Hatton’s description of architecture as a ‘conversation […] whispers in a courtyard’, conceived ‘for circulation among friends’, was in tune with other accounts of late Soviet culture given during Perestroika, highlighting the role of informalsocial practices and spending time among the circle of friends as the true site for independent cultural practices and artistic work.
The term that was often used in Russian for these practices was obshchenie, simultaneously denoting inter-communication, communality, and spending time together. Literary scholars Petr Vail and Alexandr Genis wrote about obshchenie in the 1960s, relating it to practices on the margins of the official public sphere. In other accounts from the 1980s, obshchenie was described as a substitute for religion and portrayed as the only valuable way of existence that defined all other spheres and meanings. Several authors writing retrospectively about the late Soviet period have emphasised the correlation of domestic interiors and the personal interiority that was communicated to the circle of friends. For example, Svetlana Boym wrote about alternative communality (kommunalnoe obshchenie) that was established in shared apartments in the post-Stalin years. She further described a specific culture emerging from the 1960s onwards in the tiny kitchens of the newly erected mass housing, that provided places for the most confidential or unrestricted conversations: ‘The most important issues were discussed in the overcrowded kitchen, where people “really talked” […] The kitchen provided a perfect informal setting for the subtle, casual but friendly intimacy that became a signature of that generation.’
From here anthropologist Alexei Yurhak described obshchenie as a characteristic trait of a late Soviet spatiality that he called a ‘deterritorialised milieu’, existing neither inside nor outside the dominant system while reinterpreting and appropriating the official language and culture. Indeed, for Yurchak, the intimate commonality and intersubjectivity of obshchenie was a performative genre that continuously reproduced this milieu:
The noun obshchenie has the same root as obshchii (common) and obshchina (commune), stressing in the process of interaction not the exchange between individuals but the communal space where everyone’s personhood was dialogized to produce a common intersubjective sociality. Obshchenie, therefore, is both a process and a sociality that emerges in that process, and both an exchange of ideas and information as well as a space of affect and togetherness.
Obshchenie was thus a general name that could characterise a relaxed chatting with friends, an intense exchange of nonconformist ideas among writers or artists, or sitting around a table in a good company and freely exchanging thoughts without the pressure of fitting to the dominant ideological doctrine.
In recent years authors have also spoken of nostalgia for obshchenie in the postSoviet situation in Russia. Overlooking the social difficulties of the late Soviet period, fans of the rock music of that period look for rare recordings and reconstruct the hangouts of the time ‘as if trying to regain obshchenie’.
Andres Kurg, “Free communication: from Soviet future cities to kitchen conversations” (2019)