Skip to main content Site map

Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin


Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin

Hardback by Harris, Steven E. (University of Mary Washington)

Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin

£51.50

ISBN:
9781421405667
Publication Date:
24 May 2013
Language:
English
Publisher:
Johns Hopkins University Press
Pages:
416 pages
Format:
Hardback
For delivery:
Estimated despatch 27 - 29 May 2024
Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin

Description

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.

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. 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

Back

University of Salford logo