Kremlin, by the wall of which I would later brood over the endless line for the mausoleum.
Ascetic food mores à la Rakhmetov carried over, it might be said, into the new Bolshevik state’s approach to collective nutrition. Food equaled utilitarian fuel, pure and simple. The new Soviet citizen was to be liberated from fussy dining and other such distractions from his grand modernizing project.
Novy sovetsky chelovek
. The New Soviet Man!
This communal socialist prototype stood at the very heart of Lenin and company’s enterprise. A radically transforming society required a radically different membership: productive, selfless, strong, unemotional, rational—ready to sacrifice all to the socialist cause. Not letting any kind of biological determinism stand in their way, the Bolsheviks held that, with proper finagling, the Russian body and mindcould be reshaped and rewired. Early visions of such Rakhmetovian comrade-molding were a goony hybrid of hyper-rational science, sociology, and utopian thinking.
“Man,” enthused Trotsky (who’d read
What Is to Be Done?
with “ecstatic love”), “will make it his purpose to … raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness … to create a higher social biologic tongue type, or, if you please, a superman.”
A prime crucible for the new Soviet identity was
byt
(everyday life and its mores)—to be remade as
novy byt
(the new lifestyle). A deeply Russian concept, this
byt
business, difficult to translate. Not merely everyday life in the Western sense, it traditionally signified the metaphysical weight of the daily grind, the existentially depleting cares of material living. The Bolsheviks meant to eliminate the problem. In Marxian terms, material life determined consciousness. Consequently,
novy byt
—everyday life modernized, socialized, collectivized,
ideologized—
would serve as a critical arena and engine of man’s transformation. Indeed, the turbulent twenties marked the beginning of our state’s relentless intrusion into every aspect of the Soviet daily experience—from hygiene to housekeeping, from education to eating, from sleeping to sex. Exact ideologies and aesthetics would vary through the decades, but not the state’s meddling.
“Bolshevism has abolished private life,” wrote the cultural critic Walter Benjamin after his melancholy 1927 visit to Moscow.
The abolition started with housing. Right after October 1917, Lenin drafted a decree expropriating and partitioning single-family dwellings. And so were born our unbeloved Soviet
kommunalki
—communal apartments with shared kitchens and bathrooms. Under the Bolsheviks, comforting words such as
house
and
apartment
were quickly replaced by
zhilploshchad’
, chilling bureaucratese for “dwelling space.” The official allowance—nine square meters per person, or rather, per statistical unit—was assigned by the Housing Committee, an all-powerful institution that threw together strangers—often class enemies—into conditions far more intimate than those of nuclear families in the West. An environment engineered for totalitarian social control.
Such was the domicile near Red Square where I spent the first three years of my life. It was, I’m sad to report, not the blissful communal utopia envisaged in the hallowed pages of
What Is to Be Done?
Sadder still, by the seventies, the would-be socialist ubermensch had shrunk to
Homo sovieticus
: cynical, disillusioned, wholly fixated on kolbasa, and yes, Herzen’s petit bourgeois chicken.
Naturally, the Bolshevik reframing of
byt
ensnared the family stove. Despite the mammoth challenge of feeding the civil-war-ravaged country, the traditional domestic kitchen was branded as ideologically reactionary, and downright ineffectual. “When each family eats by itself,” warned a publication titled
Down with the Private Kitchen
, “scientifically sound nutrition is out of the question.”
State dining facilities were to be the new hearth—the public
Ascetic food mores à la Rakhmetov carried over, it might be said, into the new Bolshevik state’s approach to collective nutrition. Food equaled utilitarian fuel, pure and simple. The new Soviet citizen was to be liberated from fussy dining and other such distractions from his grand modernizing project.
Novy sovetsky chelovek
. The New Soviet Man!
This communal socialist prototype stood at the very heart of Lenin and company’s enterprise. A radically transforming society required a radically different membership: productive, selfless, strong, unemotional, rational—ready to sacrifice all to the socialist cause. Not letting any kind of biological determinism stand in their way, the Bolsheviks held that, with proper finagling, the Russian body and mindcould be reshaped and rewired. Early visions of such Rakhmetovian comrade-molding were a goony hybrid of hyper-rational science, sociology, and utopian thinking.
“Man,” enthused Trotsky (who’d read
What Is to Be Done?
with “ecstatic love”), “will make it his purpose to … raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness … to create a higher social biologic tongue type, or, if you please, a superman.”
A prime crucible for the new Soviet identity was
byt
(everyday life and its mores)—to be remade as
novy byt
(the new lifestyle). A deeply Russian concept, this
byt
business, difficult to translate. Not merely everyday life in the Western sense, it traditionally signified the metaphysical weight of the daily grind, the existentially depleting cares of material living. The Bolsheviks meant to eliminate the problem. In Marxian terms, material life determined consciousness. Consequently,
novy byt
—everyday life modernized, socialized, collectivized,
ideologized—
would serve as a critical arena and engine of man’s transformation. Indeed, the turbulent twenties marked the beginning of our state’s relentless intrusion into every aspect of the Soviet daily experience—from hygiene to housekeeping, from education to eating, from sleeping to sex. Exact ideologies and aesthetics would vary through the decades, but not the state’s meddling.
“Bolshevism has abolished private life,” wrote the cultural critic Walter Benjamin after his melancholy 1927 visit to Moscow.
The abolition started with housing. Right after October 1917, Lenin drafted a decree expropriating and partitioning single-family dwellings. And so were born our unbeloved Soviet
kommunalki
—communal apartments with shared kitchens and bathrooms. Under the Bolsheviks, comforting words such as
house
and
apartment
were quickly replaced by
zhilploshchad’
, chilling bureaucratese for “dwelling space.” The official allowance—nine square meters per person, or rather, per statistical unit—was assigned by the Housing Committee, an all-powerful institution that threw together strangers—often class enemies—into conditions far more intimate than those of nuclear families in the West. An environment engineered for totalitarian social control.
Such was the domicile near Red Square where I spent the first three years of my life. It was, I’m sad to report, not the blissful communal utopia envisaged in the hallowed pages of
What Is to Be Done?
Sadder still, by the seventies, the would-be socialist ubermensch had shrunk to
Homo sovieticus
: cynical, disillusioned, wholly fixated on kolbasa, and yes, Herzen’s petit bourgeois chicken.
Naturally, the Bolshevik reframing of
byt
ensnared the family stove. Despite the mammoth challenge of feeding the civil-war-ravaged country, the traditional domestic kitchen was branded as ideologically reactionary, and downright ineffectual. “When each family eats by itself,” warned a publication titled
Down with the Private Kitchen
, “scientifically sound nutrition is out of the question.”
State dining facilities were to be the new hearth—the public
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