Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mark B. Smith. Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. xii, 240 pp. Glossary. Abbreviations. Charts. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $40.00, cloth.The Bolsheviks are often cited for abolishing private property upon coming to power, while Khrushchev has conventionally been credited with orchestrating a massive shift toward providing separate family apartments four decades later. As Property of Communists reveals, these facts are not entirely true. Nor are they categorically false. Presenting a meticulous comparison of three periods-the final stages of World War II and reconstruction, the last years of Stalinist rule, and the Khrushchev era-Mark Smith formulates two key arguments. First, individual ownership persisted after the Revolution, and secondly, the July 1957 housing campaign that Khrushchev launched was not a clear departure from previous rhetoric and practice.As Smith demonstrates, state responses to wartime destruction formed the foundation of the postwar housing program. Within this context, official support for the separate apartment, already evident in the 1930s, swelled, and standardized designs and prefabricated construction techniques emerged. In addition, financial investment increased, the labour force became better trained, and new administrative entities ensured that resources were more effectively channelled to construction needs.Despite such advances, before the Thaw, the separate apartment remained a construct of public culture rather than the basis of an expansive policy. Asserting that the end of the Stalin period was as crucial as its legacies, Smith contrasts the capriciousness and disregard for the populace that Stalin exhibited with the commitment that Khrushchev made to rationalizing construction, radically increasing the amount of living space, and improving housing administration. Ultimately then, the provision of millions of new apartments during the 1950s and 1960s would not have been possible without several essential antecedents and the dedication of Khrushchev.To these factors, Smith adds another critical element in the development of the postwar housing program: autonomous reactions to the housing crisis. Popular responses were rooted in a strong sense of individual ownership rights fostered through official directives like the 1936 consolidation of revolutionary-era legislation that had made property acceptable. Economic planning llirther encouraged this sentiment by factoring in a blend of individual and co-operative construction to compensate for the dearth of state resources. Also significant was the existence of different forms of tenure. Citizens could own personal property, a de jure form of individual ownership that accounted for about one third of the urban housing stock (p. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".