Maria Timofeevna Proletarskaia, who had recently moved to Novosibirsk, was a pensioner and a long-time Communist Party member who suffered greatly from her living conditions. Deeply concerned, two neighbours in their kommunalka , their shared communal apartment, wrote to the local newspaper in June 1960. ‘In our apartment, without access to fresh air and sunlight, Maria Timofeevna Proletarskaia, a party member since 1930, is dying in the bathroom …. Maria has been living in the bathroom since 1956 and we ask that you send a representative to examine her state and that you work to improve the living conditions of this worthy old person.’Footnote 1
Proletarskaia’s case exemplifies the abject situation that moved Nikita Khrushchev to announce an extensive housing campaign in 1957; the aim was to eliminate the USSR’s housing shortages and poor living conditions within ten to twelve years. The project’s scale was unprecedented in the history of both the USSR and Europe.Footnote 2 From 1956 to 1963, the USSR outstripped Europe in per capita housing construction; between 1956 and 1965, cost-effective design and mass replication made it possible to produce 964.7 million square metres of living space. All told, 38 million new apartments were built across the country and about 65 million families saw an improvement in their living conditions. The Soviet cityscape was dramatically transformed.Footnote 3 Accompanying this massive construction were reforms in the administration of housing. It is on those – particularly on the management of the waiting list for apartments in Novosibirsk – that this article concentrates.
The numerous studies that have examined Khrushchev’s housing campaign have focused on its political, cultural and social effects. Stephen Bittner has demonstrated that the housing campaign coincided with debates over Soviet architectural legacies, and he has explored the distinctiveness of the Soviet project within the wider post-war reconstruction effort, in which mass housing emerged as a prevalent model.Footnote 4 Mark Smith has traced the origins and course of the campaign on the all-union, republican and local levels. One of his conclusions is that the nexus of property and welfare turned housing into a de facto form of individual ownership.Footnote 5 Christine Varga-Harris highlights the campaign as a revival of the social contract between state and society, with citizens mobilizing the official discourse of the Thaw to assert their entitlement to apartments. Through an examination of citizens’ petitions and complaints, she demonstrates how housing gave rise to a new discourse of the Soviet self and became a symbol of justice, normalcy and wellbeing.Footnote 6 Along the same lines, Steven Harris’s study of the impact of the campaign on ordinary urban dwellers shows how it came to symbolize the move out of the Stalin era. As part of that study, he examines the complexities of local politics, along with the various claims, expectations and conceptions of social justice in the approach of citizens and officials to the housing reform.Footnote 7
By emphasizing the waiting list, this article extends the examination of the campaign’s social and cultural impact. Instead of focusing on the broad organizational effort or on the more personal experience of potential beneficiaries, this article looks at the space in between. How were the regime’s reforms translated at the local level? How did regional and municipal officials make decisions about who received housing and who did not? Aside from providing a fuller picture of the campaign, this focus offers a corrective to the dominant scholarly emphasis on institutions and formal, normative assessments of goal fulfilment. In an early example of this approach, Henry W. Morton showed that the waiting lists maintained by municipalities had longer distribution times than the waiting lists maintained by many enterprises, ministries and factories – the sector this article will refer simply to as ‘the workplace’.Footnote 8 In his footsteps, Gregory D. Andrusz stressed the competition between the workplace and the local soviets.Footnote 9 These two scholars set the tone that continues to this day. Bittner, Smith and Harris all highlight the challenges that local soviet officials faced as they applied Khrushchev’s reforms to the administration of housing. A major hurdle these scholars identify was the need to deal with factories and enterprises that closely guarded their housing stock for their employees.Footnote 10 In these contexts, with the institutions and their interests looming large, the management of the waiting list becomes a peripheral matter, a mere side effect of official policies and power struggles.
By foregrounding the waiting list, this article challenges economic assumptions about competition over resources. Although the waiting list indeed reveals the intricacies of allocating a limited resource, it also illuminates a process that is largely non-economic but not simply derived from central dictates or clear power relations. What emerges is a more contingent historical context than the one that appears in institutionalist accounts. The sometimes-conflicting sides no longer look like coherent or unified wholes; instead, they reveal themselves as interrelated and mutually entangled. More salient in this approach are local considerations, which sometimes prevailed over national directives, and the centrality of the local nomenklatura, a trust network of high-ranking officials and cadres.
Another contribution of this article is its attention to Novosibirsk, far from the cities of Moscow and Leningrad on which most previous scholarship has focused. Located in southwestern Siberia, Novosibirsk was established at the end of the nineteenth century as an outgrowth of the new Trans-Siberian Railway. The city occupies a strategic position along waterways and has access to natural resources such as timber and oil. Although Novosibirsk is now Russia’s third most populated city as well as the academic, cultural and industrial centre of the Asian part of the country, in Soviet times the city was remote and decidedly peripheral. An examination of this periphery can enrich our understanding of the local social landscape and reveal the role of informal mechanisms in the implementation of Khrushchev’s housing campaign.
Novosibirsk is a particularly suitable setting because of the dramatic changes it underwent as a result of the campaign. From 1954 to 1964, the city’s residential area more than doubled, from 4,500,000 to 9,300,000 square metres; Novosibirsk numbered among the five Soviet cities with the greatest number of apartments constructed in the year 1963.Footnote 11 The transformation of the urban fabric was profound. New unities arose: territorial unity, because the establishment of new neighbourhoods on uninhabited land connected previously isolated districts; architectural unity, because older structures were destroyed and rebuilt according to the standardized aesthetics of the new construction; and even temporal unity, because the new territorial continuity called for a single time zone to replace the two different zones, an hour apart, on either side of the Ob’ River that flows through the city.Footnote 12 The same period also saw the construction of Akdemgorodok. This innovative scientific centre, for which Novosibirsk is well known, was built in a pine forest about 20 kilometres to the south on the eastern bank of the Ob'.Its isolation was intended to encourage a focus on research. Like the refashioned areas of Novosibirsk, Akdemgorodok contained standardized apartments that were organized into micro-districts, or orderly neighbourhoods that included not only the new residential buildings but also accessible social services.Footnote 13
In this context, it is worth noting that change was uneven across what were then Novosibirsk’s eight districts.Footnote 14 Since it was physically impossible to refashion the entire city at once, the earliest construction focused on the central districts of Tsentral’nyi, Oktiabr’ski and Zheleznodorozhnyi. By contrast, the remote Pervomaiiski remained mostly unchanged. This unevenness intensified Novosibirsk’s social stratification. Even before the modernization of the city centre, Pervomaiiski, with its large peasant population, had been perceived as rural and therefore ‘backward’.Footnote 15 Still, when the city is considered as a whole, the changes were indeed significant.
Novosibirsk is also instructive because of its remoteness from the seats of power. A focus on the Soviet periphery avoids privileging a single path or geographical location as the measure of historical change. A widening of social and geographical scope introduces new, plural voices into the historical account. The regional setting reveals complex hierarchies of power, need and eligibility that did not always correspond with national directives and that challenge some of the prevailing assumptions in the research.
The ideological basis of the housing campaign
The Soviet Union was certainly not alone in its attention to mass housing in the aftermath of World War II. The French grands ensembles , the Swedish Million Programme and the American Pruitt-Igoe are only a few examples of the urban renewal that was undertaken during or shortly after the period.Footnote 16 Reconstruction efforts were fuelled by a modernist vision of progress that shaped physical landscapes as well as the lifestyles they were intended to support. Industrial prefabrication, mass production and other optimizations were omnipresent.
The scale of Khrushchev’s project exceeded that of other efforts. The project’s most significant distinction, however, lay in its ideological imperatives. The Soviet campaign cannot be understood independently of the broader process of de-Stalinization that Khrushchev initiated after Stalin’s death in 1953. Although this process was unstable, and sometimes even destabilizing, it involved a repudiation of the Stalinist past, a rejection of Stalin’s cult of personality and a new openness to the West. The Civil War, the mass arrests and executions, the horrors of collectivization and the devastation of World War II were all relegated to history as the new regime strove to bring peace to quotidian life and gave more attention to ordinary citizens.Footnote 17 De-Stalinization carried broad populist commitments: renewed attention to the people’s welfare as workers and consumers as well as concern for their ability to thrive in their homes and neighbourhoods.
The goal of the campaign went beyond addressing shortages and improving standards of living. Khrushchev wanted to establish the ideal material conditions for a communist society that he believed had lost its way during Stalin’s rule. The newly built apartments, later known as khrushchevki , were standardized, pre-designed units meant to reflect principles of modernity, technology, efficiency and rationality. It was especially noteworthy that these units were intended for single families and that they contained facilities for daily activities such as cooking, bathing and socializing; previously, these activities had been carried out in the shared public spaces of communal apartments. The new configuration engendered new notions of privacy and respectability that were actively shaped by journalists, intellectuals, moralists and pamphleteers. Women’s organizations, among other public and voluntary organizations, defined and regulated the proper way to run a household, decorate a home and behave within it. The new domestic arrangement came to symbolize the strengthening of communism and a return to the values of the Revolution.
The administrative reforms that accompanied the building of these units were also part of the de-Stalinization effort. Dysfunctional patterns that had arisen during the Stalinist period were to be eliminated by changes to the allocation system, including the establishment of criteria for advancing in the housing queue as well as the introduction of principles for addressing residents’ complaints. The Khrushchev regime wanted administrative structures that were centralized, rational, equitable and transparent.Footnote 18
But the sharpest distinction between Khrushchev’s campaign and its counterparts in other countries concerned the Soviet moral economy. In the Soviet campaign, both the production and distribution of housing were led by a paternalistic state and it was by right that every citizen was to have access to a private, modern apartment. In capitalist countries, by contrast, housing was part of the market economy that was largely external to state control; in the United States especially, the overwhelming majority of dwellings have always been produced by the private sector on private land.Footnote 19 An acknowledgement that the human need for shelter cannot be left entirely to impersonal market forces did indeed lead the state to intervene on behalf of the most financially vulnerable. In these cases, however, individuals received housing on a different basis from the Soviet citizen: what in the Soviet Union was a basic right of citizenship was in free-market economies the generous assistance of the state – essentially, public charity. Although Western capitalist countries saw their housing projects as quick solutions for people at the bottom of the economic ladder, the approach tended to perpetuate or even increase social inequality rather than to reduce it.Footnote 20
Queues for housing under Stalin
Various factors led to a shortage economy under Stalin, including the political closure of the Soviet Union, the preference for heavy over light industry and the centralized economic system. The resulting gap between supply and demand made queuing for consumer goods and food a major feature of daily life.Footnote 21 As Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown in her study of everyday life under Stalin, in a material reality characterized by severe shortages, citizens tended to join any queue they saw, regardless of what they needed or what goods were being offered.Footnote 22
In this reality, the true currency was not money but the connections that brought privileged access to goods and products. These connections, which came to be known as blat , overlapped with personal and occupational networks but were not fully identifiable with either. Blat , unlike personal networks, included ‘non-intimate, non-routine ties’ that could remain dormant until a specific need arose. In other words, blat was a way to ‘borrow’ access through one’s connections, whether close or distant, to the desired goods and services, an ability that was more valuable than money.Footnote 23 Although money certainly helped people to bypass long waiting lists and to acquire goods more quickly at the more expensive kolkhoz markets and after-hours shops, it had limited significance for most of Stalin’s rule. Even during the industrialization drive, when wages were raised to attract workers and boost productivity, the availability of goods often lagged behind the money that people had to purchase them.Footnote 24 In other words, the allocation of goods and products was not determined by income level but rather by access to supply centres for goods and services – and this access was socially driven and reliant on connections and patronage. In this context, money functioned as a unit of account rather than a store of value.
The rationing that the state introduced during its first decades formalized this system, granting price-controlled products to those with special privileges. This practice had a profound impact on the social dynamics of the country’s economic culture.Footnote 25 Special shops ( otdely rabochego snabzheniia , ORS) served employees of large factories as well as members of the party, the state and academia. These shops remained restricted to those groups even after rationing periods ended.Footnote 26
The housing queue mirrored other queues and by the 1930s, apartments had become a status symbol. Under Stalin, preferential access to housing was reserved for privileged groups, including party officials, exemplary workers such as the Stakhanovtsy and Udarniki and members of the urban intelligentsia such as engineers, technicians and other white-collar professionals. These groups were deemed the vanguard of Soviet society, a status that justified special access to material goods, including food at exclusive stores, chauffeured cars, cottages, separate apartments and vacations at government-run resorts or sanatoriums.Footnote 27 Special treatment extended beyond individuals to entire organizations, with an impact on construction projects. Employees of large, prestigious organizations such as the newspaper Pravda, the Malyi Theater in Moscow and even Gosstroi, the administrative body that oversaw and managed construction, were allocated new apartment buildings in the early 1950s.Footnote 28
Construction and management of public housing before Khrushchev
Theoretically, housing in the Soviet Union was owned by the people and entrusted to the state, which was responsible for distributing, maintaining and expanding the housing stock for them. Beginning in the 1920s, this responsibility was divided between two state bodies, the local soviets and the workplaces. Initially, the local soviets held a place of honour in the communist creation myth, as they were the first political bodies to organize at the grassroots level. For Lenin, they were the cornerstone of revolutionary proletarian governance, as epitomized by the Bolshevik slogan ‘All power to the soviets!’ ( Vsia vlast’ Sovetam ), which was used in 1917 to challenge the legitimacy of the Provisional Government. During the Revolution, the soviets orchestrated factory strikes, embodied principles of democracy and self-governance and wielded administrative and governing powers.Footnote 29 Despite their heroic image, however, the local soviets were soon reduced to operating under the strict supervision of the Communist Party, with minimal influence on Soviet decision-making and policy.Footnote 30
The local soviets’ status declined further in the early 1930s. After Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, the soviets relinquished many of their urban planning and management functions including the construction and maintenance of residential buildings to enterprises and factories. Two main factors drove this shift. First was the lack of a pre-Revolutionary precedent for local governments to engage in the construction and distribution of housing,Footnote 31 and second was the intensified industrialization, collectivization and urbanization that gave factories a central role in the nation’s political and economic development. Factories had historically provided worker housing in nineteenth-century Tsarist Russia and they continued this practice under the new regime, albeit with changes in the manager-worker relationship. By the late 1930s, the state’s financial resources for housing construction were mostly transferred to the workplace.Footnote 32
The workplace’s role in the construction and allocation of housing continued to grow during World War II, when many factories became critical to the war effort. Factory workers and their families received improved housing and food. In Novosibirsk, which was overcrowded by hordes of people fleeing the west, factory families were the lucky ones among the refugees.Footnote 33 By July 1941, local factories had allocated about 53,000 square metres of living space for worker housing. The Voskov factory, for example, provided 1,600 rooms and Factory No. 208 provided 750 rooms.Footnote 34
Enterprises and factories maintained their central role in the construction and allocation of apartments even after the war. This was largely the result of Stalin’s continued prioritization of heavy industry as well as his inattention to the housing shortage; his reconstruction efforts favoured the restoration of cultural assets over the alleviation of daily hardships. This neglect, combined with an underdeveloped construction industry and a convoluted chain of command, undermined even the limited initiatives for residential construction under the Fourth Five-Year Plan (1946–50). By the end of 1948, enterprises and factories had reached only 33.8 per cent of their target under the Plan and the local soviets had reached only half that percentage.Footnote 35
Restoring the role of local soviets in city management and Khrushchev’s reform of the waiting lists
Because Khrushchev sought not only the construction of housing but also reform in the administration of housing, it is no coincidence that the revival of the local soviets corresponded with his announcement of the campaign. Up to that point, the soviets and the workplaces had jointly managed local waiting lists for public housing; now Khrushchev wanted to bring the enterprises and factories under the oversight of the soviets. He had two reasons for this change. First, he wanted to restore the soviets to their role as the embodiment of self-government, which would represent another step in the country’s return to its communist values. Second, he wanted to unify the multiple, and sometimes conflicting, lists that had developed in cities. The disorder was inefficient and the lack of transparency encouraged corruption.
To establish the soviets’ new role, the Central Committee drafted a national decree entitled ‘On the Further Improvement in the Distribution of State Living Space’. The draft was mild, offering no practical measures for the soviets to oversee all the waiting lists, but even in that form, the decree never passed.Footnote 36 Instead, the soviets’ influence over housing allocation was determined locally, by the social dynamics and history of each city and region. Where the need for reconstruction was particularly high or where a major industrial endeavour, civilian or military, already existed, the soviets tended to have less influence than in newly occupied territories such as the Baltic republics.Footnote 37 Despite government statements, in Soviet Russia the degree of soviet control over housing allocation remained almost unchanged, even decreasing slightly, from 34.8 per cent in 1950 to 32.4 per cent in the late 1960s.Footnote 38
Another aspect of the administrative reform was the establishment of uniform criteria for advancing in the housing queue. A series of directives and orders, such as the 1958 decree ‘For Further Improvement in the Distribution of Public Living Space’, provided definitions of need and urgency as well as rules for circumventing the queue on the basis of privilege and affiliation with eligible groups. Based on need, the first in line were people whose living space was smaller than 4.5 square metres or whose homes had been designated for demolition. Based on contributions to the state, priority was given to military invalids, families of fallen soldiers and war veterans. Others with preference in the queue were people with tuberculosis and individuals returning from the Gulag.Footnote 39
Housing queues in the workplace were also subject to regulation. Official criteria for allocation included current living conditions as well as worker qualifications such as proximity to the workplace, length of service, efficiency and performance.Footnote 40 Now, with the housing reform, factories and enterprises were also required to confirm their allocation decisions with the raiispolkom , the executive committee of the district soviet. Decisions, in other words, needed to be made transparent to the local government. This displeased all the actors. Transparency would make it harder for both the workplace and soviets to do as they wished and would expose them to the discontent of local residents.Footnote 41
The case of Novosibirsk
On 25 September 1957, three months after Khrushchev announced the housing campaign, the municipal executive committee of Novosibirsk, the gorispolkom , issued Regulation No. 1117. This directive aimed to standardize waiting lists and guarantee the consistency of decisions: all housing allocations, whether through local soviets or workplaces, would be based on an objective definition of need. The Regulation also gave soviets oversight of workplace decisions, with deadlines to transfer recipients’ names to the local soviet. These measures were intended to transfer authority to the soviets, in accordance with central command.Footnote 42
Regulation No. 1117 also required the district soviet to take greater responsibility for improving living conditions and supervising waiting lists. The executive committees were criticized for neglecting these matters in the past: ‘The raiispolkomy have not yet regulated the registration of citizens who do not have living space; the need of citizens for living space is not sufficiently verified, and this results in the registration of people without an urgent need for housing, leading to an artificial increase in the number of people on the waiting list to receive living space.’ The Regulation required the raiispolkomy to inspect the living conditions of everyone registered on their waiting lists and to make any necessary adjustments based on the strict criteria of eligibility and privilege defined by the state. People whose position on the list was changed were to be informed of the decision.Footnote 43
The reform came at a critical time. The war had generated a flood of migrants: the city’s population had grown to 723,000 by 1955, an increase of 178 per cent from 1939.Footnote 44 With its accessibility via the Ob’ River and Trans-Siberian Railway, along with its proximity to abundant natural resources, Novosibirsk became a key destination during the Soviet retreat eastwards.Footnote 45 In addition to the national factories and cultural institutions that were moved to the region along with their staff, hordes of refugees arrived in the city after fleeing the horrors of war in the west. Most of the newcomers lived in temporary huts, trenches and dugouts; a tent city arose on the banks of the Ob’. The more fortunate managed to carve out space in clinics and schools or tucked themselves into warehouses, basements and attics – these at least offered some protection against the bitter winter – and the even luckier settled in the homes of city residents. But almost none of these people had found a permanent solution.Footnote 46 Although fewer newcomers arrived after the war, a steady stream of migrants, including military veterans and peasants, kept coming in search of work. By 1957, 25,000 families were on the waiting list for housing and another 4,350 families were living in dilapidated buildings that were set for demolition in the following two years.Footnote 47
Regulation No. 1117 made some slight changes to official policies regarding the housing queue. The following people were not allowed to register for the list at all: a person who owned a home or lived with relatives and whose living space measured at least 4.5 square metres, the sanitary minimum for a single person; a person who did not participate in socially beneficial work; a person who rented out their living space or who planned to construct a private home independently; and a person who moved to the city for medical or educational purposes or arrived without an employer’s referral. Additionally, qualifications were established for the shorter, priority queue. The following were included: war invalids, families of soldiers killed in action, reserve or retired officers, elementary and middle school teachers, residents of homes designated for demolition, families with more than five children, pensioners and individuals for whom the government officially mandated housing.Footnote 48
All of this seemed clear enough on paper. The actual implementation of Regulation No. 1117, however, involved significant variations in the way that district soviets and their representatives understood and acted upon the new municipal directives. The next part of this article will examine three aspects of local implementation in which variations become apparent.
Advisory committees, sub-queues and blat
The first area in which variations arose involved the postoiannaia zhilishchnaia komissiia , a housing advisory unit composed of representatives of the local soviet. At the end of the 1950s, each of Novosibirsk’s district executive committees had one of these units, whose function was to assess the current living conditions of each applicant and to report the findings to the executive committees. According to the official criteria set by the Regulation, the executive committees would then determine the applicant’s place on the district waiting list.
Actual practice, however, sometimes looked different and it varied from district to district. For example, in Tsentral’nyi district, the postoiannaia zhilishchnaia komissiia dealt mostly with the repair and renovation of residential buildings. Although this was not how the advisory committee was originally envisioned, the shift in focus suited the particular nature of Tsentral’nyi. Most of the structures in that district had been built when the city was founded five to six decades earlier and were in serious need of attention. Other differences among districts related to the degree of autonomy that advisory committees exercised in the process of allocation. In Oktiabr’ski district, the advisory committee reviewed applications and wielded authority over decisions. In Tsentral’nyi district, by contrast, the advisory committee hardly discussed individual applications, which it simply forwarded to the executive committee. This limitation on Tsentral’nyi’s advisory committee may have grown out of the privileged status of the local soviet, which governed the city centre where many cultural and political institutions were located. This prominent soviet apparently kept its power centralized and maintained its ability to make discretionary decisions. In this context, the local housing committee would have functioned mainly as a symbolic affirmation of the executive committee’s ongoing authority.Footnote 49
Other variations in the implementation of Regulation No. 1117 involved the existence of sub-queues. Although the executive committees were supposed to consolidate and reorganize the lists under their jurisdiction in accordance with the new instructions, the Regulation itself presented a fundamental obstacle to this task.Even the most consolidated list would include two separate sub-queues, the first for people meant to receive housing strictly according to their position in line, which was based on need, and the second for people who were granted priority based on entitlement classifications. This primary division gave way to further subdivisions based on the executive committees’ interpretations and interests. Discretionary decision-making explains why the number of waiting lists varied from one district to another. The executive committee of Tsentral’nyi district devised at least three lists: the standard one ‘in order of the line’ ( v poriadke ocheredi ), a second one for eligibility groups and a third one based on housing received as a form of tax from enterprises and factories.Footnote 50 Further evidence exists for a fourth list: one for residents of housing scheduled for demolition.Footnote 51 The executive committee of Oktiabr’ski district managed only two lists: the standard one and the one based on housing received as tax.Footnote 52
The widespread practice of blat was another reason that local implementation often diverged from official directives. Since blat gave people the chance to harness the more privileged access to goods and resources that others enjoyed, the stratification of society virtually guaranteed the connection between an individual’s chance at housing and larger webs of influence. Social stratification had been officially affirmed during Stalin’s rule and persisted until the end of the Soviet regime in 1991. Against that background, one’s position on the waiting list – as well as one’s ability to bypass the wait – reflected and reinforced the power relations between the citizen and the various state mechanisms that granted access to housing. Within this web, the secretary of the obkom, the regional committee of the Communist Party, was especially noteworthy. Obkom secretaries had grown stronger during the war, when the central government in Moscow relied on local leaders for reasons of efficiency and stability. Local leaders knew how to mobilize resources and workers in their territory as well as how to translate the regime’s directives into action on the ground. As a result, obkom secretaries exercised significant power in the local implementation of economic and military policy and enjoyed considerable access to resources. Since Khrushchev continued to encourage a dictator-like leadership at the regional level, the position of these secretaries remained intact after the war as well.Footnote 53 Their influence over housing decisions was all but inevitable.
In Novosibirsk, the obkom ’s first secretary during Khrushchev’s time was Ivan Dmitrievich Yakovlev, appointed in 1949. Yakovlev was a native of Siberia who belonged to the local nomenklatura, a strong patronage network, and he was responsible for high-ranking appointments within the local party and government institutions – secretaries of the gorkom , senior members of the municipal komsomol , heads of trade union committees and members of the executive committees of the city and district soviets. One person with ties to Yakovlev bypassed the waiting list twice during the 1950s. This was Grigory Rapoport, a cultural figure, journalist and respected radio broadcaster in Siberia as well as Yakovlev’s fellow member in the regional nomenklatura.
The first time that Rapoport bypassed the list was in 1952, when he and his family moved to Novosibirsk. They had previously lived in the Siberian city of Barnaul, but had been ousted when Rapoport refused to accept his reassignment as a journalist to the small town of Aleysk. Rapoport’s refusal had angered Nikolai Ilyich Belaev, the first secretary of the Altai region kraikom . Upon his arrival in Novosibirsk, Rapoport was granted an appointment with Yakovlev, who might well have punished him for disobeying the party’s directive and for falling out with Belaev. Instead, Yakovlev gave him a high-ranking post within the Siberian film industry and awarded him an apartment in the Kirovski district.Footnote 54
Still, Rapoport had a relatively low ranking within the local social hierarchy and this affected the housing that he received. The apartment was new and spacious, with four rooms, two balconies and a bathroom, but it was shared: his family of four moved into two of the rooms and a neighbour occupied a third one. This neighbour quickly became a source of distress. In an interview, Rapoport’s son Aleksandr described the man as capricious and often drunk.Footnote 55 Another problem was Rapoport’s hour-long commute to and from work, since there was still no bridge across the Ob’ River. A final drawback was the apartment’s location on the outskirts of the city, far from cultural and commercial centres, with only wasteland nearby. It took a decade before the family was able to move into a separate apartment in the Tsentral’nyi district at the centre of the city. This move was possible only because Rapoport had steadily advanced through the ranks of the municipal nomenklatura and had made a second appeal to Yakovlev.Footnote 56
The case of A.I. Roizenblit is another example of the impact of blat on the wait for apartments. Roizenblit was a manager of Plant No. 66, an enterprise that was not directly involved in construction but that was large enough, under Soviet regulations, to bear responsibility for the development of the city, including the building and provision of housing. At the same time, Roizenblit was a member of the executive committee of Oktiabr’ski district and therefore involved in decisions about people on the waiting list. The potential conflict of interest raised concerns among members of the Oktiabr’ski soviet as well as workers in the enterprise. Both groups complained about Roizenblit’s lack of transparency and the inequitable distribution of housing under his supervision. The chief engineer of the plant wrote a formal complaint to the gorkom and obkom in 1958:
Comrade Roizenblit exploits his power as the factory director, and by subordinating the heads of the partkom [the workplace party committee] and the zavkom [the workers’ union committee] to his authority, he strengthens his personal network by allocating apartments to individuals who have no connection to the factory. Moreover, most of the personnel personally loyal to Roizenblit – small families consisting of only two people – live in two-room apartments, while others, larger families with four or more members, have lived in a single room of 12–14 square metres since the factory’s founding.Footnote 57
In the entangled social and professional web that Roizenblit exemplifies, there was no clear distinction between the overseers and the overseen. Directors and managers moved between the soviets and the workplace and sometimes worked for both at the same time.
Circulation between workplaces and various state and party institutions was common within the urban bureaucracy. Avram Semenovich Zlotnik, head of the municipal housing office in 1958, had previously worked at the Sibsel’mash plant, the largest producer of machinery for agriculture and coal mining, as well as a housing provider for the city. Zlotnik had also served in the party apparatus of the Kirovski District during the war and was later transferred to various positions in that district’s soviet, including an appointment as secretary of the executive committee.Footnote 58 Vladimir Pavlovich Chikinev, who began as a worker at Sibsel’mash and then rose through the company’s ranks, was elected in 1957 as secretary of the regional Komsomol, a party organization. His subsequent trajectory suggests that the movement between workplace and state or party institutions continued well beyond the chronological scope of this study. Chikinev later returned to Sibsel’mash in more senior positions and in 1983 he became head of the municipal executive committee, the gorispolkom .Footnote 59
Much of what made this movement possible is that all these positions were fed by a single career ladder, in part through the specialized schools for officials that were established after the war. These Higher Party Schools ( vysshaia partiinaia shkola ) were venues for building relationships and creating informal connections within the nomenklatura and local versions of these schools also operated in the city and the region.Footnote 60 What emerged was an elite interconnected cadre with considerable access to resources during the housing reform. Its existence demonstrates the inaccuracy of assuming a neat division between the workplace and local soviets.
From institutions to individuals
The shifting roles of these individuals illustrate the limitations of conventional views of the housing campaign, which tend to focus on institutions as clearly defined entities and to posit competition over resources between the workplace and the soviets.Footnote 61 A greater complexity emerges by paying attention to the actors within those institutions. This focus takes account of the city’s social landscape and demonstrates that implementation of the reform involved nuances and inconsistencies that defy simple categorization.
Additional support for this focus comes from the reports on living conditions that were submitted by the advisory committee of the Oktiabr’ski district. These reports, which were intended to assess the situation of each applicant on the waiting list, show that local decisions remained inconsistent and opaque, even though they were being made by the very institutions tasked with ensuring standardization and transparency. Residents noticed and sometimes erupted in anger; they felt themselves at the mercy of officials who had arbitrary powers and no accountability. ‘What kind of supervision is there over the allocation of housing to the soldiers’ families?’ asked Citizen Petrova at a residents’ meeting on 28 February 1958. ‘The representatives should check how the new house on Lermontov Street was populated!’ Another attendee, Protodiakonova, chimed in, ‘My husband was killed at the front. My number in the housing queue is 89, but my queue has not moved for five years.’ Makarnik expressed a similar frustration: ‘[I]n 1955 my husband was rehabilitated and I was first in the housing queue, but three years have passed and I still live in nine square metres with a family of five. Where should I go now?’Footnote 62
Such cases arose because official definitions of need and privilege were often undercut by local definitions that the soviets shrouded in ambiguity and secrecy. One example is the case that opens this article, that of Maria Proletarskaia. Despite her neighbours’ efforts to improve her situation, Proletarskaia’s condition continued to deteriorate and she died in July 1960, shortly after the neighbours appealed to the local newspaper for help. That appeal had been a last resort; Proletarskaia had already made several attempts to move up the waiting list of the Pervomaiiski district where she lived. Nonetheless, she was repeatedly and summarily rejected. ‘[T]he executive committee,’ she was told, ‘does not possess any living space and therefore cannot fulfil your request.’Footnote 63 Evidence suggests a specific reason behind Proletarskaia’s disqualification: Novosibirsk’s advisory committees paid attention to the history of an applicant’s connection to the city. Committee reports in the Oktiabr’ski district, for instance, frequently mentioned this issue. What emerged was an unofficial hierarchy: recent arrivals at the bottom, long-term residents ( korennye zhiteli ) at the top and in between, people who were born in the city but had left, only later to return ( urozhenetsy ).Footnote 64 It seems significant, then, that Proletarskaia had come to Novosibirsk only in 1956, after she had suffered a heart attack and wanted to move closer to her daughter.Footnote 65 Her recent arrival would have been a distinct disadvantage.
The aftermath of Proletarskaia’s death is noteworthy. Her case gained attention in the media and in official circles both locally and beyond, even reaching Nikita Khrushchev and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. In October 1960, a thorough investigation by the gorkom , the city party committee, concluded that the district soviet responsible for the case had acted improperly. The main charge was that the soviet had taken an ‘overly formal and bureaucratic attitude to the suffering of the communist Proletarskaia’ and punishments of varying degree were assigned to the soviet’s representatives. Those deemed responsible for the misconduct and bureaucratic inertia were ultimately dismissed from their jobs.Footnote 66
This attention was no accident. Proletarskaia’s venerable past, which was noted by both her neighbours and city officials, made her case stand out among the many other tragic ones that were simply ignored. As her neighbours pointed out, she had been a party member since 1930 and had played an active role in the fight for collectivization and dekulakization, the political repression of relatively wealthy peasants. The raikom representative who investigated her case described her 35-year service to the party in various roles such as representing the Kamerovo soviet and being a member of the regional zhenotel , the women’s section of the party. Proletarskaia had also contributed to the war effort by hiding partisans in her home.Footnote 67
Another distinguishing feature was Proletarskaia’s membership in the Bolshevik ‘golden generation’, also known as ‘Lenin’s cohort’, well-respected veterans of both the October Revolution and World War II.Footnote 68 With his aspiration to revive the foundational ideals of communism and Leninism, Khrushchev singled out this group for special treatment. He wanted them to assume prominent roles in public and social organizations and his 1956 pension reform awarded them more generous payments than others received.Footnote 69 It would have seemed reasonable for a member of this cohort to receive special consideration in housing as well. By prioritizing disabled veterans, families of fallen soldiers and officers in the reserves or in retirement, Resolution No. 1117 formalized the notion that people who had done great service to the state deserved a privileged position in the queue. Indeed, there existed precedents for that notion from much earlier. During World War II, conscripts were promised adequate housing as part of an effort to raise combat morale and then, in the context of the General Demobilization of 23 June 1945, legislation gave discharged soldiers the right to living space.Footnote 70 Lenin’s cohort was thought to deserve the same treatment and so it is no surprise that Proletarskaia’s case drew public attention.
The applicant’s degree of connection to the city was not the only factor that local authorities took the liberty of introducing into their calculations. Local directives considered the salaries of the entire family, not just the individual applicant. A report filed by one representative, Rubtsova, describes a woman named Petrova who was the sole provider for a household of three: herself, her disabled mother and her young daughter. All three lived on Petrova’s salary of 500 rubles in a 16-square-metre room that they shared with another family of three. Another of Rubtsova’s reports mentions Tonikina, a woman who lived with her parents in a nine-square-metre room. All three were employed, earning a combined monthly income of 1,200 rubles, 150 of which they spent on rent.Footnote 71
Resolution No. 1117 also gave teachers a degree of preference in the waiting list.Footnote 72 This measure echoed the special privileges that Soviet rule had long accorded teachers because of their ideological role in educating the nation’s children.Footnote 73 Theoretically, these privileges included entitlement to housing, vacations in state-run sanatoria and subsidies for living expenses such as water, heat and electricity. In practice, however, teachers received little of what they had been promised. Nonetheless, since the position of applicants as teachers is noted in Novosibirsk’s housing reports, it appears that occupation was a consideration in local decisions.Footnote 74
Still, no single factor was decisive. The terse directive to prioritize teachers in the housing queue quickly lost its force as an executive committee weighed a range of considerations including need, eligibility, merits and shortcomings. This complexity is exemplified by the case of Faina Markovna Seraia. A music teacher and war widow, Seraia lived with her disabled 70-year-old mother in the basement of a cold and crumbling house. In their 17-square-metre room, the floor was uneven, the beams were rotten and the ceiling sagged; the house had no plumbing and was not connected to the sewage system. Seraia and her mother had four windows, but the moisture from their cooking and laundering ruined their clothes and furniture and spread mould that damaged their health. The humidity was exacerbated by the house’s location in a low-lying area, where the structure was steadily sinking into the ground.Footnote 75 In 1954, the house had officially been deemed beyond repair and marked for demolition.
Despite these appalling conditions, the executive committee of the Tsentral’nyi district rejected Seraia’s appeal for housing. According to the committee, responsibility for providing her with alternative housing lay with the enterprise that owned the building, the City Committee on Radio and Television; unfortunately for Seraia, that enterprise was not involved in the construction of urban infrastructure and had no housing to offer.Footnote 76 But against the background of Seraia’s occupation as a teacher and her status as a war widow, both of which should have privileged her case, the executive committee’s refusal was probably rooted in additional factors. Here it is noteworthy that Seraia had no children. Part of the goal of the housing campaign, with its promise of separate housing, was to encourage demographic growth and stability by exalting the large family.Footnote 77 Despite aspects of her personal profile that might have otherwise proven advantageous, Seraia’s position as a childless widow may well have decreased her chances of securing better housing – let alone a new, separate apartment.
Sometimes cases evoked emotional responses that broke away from official categories altogether. Such a case involved a nurse named Beshgurova, whose story touched a representative of the soviet of the Tsentral’nyi district. The representative described Beshgurova’s situation at a session of the soviet in early 1958:
I would like to tell you about a case that came to my attention last August. Nurse G.A. Bashgurova is in need of a space of her own. She suffers from tuberculosis, having contracted the disease after working for an extended period in a clinic while living in a basement. And she still lives there. In a humid basement there lives a person with tuberculosis. The ispolkom declined her appeal. I would ask the ispolkom to pay attention to her appeal and provide her with a place of her own. This basement was used as a storage room and is unfit for living – those who live there don’t see any daylight and use [kerosene] lamps, without any comforts.
The ispolkom to which the representative refers is the soviet’s executive committee, which would have been present at the meeting. In other words, he was expressing his opposition to a decision that had already been made – and in front of the very people who made it. This took some courage; his willingness to speak out shows how deeply he must have felt about the case.Footnote 78
At another meeting of the Tsentral’nyi district soviet later that year, Representative Pankova described the case of a man named Piser, who alone among his neighbours had not received adequate housing:
Comrade Piser, whose work had left him an invalid, without his legs or his right hand, lived in Gogol Square in a dugout that he had excavated with his one remaining hand. This situation resulted from the demolition of all the buildings in the square. The residents were relocated to apartments, while Piser, in his condition, was left helpless. People told me about him, and I took it upon myself to get him an apartment.
After petitioning the chairman of the executive committee and other city officials on his behalf, Pankova managed to transfer Piser to ‘a comfortable living space’.Footnote 79 On occasion, decisions were based on feelings of compassion and solidarity, considerations that could not be captured in bureaucratic language at either the national or local levels.
Conclusion
Khrushchev’s housing campaign reshaped Novosibirsk’s cityscape and led to the emergence of new territorial, architectural and temporal unities. But physical change was only one part of the campaign’s broad vision of the modern city; administrative change was a major component as well. Through the appeals of residents, the reports on living conditions and the decisions of officials, it is possible to see how the attempt at administrative reform played out in Novosibirsk. The documents reveal the complexity of the cases brought before the soviets and the intricacy of the local social landscape. Each petition involved conflicting considerations relating to need and eligibility – and even need and eligibility were defined differently at the national and local levels. As a result, officials made decisions based on distinct and overlapping systems of reasoning and sometimes on emotional grounds that defied bureaucratic categories altogether. In addition, the multiplicity of criteria and consequent ambiguity allowed for preferences based on blat that by their nature elude historical documentation. The reality of implementation was hardly the uniform, rational process that Khrushchev had envisioned.
In Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin, Steven Harris shows that the dynamics of housing in Leningrad were similar to the ones I have traced in Novosibirsk. Centralized mandates gave way to unofficial criteria in distribution that favoured social and economic considerations at the local level. Especially relevant is what Harris identifies as the unintended result of distribution based on entitlement and not just need: a social hierarchy developed among the people on the waiting lists.Footnote 80 An analysis of what occurred in Novosibirsk makes it possible to expand on Harris’s point with a greater complexity. There developed not just a single hierarchy but many different ones and these did not always sit well with one another. All of these factors argue for a greater awareness of the local landscape in studies of the housing campaign. It was at the local level, after all, that apartments were distributed and local dynamics often generated divergences from the central government’s directives.
The case of Maria Timofeevna Proletarskaia is a good illustration of this point. By the official standards of the housing campaign, she should have had priority in receiving an apartment: she was a member of Lenin’s cohort, she had an impressive history of political achievement and her dreadful living conditions were endangering her health. On the local level, however, Proletarskaia was not granted that priority. It seems that what stood in her way was her recent arrival in the city. As her case demonstrates, definitions of need and entitlement sometimes clashed with one another on the ground and even those definitions might look different from central and local perspectives.
Attention to the city’s social landscape also calls into question economic assumptions about competition over resources. The workplace and the local soviets are not so easily distinguished. Many individuals held concurrent positions in multiple institutions and the social connections established through attendance at the same educational institutions or participation in the same nomenklatura tended to blur the boundaries between different frameworks – a blurring that still occurred in the 1980s, as Chikinev’s example suggests. What appears in official terms as a transfer of authority to the soviets reveals itself to be a far more complex process, one driven by the political and social nuances of the individual settings where Khrushchev’s housing campaign was implemented.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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