Back to Results
Cover image of Communism on Tomorrow Street
Cover image of Communism on Tomorrow Street
Share this Title:

Communism on Tomorrow Street

Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin

Steven E. Harris

Publication Date
Binding Type

This fascinating and deeply researched book examines how, beginning under Khrushchev in 1953, a generation of Soviet citizens moved from the overcrowded communal dwellings of the Stalin era to modern single-family apartments, later dubbed khrushchevka. Arguing that moving to a separate apartment allowed ordinary urban dwellers to experience Khrushchev’s thaw, Steven E. Harris fundamentally shifts interpretation of the thaw, conventionally understood as an elite phenomenon.

Harris focuses on the many participants eager to benefit from and influence the new way of life embodied by the khrushchev...

This fascinating and deeply researched book examines how, beginning under Khrushchev in 1953, a generation of Soviet citizens moved from the overcrowded communal dwellings of the Stalin era to modern single-family apartments, later dubbed khrushchevka. Arguing that moving to a separate apartment allowed ordinary urban dwellers to experience Khrushchev’s thaw, Steven E. Harris fundamentally shifts interpretation of the thaw, conventionally understood as an elite phenomenon.

Harris focuses on the many participants eager to benefit from and influence the new way of life embodied by the khrushchevka, its furniture, and its associated consumer goods. He examines activities of national and local politicians, planners, enterprise managers, workers, furniture designers and architects, elite organizations (centrally involved in creating cooperative housing), and ordinary urban dwellers. Communism on Tomorrow Street also demonstrates the relationship of Soviet mass housing and urban planning to international efforts at resolving the "housing question" that had been studied since the nineteenth century and led to housing developments in Western Europe, the United States, and Latin America as well as the USSR.

Reviews

Reviews

Harris provides fascinating new information about how state and society tried to build the daily lives of citizens in the post-war period.

This book is meticulously researched... Harris effectively presents the increasingly demanding attitudes of citizens towards authorities as well as the forms of social control generated by the new housing policy.

Communism on Tomorrow Street is based on a considerable body of sources, and its empirical depth is itself an impressive scholarly achievement... Aside from breadth and depth, the book offers new analytical insights... Harris' book therefore succeeds in adding new material, novel perspectives and distinctive interpretations to the study of the housing programme.

Relying on a wealth of previously untapped archival evidence, Steven Harris has written an important social history of this reform, which was crucial to the transformation of Soviet society known as the Thaw... This reviewer recommends the book to all academic audiences—students and scholars of modern Russian history.

The book draws from an impressive variety of sources... it is also remarkable in the way that it spans social and architectural history. Harris demonstrates the relevance of architecture for social history and also provides explicit hands-on examples of the socially constructed nature of the built environment.

See All Reviews
About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
416
ISBN
9781421405667
Illustration Description
15 figures
Table of Contents

Tables and Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Moving to the Separate Apartment
Part One: Making the Separate Apartment
1. The Soviet Path to Minimum Living Space and theSingle-Family Apartment
2

Tables and Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Moving to the Separate Apartment
Part One: Making the Separate Apartment
1. The Soviet Path to Minimum Living Space and theSingle-Family Apartment
2. Khrushchevka: The Soviet Answer to the Housing Question
Part II: Distributing Housing, Reordering Society
3. The Waiting List
4. Class and Mass Housing
Part III: Living and Consuming the Communist Way of Life
5. The Mass Housing Community
6. New Furniture
7. The Politics of Complaint
Conclusion: Soviet Citizens' Answer to the Housing Question
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Author Bio
Featured Contributor

Steven E. Harris

Steven E. Harris is an associate professor of history at the University of Mary Washington. Harris was a research scholar at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute in 2003–2004.