ABSTRACT
The USSR in the 1980s is a land of city dwellers, with over 63 percent of the Soviet people living in areas designated as "urban." In the eyes of Soviet leaders, the most serious problems of the contemporary Soviet city in the European part of the USSR are that its population is aging and immobilized, which has led to severe labor shortage. Historically the rate of industrial investment far exceeded the financing of urban services, and this vitiated the practice of comprehensive urban planning, which was supposed to provide a balance between industrial growth and urban development. Soviet agriculture has never recovered from Stalin's policy of forced collectivization of farms in 1929 and 1930, which removed Russia's best farmers from the soil. The average living space per person was only five square meters in 1950.
