Gaining privacy. about N. B. Lebina’s book “Khrushchev. Soviet and Non-Soviet in the space of everyday life” (Moscow, 2024)

The paper is devoted to the book by N. B. Lebina “Khrushchevka. Soviet and Non-Sovieе Issues in the Space of Everyday Life”, published in January 2024 by the New Literary Review publishing house. The author notes the relevance of the problems of the text, which continues the tradition of research into Soviet everyday life. The main category that N. B. Lebina works with, by her own admission, is space. Indeed, the space of a small apartment created during the early period of mass housing construction in the USSR has been worked out very carefully. The study shows both the objective characteristics of this space and its semantic content. The author draws attention to the research technologies and techniques that make it possible to achieve this effect: a consistent transfer of attention from official documents, statistics, etc. to the field of personal perceptions, emotions, and everyday practices recorded by various genres of art. In the book by N. B. Lebina’s, a comparative historical approach is consistently and clearly implemented. Changes in Soviet everyday life are correlated with similar European ones (mainly French and German). The conclusion turns out to be unexpected – by the early 1960s, the lifestyle of a Soviet citizen was as close as possible to the lifestyle of an average inhabitant of postwar Europe. In conclusion, the author emphasizes N. B. Lebina’s utmost respect for the interests of the reader – the book is written vividly and interestingly, but with the preservation of traditional scientific objectivity.