Housing in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia: The Transformation of Property Relations and Everyday Resistance

Abstract

Citation: Ryzhova N., Zhuravskaya T. (2019) Housing in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia: The Transformation of Property Relations and Everyday Resistance. Mir Rossii, vol. 28, no 3, pp. 48–66 (in Russian). DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2019-28-3-48-66

In this article, we apply the concepts of ‘everyday politics’ and ‘routine resistance’ to explain the transformation of political organization and property relations in housing practices in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Specifically, we discuss how property relations were reformed during the Soviet period and how they affected the daily life of ordinary people. We show that Soviet political organization molded a specific ideology in an attempt to change rationality and everyday life. In accordance with Marxist ideology, the control over people’s minds led to control over material things. As a result, the ruling party and its members dominated without possessing formal property rights, while the production of the ideology and the molding of a “new Soviet citizen” was conditioned by a number of incoherent, diffuse and omnipresent actions by representatives of the Communist Party, administrative units and ordinary people. Routine resistance prevented the complete disappearance of private property relations. Despite its formal non-existence in the Soviet era, private property did exist, albeit vested in a specific cultural form (e.g. in the practices of pseudo-market selling, exchange and inheritance). Such forms of routine resistance in the Soviet period were one of the factors that contributed to the political reorganization of the early 1990s. The ensuing difficulties in the implementation of private property relations that followed were largely due to the resistance of the ‘material infrastructure’ from the Soviet era. This material infrastructure continues to influence routine resistance, for example, people do not want to own collective property or they evade payment for it. As a result, housing as a material object has become one of the important causes of the unsuccessful market transformation in Russia. Empirically we draw on the descriptions of Soviet housing practices in the academic literature and the data collected during many years of observations in St. Petersburg and Blagoveshchensk, in a village in the Amur Region.