Pilipenko, Igor V. (2023). The Main Approaches to Studying of Housing Construction and the Housing Issue in the USSR (Part I). Ekonomika i Upravlenie: Problemy, Resheniya (Economy and Governance: Problems, Solutions) (ISSN 2308-927X), April, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 4–22. (in Russian).

Abstract

The peculiarities of housing construction in the USSR within the planned economy determined the fundamental difference between the housing sector of the Russian Federation presently, other post-Soviet republics and countries of Central and Eastern Europe, on the one hand, and developed states, on the other hand. It is the dominance among households in the former countries of outright homeowners (with no mortgage) whereas the majority of households in the Western states either rent their dwellings or have a mortgage. However, most of contemporary studies have often overlooked this fact, which considerably influences the standard of living and the structure of households’ expenditures when international comparisons are performed. In this article in two parts, we consider approaches from the beginning of the 20th century to the 2010s to studying results of housing construction and the housing issue resolution in the USSR. Taking into account the results of pre-Revolution publications on the housing sector in the Russian Empire, we identify five general approaches in the Soviet professional literature and main features of Russian (post-Soviet) and foreign studies. This article reveals that underestimation in scholarly works published during last 30 years of the contribution of individual housing construction in the USSR, the activities of housing construction cooperatives, kolkhozes, housing construction in rural areas as well as not always balanced assessments of the qualitative progress in the housing sector during the 20th century prevent from obtaining the comprehensive picture of housing construction developments in the USSR and the thorough assessement of the current state of the housing sector in the Russian Federation in comparison to the Western states.