Would your average citizen be able to afford such luxuries as wallpaper, paint, or other decorations like paintings, etc? Would these even be available in the Soviet economy to begin with? In lieu of that, what other options might I have to satisfy my creative soul?
Let's assume that you're living in Soviet Russia and not further afield (Kazakhstan, for instance). Let's also presume you're in a city in Western Russia, perhaps Leningrad (modern St. Petersburg.)
Because it's the mid-60s, lucky you! You get to live in a Khrushchyovka, named for Nikita Khrushchev. Don't listen to the whispers of the public who call these five-story, elevator-free, concrete blocks khruschoba (or Khrushchev-slums.)* This is modern living, Soviet-style, and you are going to get all the conveniences of the Soviet plan. Maybe you'll even have a telephone. (Maybe.)
*Many of these are still in use in the Baltic States; they are notoriously difficult to heat.
First of all, you're going to have to make sure that everyone who is living in your apartment with you agrees with your taste. Soviet apartments were communal, with anywhere between two and seven (!) families sharing an apartment. You have a room for your family to sleep, but you share a kitchen-- which is about 6m square or 65 sq ft) on average-- and you share hallways and sitting areas. You also share the bathroom. As it turns out, your communal apartment neighbours are very particular, so the bathroom/hallways/kitchen are a MAJOR no go. You can decorate your shared bedroom.
Let us also presume that demographically, your 1960s Soviet Russian family is statistically normal, and therefore you are one-half of a married couple with two children. Let's also assume you are a regular worker and not an elite official, whose homes would be more generous.
So, the four of you have one room to decorate. What can you buy? Enthusiasm about the agricultural developments of the last decade, plus the space race, means you can enjoy some ornaments with cosmonauts or corn.
But access to paint? Well, my brother, I fear we have not yet beaten the bourgeoisie attitudes out of you! Why do you wish you change and alter the great gift you've been given? To behave with such egregious imperial individualism! Grotesque!
"It was quite comfortable in our one room, but in school we were taught that comfort was akin to philistinism,” author Lidiya Lebedinskaya recalled. “So, once when returning home from school, I looked around and realized that I had to immediately battle philistinism. There were still no adults at home, so I took the scissors and cut away the tulle curtains from the window. Then I took off all the paintings and portraits from the walls and threw at them knives and forks. Tying everything with a tablecloth, I took it to the trash... Just when I was trying to take down the carpet, my father returned home from work...” [x]
To decorate, to make one's own a space, to acknowledge that the Khrushchyovka wasn't perfect/ideal/etc as it was, would be to betray a rather vital portion of the Soviet experience. In Lebedinskaya's retelling, there was some minor access to decorations of comfort-- tulle or portraits, carpet, a tablecloth-- but these were seen as undesirable baubles by the Soviet administration. These would likely have come from the "second" or "shadow" economy of the USSR, possibly smuggled in from Hungary or other less-repressed regions. I highly recommend flitting through the 1992 paper from Rutgaizer that I linked below, which is lengthy but wholly available online.
Your wages wouldn't have allowed you to buy much-- your HONEST wages, anyway. But your second economy wages perhaps could fund your second-economy purchases. Fix a leaky faucet or a drafty window for your communal apartment dwelling friend and perhaps you can use a little money to buy some fabric. (The Rutgaizer paper notes that more than 50% of all repairs of homes and consumer goods were done in the shadow economy-- off books, unofficial.) You hopefully know of a fartsovshchik (international smuggler, trafficker) who isn't too mouthy who can get you some cool stuff from the outside. That could be anything from luxury fabrics to clothes to LP records from Western artists. Just don't play them too loudly. Your neighbours will hear.
Part of the communal housing plan wasn't just saving money-- it was attempting to politicize the private sphere. "As everything becomes political, everything becomes public. ‘The communal apartment stands as a metaphor of the distinctive Soviet mentality"-- ie., of a collective political identity as workers rather than an individual identity. (Boym 1994: 124) With pass-through rooms and hallways, the comings and goings of every citizen were the business of every other citizen in their communal apartment. Where are you going? What are you doing? When? With whom? So, in theory you can buy some new decor with your ill-begotten money, but mind your children don't destroy it while you're at work in a fit of Soviet nationalism...
You mentioned your creative soul. Fortunately you are living during the Kruschchev Thaw, when the censorship of the early 20th century was significantly relaxed. It wasn't eliminated, but popular culture emerged. You could watch Goluboy ogonyok, (Little Blue Light) on TV if you can find a set to watch. If you've got some musical training, you can participate in the newly fledged music scene, which grew substantially from the 1950s to the 1970s. Maybe your teenage sons and daughters are stilyaga, showing off their snappy foreign clothing. You can write poetry with less censorship than before, too.
Ultimately, what sometimes gets lost in the mythologizing of the Soviet Union is not just the physical living space but the social rules that constrained it. Leave your apartment alone, brother. It's fine the way it is. glare
Sources
Also, a few links not to be used as historical sources but to show you some pictures:
EDIT: thank you for the gilding! :) If you are interested in more information about mid-century Soviet life, I'd recommend watching some movies from the time. Even with censorship they give you a sense of what common life was. A popular choice is the Academy Award winning Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears from 1979.
You get to live in a Khrushchyovka
Soviet apartments were communal, with anywhere between two and seven (!) families sharing an apartment
Pick one, please. Sadly, this well-sourced and in-depth post somehow mixes up the two concepts from different eras.
Communal apartments were an old thing long before the Soviets. Even in Tsarist Russia, a lot of housing in major cities like St. Petersburg was revenue houses with multiple apartments and rooms, even parts of rooms ("corners") offered for rent. As you can guess, years of World War I, two revolutions and Russian Civil War didn't do much good to urban housing stock. On August 20, 1918, All-Russian Central Executive Committee abolished private property to urban housing, launching a policy called Uplotnenie (literally "compacting"), basically confiscating most of housing within cities and redistributing it at the discretion of local authorities; as a result, a lot of larger existing apartments were turned into communal apartments with a shared kitchen and bathroom, one room per family. It was definitely an improvement for millions of peasants coming to the cities to work, leaving their village shacks behind; less so for older tenants. Of course, the Soviets started building new houses, and built a lot of them, but crowded communal apartments were the fact of life for tens of millions of Soviet citizens before, during and after World War II. In 1917, 17% of population of the Russian Empire lived in towns and cities; in the USSR in 1956, this figure was 48%. They had no other choice but to "get compacted" into communal apartments.
So, where do Khrushchyovkas come from? In 1954, just a year after Stalin's death, the Soviet government moved to tackle the housing problem at last. 1957 Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR "On development of residential construction in the USSR" stated: "Starting from 1958, to provide for cost-effective single-family apartments with all modern conveniences in all residential buildings being built both in urban and rural localities". In other words, the new type of housing was specifically designed as the opposite of communal apartments.
Khrushchyovkas were multy-apartment modular buildings, assembled of reinforced concrete panels, easily to produce and scale to gigantic proportion. Yes, they were ugly. They had no elevators or garbage chutes, so much for "all modern conveniences". They had low ceilings, small rooms, even smaller kitchens. They weren't designed for long service. But they were filthy cheap to build, and the Soviets build them by tens of thousands year by year: a lot funded directly by government, even more by housing cooperatives (societies chipping in together for a new multi-apartment house). It is claimed that more residential housing was built between 1956 and 1963 than in the previous 40 years combined; the total area of housing in the USSR doubled in ten years, going from 640 million m2 to 1.184 billion. I'm not saying that communal apartments, shacks, basement dwellings, pit-houses and other unpleasant forms of housing disappeared completely; but by mid-1960s, they became forgotten for good for millions of Soviet citizens, who were moving to khrushchyovkas (as incomfortable as they were) as the next improvement.
There's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution. Even now, in 2020, the cities of Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics (Baltic States included) are full of thousands of badly aged khrushchyovkas. Communal apartments still exist as well; according to 2010 Russian Census, 3 million of Russians were still living in them.