ABSTRACT
The home was at the heart of Soviet efforts to build the communist utopia. It was a political problem, an instrument of ideological exertion and a cultural construction site. Its importance became apparent right from the start, when the newly proclaimed socialist state began to gain legal control over the housing stock. Measures may have been gradual and even chaotic at first, ideological fervour mixed with compromises and reversals, but housing became increasingly a state affair. This started with the sequestering of large residential buildings and some smaller properties by local soviets and the nationalization of factories along with their employee dwellings. The Soviets' own industrialization programme, launched in the late 1920s, pushed the state to start building homes to accommodate the influx of workers to new industrial sites. However, the process was enormously accelerated with the launch of an unprecedented mass housing campaign under Khrushchev. This was a bold attempt to breathe vigour into the Soviet project and solve one of its thorniest problems. Enormous resources were poured into the campaign, whose results changed the Soviet urban landscape for decades to come. It also confirmed the predominant role of the state as a provider of homes. Until the 1960s, one-third of all urban housing was still in private hands, but, in 1980, 77 per cent of urban stock belonged to the state, which was responsible for 91 per cent of all new building. Under Khrushchev, the pledge of adequate housing for all turned from a propagandistic leitmotif into the government's central claim to legitimacy. The subsequent governments of Brezhnev and Gorbachev felt compelled to adopt and reiterate it. 1
