Equality in Poverty

Sometimes the deep differences between the same social element, whether it be food, or sex, or – as here – housing, can be vividly revealed by the words and phrases which people use when talking about them. For example, if an Englishman or American or Frenchman is asked about his housing plans, he will usually reply using an active tense: 'I'll buy or rent a house', or 'an apartment in Beverly Hills' or 'in the XVième arrondissement of Paris'. A Russian citizen, by contrast, throughout the entire Soviet period, would answer the same question in the passive tense: 'I've been given an apartment/room', 'I was allocated an apartment/room at … ' Such phrases imply not only sharp differences in space for living – a house, an apartment, a room — but still more importantly, in the use of the active or passive tense, a hint at a totally different way of distributing housing space. For in Soviet Russia, housing was a common good, held as a monopoly by the State and distributed through State institutions. In this situation, the housing strategies of groups and individuals were not based on independent choices reflecting social position, and in parallel with other social choices, as such strategies are evolved in Western countries, ¹ but instead on the total dependency of both individuals and groups on the State's chosen policy of housing distribution, shaped by the ideological preferences of the dominant power system.