The article discusses some possibilities for studying everyday culture under socialism, emphasizing the specific role of non-verbal culture-building in the domestic milieu. The analysis focuses on the creation and restoration of privacy as a strategy for coping with cultural trauma. Ethnographically documented creative activity of people demonstrates how, in a context where cultural traditions and political-economic changes collided, the Soviet reality was formed. The result was equally different from the socialist, as well as from the nationalist utopias.