Exposing the myth of free apartments in the Soviet Union

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The dispute about the pros and cons of Scoop sooner or later leads to an argument about free apartments. After all, in the Soviet Union, workers were given free housing! O! Isn't that a miracle? For one thing, can I not forgive Scoop all the disadvantages?

An attraction of unheard of generosity, according to Scoop fans, should be on the spot to beat the imagination. The fact that the cost of these apartments was included in salaries by default, adherents often simply refuse to understand. You can just as well be happy for the prisoners, because they also have free housing, medicine and food. Isn't it heaven? But this all-Union scam with the "free" distribution of apartments begins to play with new colors when trying to figure out what kind of apartments were "distributed" to the citizens of the country.

But let's start with history …

With the development of industry in the 19th century, the influx of people from the countryside to the cities increased. All over the world, the centuries-old way of life was destroyed, when there were more peasants than townspeople. For the workers on the outskirts of cities, barracks and workers' settlements with a very dense population arise. The apartment buildings, which became the prototype of modern multi-apartment buildings, became very popular. An apartment building is an apartment building built for renting out apartments. But even taking into account the migration of people to the cities, by the time the Bolsheviks came to power, about 85% of the population still lived in rural areas.

Saint Petersburg. Profitable house of S. E. Egorov.

Milka, you, dance, dance, Nice in this world!

The expelled bourgeois whines

In his apartment."

Folk ditty.

And in 1917 the Russian Empire ended. Together with the class structure of society and the traditions of life. All became equal. The industrialization policy was gaining momentum, requiring more and more workers in the cities. In the 1920s, the USSR was preparing for a world revolution and withdrew after the civil war. At this stage, the housing problem in cities was solved in the most revolutionary way: they took away housing from those who had more than one room per person, and distributed it to those who were poorer. This is how communal apartments appeared. Apartment houses have turned into "non-profitable" ones. An apartment with an area of 200-300 square meters could accommodate up to 15 families. Thanks to these measures, in Moscow in 1917-1920 alone, the percentage of workers living within the Garden Ring increased from 5% to 50%. But the expropriation of bourgeois property could not continue indefinitely, and here also Comrade Stalin, in his infinite wisdom, started industrialization throughout the country.

From the party program prepared by Lenin and Bukharin, adopted at the VIII Congress of the RCP (b) in March 1919:

The task of the RCP is … to strive with all its might to improve the living conditions of the working masses, to eliminate the overcrowding and unsanitary conditions of the old quarters, to destroy unsuitable dwellings, to rebuild the old ones, to build new ones corresponding to the new living conditions of the working masses!

Typical design took a significant leap in the years of the first five-year plans. The growth of the country's population by almost 40 million people, the continuous influx of labor into the cities, the need to replace the old housing stock, all this required massive construction.

In the 30s, the first Stalinks appeared. To this day, they are presented as the ideal of housing that was created in the USSR. Against the background of Khrushchev apartments, communal apartments and barracks, the stalinka really look good. But on the example of what was before the Bolsheviks, they turned out to be only a step backward. If before the revolution the average area of apartments was 200-300 square meters, then the average area of Stalin was 60-90 square meters. The number of apartments in one entrance has increased several times, the height of the ceilings has decreased from 3, 5–4, 5 meters before the revolution, to 2, 9–3, 2 meters in stalinkas. The decoration of the apartments has also worsened. And at the same time, the Stalinists were elite housing, available only to the highest categories of Soviet society. The rest were waiting for massive, cheap housing.

Initially, the industrialization program did not provide for the construction of normal housing for workers at all. The main housing was hastily erected barracks, built next to the enterprises. Housing close to work is, of course, convenient. He left the house - and already at the bench. The downsides of this arrangement were factory noise and emissions - smoke flying straight into the windows.

A barrack for workers of the Ulyanovsk Automobile Plant. 1944 year.

Barracks were usually built of wood. Because it's cheap. The barracks were made two-story. Because a one-story building, taking into account the supply of communications and the construction of the foundation, was less profitable, and a three-story building was already dangerous. There was usually only one entrance to the barracks, in the center of the building. Long dark corridors with living quarters on both sides diverged from it. Each floor had one or two communal kitchens. And that was the only place in the building with water. Cold. Toilets in the yard are standard booths with a cesspool. The rooms in the barracks were 12-15 square meters. Stove heating. There were no bathrooms at all. Public baths were used for bathing. One of the subtleties of the new Soviet way of life was that the intelligentsia (for example, teachers and doctors) lived on a common basis in the same barracks. And few people expected that after 80 years people will still live in such conditions.

Here one must understand that there were two worlds. One is perfect. In it, architects drew fantastic projects of social cities on paper. They fantasized about how a Soviet person would live in a commune. They figured out how best to organize life. And if you look at the theoretical works, everything looks very good there, even by modern standards. But then it all came down to reality. But in reality there was no money. But there were barracks in it.

A good example is the construction of Magnitogorsk, where the Germans were invited to work. In 1930, the German designer Ernst May and his team came to the USSR to build new cities.

In Europe at that time the problem of mass housing for workers was acute. The new working housing was made individual. Various versions of minimal economical apartments for one family and ways of connecting them into complexes were developed. Ernst May has achieved good results by building a new type of village in Frankfurt. The cost per square meter of housing in Germany in those years cost about 1000 Soviet rubles.

In the USSR, the concept of "working apartment for one family" was withdrawn from use back in 1929. The capital stone houses that Mai designed were originally supposed to be communal at all. The norm was officially declared 6 square meters per person. When Ernst May went to the USSR, he thought that 198 rubles would be allocated for the construction of a square meter of housing (which is 5 times less than in Germany). On the spot, it turned out that a young but impoverished state can only allocate 100 rubles per square meter. On March 4, 1931, the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR issued a decree on the average cost of living space. According to the document, the price per square meter was limited to 102 rubles. At the same time, a small number of privileged housing was being built, due to which the cost of a massive square meter was reduced to 92 rubles.

In a short time, May's group has made projects for the development of cities and individual districts of Nizhny Novgorod, Volgograd, Nizhny Tagil, Magnitogorsk, Kemerovo, Novokuznetsk (modern names are indicated) and many other cities. The main principle of May's work was a functional layout and line building. The May bureau was subordinate to Soviet builders - mostly peasants who fled from collectivization from villages or deported peasants. Their qualifications, as May wrote, were close to zero.

Another German architect Konrad Puschel, who was working in Orsk at that time, described the construction of "socialist cities" in the first five-year plan:

The construction was carried out according to the draconian plans and ideas of the ruling stratum: exact execution of the plan was required at any cost. There was no point in using technical means; even if they were available, they were so primitive that no pharaoh would have used them in the construction of the Egyptian pyramids. It was necessary to use and adjust the labor force, a prerequisite for which was the presence of a large number of prisoners.

Magnitogorsk. 1931 year.

May's initial project immediately ran into Soviet poverty. The cost of the Magnitogorsk designed by him for 200 thousand inhabitants was 471.6 million rubles. In total, 1.1 billion rubles were allocated for all housing and communal construction of the RSFSR in 1931. Therefore, the volume of construction of stone houses was reduced to 15 thousand inhabitants. The remaining 185 thousand people were housed in barracks, dugouts, tents and carriages.

May's houses in Magnitogorsk will be rented out and populated without running water, sewerage, kitchens, and sometimes without internal partitions.

May even wrote to Stalin. However, the plan for the construction of heavy and military industries, known as the "industrialization of the USSR", envisaged lowering the living standards of the population to a physically possible minimum and using the resources thus obtained in industrial production, which was especially pronounced in new cities built from scratch, such as Magnitogorsk. …

The German architect Rudolf Wolters wrote an impressive review about the quality of the houses under construction in the USSR and the living conditions in them, who in 1932 came to the USSR to design the stations:

Separate two-room apartments were occupied only by senior officials and party members, as well as a few married foreign specialists. Russian engineers, if they were married, had one room, with a very large family - two. Two or more of these families shared the same kitchen. Nobody will believe me if I say that single workers live by 20-30 people in one room in barracks or barracks, many families share one room and the like.

I saw it myself, and I saw that it could not be otherwise; but I was always amazed at the incredible impudence with which Russian propaganda works abroad, and how it manages to compare a couple of new settlements in Moscow and Leningrad with Berlin dacha colonies. In Russia, propaganda has been roaring so loudly and continuously for 15 years now that comrades really believe that, in comparison with the German workers, they live in paradise.

Since the Second World War, capital construction in the USSR has ceased altogether. All resources were thrown into the war. At the same time, in the territories affected by the occupation, the loss of housing stock amounted to about 50%. In the first years after the war, resources, in the best Stalinist traditions, were devoted to the restoration of industry. But the housing stock was recovering slowly. At the same time, standard house designs were created for all regions of the country. Mostly houses were built from two to five floors. Construction of communal houses continued.

In 1953, Comrade Stalin died and the construction programs were revised. On November 4, 1955, the historic Resolution No. 1871 of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR "On the elimination of excesses in design and construction" was issued. The era of Soviet monumental classicism is over, it was replaced by a functional typical architecture.

"The outwardly ostentatious side of architecture, replete with great excesses", characteristic of the Stalinist era, now "does not correspond to the line of the Party and the Government in architecture and construction…. Soviet architecture should be characterized by simplicity, severity of forms and economy of solutions."

The buildings have lost their aesthetics and individuality. Instead, the economy and strict functionality increased dramatically, which made it possible to provide many with housing.

It was announced that communal apartments were not a project of the Soviet government, but a forced measure during the period of industrialization. That several families live in one apartment is not normal and is a social problem. What is needed is massive construction using new technologies. So the famous Soviet Khrushchev was born, which became a symbol of bad, uncomfortable, low-quality housing. But we must understand that the Khrushchevs became a huge step forward compared to what was happening under Stalin. The main goal was to provide each Soviet family with a separate apartment. By 1980. Around the same year, the offensive of communism was also planned. However, by the mid-1980s, only 85% of Soviet families were provided with separate apartments. The complete closure of the housing deficit was pushed back to 2000. The arrival of communism moved around the same time.

They tried to make the first series of Khrushchev from bricks, but quickly switched to panels that seemed to be cheaper. The houses looked simple on paper. But in practice, transporting panels to construction sites turned out to be quite an expensive pleasure, which destroyed the already traditionally bad roads. The buildings themselves turned out to be monstrously energy inefficient. In an effort to reduce the cost of the building, all norms were pushed to the limit. The ceilings decreased from 2, 9–3, 2 to 2, 3–2, 5 meters (there were even options with ceilings of 2, 2 meters). The minimum allowable area of the room decreased from 14 square meters to 7. The kitchen was available, but the dimensions became completely symbolic - about 6 square meters.

"So what if the housing was poor. Savings. We provided ALL residents of the country with FREE housing. But the quality was - wow! Not like the present! Soviet quality!" - say adherents of the sect of Scoop fans. Although the quality was really Soviet. That is, shitty.

In March 1961, a collapse of the walls of a five-story building series 1–447–5 was recorded. The reason is that the house was assembled in frost, and during a thaw, the mortar of the brickwork of the basement thawed (what kind of solution is this?). The plinth was crushed by the weight of the upper floors, and voila. Cause? The reason is simple - violation of the requirements during the performance of work in the winter period. It's good that this happened even before the construction was over and the house was empty (however, there could be builders there - the source does not say about this).

Frosts in Sverdlovsk in January-March 1966 reached 30 degrees Celsius, but work on the installation of a five-story large-panel building was not interrupted. And who will interrupt them, who will disrupt the plan to provide workers with Free Apartments ™? Further quotation: "On March 27, 1966, a positive outside air temperature came. The frozen concrete and mortar began to thaw. It took four days with a positive air temperature and on March 30, the house collapsed." Oh how! For 4 days, the Soviet exemplary extra-strong (according to a number of prominent experts) house for working people melted, like an ice hut from a famous fairy tale.

On April 22, 1979, in Surgut, a large-panel five-story dormitory building of the I-164-07 series collapsed. All five floors of the building in the middle of the building collapsed completely. "Installation work was carried out in winter at negative temperatures from minus 8 to minus 30 degrees Celsius … After two days of warming on April 22, the middle part of the house collapsed …"

But even with such housing, Soviet citizens were insanely happy. Because sometimes dugouts were the alternative.

In the 70s and 80s, the construction of the Khrushchevs continued. But during this period, the so-called brezhnevka appeared. Houses of this type continue to be built to this day. Brezhnevkas are considered to be of better quality housing than Khrushchevkas. The area of the kopeck piece in a typical panel brezhnevka is 45–48 square meters (about 7 meters more than in Khrushchev), there is a separate bathroom, ceilings are at least 2.5 meters, slightly thicker than the wall. The standard number of storeys in all Soviet cities of the post-Stalin period is 5 and 9 storeys. Limitation of 5 floors due to the fact that at this height of the building there was no need to install elevators. Buildings above 9 floors were to be equipped with special fire escapes, two elevators at the entrance, and gas stoves could only be used up to the 9th floor. One of the main reasons for the limitation of 9 floors is that fire escapes reached a maximum of 9 floors. As a result, almost all districts of all Soviet cities turned into faceless ghettos.

When Scoop's fans say that housing in the USSR was handed out for FREE, for some reason they forget to mention that the apartments did not belong to the tenants. They could not be sold or inherited because in fact they belonged to the state. Housing in the hands of the authorities turned into an excellent means of dealing with obstinate citizens. Any person who worked poorly or was dissatisfied with something could be fired with eviction from departmental premises. Housing became part of the pay-as-you-go system. The authorities encouraged and punished their slaves with housing. With the help of housing it was possible to control migration flows in the interests of the state, directing masses of people to the "construction sites of the century." The person was a consumable material, for the comfort of which minimal funds were allocated. The country helped brothers from the socialist camp, invested huge funds in weapons, and all this was done at the expense of citizens turned into slaves. "Free" Soviet housing was built by Soviet citizens and was repeatedly paid for by a low standard of living and low quality of housing. But even this "free" housing has been turned into another way to control people.

The Soviet experiment ended, demonstrating the total inefficiency of the socialist system. However, today millions of people miss the Scoop and the "freebie". Those who are older miss their youth, the youthful years that fell on the Soviet era. This is a common occurrence in human thinking. But those who are younger, corny do not know the realities of Soviet life. Having listened to fairy tales, young people believe them, without even realizing how hostile the Soviet state was towards its slave citizens.