ABSTRACT
The "micro-districts" of housing constructed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) on the initiative of Nikita Khrushchev in the second half of 1950s and 1960s are at present on whole rejected by specialists and broad sections of public as architectural and artistic heritage. Architects devoted attention to questions of compositional urban-planning character as a means of bringing beauty into functionally rational system of a micro-district. Referring to the exemplary ninth block of Moscow's Cheremushki district, which has the status of a "valuable city-forming fragment", but where not a single residential building is protected from reconstruction, Bronovitskaya postulates the aesthetic value of such architecture, which makes it possible to speak of heritage and thus of a right to preservation and protection. In the 1920s, the construction side of Soviet housing policy had been directed towards communal living in hostels, house-communes, barracks-type housing and so on. Standardized construction using factory-made elements began in Leningrad later than in other cities.
