The Comrades' Belief: Intended and Unintended Consequences of Communism for Neighbourhood Relations in the Former GDR

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Marxist societies were experiments not only in destratification but also in openness and cohesion. Of all relationships a political regime might use to create 'friendship between classes: those among neighbours may be most prone to manipulation. We examine how relationships among neighbours in the former GDR were affected by the regime's housing policy of mixing people of different classes. Our retrospective data were collected in May 1992 (n = 189) and in April 1993 (n = 300) among two random samples of respondents in Leipzig and Dresden. While the communist regime was very successful at creating neighbourhoods of mixed social composition, its housing policy failed to create friendship between classes. Meeting did not lead to mating: next-door neighbours were socially distinct and hardly socialized with each other. The few existing ties in the neighbourhood were largely restricted to similar others. We understand these shallow and homogeneous neighbourhood networks as the unintended effect of the party's political control of private life: one would be unlikely to invest in relations that posed a threat and with individuals one did not trust, such as neighbours, who were dissimilar to oneself and who, because they lived next-door, knew about one's private life as well. Analysis shows furthermore that being a neighbour and having a dissimilar occupation increases the chance of being distrusted.