Revolution begins at home
In 1975, the officers and crew of Soviet destroyer Storozhevoy (Sentry) mutinied, under the leadership of their erstwhile Marxist political officer Valery Sablin, who steamed her out of Riga into the Baltic Sea with visions of recreating the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion, an idealistic uprising against what the sailors saw as the Bolshevik betrayal of revolutionary principles.
The inspiration for Red October
The uprising failed, of course – Soviet aircraft shot Storozhevoy dead in the water and it was towed back to
You mean I’m not entirely fictional?
All this I discovered while reading The Last Sentry, a 2005 book chronicling the actual events that included, of all things, an extended discussion of the Soviet housing system. And that got me thinking …
Does revolution begin at home?
In other words, does a society that fails to provide quality housing sow the seeds of its own overthrow?
Here are authors Gregory Young and Nate Braden describing Soviet housing (pages 63-68)
If there is one thing Russians can remember with crystal clarity, it is the housing they lived in and how long it took them to get it. Privacy was a scarce commodity in the
Blog readers know that along with several other University of Maryland adjunct faculty, I’ve participated in teaching Army housing staff about the Army’s Residential Communities Initiative (RCI) privatization of on-post military housing, and in that context I’ve visited roughly a dozen large posts around the country. As they say in the US Army, “housing is a readiness issue.”
It really is this nice: on-post military housing,
Quality family housing is critical to good morale for the service member. Especially when on long deployment, the service member needs to know that the family back home is well taken care of.
Here’s the Soviet military housing, circa 1975:
What the Soviets wanted the world to see
Each naval conscript reported to a training unit prior to joining his ship or shore station. When a conscript in the mid-1970s reported to a Northern Fleet training platoon, he found the buildings unheated in the winter, even though the temperature often fell to twenty below zero. His kazarma (barracks) slept close to a hundred men packed in two rows of three-tiered bunks. The beds were so close together that any infectious disease spread rapidly throughout the whole unit. Even sailors used to crowded conditions at home found life in the kazarma intolerable.
Soviet family housing, what remains of it
The latrines and washstands were outdoors, the former housed in a long shed with many holes in the floor. The mid-1970s conscript reported having to clean the latrines in the winter when urine had frozen to the floor and many of his drunken comrades had vomited there after a night on the town.
I don’t know about you, but I’d find it dispiriting to make a midnight visit to a latrine whose floor was frozen urine and frozen vomit.
Red Army barracks, long abandoned
He held no fond memories of this experience, though he did report that conditions improved when he got to his shore-based technical unit.
Of all the Soviet domestic problems, the housing shortage remained one of the most persistent. The situation under the tsars was dismal, and early Soviet leadership did nothing to alter the housing shortfall. In fact, Stalin made it worse. He invested significantly in heavy industry but failed to provide housing for the millions of peasants who left the farms to work in the new factories. Soviet citizens lived in communal squalor, and it was commonplace for several families to crowd into a single apartment. In 1950, it was estimated that each person had less than fifteen square feet of living space.
Among my rules-of-thumb-in-process is this: average home square feet per person is a great indicator of overall national wealth. I’ve written elsewhere about the evolving modern home – houses today are roughly twice as large as those of our grandparents fifty years ago.
Evidently the reformers of Khrushchev’s generation thought housing important, since after violently suppressing the 1956 Hungarian rebellion, they embarked on a massive building program:
A wakeup call for the Soviet system:
After 1957, Stalin’s successors built 2.2 million housing units per year. The results of this achievement were visible in every city. By 1982, per capita living space had increased to twenty-seven square feet.
Still painfully small: that’s a family of four in a room ten by ten, a living standard worse than one finds today in slums like Dharavi.
This improvement, however, only dramatized the shortfall for the millions still waiting for their own apartment. The tremendous quantity of construction did not keep pace with rising expectations. Soviet citizens continued to suffer the poorest housing conditions of any industrialized nation, and in the late 1980s an estimated 20% of all urban dwellers still lived communally. The waiting period for an apartment was indefinite; it could take anywhere from a decade to a lifetime if you lacked connections.
Scarcity breeds favoritism and invites corruption … and everyone in the system knows it.
Overcrowding also breeds resentment:
The Soviet authorities appeared to make no better effort to improve housing for service families, either in quantity or quality, particularly in such inhospitable areas as Polyarniy in the Arctic and
The price of substandard housing? A MiG 25 Foxbat
These conditions are so reminiscent of Winston Smith’s Victory mansions in 1984 that I think Orwell must have been imagining them when he was writing it. Orwell understood that you are what you live in; destroy the home and you destroy the will.
Most dependent housing was built by Soviet naval construction personnel and was extremely poor in quality. Letters in the “Letters to the Editor” section in Krasnaya Zvezda often complained of leaking roofs, poor insulation, use of inferior quality building materials, the absence of bathing or laundry facilities, and inadequate ventilation, water, and electrical systems. Often these shortcomings were only remedied by subbotniki, the supposedly volunteer weekend work details made up of military personnel. More often than not, servicemen’s complaints elicited no response at all from housing authorities.
A government indifferent to its citizens’ demands loses all claim to those citizens’ support. I’ve written elsewhere about the importance of validating slum-dwellers through things as simple as delivery of mail, which turn them from interlopers into actual consumers of government services – and hence citizens who have a right to demand more from their government.
It seems that the military hierarchy was aware of these problems and acknowledged them, but according to Belenko and others, it did not give them the priority they deserved. In Krasnaya Zvezda in 1974, Rear Admiral Sidorchuk (chief of the fleet rear services) discussed the housing situation for naval personnel in the Pacific Fleet in fairly frank terms:
“The party and the government are showing consistent concern with regard to improving the housing and living conditions for service families…. In the Pacific Fleet in the last three years alone, thousands of families have received new living quarters. There is a problem of maintenance, however. In isolated far-off garrisons there is often a lack of trained maintenance specialists… In some areas housing maintenance committees exist solely on paper and actually do nothing. This has resulted in problems which can affect the serviceman in the performance of his regular duties.”
Housing is a readiness issue, not just in military families, but in any kind of worker families.
Housing for servicemen in other areas of the
“To be promised an apartment was one thing, but to be given an apartment as promised, quite another. Eagerly and expectantly, I unlocked the door and smelled dampness. The floor, built with green lumber, already was warped and wavy. Plaster was peeling off the walls. The windowpane in the kitchen was broken and no water poured from the faucet. The bathtub leaked; the toilet did not flush. None of the electrical outlets worked…. Another lieutenant and I confronted the first party representative we could find, a young political officer in the same building. He was cynical yet truthful. The building had not been inspected as they had been told. The military builders sold substantial quantities of allotted materials on the black market, then bribed the chairman of the acceptance commission and took the whole commission to dinner. There the acceptance papers were drunkenly signed without any commission member ever having been inside the building.”
All apartments certified in tip-top condition
The authors suggest that the Soviet government’s failure to deliver quality housing likewise influenced Valery Sablin by confronting him with a Soviet reality grossly at odds with Soviet rhetoric:
Valery Sablin was a graduate of the most prestigious naval academy and a promising junior officer on a front line Soviet warship, yet the litany of his housing problems must be more than indicative of what tribulations all crewmembers of Storozhevoy faced with their families.
A room of one’s own became possible only when married – and often, not even then.
How many households per room? Soviet-era housing
After they were married, Nina met Valery’s family and the couple spent a month with them in
That’s a newly married couple, you understand. I presume they developed the equivalent signal of a sock on the doorknob.
Maybe something a little more obvious
A month later, they moved up:
After one month, they moved to the one-room apartment of an officer who lived upstairs but was deployed at sea. Eventually, they got one room in a barracks-like building for navy families. They shared a kitchen with two other families, had no hot water, and despite the presence of a wood-burning stove, they were always cold. The tin roofed building was, according to Nina, not insulated at all against the Arctic winds of Severomorsk.
When we look at the fashions of yesterday, we have to remember that people were always cold, clothing was expensive (so one suit had to do for several uses), and indoor plumbing was a luxury.
Before 1850, every home had many of these
When Nina went home to
Lack of housing creates family separation, which damages families.
Leonid Brezhnev, who ordered the Storozhevoy disabled or sunk
When his ship moved to
Their never-ending housing problems continued when Sablin’s ship returned to the Northern Fleet. Valery went ahead to find accommodations, while Nina and Misha waited with her family in
Seven years in the Navy, and multiple promotions, yet still living in what we would call squalor.
Even in the big city of
Fourteen years in the military
“We will bury you.”
Their good fortune was only a result of Valery’s promotion to third rank captain and the relative abundance of housing in
Did The Hunt for Red October begin in dingy Soviet flats?
“When he reached the
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