Property of Communists - (Niu Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) by Mark B Smith (Hardcover)

About the Book

Within fifteen years of the end of the Second World War, many tens of millions of Soviet city dwellers had been rehoused--liberated from shelters and overcrowded communal dwellings--and the paradox of housing ownership rights under proto-communism had been clarified. The transformation of the Soviet cityscape and of popular living conditions underwrote many other changes in Soviet life. In this first, full-length study of one of the major social reforms of 20th-century European history, Smith presents an analysis built on hundreds of previously unexplored sources that include papers from state and municipal archives, material from the popular and professional press, legal tracts, films, novels, and personal accounts.

Property of Communists makes two substantial contributions to historical scholarship. First, it challenges the commonplace belief that the housing program was entirely a post-Stalin reform and discusses in detail its wartime and late Stalinist origins as well as its escalation under Khrushchev. Second, the originality of Smith's study involves property relations, as he demonstrates that the Soviet housing stock was never a monolithic item of state ownership, but was the subject of multiple tenures that invested the individual resident with substantial rights of possession. With its wide chronological framing, its reappraisal of the status of property and ownership in the first communist society, and its anchoring in comparative history, this provocative book will appeal to a broad audience of European historians and Soviet scholars and students.

Book Synopsis

Within fifteen years of the end of the Second World War, many tens of millions of Soviet city dwellers had been rehoused--liberated from shelters and overcrowded communal dwellings--and the paradox of housing ownership rights under proto-communism had been clarified. The transformation of the Soviet cityscape and of popular living conditions underwrote many other changes in Soviet life. In this first, full-length study of one of the major social reforms of twentieth-century European history, Smith presents an analysis built on hundreds of previously unexplored sources that include papers from state and municipal archives, material from the popular and professional press, legal tracts, films, novels, and personal accounts. Property of Communists makes two substantial contributions to historical scholarship. First, it challenges the commonplace belief that the housing program was entirely a post-Stalin reform and discusses in detail its wartime and late Stalinist origins as well as its escalation under Khrushchev. Second, the originality of Smith's study involves property relations, as he demonstrates that the Soviet housing stock was never a monolithic item of state ownership, but was the subject of multiple tenures that invested the individual resident with substantial rights of possession. With its wide chronological framing, its reappraisal of the status of property and ownership in the first communist society, and its anchoring in comparative history, this provocative book will appeal to a broad audience of European historians and Soviet scholars and students.

Review Quotes

[R]eaders will find in the densely constructed narrative, from materials as diverse as official archival documents, reports, and policies, citizens' complaint letters, and occasionally literary accounts, a wide range of inspiring stories that offer fresh perspectives on this key episode in modern European welfare policy.

--Torsten Lange "EAST CENTRAL EUROPE"

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

This sharp study of the urban housing program in the USSR after 1945 is of broad interest to those working in Russian and Soviet studies. Amidst a growing collection of new urban research in Slavic and East European studies, Property of Communists is an indispensable work.

-- "Slavonic and East European Review"

About the Author

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