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The major part of this book project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 700913.
This book is about two distinct but related professional cultures in late Soviet
Russia that were concerned with material objects: industrial design and
decorative art. The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to
have been Russia’s first truly original contribution to world culture. In
contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hackwork
and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities. This book
identifies the second historical attempt at creating a powerful alternative to
capitalist commodities in the Cold War era. It offers a new perspective on the
history of Soviet material culture by focusing on the notion of the ‘comradely
object’ as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet
design inherited from the avant-garde. It introduces a shared history of
domestic objects, handmade as well as machine-made, mass-produced as well as
unique, utilitarian as well as challenging the conventional notion of utility.
Situated at the intersection of intellectual history, social history and
material culture studies, this book elucidates the complexities and
contradictions of Soviet design that echoed international tendencies of the late
twentieth century. The book is addressed to design historians, art historians,
scholars of material culture, historians of Russia and the USSR, as well as
museum and gallery curators, artists and designers, and the broader public
interested in modern aesthetics, art and design, and/or the legacy of socialist
regimes.
exercise authority in a limited space, within territory belonging to the dominant political power. It establishes a zone, no matter how small, in which an alternate jurisdiction operates, one intended to balance power relations between vying political states. Grotius's own experience is telling. He fled his homeland of Holland because of religious oppression, and crossed over into France. His flight suggests the link between the necessary, special legal status of such an extraterritorial zone and the refuge it offers. Grotius is a migrant avant la lettre , and he draws
demonstrate (Hsy, 2017 ; Butterfield, 2009 ). In twentieth-century cultures around Europe, speakers and writers who need to work across Romance vernaculars and the Semitic languages of Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya, and Hebrew are prevalent, as they are in current times. Indeed, this modern-day version of the transfer of language and knowledge, translatio linguae et studii through the enforced transfer of political power, the translatio imperii , explains much about the acculturation of migrants. Those who are forced to move by the march of European
exhibition familiarised a broad stratum of Soviet society – not just the attendees but all those who followed the press coverage – with the appealing image of Western consumer culture. This momentous event has been described in detail by several historians, particularly emphasising the famous ‘kitchen debate’ between Khrushchev and the American Vice-President Richard Nixon. The debate made obvious the significance of domestic consumption as a component of political power.65 By the end of the 1950s several factors had come together for the emergence of the design profession