Gender and Housing in the Soviet Russia: Private Life in Public Space

This book explores housing policies and realities during the different stages of the Soviet Era which lasted just over 70 years (1917–1991), with particular reference to the gender implications, especially for women. It is a difficult book to read because the accounts of the dreadful housing conditions people experienced are so distressing, and contrast so sharply with the official idealized image of ‘the new way of living’ for which housing was designed, with the specific purpose of abolishing ‘private life’. Women, according to the propaganda, were meant to be main beneficiaries of the ‘new way of living’, (novyi byt). All the domestic and personal areas of people’s lives were to be broken down, not only to destroy the roots of incipient capitalism and individualism, but also ostensibly to liberate women from domestic drudgery. Thus, during many periods within the Soviet Era there is, intentionally, no investment in the domestic realm. Women were strongly disadvantaged by these policies, because the state did not recognize the validity or necessity of the domestic work women still had to do, such as childcare, washing, shopping and home-making. Instead, the state ‘liberated’ them by expecting women to be full-time workers outside the home as well, thus creating a particularly harsh version of the ‘double shift’. In reality, state facilities and alternatives were either severely limited or completely inappropriate to meet the practical demands of daily life. A combination of male-dominated policy making, and an unwillingness of Soviet husbands to share childcare and other domestic duties, meant that women had to use all their ingenuity and powers of self-sacrifice and survival to get by and thus to shore up the great Soviet experiment in communal living. Therefore, a key theme of the book is the ‘gap’ that existed between ideology and reality, between policy and practicality, not least because of a complete disregard for gender considerations. It is also a difficult book to read because it needs a really good edit, as there is so much repetition. The book is as overcrowded with details as the Soviet apartments were overcrowded with people. Arguably, a clearer ‘structure’ is needed that might better frame, and explain, the significance of the detailed descriptions that fill every chapter. I reviewed one of the author’s books 20 years ago and have to say that it was far better organized than the present volume (Attwood, 1990). However, she is to be commended for carrying on presenting a critical feminist perspective of Soviet history when gender can so easily be swept under the carpet of the past. The book is about housing, but it is written by an author whose main expertise is in Russian studies and gender, not the built environment. Key architectural and town planning issues are included almost incidentally, apparently without realization of their significance of housing in the wider planning policy context. For example, there is only limited reference to the popular Soviet spatial planning concept of micro-districts. But, for a planner, Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 16. No. 4, 551–559, November 2011