Navigating the Housing Bureaucracy in Late Soviet Moscow: A Housing Order as a Document of Socialist Desire

Europe-Asia Studies. 2024. Vol. 76. No. 8 . P. 1280–1298.

Полухина Е. В., Карпенкина Я. В.

Many scholars have drawn attention to the large housing programme at play in the late Soviet period. However, this programme did not solve the housing shortage, and the housing order (zhilishchnyi order) remained an object of desire for Soviet citizens. This document was an official guarantee of accommodation in the USSR, where there was no housing market. Based on archival sources and interviews, this article focuses on the history of the housing order and people’s strategies for obtaining it. It reveals the specifics of the public housing delivery system and the means through which ordinary Soviet citizens navigated its bureaucracy.

This article was prepared within the framework of the Basic Research Program at HSE University. The authors are thankful to the team behind the project ‘Social Anthropology of Institutions of the Late USSR’, especially to Galina Orlova, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov and Roman Abramov for supporting and developing the ideas reflected in this article. The authors are also grateful to students Maksim Shulga, Aleksandr Pashchenko, Evgenii Vlasov, Maksim Gurin, Ruslan Khasanov and Tatiana Malchugina for help with the data collection and preparation.

Ключевые слова: история СССР, housing policy, социальная и жилищная политика, ордер, late USSR

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