Kvadratnye metry, opredeliaiushchie soznanie: Gosudarstvennaia zhilishchnaia politika v SSSR. 1921-1941 gg , and: Kak vlast'narod k trudu priuchala: Zhilishche v SSSR: sredstvo upravleniia lud'mi. 1917-1941 gg by Mark Grigor'evich Meerovich (review)

Abstract

170 SEER, 86, I, 2008 intellectuals and political opponents of Bolshevism, many ordinary middle class Russians managed to obtain exit visas or unofficial permits and to get to Berlin, Prague and Paris, as well as London, Manchuria, Hong Kong, San Francisco. It has been calculated that as many as twomillion leftthe country during and in the immediate aftermath of theCivil War, among themmany thousands ofJews.Weimar Germany was especially attractive toRussian and Jew alike: of the roughly 250,000 formerRussian subjects living there in 1925, some 65,000 were Jews, while theRussian law society inGermany, founded in 1920,was made up entirely ofJews. A fifth of theRussian trade, industrial and finance union inParis were Jewish entrepreneurs (p. 495). Budnitskii also shows thatRussian politics continued to function in its?migr? setting (though he omits mention of the Russian Nazi Party in Germany or the Russian Fascists in the Far East), and he demonstrates that emigration did nothing to dilute the prejudices of the antis?mites. On a positive note, emigration of prominent Jewish figuresmeant thatwhen the question of a Jewish post-war settlementwas discussed in the international arena, theJewish Diaspora, and by implication theJews ofRussia and Eastern Europe, were represented by authoritative voices. Budnitskii's research ismost thorough. He has consulted a wide range of central, regional and personal Russian archives, as well as archives in London, Leeds, New York and Stanford; and his secondary sources, inRussian and English, are impressively inclusive.His book isa valuable addition to the study ofRussian-Jewish historywhich, inRussia, began essentially only in the last year or two of the Soviet era, and which has by now seen the publication of a substantial number of valuable learned works. StAntony'sCollege Oxford H. Shukman Meerovich, Mark Grigor'evich. Kvadratnye metry, opredeliaiushchie soznanie: Gosudarstvennaia zhilishchnaia politika v SSSR. ig2i-ig4i gg. Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, 5. Ibidem, Stuttgart, 2005. 209 pp. Notes. Appendix. 22.00 (paperback). Meerovich, Mark Grigor'evich. Kak vlast' narodk trudupriuchala: ^hilishche vSSSR ? sredstvo upravleniialud'mi. igiy-ig4i gg. Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, 7. Ibidem, Stuttgart, 2005. 143pp. Notes. Appendix. 22.90 (paperback). These two short studies of Soviet housing policy in thepost-revolutionary and Stalinist periods byMark Grigor'evich Meerovich, an historian of architecture at Irkutsk State Technical University, are the fifth and seventh volumes to appear in the book series 'Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society', published in Stuttgart by the Ibidem press. Under the enterprising and innovative editorship ofAndreas Umland, thisnew series (launched October 2004) specializes in 'narrowly focussed' and 'empirical' scholarship on 'understudied' topics in the history of the former Soviet bloc from the early twentieth century to the present. Almost uniquely, it publishes work in REVIEWS 171 English, German and Russian, thus playing a valuable role in bringing work by scholars inCentral and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to the attention of a farwider readership than theywould receive were they to be published only in their own countries. However, while similar ventures promoting the dissemination of East European and Eurasian scholarship to an international audience, such as the historical journal Ab Imperio (based in Kazan', Russian Federation), have a large team of editors enforcing strict academic controls on published work, the Ibidem series is somewhat weaker in this regard. The two books here under review are prime examples of how an undertaking tobring post-Soviet academic output directly to Western read ers, highly praiseworthy in itself,can come unstuck without intensive editorial intervention. Meerovich gets off to a bad start, introducing his first volume with an ill-considered and provocative polemic, thepatronizing tone ofwhich reminds this reviewer of the ritual condemnations ofWestern 'bourgeois' historiogra phy trotted out in the introductions tomost Soviet-era works of historical analysis. European researchers who have studied early Soviet housing policy, he asserts without any evidence or references to substantiate his claim, have 'bought' the regime's own self-justifying explanation that the wholesale destruction of housing stock during theCivil War, and lack of resources for its subsequent reconstruction, accounted for thehousing problems itfaced and solutions it devised in the interwar period. 'The European could not think differently',Meerovich declares. 'Surely Soviet power couldn't have...