Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev

"Makes a signal contribution to the rapidly evolving historiography of the postwar Soviet decades. Smith's arguments are substantiated by an impressive repertoire of sources. Indeed, in both qualitative and quantitative senses, the research base is truly phenomenal. Written in a style that is not only accessible but occasionally rises to the level of elegance."---Lewis Siegelbaum, Michigan State University

"Smith puts the mass-housing campaign into a pan-European/North American context by evaluating the adequacy of the term `welfare state' for the Soviet Union. His cardinal achievement is the opening of an entirely new topic of analysis---Soviet property relations. Smith deserves a great deal of credit for questioning what had long gone unquestioned."---Stephen Bittner, Sonoma State University

After the Second World War was over, Soviet people came back to chaotic and devastated cities. If their home still existed, it was often occupied by strangers. In 1945, at a time of disorientation and exhaustion, many city dwellers lived in barracks, corners of buildings, and shelters hacked out of the ground. Yet within fifteen years, a mass construction program had liberated tens of millions of citizens from these miserable communal dwellings and rehoused them in new family apartments. Ownership rights were clarified. Under Khrushchev, revivified Soviet cities looked like they were moving, for a moment, towards communism.

In this first full-length, archive-based study of one of the major social reforms of 20th-century European history, Smith tells the stories of both ordinary people and leading officials as they struggled together to solve an intractable housing crisis. Drawing on hundreds of previously unexplored sources, he challenges the commonplace view that the housing program was entirely a post-Stalin phenomenon and discusses in detail its late Stalinist origins as well as its subsequent escalation under Khrushchev. This book also tells another new story: about Soviet property relations. Although private property had been abolished during the Russian Revolution, Smith shows how the housing program was driven forward and distinctively marked by an unexpected paradox: its expansion of citizens' ownership rights.

This groundbreaking book's analysis of the dual impact of World War II and the death of Stalin on the USSR, its reappraisal of the status of property and ownership in the first `communist' society, and its anchoring in comparative history will appeal to a broad audience of scholars and students of European and Soviet history a like.

Mark B. Smith is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Leeds.