Christine Varga-Harris. Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years.

Abstract

From 1917 to 1991, one constant in Soviet life was the shortage of adequate housing. Immediately after the revolution, the Bolsheviks tried to solve the housing problem by expropriating and subdividing bourgeois apartments, thus creating the quintessentially Soviet institution of the communal apartment (kommunalka), in which perhaps twenty or thirty tenants shared a single kitchen, bathroom, and toilet. The problem only got worse in the 1930s, as Stalinist industrialization brought millions of new workers into already overcrowded cities. Wartime damage to housing stock exacerbated already acute shortages in cities such as Leningrad, the focus of Christine Varga-Harris’s Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years. Residents returning from evacuation or service in the Red Army whose former homes had been destroyed or were occupied by others sheltered in basements, hallways, and dugouts. Ten years after the end of World War II, housing remained a pressing practical problem. In the context of the Cold War and de-Stalinization, Varga-Harris argues, housing also constituted an ideological opportunity. When, in 1957, Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, launched the drive to house every Soviet family in a “separate” (single-family) apartment, he aimed “not only to provide living space, but also to regenerate society and create model individuals” (9). With so many waiting for housing, new construction often fell short of state and popular expectations. Nonetheless, Varga-Harris concludes that the regime’s efforts to rejuvenate the revolutionary project often succeeded because, at least in the realm of housing, “individual interests in many ways corresponded with state objectives” (213).