“Good people live in bathtubs.”
By Sean at 31 July, 2009, 10:44 am
Vedomosti has a great article on the history of Russia’s housing crisis. Housing, as Maksim Trudoliubov notes, is a chronic historical problem in Russia, one which the Soviets tried to attenuate, but made little headway until the 1960s. “The comfort of our home life is still not good for many of us,” Trudoliubov begins. “As in the early Soviet and even in the “mature Soviet” period housing was the main problem for the majority of citizens. Life was collective not because the state managed to inculcate citizens with a fancy for the romanticism of “communal life,” and because of this all of Stalin’s construction projects must be seen in this light. There’s just not enough housing (as is the case up to the present). But even more important, housing–from the bunks in dormitories to elite apartments in nomenclature buildings–was an instrument of manipulating people.”
Indeed, as Truboliubov continues, solutions to the housing problem took on a variety of realist and ideological forms to manipulate people. Lenin, for one, saw the housing problem a matter of distribution and allocation. According to the Soviet founding father, the Tsarist elite held a monopoly over living space. The solution was a simple but cold revolutionary formula of “K = N – 1,” where K equaled the number of rooms, and N the number of residents. Meaning that “the number of people in an apartment must be one more than rooms.” Well, as the those intimately familiar with Russian housing know well, the proportion of people to rooms was often many times more lopsided than Lenin’s prescription.
Things only worsened after the Civil War when structural dilapidation, poverty, disease, and general governmental decay exacerbated the existing housing problem. As Truboliubov writes, “In 1921 37% of buildings in Moscow were unsuitable for habitation.” As one resident of what is now Building 9 on Bolshaya Dmitrovka, the street that runs parallel to Tverskaya, central Moscow’s main drag, commented in 1922, “The pluming system, drainage and heating are destroyed. Apartments lack facets, radiators for central heating, and are stripped of stoves. In the majority of apartments the floors are taken apart, and dirt and garbage are everywhere.”
Apartment life in the 1920s was abysmal to say the least. As any reader of Bulgakov’s Dog’s Heart will know, apartments were allocated and reallocated in a sporadic, albeit proletarian, manner. Residents of various classes were cramped together. Revolutionary justice in housing required the bourgeoisie to give up their rooms to the new proletarian ruling class. And “when there weren’t any rooms to rent, then people rented corners, that is parts of rooms, corridors and kitchens.” And if those weren’t available, then sleeping in bathtubs served as a desperate alternative. The average living space in the 1920s was an average of 5.2 to 5.8 square meters per person.
Stalin’s industrial campaign of the 1930s only made matters worse as millions of peasant migrants flooded into Russia’s cities. As David Hoffman notes in his Peasant Metropolis, migration was so great that there was no conceivable way for the authorities to provide adequate housing. The solution was often the rapid and shoddy construction of worker’s barracks. The crunch was so great that the average number of persons per room in the Soviet Union rose from 2.71 in 1926 to 3.91 in 1940. One can only guess that the increase would be even more if the statistics only accounted for the country’s industrial urban centers.
More people meant less comfort. One American cited by Hoffman described his friend Kuznetsov’s living conditions in the barracks of the Kuibyshev electronic factory in the 1930s,
“Kuznetsov lived with about 550 others, men and women, in a wooden structure about 800 feet long and fifteen feet wide. The room contained approximately 500 narrow beds, covered with mattresses filled with straw and dried leaves. There were no pillows or blankets. Coats and other garments were being utilized for covering. Some of the residents had no beds and slept on the floor or in wooden boxes. In some cases beds were used by one shift during the day and by others at night. There were no screens or wall to give any privacy to the occupants of the barracks . . . I could not stay in the barracks very long. I could not stand the stench of kerosene and unwashed bodies. The only washing facility was a pump outside. The toilet was rickety, unheated shanty, without seats.”
Rapid urbanization also gave rise to the Stalinist internal passport system in 1934. The passport system was an attempt to slow migration, especially that induced by the famine in Ukraine. The logic was to prevent an already desperate situation was getting worse. With housing and food supply already short (urban residents were on rations), a tidal wave of starving peasants would have brought the situation to the brink Soviet officials reasoned. The policy was certainly cruel. But Stalinist policies were never known for their niceties.
The passport system also became a permanent biopolitical measure of population control. Urbanites got them. Kholkhozniki didn’t. And though getting off the collective farm was easily done, the system put in place institutionalized discrimination until the mid-1970s when Russia’s rural inhabitants began getting passports. This is not to say that urban residents were allowed to move freely. City to city migration required registration. True, people still moved throughout the postwar period, but the passport and registration system was yet another bureaucratic control for the authorities to wield when necessary.
Substantial housing relief didn’t come until the 1960s when Nikita Khrushchev attempted to tackle the housing problem with the mass production of five story, box like apartment buildings. The “khrushchevki” provided relief, gave many their own apartments, but were hardly aesthetic or structural masterpieces. But a shoddy apartment was better than no apartment, especially for those war refugees who were living in dugouts until the late 1950s. And the continued housing projects of the Brezhnev period provided additional living space. So much so that by the end of the Soviet period, the square meter per person had grown to 15.3 square meters.
Present day housing, though still a problem, appears to be improving. As Truboliubov notes, according to Rosstat, the average living space has increased to 20.9 square meters per person. This is still low by Western European and American standards (Germany, 36 sq. m.; Sweden, about 40; and the US, 60), yet by Russian standards, which has a totally different historical relationship to living, privacy, and relationships, this is a great improvement.
Finally, Truboliubov ends his narrative with a reminder that registration, though deemed illegal by the Russian Constitution, remains in force. The authorities repeadtly balk at abolishing it. They only seem to always promise to “modernize” its application. Why? As Truboliubov notes, one of the features of a capitalist system is to increase the mobility of not just capital, but labor. But Russian capitalism works on an additional profit motive. The registration system has an additional function as an “instrument of extracting the profit of corruption.” “The Stalinist institution of registration now properly serves the bureaucrats as a source of income.”
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Don’t forget, that at the start of the XXth century, over 85% of Russia’s people accounted to the rural population, while currently it’s less than 30%. That means, that within the lifespan of a single generation half of the country moved from villages to cities. I wonder, if any other country had such tremendous scale of population migration.
As for the current situation, I wouldn’t idealize it. Are you aware of now not even a recent joke, that in some Russia’s regions capital punishment was replaced by mortgage with the annual percentage rate of 25%?
Your post title reminded me of a good old book. One of chapters of a sci-fi novel of 1950-60s describes an inspector coming to a space station so overpopulated by physicists, that one of them even has to live in a lift:
(English translation is rather shitty. It’s much better in Russian.)
“But it’s true, Vladimir Sergeevich!” – the mirthful Kostya exclaimed.
“Comrade chief inspector! The people really want to work! Do the gravity
surveyors want to work? They do. Do the relativists want to? They do as
well. I am not even talking about the cosmogonists, who squeezed in here
right over my dead body. And on Earth, another hundred and fifty are eager
as anything… Big deal, sleeping in a lift! What else, should they wait
till IBCC finishes the construction of a new station?”
The only country I can think with a comparable migration with Russia 1890s-1960s is probably China over the last 20 years.
Interestingly, internal migration in Russia is little studied to my knowledge. At least I don’t know of any historical treatments besides Hoffman’s and a book on Russian WWI refugees by Peter Gatrell called A Whole Nation Walking. Does anyone know what’s been published on the Russian side?
But Russian capitalism works on an additional profit motive. The registration system has an additional function as an “instrument of extracting the profit of corruption.” “The Stalinist institution of registration now properly serves the bureaucrats as a source of income.”
This has nothing to do with capitalism. It’s pure late feudalism when a regulatory authority is equipped with ability to forage off it.
And it’s everywhere from traffic cops and customs officers to almost all high and middle managers of the state monopoly pyramid including health care that is supposedly free.
And every regulatory department conveniently has a commercial “affiliate”. Regulatory entity imposes standards and its commercial affiliate inspects and certifies. Some capitalism, Sean.
Sean: I’m not a historian. Try asking your question at a forum of history students of the Moscow State University:
http://forum.tssi.ru/
Cyrill: What do you propose to improve the situation?
Cyrill: What do you propose to improve the situation?
Good question, Evgeny. I’t much easier to bloviate on an internet blog then come up with ideas.
If you are talking about corruption, then the only way to minimize it is to make regulatory authorities less powerful, i.e. deregulate. Unfortunately both our countries are going exact opposite way right now, Russia leading by example of spawning monopolies right and left. Obama is trying to do the same.
Here is a good example of monopoly vs demonopolized market. There are two basic ways to ship a container of, say, lighting fixtures from Guangzhow to Nizhni Novgorod. 1: quick ocean freight to Vostochny, then on the railroad directly to Nizhni. 2: a long haul around India, through the Suez, to Bremen, reload on a feeder to ship to Kotka (Finland) or St. Pete, and then truck it to Nizhni.
The #1 above is 3 times more expensive then the #2. Why? Russian State Rail Monopoly vs. multiple operators competing. Government monopolism works in the same way across the board be it Customs, Rail, Gazprom or ГБР.
There is no question the more regulations and bureaucracy the more opportunities there are for corruption. Why, though, several of the countries with strong regulatory regimes are also among the least corrupt of the world? This is not a rhetorical question, I really do wonder why is that, say, Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Canada are less corrupt than the US and much much less corrupt than countries such as Argentina, Russia and India.
The US is a huge country of over 300 million people and there are fairly large regional differences within it. In terms of state government and regulations Vermont and New Hampshire are quite different, but why is it that they are among the least corrupt states while, say, Mississippi, Florida and Illinois are among the most corrupt?
Kolya, no question that culture adds a tremendous amount to overall tendency for a state to be more or less corrupt. There is probably some cultural and religious inertia that plays an uncertain role. It takes time to build resistance towards corruption into a national culture.
Overall, Protestant (especially long established) countries seem to be less corrupt then Catholic or Orthodox within just Christianity. Does it relate to tenets of the dominant denomination and how, since Bavaria is predominantly Catholic? And why is the South in the US more corrupt, while being Protestant. Could it be that the Cracker culture of deep rural areas in UK (lowland Scotland and adjacent areas of England) that generated a lot of migration to the South, still plays a major role?
I guess all things being equal, one of these factors would move a country on the scale less/more corruption. Tricky part starts when there are several factors in place. In some cases one would negate another, in some unfortunate cases like Russia, several factors compound each other.
Cyril, you are probably right. I wonder what are the necessary elements to change the dynamics decisively into a direction from more to less corruption. As a regular (non-influential) person who lived in countries in which everyday corruption is one of lifes indignities that one has to deal with, it is a great relief, a pleasure, to live in a place that is free of such a thing.
By the way, I’m sure that historically there is a lot to that Protestant vs. Catholic/Orthodox divide. As you say, though, for better or for worse, cultural inertia plays an important role. For example, Protestant looking Vermont was indeed a predominantly Protestant state. Now there are as many Catholics as there are Protestants and a full 1/3 of the population claims no religious affiliation (highest percentage in the US.) Perhaps (and this is pure speculation on my part) it’s simply the case that non-practicing Catholics are less inclined than Protestants to claim that they have no religious affiliation (23 percent of Vermonters are of French Canadian ancestry.)
In any event, what interests me is how countries/cultures/regions move from more to less corruption. Although there is a lot of emphasis on contracts and documents, one of the keys is the level of trust of a given society. How much do society members trust those who are not their relatives or friends? How much trust do you have that if you mistakenly overpay a vendor in cash, this vendors will return the difference as soon as he notices the difference? How much trust do you have that if you leave your wallet on a city bench, you will get the wallet back intact?
How much do society members trust those who are not their relatives or friends?
Several years ago I had a great experience of interpreting cultural orientation classes for Russian-speaking foreign nationals temporarily transferred to work in the US at one of the Big Oil HQ. The person conducting the seminar was a real pro cultural anthropologist or something. She was making a few very important points (that were unfortunately lost on the students for they did not care for the subject, other then where is the nearest grocery store)
One was the size of “immediate family”. Such clannishness of a society I think is reverse proportional to the trust you are talking about. In a clannish society such trust is reserved more to clan members.
Also, if you put this in a much broader perspective that I borrowed long time ago from “Лекции по истории средневековья” Тимофея Грановского. History seems to go from more socialization to more individualization, like the transformation from pre-feudal time of antiquity to feudalism. In antiquity individual did not exist without citizenship, without belonging to a state. Economic change from antiquity to the feudal system of allotments also broke that direct link between a person and a state.
Since then humanity moved to even greater individualization and less and less clannishness. I think the reason is that association and thus trust within a clan is forced, you are born with it, associations in a less clannish society are voluntary, based on choice.
In addition to cultural/social inertia and bureaucratic/regulatory regimes, I think a lack of resources can create corruption. If something is in short supply, only a few will have access to that resource, creating a natural condition for corruption. Note that each potential cause of corruption is more prevalent in areas of higher population density, which seems to correlate well.
I was talking to a guy from Argentina once about the difference in corruption between our two countries. We discussed what might be the reason for the difference (religion, class, etc.) and his answer was that it was simply cultural. Not to be ethnically insensitive, but German/Slavic/Scandinavian immigrants out here just didn’t seem interested in being corrupt or trying to get rich quick back in the day, and to large part, I think that has carried over to today. Maybe this is all due to what a society/culture values, i.e. wealth versus respect. Being corrupt will get you rich, it isn’t going to make your parents proud of you though.