Sleeping

This chapter claims that the roots of demand for apartment remodeling rested deep in Soviet reality and that the basis for supply of remodeling services began while the Soviet system was still standing. The chapter analyzes the everyday practice of sleeping and the ways in which this practice transformed between the beginning of perestroika in 1985 and the second post-Soviet decade. It also breaks down the category of privacy present in every study of domestic space in order to locate the distinct peculiarities of Soviet and post-Soviet sleep. The chapter points out how a designated bedroom in the Soviet Union was a rarity rather than a rule, unlike in the United States, where the number of delineated spaces in a home is measured by the number of “bedrooms.” It talks about residents of Soviet apartments who slept in multifunctional spaces with standards for acceptable sleep arrangements quite different from those found in American homes of the same era.