Description
Book SynopsisCommunism on Tomorrow Street 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.
Trade ReviewHarris provides fascinating new information about how state and society tried to build the daily lives of citizens in the post-war period. -- Seth Bernstein, National Research University, Higher School of Economics, Moscow Canadian Slavonic Papers 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. -- Inna Leykin, Tel Aviv University Anthropology of East Europe Review 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. -- Mark B. Smith Slavonica 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. -- Dennis Kozlov Journal of Modern 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. Contemporary European History
Table of ContentsTables 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
