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  • Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev by Mark B. Smith
  • Amy E. Randall
Mark B. Smith , Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev. DeKalb, IL: University of Northern Illinois Press, 2010. xii + 240 pp. $40.00.

The following joke was popularized during the era of Nikita Khrushchev: "The inspection committee is checking out a newly finished apartment building. To test the sound-proofing, a committee member walks into the next apartment and yells to his partner, 'Kolya, can you hear me?' In response, his partner says: 'You fool, I can see you.'" (Taken from Bruce Grant, Tiny Revolutions in Russia: Twentieth Century Soviet and Russian History in Anecdotes New York:Routledge, 2005, p. 75.) The prefabricated and standardized five-story walk-ups that spread throughout the urban landscape under Khrushchev's leadership, nicknamed the khrushchevki, were often the butt of jokes. As disillusionment with this new form of housing set in, the khrushchevki were often referred to as krushcheby, a play on words that essentially means "Khrushchev slums." Lacking amenities such as elevators, and sometimes suffering from major structural defects, these small and poorly designed apartments came to be widely ridiculed and despised. According to Mark Smith, however, Khrushchev's mass housing program was no joke: it marked a fundamental shift in Soviet policy from "sacrifice to beneficence." If in earlier years housing was sacrificed on behalf of other socialist goals, under Khrushchev its mass development became a top priority. Despite the legitimate criticism at the root of many khrushchevki jokes, tens of millions of Soviet people benefited from the creation of these structures as they moved from frequently oppressive and poor-quality communal housing and "basements, barracks, wretched shacks, and worse" into homes of their own (p. 123).

Smith's well-researched book examines urban housing policy during the late Stalin and Khrushchev years. Under Khrushchev's rule, the government promoted many new housing initiatives, and residential construction proliferated. As a result, housing reform is typically associated with the Khrushchev era. Although Smith grants Khrushchev a crucial role in the development of a mass housing program, he explains that a new Soviet approach to housing began much earlier. Smith's work thus contributes to a growing body of scholarship that jettisons the conventional historiographical divide between Stalinism and post-Stalinism.

Chapters 1 and 2 examine the early stages of housing reform. Smith convincingly argues that World War II served as the catalyst for change. The wartime destruction of an already insufficient housing stock made postwar reconstruction unavoidable, and thus the Soviet government turned to the residential needs of urban populations. Smith argues that this constituted an initial step toward a new ethos of "beneficence" in housing policy. As officials promoted concrete measures to improve residential living standards, people's basic housing needs began to be addressed.

In grappling with the postwar housing crisis, Soviet officials initially adopted largely piecemeal solutions and limited reforms. But as central government agencies and local bodies sought to increase housing output efficiently and quickly, architectural [End Page 260] planning began to shift. Although postwar construction and reconstruction still involved grandiose Stalinist designs, by the early 1950s more and more projects relied on standardization and prefabrication, a design strategy that Khrushchev promoted en masse. During the late Stalinist era, officials additionally advanced rationalizing measures in the housing economy, such as organizational reforms between the center and localities and better training and wages for construction workers. Although such measures were sporadic and uncoordinated, Smith argues that they laid the groundwork for the mass housing program that unfolded under Khrushchev.

Smith explains that from 1954 to 1957, Khrushchev's incipient mass housing program was guided by the "ethic of beneficence"—a commitment to developing housing for the benefit of the Soviet people—which was to be achieved by quantitative expansion and "rationality in approach." Although central planning, patronage, and the release of hundreds of thousands of Gulag prisoners challenged efforts to increase output and rationalize the housing system, considerable progress was made. In 1957, Khrushchev formalized his all-union housing policy in a decree that called for the elimination of the housing shortage within twelve years...

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