home," "ownership" (Aleksandr Vysokovskii). Each contributor adduces valuable and often surprising data. We learn, for example, that Nietzschian philosophy seems to have effected the planning of Magnitogorsk (Bliznakov), that the planners of Stalin's hydraulic civilization looked closely at the cities of Mesopotamia (Paperny), that Leningrad statistics in the 1970s indicate that 45 percent of all families had only one or two members, while only 24 percent of the apartments being built were intended for such units (Ruble), and that the average wait to receive bricks for dacha construction is one and a half to two years (Vysokovskii). Such comments, whether factual or speculative, make what could be heavy reading light. Furthermore, in contrast to so many recent publications on Soviet architecture, the collection is distinguished by its empha- sis on constructions that were built and on apartments that were inhabited rather than on "paper architecture." On this level, the discussion of the Moscow and St. Peters- burg dokhodny doma (Brumfield) and of the partial resolution of the housing crisis under Khrushchev and Brezhnev (Ruble) are especially commendable, for they tell us a great deal about the residential patterns of both the Russian middle-class and later the Soviet proletariat-and respond to Edelman's opening remark that "Everybody's got to be someplace."

Inevitably, in an ambitious and complex enterprise of this kind, the inquisitive reader might quibble with certain emphases or perceive certain omissions. There is no real discussion, for example, of low income housing in tsarist Russia, little on dacha and spa housing before and after the Revolution, and the issue of prison camp housing, inhabited by millions, is disre- garded. But a pioneering study of this kind cannot be all-encompassing and such a difficult subject is bound to generate imbalances which, in this volume, do not detract from the historiographical, sociological, and esthetic prerogatives of these lucid, informative, and en- gaging essays.

John E. Bowlt, University of Southern California

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