Smith, Mark B. Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 371 Smith, Mark B. Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2010. xii + 240 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $40.00. In July 1957 the Soviet state began an ambitious mass housing campaign, pledging to end the housing shortage in the USSR within twelve years. In part the result of Nikita Khrushchev’s longstanding personal involvement in the Sovietbuildingindustry,thehousingcampaignwasfar-reachinginitseffects.In every year of this campaign, millions of Soviet citizens received separate family apartments in new standardized microdistricts that radically transformed cityscapes across the USSR. During the mass housing campaign, more housing was built per capita in the USSR than anywhere else in Europe. In Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev, Mark B. Smith examines the development of Soviet urban housing policy in the two decades after 1945. In these years between the end of the Great Patriotic War and the fall of Khrushchev in 1964, the USSR engaged in what Smith calls ‘one of the great social reforms of modern European history’ (p. 183). In five chapters, Smith examines the origins and implementation of the Soviet Union’s mass urban housing programme. The three chapters that make up part one of the book offer a chronological account of the housing programme from 1944 to 1964. Here, Smith convincingly begins his account in the last years of the war, drawing continuities across the late-Stalin and post-Stalin divide and arguing that the reorientation of urban housing policy in 1957 was the result not merely of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization platform, but also of the war. Smith discards the ‘thaw’ as an organizing concept from the outset, arguing that the 1957 housing campaign was the result of both Stalinism and de-Stalinization. Drawing on archival materials at the USSR, RSFSR and Moscow levels, Smith shows that it was during the late-Stalin period that the policy, bureaucracy and technology necessary for the 1957 campaign were first developed. Chapter one charts the policies adopted between 1944 and 1950 when architects and leaders coped with the massive task of post-war reconstruction. Chapter two follows Soviet leaders, Khrushchev among them, as they confronted the inadequacies of earlier policies and paved the way to a new approach enshrined in the housing campaign of 1957. And chapter three examines real achievements in housing construction alongside the problems created by policy-makers who measured their programme’s success primarily on the basis of how many square meters of living space were constructed. In part two, Smith makes a major contribution to our understanding of property relations in the Soviet Union. Chapter four offers a comparative discussion of the concept of individual ownership, showing that the Soviet case SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 372 fits squarely within the European tradition of property. Chapter five examines the implications of Soviet notions of ownership—in particular, the right of occupancy — on the housing policies of the late-Stalin and Khrushchev eras. At the core of Khrushchev’s urban housing programme, Smith argues, was a unique ‘nexus of property and welfare’. As Smith shows, individual forms of ownership did not disappear with the abolition of private property. In the 1920s, property was transformed by the new Soviet state from a ‘profit-generating commodity into a welfare good’ (p. 169). Personal property, a category of tenure that became more widespread during post-war reconstruction, made up one-third of the Soviet urban housing stock by the late 1950s (p. 144). The mass housing campaign built on this Stalinist foundation, shifting towards housing cooperatives rather than individual construction that had formed the basis of housing policy during late Stalinism. Smith frames his discussion of Soviet housing policy with three ideological motifs — sacrifice, beneficence and paradise — each of which came to the fore at different moments to inform policy-making. The dogma of sacrifice dominated in the 1930s, as Soviet citizens were asked to forego decent living standards for the sake of rapid industrialization. During the war, this sacrificial ideology gave way to beneficence, which underlay the state’s determination to raise living standards as a goal unto itself. During the Khrushchev era...