Garden City: Everyday Life of Sixties in Soviet Social Memory

Abstract

The article is devoted to the history of Soviet urban everyday life at the turn of the 1950s-1960s. and its reflection in the social memory of the inhabitants of Omsk, the problem of exploiting the enthusiasm of Soviet people during the years of the Khrushchev thaw. A forgotten episode in the history of urban housing construction in a Siberian city is associated with the socialist competition between Omsk and Leningrad in 1959 for the title of an exemplary Garden City. The very fact of the improvement of the urban environment by the forces of the townspeople and the method of socialist competition laid a lot of contradictions - between the general and the private, between free and paid, between the ideological and the real. And in this historical episode, many aspects of the behavior of ordinary workers of the Soviet industrial city were manifested, with their explicit and hidden desires, aspirations, upbringing and the degree of "faith in a bright future." The creation of a garden city by the public work of the residents themselves has become a significant idea that can unite everyone. It lay on the basis of the very atmosphere of the “Khrushchev thaw” when the most daring ideas and projects were born and implemented. The study of the history of urban non-capital everyday life was carried out on materials of oral history (memoirs of the old residents of the city of Omsk), a large complex of archival sources, periodicals, etc.

Keywords:

everyday history, oral history, social memory, Khrushchev thaw, city, urban anthropology