Housing is clearly one of the most crucial features of daily life. As Marx famously noted, ‘life involves before everything else eating, drinking,a habitation, clothing and many other things’.² One would expect that the first socialist country in the world, which was explicitly organised in accordance with Marxist principles, would be determined to ensure that these fundamental needs were met. Housing, however, was to prove an intractable problem throughout the country’s history.

The Soviet regime inherited an urban housing crisis of enormous proportions from the Tsarist era. While resolving this crisis presented a huge challenge, it also provided an...

Before we start exploring the Soviet approach to housing, we need to understand the state housing was in when the Bolsheviks came to power, and hence what they had to deal with before they could start putting their own ideas into practice. Accordingly, we will start this chapter with an outline of the housing situation in Russian cities before the Revolution. We will then look at the revolutionary government’s attempts to develop a distinctly socialist housing policy in the chaotic conditions of the Civil War and War Communism, paying particular attention to their views on newbytand gender relations....

The New Economic Policy, or NEP, was introduced by Lenin in 1921. It was initially intended as a short-term measure to deal with the acute crisis in food production. Under War Communism, grain which was considered surplus to the peasants’ own needs – and this was open to interpretation – had been requisitioned by the authorities and used to feed the urban workers and the army. The furious peasants had rebelled; if the food they produced would be taken from them, they would simply produce less. A severe drought in 1920 and 1921 turned the food shortage into a famine,...

The revival of the private housing market in the NEP period was seen by the Bolsheviks as a necessary but temporary evil. Not only did it encourage speculation and exploitation, but it was inconsistent with the socialist principle of collectivism. It would be eradicated once the housing crisis had been brought under control. Though the private family home still had its supporters, the predominant view was that in a communist society people should live communally. Here, ideology dovetailed neatly with economics. Proponents of communal housing stressed that it was both the most ideologically correct, and the most cost-effective, form of...

Housing cooperatives could function as a first step in communal living, but they did not necessarily require their members to live communally. This was not the case with communes, hostels and barracks. Whether or not they wanted to live communally, their residents had little choice in the matter. In this chapter we will explore the various forms of communal housing which existed in Soviet cities in the 1920s, looking both at how they were portrayed in the literature and, as far as we can determine, how they were actually experienced.

The house commune, ordom-kommuna, would be the ultimate in...

With Stalin firmly in power by the late 1920s, the country was plunged into a new upheaval – what has been variously termed a second revolution, a revolution from above, a second socialist offensive. This one was carried out under the banner ‘Socialism in One Country’. In the early years of the Revolution the country’s leaders had been convinced that the Soviet Union was insufficiently developed to be able to establish socialism by itself, and in any case, the capitalist world would not allow it to do so.¹ However, its revolution would be such an inspiration to workers in other...

The first Five Year Plan was supposedly such a success that it was declared fulfilled by the end of 1932, after just four years – though, as Hosking puts it, the figures which were meant to confirm this claim were ‘wild flights of the imagination’.¹ Those four years of astonishing upheaval had resulted in significant changes in the official understanding of newbyt.

Most importantly, for reasons we will discuss in due course, the commitment to communal living and communal housing came to an end, and the individual family apartment was now proclaimed the ideal form of housing. In reality,...

Even if the Soviet authorities had abandoned their commitment to communal living, in practice it remained the norm. Industrialisation and collectivisation resulted in a flood of additional people migrating from the countryside to the cities, and these had grossly insufficient housing for those already living there. In this chapter we will look at the various forms of housing available in the cities in the 1930s.

An increasing amount of housing was now controlled by the workplace and allocated to its workers. If the workplace did not have housing of its own, it would be allotted a certain amount by the...

On 22 June 1941, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and forced the country into the Second World War – or what the Soviets referred to as the Patriotic or Fatherland War. Much has been written on the country’s lack of readiness for this attack, and on Stalin’s apparent surprise that Hitler had reneged on the treaty which the two countries had signed in 1939. Little attention, however, has been paid to the ways in which housing and the home were explicitly affected by the war. This chapter will look at the treatment of these topics inOgonekandRabotnitsa...

By 1956 Khrushchev had emerged as the new leader of the country, and that same year he launched what was arguably ‘the most ambitious governmental housing program in human history’.¹ The aim was to provide all families, including newly wed couples, with their own apartments within the next twelve years. The seven-year plan launched by Khrushchev in 1958² pledged to build 15 million new city apartments, to be distributed ‘on the principle “one family, one flat”’.³ The building programme would be characterised by the slogan ‘build quickly, cheaply, and well’ (stroit’ bystro, deshevo, khorosho).⁴

This mammoth enterprise could only be...

After Khrushchev was deposed in 1964, many of his reform programmes were halted or overturned. This was not the case with the housing programme. While some aspects of Khrushchev’s approach to housing were now rejected – most notably, the standardised five-storey apartment block – the programme itself continued unabated.

According to the press, it was hugely successful.Ogonekclaimed in 1970 that between 100,000 and 120,000 new apartments were being built in Moscow alone every year,¹ and that, in the country as a whole, forty-four million people were resettled in new or renovated apartments between 1966 and 1970.²Rabotnitsaput...

Brezhnev died in November 1982. For the next two and and a half years the country was led by elderly and ailing men, first Andropov and then Chernenko. In March 1985 the relatively youthful Gorbachev came to power and launched a massive reform programme, referred to asperestroikaor restructuring. Initially intended to make the economy more efficient, in due course it extended into all corners of Soviet life.

At the same time, the policy ofglasnost’, or openness, made it possible to discuss the negative aspects of society much more honestly. Initially the intention had not been to introduce...

The previous chapters have drawn primarily on material from Soviet magazines, journals and newspapers. Some of these publications aimed to provide information on changing housing policies for those who were engaged, in various capacities, in the construction or distribution of housing. Most, however, were intended for the ‘masses’: those who lived, literally, with the consequences of those policies. While they usually played down the appalling conditions in which people were housed, I have argued that a close reading can still provide numerous insights into the reality of people’s lives. This chapter aims to go further down this road by asking...

This study has explored Soviet housing throughout the entire span of Soviet history. It has also demonstrated the ways in which housing has been bound up with a range of social issues such as the changing understanding of newbyt, attitudes towards gender, and the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’. In this way, housing has served as the starting point for a broader study of Soviet social history. We will now draw out the study’s major conclusions.

Post-revolutionary housing policy was, we have argued, developed in accordance with ideological principles. These included a commitment to newbyt, equality between men...