Build­ing binge com­menced in the Soviet Rus­sia in 1955 when the Cen­tral Com­mit­tee of the Com­mu­nist Party  issued a decree “About elim­i­na­tion of unnec­es­sary extrav­a­gance in archi­tec­ture”.  The pre-war, Stalin-approved  archi­tec­ture was notable for mon­u­men­tal columns, high-stud ceil­ings and indis­pens­able stucco mould­ings.  This  was a Soviet ver­sion of Empire style (or “Vam­pire”, coined by con­tem­po­raries) and it was about to fade away.

Nikita Khrushchev who replaced Josef Stalin  made a deci­sion to build cheap houses at  mass vol­umes. At that time the res­i­den­tial accom­mo­da­tions in еру USSR was  in a totally dis­as­trous con­di­tion – only 10 – 15% of urban pop­u­la­tion had pri­vate apart­ments;  the major­ity of this group apper­tain­ing to the gov­ern­ing elite. The ordi­nary Sovi­ets mostly lived in d.i.y wooden sheds  -  that com­prised to around 30% out of all urban accom­mo­da­tion ( and pos­si­bly even more in some regions, like Siberia).  Now those sheds are hard to imag­ine, how­ever, there are still rem­nants of those  in some remote places. Toli­ets, bath­rooms, and even water sup­ply were often missing.

So the mass con­struc­tion of houses with­out unnec­es­sary extra­van­gances had com­menced. To under­stand the scale of those devel­op­ments, sim­ply com­pare the fol­low­ing fig­ures.  From 1917 to 1941 (when the  War began) 200 mln of square metres of accom­mo­da­tion was built. 70 mln was destroyed dur­ing the War but about 50 mln  was restored in late 1940s. Whereas dur­ing the seven-year period from 1959 to 1965 more than 300 mlns of sq metres of accom­mo­da­tion was built — and hun­dreds of new flats got occu­pied right away. The  first wave were the  brick houses (those are still highly val­ued on the mod­ern sec­ondary house mar­ket). Despite tiny kitchens and quite pokey lay­outs, those flats had  bal­conies and (sic!) sep­a­rate toi­lets and bath­rooms as well as sound­proof walls! Really, those  brick apart­ment blocks were a good deed of the Soviet system.

As it turned out in 1957, the  pop­u­la­tion growth exceeded the speed of the con­struc­tion.  The change of power from Stalin to Khrushchev gave opti­mistic hopes to Soviet peo­ple, which in turn resulted in the Soviet baby boom. So, after two years after the first res­o­lu­tion, the Com­mu­nist Party issued a sec­ond one “About res­i­den­tial accom­mo­da­tion devel­op­ment”. This res­o­lu­tion stated that con­struc­tors did not pay enough atten­tion to panel and block-based con­struc­tion and, hence, made a start to a new type of  build­ings. They were  five-storeyed panel blocks with­out rub­bish chute or ele­va­tors,  assem­bled in less than a month. This manic con­struct­ing of 1950s was one of the most pop­u­lar themes of the Soviet art. Mass demo­li­tions of wooden sheds and, at the same time, demo­li­tion of antique build­ings of tsarist Rus­sia, were cel­e­brated in a num­ber of the Soviet movies. The typ­i­cal movie showed a close-knit fam­ily moved into a sep­a­rate flat where the typ­i­cal urban land­scape was stud­ded with build­ing cranes. That was an end of the era of shared house­holds where peo­ple ten­anted in huge com­mu­nal flats with pub­lic kitchens and shared facilities.

Cer­tainly the dif­fer­ence to those wooden sheds was tremen­dous. Still, it is inter­est­ing to see what a typ­i­cal Soviet flat looked like.  The main dis­tin­guish­ing  fea­ture was a toi­let of an incred­i­bly small size. It was per­son­ally set by Nikita Khrushchev who tried the model of the toi­let and said “If I fit into this toi­let, they would also fit”. As the result,  the toi­lets designs were based on the Khrushchev’s dimensions.

As for the kitchen, it was often small enough to fit only one per­son of aver­age size, whereas some­body big­ger (let alone obese) may not have fit­ted at all.  It is believed that the tiny size of the kitchen orig­i­nated from the com­mu­nist ide­ol­ogy. It was sup­posed for the peo­ple of this soci­ety to have lunch in a work­place and din­ner at a cafe­te­ria. It was also assumed that would be no need for the pantry as every­thing would be avail­able from a local food shop. This approach resulted in the lack of space for the fridge. Instead, these flats were equipped with a so called “Khrushchev’s Fridge”. It was a small closet under the win­dow approx­i­mately 1 x 1 metre in size where peo­ple could store some food only in the win­ter time, as it had an actual hole in the wall.

Inter­est­ing to note how these apart­ments were allo­cated to peo­ple. One had to file a for­mal request for an apart­ment, and then wait for an approval. Impor­tantly, the wait was never longer than a num­ber of years and usu­ally those who needed their own dwelling — like, young cou­ples — were granted it. The queue might have been sped up in some extra­or­di­nary cir­cum­stances — like, for aca­d­e­mics, sports­men, high achiev­ers on the pro­duc­tion line etc.

The scheme of allo­ca­tion usu­ally worked as fol­lowed. The cou­ples with no kids were given a stu­dio, a liv­ing room with a sep­a­rate kitchen. A fam­ily with a child were enti­tled to a one bed­room apart­ment. Two kids fam­ily would get a two bed­room flat. Three bed­rooms was as big as any apart­ment got — no mat­ter how many kids one had, they all would have been accom­mo­dated in three measly bed­rooms. Oh well, with an aver­age of 2.1 kids per Soviet fam­ily, and an over­all scarcity of accom­mo­da­tion, this never seemed insufficient.

These five-storeyed build­ings were being built until 1985 and they spread across the whole coun­try. In 1985 the mas­sive con­struc­tion stopped. It was replaced by con­ve­nient indi­vid­ual con­struc­tion of apart­ment build­ing where the new apart­ments were not avail­able for the major­ity of ordi­nary peo­ple any more. Then, it actu­ally turned out that Khrushchev’s mas­sive con­struc­tion of tiny and incon­ve­nient flats was not a bad thing  — rather, an act of humane care, actu­ally the one out of a small num­ber of pos­i­tive things of that time.

Source: www.sobesednik.ru

Related posts:

1. Сollec­tive Housing
2. Think Big? No, Even Bigger!
3. May, 1^st: Soviet Labour Day.
4. Take Me To The River!
5. Best of Win­ter 2009  –  2010