Harris (history, U. of Mary Washington) presents a study of the transition from communal housing to single-family apartments in the Soviet Union instigated by Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s. Harris describes Khrushchev's rule as a period of thaw from the Stalinist nightmare and that this housing transition was the most ordinary way people experienced it. He investigates mass housing as a site of construction by both the State and citizens. While showing the latter to be taking charge of building a classless society, Harris also considers these as possible outcomes influenced by the State pursuing the "New Soviet Man and Woman." He begins by tracing the origins of the quest for minimum living space requirements, the Bolshevik approach to answering it, and how the communalization of apartments led to the Khrushchev design. The first part of the book thus focuses on the design to better understand what urban dwellers said about the apartments and their problems. The second part considers the politicization of housing allocation and in turn, the social divisions created by different paths to gaining a separate apartment. The final section examines how discourse on "the communist way of life" incorporated the separate apartments in heralding the communist future, the rise of communist consumerism, and how residents confronted furniture designers and housing officials about shortcomings. Distributed by Johns Hopkins University Press. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Recenzijos
Harris 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
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Harris is the first historian to explore fully the role of Khrushchev era mass housing as a catalytic component of what party ideologues and Soviet citizens called the 'communist way of life.'... A pathbreaking study of the ways Soviet citizens claimed positions of agency in late-socialist society, Communism on Tomorrow Street meticulously assembles responses collected from visitor books at exhibitions, public meetings, and housing department petitions to create a fine-grained account of what was know as the 'the housing question,' and how it was politicized-often in ways that differed sharply from the methods and message preferred by Khrushchev's regime. -- Greg Castillo, University of California, Berkeley Harris does many things superbly in Communism on Tomorrow Street. His chief aim is to write a social history of Khrushchev's mass housing campaign. He argues that movement to single-family apartments was the way most Soviet citizens experienced the thaw after Stalin. Harris thus challenges long-held assumptions about the centrality of the intelligentsia and high culture in the thaw. Moreover, he shows that the mass-housing campaign had many of the trappings of earlier, Stalinist campaigns, except in one crucial regard: it was non-violent. The result is a major contribution-written in elegant, accessible prose-to the emerging historiography of the post-Stalin period. -- Stephen Bittner, Sonoma State University
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.
