Nostalgia Takes a Hit

“I’m not sheltering in a basement or standing in line for bread – in other words, I’m not in a warzone and can’t think about the war 24 hours a day,” said photographer Anastasia Tsayder
(@anastasia_tsayder on Instagram), who lives in Moscow. “When do I remember the war? When I look out the window and see a panelka. That is probably the most powerful image of war that we encounter every day.”

Images of bombed-out apartment buildings not only signal catastrophe but serve as evidence that Russia is not just attacking military targets, as it claims, but is intentionally destroying the homes of ordinary Ukrainians. And since most of Ukraine’s housing stock was constructed in the post-Stalin era, these images typically show the iconic prefab concrete-slab panelki that sprung up across the Soviet Union in that period. Footage from Ukraine showing panelki reduced to rubble hits home, since many Russians are also still housed in the very same sort of buildings, or at least living among them.

In the 1950s, prefab concrete panels became a tool enabling the rapid construction of private apartments for a population that had largely been living in communal apartments or dormitory-like barracks. Nikita Khrushchev (Communist Party First Secretary from 1953 to 1964) implemented new architectural standards that enabled a program of nationwide, accelerated construction of small, low-ceilinged apartments with simple floorplans. Costs were kept down: toilets, sinks, and bathtubs were all in a single room (unlike the split bathrooms found in most communal apartments, spacious prerevolutionary apartments into which many families were crammed after the revolution); there were no elevators; and purely decorative elements or deviations from the standard floorplan were forbidden as “architectural excess.”

The fact that the apartments had small rooms, poor sound- and weatherproofing, questionable proportions, and were oppressively monotone didn’t prevent these unadorned – but private! – boxes from becoming dream homes for many Soviet citizens. They also felt like the first installment on a utopian future in which everyone would live in blissful equality.

The initial euphoria brought on by these Khrushchevki (their other nickname) faded rather quickly, and a few innovations were made to the standard design. Buildings began to be distinguished by added conveniences, as well as variations on the floorplan, dimensions, and heights: the classic Brezhnevki (named for Communist Party general secretary Leonid Brezhnev, who held that post from 1964 to 1982) were nine-stories high (rather than the initial five) and later grew even taller.

One important change was a lifting of the ban against aesthetic touches, resulting in neomodernist balconies, the addition of decorative tile to exteriors, carved wooden ornamentation along the roofline, and a choice of gratings over the first-floor windows (sunburst patterns were among the most popular).

These standard-design buildings did not manage to fully solve the housing problem or bring about a utopian Communist future, but they did transform urban landscapes, giving Soviet cities and towns a somewhat uniform look, albeit with a few custom flourishes based on local geography or culture. For example, in flood-prone neighborhoods along the Gulf of Finland, some St. Petersburg panelki were built on stilts, elevated by concrete supports that raised them several meters above the ground, saving the lower floors from mildew-inducing dampness. And in hilly Tbilisi, a “skybridge” cuts through several buildings all sitting at different elevations along a steep hillside, allowing for easy movement among them. In far-northern Syktyvkar, capital of the Komi Republic, traditional Komi decorative patterns adorn otherwise standard apartment blocks, and in Ufa, capital of Bashkortostan, you’ll find panelki decorated with Bashkir motifs.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, most people felt a sense of revulsion toward these relics of the Soviet past. “Standard” became a dirty word, and there was a rush to renovate apartments, expanding spaces by knocking down walls, or eliminating, for example, the storage cubbies hanging down from the ceiling. It became fashionable to replace the rectangular entries into the main room with arched openings. Fueled by an urge to replace the Soviet aesthetic, the evroremont (European-style renovations, using imported materials) became all the rage.

“Back then, I was listening to popular bands from England and lived in an imaginary Manchester,” said Tsayder, who curated a photography exhibit titled New Landscape, a study of the urban environment since the early aughts. “And I think it was the same for a huge number of people. The older generation didn’t pay much attention to its surroundings, because they were too busy just trying to survive, and young people were mentally off in other parts of the world. This is reflected in photographs from that period. Because between 2000 and 2010, most of the most popular photographers were photographing India, Cuba, and Mexico – nobody was taking pictures of Russia. But then, a sudden interest in that environment emerged.”

The pendulum swung back, and people started feeling a sense of nostalgia. But at the same time they understood that the past they were nostalgic for hadn’t receded all that far, and that, for example, huge numbers of people were still living much as they always had in panelki. “This wasn’t just nostalgia,” said Tsayder, “but an attempt to understand – ‘we’ve got a Pyatyorochka [a popular grocery store chain] in every neighborhood’ – what does that mean for us? In other words, it wasn’t just about panelki, but about people making sense of their place in life.”

The hopelessness associated with the gray panelka environment and the underlying ideal of social equality melded into an interesting semantic alloy that prompted a wide variety of conceptualizations, extending to the surreal. For example, Rinat Voligamsi’s paintings show five-story buildings with huge nails sticking out of the roof, or jumbled in a heap, like discarded boxes (@#rinatvoligamsi). The landscape artist Dmitry Bulnygin (@bulnygin) created buildings out of lead, some of which have mysteriously melted. And in Tsayder’s photographs, panelki are shown overgrown with forest.

In 2017, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin launched an aggressive plan to tear down low-rise apartment buildings, including Khrushchevki. Indeed, modern apartment buildings are more comfortable, but they were erected without any supporting infrastructure and packed densely together. People realized that they preferred the old Soviet-era micro-neighborhoods to the faceless high-rise ghettos. It suddenly felt incredibly important to save the quiet, leafy clusters of squat little Khrushchevki as an act of historic preservation. Artists responded with a huge volume of works in tune with the new wave of nostalgia. The watercolors of Ilgiz Gimranov (@ilgiz.gimranov), for example, feature panelki sparkling with all the colors of the rainbow and casting wary window-eyes at the children looking at them from the outside.

Sasha Khokhlova and Dima Rengolt, of the Strong Finger art group (@krepki_palez), made 100 plaster-cast 1:100 scale copies of a series of panelki and gave them to various professional and amateur artists to add their creative touches. The various efforts yielded a giant face trapped inside a panelka-esque concrete structure, a fingerprint across the entire face of the building, a building covered with diabolical-looking red birds, and another with a plaster-cast ear attached to a wall of the building (a wink at panelkis’ notoriously poor sound insulation and the saying “the walls have ears”).

“For some, [the panelka] represents nostalgia and happy childhood memories,” Khokhlova mused. “For others it could be a harsh ghetto, entryways reeking of urine, an architectural history deserving a fresh look, a science-fiction future and space domes, isolation within four walls, collectivism and unity – the possibilities are endless.” Khokhlova grew up in a panelka and doesn’t consider these buildings to be in any way repulsive. “It’s just part of the urban landscape,” she said. Perception depends on “the number of sunrays hitting the surface.”

Artist Nikita Anokhin, who makes intricately detailed table-top panelki with illuminated windows, advertises them on Instagram (@anokhinnikita_store): “Dear Friends, if for some reason you’ve decided to leave our marvelous country, you simply must purchase a Khrushchevka from us. It will undoubtedly remind you of home and of why you decided to leave.” Anokhin’s idea started a mass-market phenomenon, and soon his panelki became the rough equivalent of matroshki nesting dolls for intellectuals, with internet stores selling not just similar illuminated art, but also socks featuring panelki and planters in the form of concrete-slab buildings, along with wooden “paint it yourself” models.

Then came 2020 and the pandemic. “In those days, our habitats were limited to a few square meters,” said sculptor Olga Pal, whose work has often involved urban geometry (@o.pal-ceramics). “We came face-to-face with the fact that there aren’t many of these meters but plenty of people. The quarantine impacted our perception of our living spaces. I have a Covid-era work – a colorful multi-story building wrapped in barrier tape, the same tape that we were seeing here, there, and everywhere.” The panelki in Pal’s work are more reflections of how they’re seen with the mind’s eye rather than our physical vision. For example, her bent-over panelki, as if wind-blown, are a statement about their notoriously poor insulation and how cold they can be inside. And her “quarantine building,” suggestive of a cozy and compact tower with no way out, reflects the desire for a warm hearth and the sense of safety homes represented during the pandemic.

These dreams of safety and the aura of nostalgia surrounding panelki shared by everyone who lived in the Soviet Union were joltingly and quickly destroyed by the war. During the first weeks following the full-scale invasion, distraught Russians started posting social media comments about how monstrous it was that people were being killed, but on the bright side, Ukraine would finally be rid of its ugly Soviet architecture. Meanwhile, on a top oppositionist Russian-language outlet, Ukrainian historian Vadim Ilin called the destruction of panelki being perpetrated by the Russians “urbicide.”

Almost immediately after the invasion, in March 2022, Ukrainian illustrator Sasha Anisimova (@sasanisimova) began posting photographs of destroyed buildings overlaid with her illustrations of people continuing to go about their daily lives in apartments without walls, in buildings with charred facades. The people in Anisimova’s works (are they the souls of the dead or just stubborn survivors refusing to give in to the enemy?) calmly make coffee, take showers, read books, and water their plants amid the ruins of war. These works were soon followed by a steady stream of images showing bombed-out panelki that she continues to produce to this day.

Like a nightmare that won’t go away, the variations on this theme are endless: artists working across a range of styles have populated Russian and Ukrainian art with buildings blackened by fire, hollowed out by bombs, licked by flames, covered in tears, or turned to coral sitting atop a dried-out seabed.

“It became clear that the new context could not be ignored,” said Tsayder, who at the time had already gathered material for a book of photographs of modernist architecture in cities across Russia, Uzbekistan, Belarus, and other former Soviet bloc countries. “An important aspect of the book was the idyllic concept of the city as garden transformed into the city as forest, and I think a lot of people looked at their buildings, and the interior courtyards that came with them, that way. The utopia of building a society of equality and affordable housing, the elimination of poverty – these things were an integral part of the concept of Soviet modernism, and that picture was obliterated by the images we were seeing of the war. Seeing photographs of Mariupol and other destroyed cities, we can no longer see panelki as idyllic. The penetration of the news into the collective visual has changed it. This imagery shows the final, absolute demise of utopia.”

On February 24, 2022, Russian bombs dealt a blow not only to Soviet-era apartment buildings, but to the very image of the panelka, to the humanist idea of standardized, inexpensive housing that represented an important component of the common past shared by Russians and Ukrainians. Buildings with exposed and charred interiors and concrete panels dangling from rebar threads – both on news footage about the war and in artistic works – make a clear statement that the panelka now occupies a very different place in the Russian imagination.