SUMMARY

The article by Olga Smolyak is devoted to exploring the ambiguous category of comfort in the history of Soviet society. The author suggests taking the analysis beyond the realm of the private sphere and focusing on how this category functioned in ordinary Soviet people’s subjective perception of social realities. The first part of the article builds an analytical model based on an understanding of social space as a composite structure made of diverse natural, material, and social phenomena, as well as social networks and forms of exchange of information and material objects. The author is especially interested in the problem of boundaries and zones of social transparency that helped ordinary Soviet people to become oriented in the social space and to devise strategies vis-à-vis the authorities. The emerging model is built on the assumption that the sense of comfort was linked to tripartite feelings of stability, dignity, and satisfaction. The article includes two case studies that present the creative tactics of ordinary Soviet people in building zones of comfort. The first case is the story of building a stand-alone house and household economy. The specifics of this case are associated with the functioning of the planned economy in the Soviet Union, within which there were no legal ways to procure materials for individual house construction. The second case demonstrates the creative strategy of a Soviet family toward mastering a space of comfort with the help of a hand-made vehicle. In conclusion, the author contends that the historically formed sense of comfort in the 1960s was underpinned by (1) familiarity with and routinization of interactions in the social space, which in turn were made possible by the retraction of mechanisms of totalitarian control; and (2) the perception of Soviet society as a stable and predictable matrix of social life, which made it possible for ordinary Soviet citizens to expect full self-realization in their lives.