1st Edition

Everyday Soviet Utopias Planning, Design and the Aesthetics of Developed Socialism

By Anna Alekseyeva Copyright 2019
286 Pages
by Routledge

286 Pages 21 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

286 Pages 21 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book explores how intellectuals of the later Soviet decades – the 1970s and 1980s – sought to bring about the socialist utopian world. It argues that the last two decades of the Soviet Union were not characterised by state withdrawal and malaise, as some scholars have argued; attempts to envisage and enact Utopia remained as imaginative and creative as ever. The book considers... Read more

Chapter 1: Introduction



Chapter 2: Social and economic control under developed socialism: themes and context



Part I: Everyday Urbanity



Chapter 3: Social life in the microdistrict: forging a new type of collective



Chapter 4: Humanised urban design: visions and realities of city planning



Part II: Domesticity and Khoziaistvo



Chapter 5: From ‘machine’ to ‘organism’: changing views on the nature of the living cell



Chapter 6: Khoziaistvo in the socialist city: organising byt and family life



Part III: Everyday Objects



Chapter 7: Managing consumption and rehabilitating the object-world



Chapter 8: Postmodernism with a Socialist Realist face?



Chapter 9: Conclusion

Biography

Anna Alekseyeva completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford.