In the 1970s, machinist Yevgeny Rudakov was living in a communal apartment with 30 people in north-central Moscow where “there was always a line for the toilet.”
He was also in line for his own apartment, through the institute where he worked. Finally his turn came and he and his wife were given a two-room apartment at 16 Grimau Street.
Built in 1957, the four-story, 64-apartment building is considered the first “Khrushchevka,” a kind of prefabricated, low-rise apartment block that was erected in the tens of thousands across the former Soviet Union and came to be called after then-Soviet Union premier Nikita Khrushchev. The colloquial term has come to apply to almost any late Soviet five-story residential building.
Illustration: Mountain People
Now 16 Grimau Street, along with up to 7,900 other Soviet apartment blocks in Moscow, are to be torn down, in what is to be one of the largest urban resettlement programs in history.
With the backing of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has declared the program an “absolute necessity” to replace aging housing.
He promised the replacement apartments would be on average 20 percent larger.
However, to Rudakov it is just another example of profit taking precedent over heritage.
“This is the first housing block that Khrushchev built. They don’t have any regard for this now,” he said of his home. “Money comes before anything else.”
He added that he did not “know why Putin said” to tear such apartment blocks down.
“The building is good, the walls are thick,” he said.
Many residents have joined him in speaking out, fearful that the government would build huge housing towers rather than comfortable neighborhoods and resettle people far away from their current addresses.
Many of the Khrushchevka buildings could be renovated, they said.
The demolition project is driven by politics and profits, analysts said.
In addition, the federal legislation to give the Moscow City Government power to knock down entire neighborhoods has worrying implications for the rights of residents and small-business owners. Residents who do not sign an agreement to transfer ownership of their apartment within two months are to be taken to court.
“They are forcing people out, like under [former Soviet Union premier Joseph] Stalin,” housing advocate Lena Bogushch said.
Opposition advocate and former lawmaker Dmitry Gudkov said that the legislation would allow the government to tear down not only Soviet prefabricated apartment blocks, but also nearby “analogous” buildings.
When asked how the fate of nearby buildings would be decided, the author of the law, lawmaker Mikhail Degtyaryov, told TV Rain that a city commission would simply “take a neighborhood and circle” the whole thing for demolition.
“The law allows the program to be realized not in the interests of residents, but in the interests of the construction lobby,” Gudkov said.
Since Sobyanin took office in 2010, Moscow has tackled several huge urban development projects. It has refurbished Gorky Park, opened the Moscow Ring Railroad and started a 120 billion rouble (US$2.15 billion) renovation of 1 million square meters of streets. It has encouraged the demolition and redevelopment of gigantic Soviet industrial areas.
However, the program to renovate five-story buildings, as the city euphemistically calls it, would be by far the largest undertaking yet.
Although the city has yet to list the buildings that are to be demolished, Sobyanin has promised that 25 million square meters of residential real estate — more than 10 percent of the city’s housing stock — would be torn down. An estimated 1.6 million people would be resettled.
The city said it is to spend at least 300 billion roubles, but independent experts have estimated the actual investment would be 3 trillion roubles.
It is not clear what kind of buildings would replace the Soviet housing.
Moscow’s chief architect declined to comment. The mayor’s office asked for written questions, but failed to answer them.
Ubiquitous throughout the former Soviet Union, Khrushchevka buildings stand as testaments to a paradigm shift in Soviet policy and culture. Under Joseph Stalin, “Stalinist empire” architecture glorified the nation with grandiose forms and most new housing projects were individually designed, ornamental, spacious brick buildings reserved for the Soviet elite.
The majority of the population lived in rickety barracks and crowded communal apartments, sharing toilets and kitchens and bathing in public steam baths.
After Khrushchev came to power, he declared that the architecture of the past 20 years had been full of expensive excesses that were “causing significant harm to the economy and hindering the improvement of residential and cultural and social conditions for the working classes.”
Instead, the state should develop unembellished, prefabricated housing that could be erected cheaply and quickly, with the goal of giving every family its own apartment, he said.
Thus began a three-decade housing drive that was unprecedented in human history. It ushered in a new, industrial approach to construction: Several different designs for prefabricated apartment blocks were tried out in the Cheryomushki neighborhood, where Rudakov lives, as was a residential district layout — minimizing through-traffic and maximizing green space — that would be repeated throughout the country.
Working mostly with concrete panels and other factory-produced components, brigades of laborers competed to see who could put together the huge apartment blocks the fastest. One team managed it in 11 days.
According to the Russian state statistics service, the amount of housing built by the state jumped from 26.9 million square meters during the second five-year plan, from 1933 to 1937, to 152.2 million square meters from 1956 to 1960 and 227.6 million square meters from 1966 to 1970.
From 1955 to 1964, a quarter of the Soviet population, about 54 million people, received their own apartments. By 1975, the state had built 1.3 billion square meters of housing and it continued to build in huge amounts up until the Soviet breakup.
For the first time, large numbers of people had private housing in the city. This huge resettlement marked a boost in quality of life, a change in living habits and a cultural shift that was commemorated in works including Dmitry Shostakovich ‘s operetta Cheryomushki, named after the neighborhood where the first Khrushchev apartments were built.
“Look the hallway is ours, look the coat rack is ours. The whole apartment is ours, ours. The kitchen too is ours, ours,” sang the main characters in a 1962 movie based on the operetta.
Olga Kazakova, an art history doctoral student and director of the Institute of Modernism said one theory is that along with Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation policies, the privacy allowed by Khrushchevka apartments contributed to the rise of dissident activity, such as samizdat (the copying and passing of banned literature by hand), in the 1960s.
In addition, the new housing was fairly low-density and its common areas and green space facilitated socializing among neighbors, said Nikolai Yerofeyev, a philosophy student at University of Oxford who is writing his dissertation on post-World War II Soviet housing. He also owns an apartment in a Khrushchevka that will probably be torn down.
Of course, such mass-produced housing had drawbacks. The height of functionalism, Khrushchevka were architecturally monotonous: Rectangular, five-story boxes with evenly spaced windows, balconies and staircases. The ceilings were low and single-room apartments were typically only 30m2 to 33m2, while two rooms were 33m2 to 45m2. Elevators and trash chutes were shunned as a costly extravagance.
There were complaints about sound isolation and heating in the winter. Some included strange innovations, such as a small niche beneath the kitchen window, separated from the outside by only a few centimeters, meant to function as a refrigerator in the cold months.
The five-story buildings were designed to last about 25 years. Most have served longer, with mixed results. Retired dentist Sofa Shkolnik, who lives with her husband, Felix, in a five-story apartment block built in 1962, said she is warm in the winter and can barely hear the neighbors.
The building, which is surrounded by green space with apple, cherry and pear trees and several playgrounds, is on a tentative list of blocks to be torn down.
Shkolnik fears they will be resettled to a high-rise building or moved far away from their daughter, granddaughter and great granddaughter, who all live nearby.
The city has promised to resettle residents within their districts, but some of these cover large, incongruous areas.
“I love modest housing — a small building, close to the earth, so I can look out the window and see trees and people,” she said, sipping tea on a stool at the tiny kitchen table, a pot of borscht on the stove next to her.
Since the water pipes were replaced, she added, their building “could serve for a while more.”
However, Felix said the sewage drainage system had not been replaced and had burst a pipe twice in the past decade.
“We’re on a state of alert in case it breaks in another place, because the utilities are old,” he said, adding that he had drilled into the concrete panel wall to find it was disintegrating.
Sobyanin argued that the five-story buildings are too difficult to renovate, since the pipes for plumbing and central steam heating are built into the wall.
“Even if we do some sort of renovations in these buildings, in 10 to 20 years they will nonetheless turn into hazardous housing,” he told the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.
The quality and condition of five-story buildings varies widely. While many were built with concrete, others were built with bricks, which are typically sturdier and more heat-efficient.
The most dilapidated Khrushchevka buildings in Moscow have already been torn down, Yerofeyev said.
He said the program is an attack on “low population density, [which] apparently is too big a luxury in Moscow now.”
“The argument that they are in bad condition structurally is not convincing, especially since there are massive projects to reconstruct Khrushchyovka buildings in eastern Europe,” he said. “There are many methods of how to deal with [aging prefabricated housing] and of course tearing it down and building a new tower is not the best one.”
In one notable example, Stefan Forster architects in Leinefelde, Germany, knocked down the top floors of eight Soviet apartment blocks from the 1970s, stripped them down to their concrete structure and outfitted them with new windows and balconies and ground-floor gardens as part of an urban regeneration project.
Forster said renovation costs depend largely on how much is rebuilt to modern construction standards, such as better sound isolation requirements.
“In principle, prefabricated apartment blocks are suitable for conversion to affordable housing,” he said.
However, Moscow is reportedly not up to the difficulty and cost of such a task. Earlier this month, the respected business newspaper Vedomosti quoted an unnamed official as saying the city had decided that building new housing would be cheaper than renovating.
According to official statistics, half of the residential buildings in Moscow are in need of major structural repairs and only a few dozen have been redone.
Another reason might be political, as Sobyanin and Putin are both likely to run for re-election next year.
Political analyst Dmitry Orlov said that as long as residents are not moved too far away and small-business owners are fairly compensated, the new program could boost electoral support in Moscow by 15 percent for the mayor and 7 percent for the president.
He based this on how a smaller resettlement program under former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov had “changed public opinion [and] allowed him to preserve a high level of trust over the years,” he said.
Housing advocates’ main complaint is that the program is mostly about money, and both developers and the city stand to make a handy profit.
They cite an example of a partially completed program started in 1999 to replace 1,722 five-story buildings. For that scheme, the city contracted private developers, who built new tower blocks, set aside 30 percent of the apartments to resettle residents of the old buildings and sold the rest.
Vedomosti quoted a source in the mayor’s office as saying the new program would free up a large number of land plots that would be sold to investors at auction.
The devil will be in the detail and specifically in what kind of housing is built and where; new residential towers in Moscow are often as tall as 25 stories, leading to less personable neighborhoods and more traffic congestion. Already, Moscow traffic jams are among the worst in the world. Housing density will almost certainly increase, given that that five-story buildings now occupy 8,000m2 to 10,000m2 per hectare, while city norms allow for up to 25,000m2 per hectare.
“They haven’t told us what technologies will be used in the new buildings, how they will look, and the quality of modern construction in Russia is not that high,” Kazakova said.
Maxim Trudolyubov, editor-at-large of Vedomosti, said the program’s results would depend largely on whether private firms or a state construction company build the new housing.
“Private companies will need to sharply increase the amount of square meters that exist in Moscow, which will choke the city for good with torrents of people and transport,” he wrote in a newspaper column.
For now, residents face an uncertain future.
“Where will they put the people? That makes us uneasy,” said Anna, the Shkolniks’ daughter.
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