ABSTRACT
Several Soviet observers have suggested that there is little correlation between per capita amounts of living space and one's socio-oecupational group. In other words, the poor need not necessarily live in more crowded conditions than other people. Standing against the national average of the late 1970s, the emigre sample average of seven square meters suggests that there is some truth in this assertion. The poverty budgets proposed by G. S. Sarkisyan and N. P. Kuznetsova assessed housing costs at a mere five percent of all family outgoings, but the poor in practice spend for more. The degree to which the poorest people are—or feel themselves to be—"a group apart" is highly relevant in any assessment of poverty in the Soviet Union. It might well be that the continuing existence of poverty in the Soviet Union serves as something of an incentive to make able-bodied members of society work a little harder.
