Socialist Housing in the Eastern Bloc: Lynne Attwood, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia Kimberly Elman Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity

This essay reviews Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia: Private Life in a Public Sphere (Pittsburgh: 2011) by Lynne Attwood and Manufacturing A Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960 (Manchester and New York: 2010) by Kimberly Elman Zarecor. The two books contribute to a deep inside analysis of socialist housing. They do this from different perspectives and with different scopes. While Zarecor’s study is driven by a fascination with the emergence of (prefabricated) architecture under the socialist regime in an Eastern European country, Attwood mainly shows how Soviet citizens experienced their housing from within. Both publications contribute to the understanding of the meaning of housing in the Eastern Bloc, and both show how living and housing were treated in a stepmotherly way, despite the importance of housing in the socialist ideology.