Context, Politics and Policy

Housing Question as a Chronic Disease

The promise to solve the housing shortage and implement mass construction was rooted in the 1917 October Revolution. Motivated by Marxist ideology, Bolsheviks sought to abolish private property, resolve the housing question, and establish a society without social classes. The Bolsheviks issued the “Decree on Land” on their second day in power, proclaiming the abolition and redistribution of private land ownership through nationalisation.14 Nevertheless, the supply of living space inherited from the tsarist regime was inadequate, and the State was too impoverished at the time to make significant investments in new housing construction. Simultaneously the concentration of progressive development in cities made them the epicentres of working opportunities and socialist intervention prompting rural residents to actively migrate to urban areas, which caused the housing shortage and conditions to worsen throughout the 1920s. When Stalin came to power in the 1930s, he neglected housing provision even more, allocating all capital and resources to industrialisation while disregarding consumer needs.15 Furthermore, the damage and destruction of the USSR’s building sector during World War II deteriorated an already inadequate housing stock making the situation even worse.16 The last time chronic disease of the Soviet State appeared within sight was in July 1957, when Nikita Khrushchev (Fig.1), who came to power in 1953 after Stalin, issued a decree “On the development of domestic building in the USSR” to solve the housing question for first, last and all the time.

Soviet Union was in a deep state of political, economic and social crisis after Stalin’s death in March 1953. The system of terror and control he created over decades of his rule simply outlived itself and became even harmful, which made it evident that political machinery of the vast country needed to be revitalized and restored. 17 Khrushchev came to power after Stalin’s death and ruled until 1964. Edward Crankshaw, the Observer Soviet affairs correspondent during Khrushchev’s rule summed up well the challenges the regime was facing during the period:

14 The process of nationalisation and redistribution in this case implies that Bolsheviks expropriated private property owned by wealthy elites in pre-revolutionary society and then distributed it among the working-class citizens, while keeping the ownership of the property. The latter remained a common practice for USSR throughout its existence.

Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2015), pp. 1-2

15 Donald Filtzer, The Khrushchev Era: De-Stalinisation and the Limits of Reform in the USSR, 19531964, Studies in European History, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 32-34

16 Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home, pp. 1-2

17 Donald Filtzer, pp. 6-7

“What is important, however, is that the post-Stalin reforms, or some of them, were inevitable. The problem facing the new leadership, collective or individual, was how to massage life back into the numbed limbs of society, how to encourage the new vitality to express itself and fructify, and how, at the same time, keep it within bounds, so that the whole elaborate edifice of administration was not swept away.”18

Khrushchev was an aspiring reformist, a dreamer perhaps. Many of his reforms failed or required even more reforms to fill in the faulty gaps and omissions.19 However, most ordinary citizens remember his “thaw” as the time when they were finally able to move into a new separate apartment and improve their living conditions after decades of waiting for the fulfilment of promises made by Bolsheviks back in October 1917.

Forty years passed between the 1917 October Revolution, in the wake of which Bolsheviks waged war on the family, private ownership, and a traditional way of life, and the 1957 housing decree, in which the Soviet State under Khrushchev set a goal to eliminate housing shortage by providing each Soviet family with a separate apartment. Early Bolsheviks who aspired to a classless society and an egalitarian way of life saw the separate apartment as a problem rather than a solution since, prior to the revolution, simple workers languished in overcrowded factory barracks and tenements, while single-family residences were only available to bourgeoisie and aristocrats. Khrushchev alternatively presented separate apartments as a way to fulfill Bolsheviks’ revolutionary promise to solve the housing question. 20 Moreover, the State gave the new housing a meaning of truly socialist as it intended to make separate apartments a widespread phenomenon by distributing them to the one social group — the family— that transcended all other divisions. 21

18 Ibid., p.9

19 Martin McCauley, Khrushchev and Khrushchevism (Basingstoke: Macmillan in association with the school of Slavonic and East European Studies University of London, 1987), pp.2-3

20 Steven E. Harris, pp.11-12

21 Khrushchev deserves credit for providing Soviet families with separate apartments, but he did not invent the concept within the context of Soviet Country. In his book Communism on Tomorrow Street, Steven E. Harris discusses Stalin's often-overlooked role in the rise of single-family housing. Harris remarks, "The Stalinist regime marginalized radical architectural theories on collectivist living and rehabilitated the singlefamily apartment as a "cultured" form of urban housing".

Ibid., pp.1-68

Living conditions prior to Khrushchev’s mass housing campaign

Fig.2- Two families of candy factory workers rent a corner in a room, 1920-1923

Fig.3- Tsentralny special settlement, general view of one of the barracks, 1933

Fig.4- Destruction of Ukranian USSR city Kharkiv during World War II

Fig.5- Kitchen of a Stalinist communal apartment, postwar years

Years

Housing Built by State and Cooperative Enterprises and Organisations, and Housing Cooperatives

Housing Built by Workers and White-Collar Employees at Their Expense and with State Credit

Housing Built by Collective Farms, Collective Farmers, and Rural Intelligentsia

Khrushchev did not come up with a ground-breaking or unconventional solution to the housing question, but his approach to solving it was truly innovative for the Soviet Union. In contrast to the country’s previous leadership, which sought to invent an utterly novel housing reality to end the housing shortage and create a new way of life for Soviet people,23 Khrushchev learned from the past practices and rectified them. He kept the Bolsheviks’ approach to housing which included the abolition of private property, nationalisation of the housing stock and land, rationing of living space in square meters, and use of housing to control society.24 Also, he kept the idea of single-family occupancy earlier reintroduced in the USSR by Stalin in the 1930s. Meanwhile, under Khrushchev, new changes to the previous housing construction and distribution practice occurred. He established a much more coherent and clearly expressed relationship between citizens’ rights and housing provision, significantly increased housing construction, and massively invested in material, financial, and labour resources. Archival data shows that the total urban housing stock in the Soviet Union increased by 87.5% between 1950 and 1960 and that the all-union urban ‘departmental’ fund grew by 78.2% from 1960 to 1965. 25 As evidenced by data, it didn’t take long to see the results of the new approach and renewed commitment, which finally “cured” the chronic disease of the Soviet Union: the housing question.

Ideological Intervention

The ownership control and political infusion of various spatial orders have existed since the formation of the Soviet Union throughout all the spaces and social hierarchies. Housing and domestic reality were not an exemption. Christine Varga-Harris argues that “housing – denoting the design, construction, and decoration of living space, and the ways in which people manoeuvre within it – was a negotiated site where policy matters related to distribution and consumptions, norms associated with materials culture, and

22 Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1967 [National economy of USSR in 1967] (Moscow: Statistika, 1968), p.675

As explained in source, the data for the years 1941-1950 represents both housing that was reconstructed and newly built.

23 The novel housing reality statement refers to the ideas of Soviet avant-garde architects in 1920s about creating “house communes” (doma-kommuny) where residents will have small rooms for sleeping, while cooking, eating, childcare and leisure would be socialised and organised in communal spaces. In reality this theory was presented by communal apartments.

24 Steven E. Harris, p.43

25 Melanie Ilic and Jeremy Smith, pp.27-28 social concerns all converged.”26 The nationalisation of land and property, as well as the official political rhetoric of egalitarian housing provision, occurred in the early days of the October Revolution and signified the first signs of the regime’s tendency to politicise the most intimate spaces and practises of Soviet citizens. “Everyday life was not opposed to ideological life. On the contrary, it was a fundamental site of ideological intervention.”, where domestic space played an essential role in this interference. 27

With the Khrushchev regime’s intense house-building programme, the idea that living space could be ordered and used for political purposes became especially important. While taking steps to provide one-family housing for all, it made the home and leisure spaces critical sites of political intervention.28 It may seem like a popular “thaw” slogan, “A separate apartment for every family!” implied the revival of privacy in the Soviet State after decades of a widespread practice of communal apartments. Still, it only concerned other citizens, not the state ideology itself. While visiting the USSR in 1928, Walter Benjamin claimed, “Bolshevism has abolished private life”. 29 Later in 1958, the title of one Soviet agitational brochure proclaimed, “Everyday life is not a private matter”.30 From being a “monopolist” in mass housing construction and furniture design, management, and distribution to providing brochures and literature on how to efficiently operate the new apartment and establish a socialist way of life (Fig.6), the Soviet State politicised every square metre of the tiny apartment and instilled ideological meaning into housing campaign.

The totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union enabled it to translate the mass-scale housing campaign and interfere with the ideological meaning in all spheres, including the media. In August 1957, on the Day of the Builder, an article appeared on the front page of “The Evening Leningrad” declaring that this holiday should be associated not only with construction workers but also, more broadly, with the recently published decree on housing construction and the upcoming 40th anniversary of “Great October.” The correspondent, emphasizing the seriousness of the task put before the builders, stated, “Socialist competition in our construction should flare up brighter than ever before.”31 Such a comprehensive discussion of construction issues suggests that the completion of the task of housing provision was viewed both literally and figuratively as a sign of success in the revolutionary transformation of society. Moving into comfortable, satisfactory, and, most importantly, egalitarian housing made it possible to “touch with your hands” the most important promise of the new society: a communist utopia. 32

On a bigger scale, Khrushchev’s regime mobilised the provision of housing to achieve the broader goals of creating a classless society, moulding the New Soviet Man and Woman, and demonstrating the superiority of socialism over capitalism. In contrast to the war,

26 Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home, p.6

27 David Crowley and Susan E Reid, Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in Eastern Bloc (New York: Berg Pub Limited, 2002), p.3-11

28 Ibid., p.11

29 The statement made by Benjamin addressed the communal apartments, which were dominating the housing sector at the time. However, in this case, it can be applied to the broader understanding of Soviet housing practices and private life.

Walter Benjamin, ‘Moscow’ (1927), in One Way Street (London: Verso, 1979), pp. 8–187

30 O. Kuprin, Byt – ne chastnoe delo [Everyday life is not a private matter] (Moscow: Gospolitzdat, 1959), pp. 1-7

31 ‘Prazdnik stroitelej’ [Day of the Builder], Vechernii Leningrad [The Evening Leningrad], 10 August 1957, p.1

32 Christine Varga-Harris, ‘Khrushchevka, kommunalka: sotsializm i povsednevnosti vo vremya “ottepeli”’ [Khrushchevka, communal apartment: socialism and everyday life during “thaw”], Modern History of Russia, 1 (2011), pp.160-166

Fig.7-Soviet agitational poster ‘To build fast, cheap and good!’ (1960)

Fig.8- Soviet agitational poster ‘For the good of the nation!’ (1960)

Fig.6 - Extract from the book Advices on housekeeping , ed. by R. V. Svetsova terror, and repression employed by Stalin’s regime, the new way of life was to be established through a consensus-building project involving the resettlement of families into their own apartments, therefore framing a new political and social reality after the death of Stalin in 1953.33 Steven E. Harris describes the transition in the context of the housing program, “When the members of a family left their communal apartment for a separate apartment, they left behind the Stalinist past as embodied in their previous housing for a new and empty apartment, a clean slate mirroring the uncharted reformism and “thaw” of the Khrushchev era.” 34 The Soviet State under Khrushchev not only instilled ideological meaning in the separate apartment and the mass-scale housing campaign but also used them as a powerful tool to reinforce and present the State’s ideology and political regime internally and externally.

(Volgograd: Volgogradskoie Knizhnoie Izdatel’stvo, 1959), pp.4-5. Pages provide visual and textual guidance on how to furnish the room to make efficient use of space and produce enjoyable environment.

Policy and the Separate Apartment

In the context of the mass-housing campaign, the underlying policies and limitations associated with Khrushchev’s separate apartment production and design were just as important as the State ideology that imposed them. The State is accountable for primary constraints faced by the housing campaign due to both the early decision of the People’s Commissariat of Health in 1919 to establish a standard of 8.25 square metres of living space per person35 and the goal to end the housing shortage in ten to twelve years adopted in the 1957 decree ‘On the development of domestic building in the USSR’. As a result, the distribution norms, cost limitations, almost exclusive use of prefabricated construction elements, tight time frames, and waiting lists all constituted part of the programme, which aimed to provide every Soviet family with a separate apartment. As Steven E. Harris argues, the Soviet State’s intense and urgent quest to find housing solutions occurred “not on the drawing board of utopias but in the process of designing the real world,” with its imminent technological, economic, and policing constraints, as well as tight schedules. 36

The State presented the small size of Khrushchev’s separate apartments as a rational and scientific organisation of space that would complete the transformation of all residents into the New Soviet Man and Woman. However, a more logical evaluation of the reasons behind the small size of khrushchevka reveals a negotiation between single-family occupancy and distribution norm based on living space and sanitary norm. The architects of Khrushchev’s mass-housing programme decided to drastically reduce living space in apartments to the point where local officials could not settle apartments with more than one family, therefore preventing communalisation. 37 The distribution norm of 8.25-9.00 square meters of living space per person was used as a maximum cut-off, implying that a family of four would receive an apartment with 33-36 square meters of living space. Nevertheless, this allowed to 33 In February 1956 Nikita Khrushchev delivered his famous “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth Communist Party Congress which denounced Stalin’s crimes including mass repressions, terror and cult of personality. It encouraged a thaw in state-society relations and revival of the country’s quest for communism. This significant event and mass-scale programme can be both viewed as integral parts of Khrushchev’s regime political and ideological intervention.

Steven E. Harris, p.267

34 Ibid., p.5

35 Steven E. Harris in his work Communism on Tomorrow Street introduced the idea that the sanitary norm to living space relationship in USSR originated in ideas about minimum living standards in the nineteenth-century housing reform movement. He traces the routes of how pan-European housing reform influenced country’s norms and housing sizes starting from France’s mid-19th century research on the minimum amount of airflow a prisoner would need to avoid asphyxiating.

Ibid., pp.31-39

36 Andrei Ikonnikov, p.7

37 Steven E. Harris, pp.1-72 achieve the desired single-family occupancy in 91 to 92 per cent of newly built apartments for the years 1959-1962 and had grown to 95.3 per cent by 1963, as evidenced by Gosstroi studies.38

The reduction of living space ensured the apartment’s distribution to individual families; however, it caused an increase in cost estimates. According to the distribution norms, a condo with smaller living spaces will ensure single-family occupancy but cost more per square metre because of the expensive provision of services in auxiliary spaces. To cut costs, the architects significantly reduced the size and infrastructure of auxiliary spaces: kitchens and entrances were shrunk, pass-through rooms were added, and bathrooms and toilets were merged. Other measures of keeping costs down included simplifying layouts, lowering ceilings, and reducing the number of rooms. 39 The State did not reform the underlying principles that tied design and cost to the distribution of housing based on the allocation of square meters per person, therefore, constricting what architects could do with separate apartments. Once the basic apartment design, which was small enough to fit one family, keep the costs down and remain separated, was created, architects concentrated on mundane technical questions and minor design adjustments. 40

In the broader discussion about the relationship between architecture and politics, Albena Yaneva observes that architecture is “shaped by bureaucratically codified state regulations” and “fundamentally conditioned by the broader political-economic context in which it is commissioned, designed, and understood.”41 These statements directly address the chronic housing shortage, political rhetoric, ideological intervention, and policy-related constarits, all of which shaped Khrushchev’s mass housing campaign and separate apartments as we know them today. Khrushchevka was a product of the Soviet Union, reflecting all of its social, historical, political, and economical characteristics while also passing them on to ordinary Soviet citizens who lived in it. In this way, this product’s merits and flaws can be traced back to the underlying principles that shaped and conditioned it.

38 Izrail B. Martkovich and others, Zhilishchnoe zakonodatel’stvo v SSSR i RSFSR [Housing legislation in USSR and RSFSR] (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo literatury po stroitel’stvu, 1965), pp.80-81

39 Steven E. Harris, pp.27-85

40 Ibid., pp.106-107

41 Albena Yaneva, pp.15-16

Chapter 2

Production, Circulation and Consumption

Minimal Living Space in Reality

After years of waiting for a much-desired separate apartment in a newly-built khrushchevka, many residents opened the doors to their new homes with unbridled joy, followed by dismay.42 The most pronounced problem for new residents was the small size of their new apartments, expressed through narrow entrances and doorways, low ceilings, tiny kitchens, and small rooms.43 Three faculty members of the Polytechnic Institute in Gor’kii complained in a letter to the Third All-Union Congress of architects in 1961 about the shrinking dimensions of mass housing, arguing that they could not satisfy people in the present, not to mention the future. The letter stated, “It isn’t normal when you can’t put a coat closet in an entranceway, when people have to drag in their furniture through the balcony and, we’re sorry to say, carry out a coffin almost vertically.”44 The limitations imposed on the masshousing campaign by previously discussed distribution norms and cost constraints resulted in an apartment with poultry dimensions, which presented inconvenience to its residents rather than the rational comfort promised by the Soviet State.

42 Steven E. Harris, p.275

43 Mark B. Smith, Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (Illinois: Norther Illinois University Press, 2010), p.126

44 Steven E. Harris, p.27

The archival photograph (Fig.11) of the room in the newly-built house taken in 1959 reveals the cramped and shrunken reality of the new socialist way of life established by Khrushchev’s mass housing campaign. The photograph is taken from a corner of the room, implying that a broader range is visible, but the crampedness and size of the space shrink the image somehow. The captured room features interesting furniture items: a bookcase with a section that folds out to serve as a small desk, a table with a collapsible section, and a sofa bed. Khrushchev’s housing campaign produced entirely new consumer goods that corresponded to the dimensions and aesthetics of the millions of new small apartments, thereby shaping people’s daily behaviours in accordance with the communist way of life.45 The decoration of the photographed room is kept to a minimum.”There should be nothing ostentatious and superfluous in our home,” wrote the Soviet journal “Working Woman.”46 These suggestions addressed one of the most pressing issues people faced when moving into new apartments: where to put all their belongings in such a small space.

45 Steven E. Harris, p.229

46 Il’ia Varlamov, Kak mi doshli do jizni takoi: khrushchevki [How did we get to this life: khrushchevki]

(2019) <https://pikabu.ru/story/kak_myi_doshli_do_zhizni_takoy_khrushchyovki_6598101> [accessed 10 January 2023]

Typification and Standardisation

The notion that “it is possible and practical for buildings which are intended for the same purpose and are of the same capacity to be built a number of times in the same form” became critical for Khrushchev’s housing campaign. It resulted in the implementation of typification, prefabricated large-panel construction technology and standardised design.47 These changes in the very nature of design and construction methods were possibly the only ones capable of completing the Soviet State’s hasty endeavour to provide each family with a small, low-cost apartment at breakneck speed. To begin with, Soviet architects and designers whittled down the number of available housing options to a bare minimum and created prototype plans and layouts. Following that, industrial prefabrication techniques were developed to aid in the rapid speed of construction while also lowering costs. 48 Simultaneously, the Council of Ministers issued a decree in 1960 advocating the design and construction of prototype apartment blocks for prefabrication and mass production. If a commission of experts determines that a prototype building is technically and economically advanced, it is identified as a “type” and approved for mass production. 49 As a result, “lookalike towers grew like mushrooms after a rain shower” as every housing feature in the USSR, from construction technique to layout, became standardised.50

47 Philipp Meuser and Dimitrij Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing: Prefabrication in the USSR 1955-199, trans. by Clarice Knowles (Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2015) p.11

48 Blair A. Ruble, ‘From khrushcheby to korobki’, in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, ed. by William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1993). p.238

49 Andrei Ikonnikov, p.7

50 Blair A. Ruble, p.243

Fig.13 - Approximate nomenclature of the standard designs for Khrushchev’s housing campaign

Fig.14- Basic nomenclature of articles for I-464 housing block type

Fig.15-Construction of the large-panel khrushchevka

Fig.16- Standardised apartment plans for different family compositions

The project 10/1 of Romanian photographer Bogdan Girbovan allows us to visually understand and comprehend the typification and standardisation of the housing programme. The photographer captured all the apartments in a vertical row, including his own on the tenth floor, located in an old soviet housing block which emerged in the period of mass construction of typified housing. 51 The author emphasised that, despite each apartment having the same layout, each resident added their own colour and personality to it. That is undeniably true; however, it is also true that some other common features remained present from the past, even though the dissolution of the USSR occurred more than three decades ago and the building itself was most likely built more than five decades ago.

Girbovan took all photographs from the same vantage point, which not only highlights the identical arrangement of the walls but also enables the identification of peculiar similarities. Six of the ten images depict wooden parquet floors with the same warmtoned varnish and arrangement, which can be found in nearly every apartment from the period of mass-housing construction. What’s more intriguing is the similar arrangement of furniture in three of the captured rooms (9th, 8th, and 5th), which are all inhabited by the older generation: a double bed on the left, a closet in the back, a foldable couch on the right, and a table with chairs in the middle. Some other apartments (6th, 3rd, and 2nd) have minor variations of the same layout, perhaps the original one intended for this type of apartment. This cannot be sheer coincidence. The mass-housing campaign is often viewed as “a symbol of individual suppression and dejection” due to its tendency to standardise and typify.52 Could this be the reason why the residents of the apartments depicted in Bogdan Girbovan’s series maintained the state-mandated layout? If not, maybe there is a more logical explanation, such as the fact that the room in the khrushchevka is so tiny that only this layout can accommodate all the necessary furniture? Perhaps it is both at the same time.

51 Bogdan described his project in the following words, “I took a photograph of each apartment (the interior of each space) from the same angle, in order to better illustrate the mix of social classes in the block, displaying only differences in the character and design of the interior. The rooms may be regarded as a psychological chart of those who live in them, reflecting their history and relation to present times.”

Martynas Klimas, ‘Identical Apartments, Different Lives in Photos by a Romanian Artist’, Demilked, 2016 <https://www.demilked.com/ten-floors-identical-apartments-neighbors-bogdan-girbovan-romania/> [accessed 13 November 2022].

52 Philipp Meuser and Dimitrij Zadorin, p.7

Aesthetic deprivation

With its typification and mass production, Khrushchev’s urban housing programme created a startlingly uniform cityscape throughout the Soviet Union, with the clusters and rows of prefabricated, five to nine-story standardised khrushchevka acting as “lead characters” of this uniformity. The new cityscape from Minsk to Magadan appeared the same because it was composed of the same elements: similar apartment buildings, homogeneous residential areas, and an overall urban design that followed centralised directives.53 The story of the Soviet film “The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!” revolves ironically around this new cityscape uniformity created by the mass-housing campaign. By mistake, the central character, muscovite Zhenya Lukashin, arrives at Leningrad airport. He gets a taxi and gives the driver his Moscow address. It turns out that there is an identical address in Leningrad that belongs to an apartment building with the same design as Zhenya’s building in Moscow. Unsuspectingly, upon arrival, he takes the elevator to “his” apartment, and the key fits in the door. Inside, even the furniture is nearly identical to Zhenya’s. 54 Academics, such as Blair A. Ruble and Mark B. Smith, view such replicated city reality as oppressive, displeasing and psychologically debilitating.55 In 1964 Laurens van der Post published his account of his recent journey across the USSR. While he found it depressing to have the same apartments for everyone, his Tashkent guide argued that they are all equal in USSR and that what is good for one is good for all.56 Soviet propaganda clearly worked well. Identical buildings, streets, and cities were the new socialist housing reality for Soviet citizens imposed by the Soviet Union, in which everyone, according to ideology, should be equal, if not identical.

Decree of November 4, 1955 No. 1871 “On the elimination of excesses in design and construction” became another reason for the extreme aesthetic deprivation faced by the Khrushchev’s mass housing campaign. Khrushchev was arguing that the outwardly ostentatious and extravagant style of architecture no longer corresponds with the Party and Government’s architectural and construction policies, and the Soviet architectural style should be characterised by simplicity, formalism, and cost-effectiveness.57 This resulted in buildings that have lost their aesthetics and individuality. Any decorative elements such as arches, columns or moldings disappeared. In return for this, economy and strict functionality increased dramatically, which made it possible to provide housing for everyone.

As evidenced by this chapter, Khrushchev’s housing programme adopted a quantitative rather than qualitative approach to housing production and provision. For the Soviet State, it was more critical to meet production quotas and deadlines than to consider the needs of the families who would live in the apartments and their aesthetics. As a result, “the most ambitious governmental housing program in human history” not only solved the housing question but also produced “the worst of all possible housing worlds”58

53 Mark B. Smith, p.111

54 Ironiya sudby, ili S lyogkim parom! [The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!], dir. by Eldar Ryazanov (State Committee of Television and Radio Broadcasting of the Soviet Union, 1976) [Motion picture]

55 Mark B. Smith, p.112; Blair A. Ruble, p.251

56 Laurens van der Post, Journey into Russia (London: Penguin, 1971), p.73

57 Postanovlenie Tsentral’nogo Komiteta KPSS i Soveta Ministrov SSSR ot 4 noiabria 1955 goda №1871

“Ob ustranenii izlishestv v proiektirovanii i stroitel’stve” [Decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR of November 4, 1955 No. 1871 “On the elimination of excesses in design and construction”] (1955) <https://web.archive.org/web/20140716132943/http://sovarch.ru/postanovlenie55/>

[accessed 12 January 2023]

58 Blair A. Ruble, pp.234-259