Ngl the micro-district hits really different when you're a kid. I remember it being so fun when all of the kids gathered in the park in the middle and we would play.
As if kids didn't play in suburban playgrounds? Now playgrounds are replaced with parking spaces because "genius" Soviet planners didn't expect that poor Soviet people would all own a car. And Russian cities are now also impossible to navigate without a car because of terrible public transportation.
It’s interesting that you say that because that’s what any American who was raised between 1950 and 1980 will say about the suburbs too! I’m really interested in studying and learning about the differences and similarities between American and Soviet mid-century life, and it’s crazy how, in so many ways, they kind of seem to be two sides of the same coin (that being said, there’s a lot that that sentiment does not apply to, as well, so I really hope that you don’t take this comment as being belittling or over-simplified at all!)
@@brotpros2306 bro the soviets dont exist any more... if you want to blame current lack in public transportation on someone blame it on the current regime and who tf even said anything about suburbs
@@NikELbErGErBergel Kid, I'm not your "bro". Soviet planners were terrible this is why there are huge traffic jams in each Russian city and they are impossible to live in without a car. They also destroyed all historic looks of Russian cities, they look the same. As for suburbs, I was responding to comment above implying as if micro-district is the only form of city planning where kids can gather - now in Russia all kids are behind a screen because playgrounds are replaced by parking spaces. At least the Scandinavins were smart enough to build underground parking in their 60s-70s projects...
@@brotpros2306 That's on the system in the sense that everyone owning a car is a US thing. Appropriate public transport would alleviate that. It's Russia now being more like the west and atomizing its citizens that has led to this, not bad city planning as most still active socialist countries rely on public transport.
@@LastBastion what makes you think a capitalist housing couldn't hold three generations of family? Look at India, Mexico, Brazil or any other capitalist, but non top-of-the-ladder economic predator country. Not to mention you actually project post-communist experience on a communist country.
Important thing was that the blocks were all unfenced, if you left the house you found yourself immediately surrounded by open alleys and greenery like in a park, wchich always was close by. The streets were never in the way, only small ones to get to the parking lots, so you didn't really worry about cars. I never had more than 5 minutes way to the store, to school, to the park, to any playing field. And we kids all knew each other even from different blocks because we were running around all over the place. I only appreciate it now that I'm older and living in a deeply fenced part of town favoring cars and streets above all else. It's a nightmare.
@@cypdashuhn1603 true but that's probably why 99% of the time these housing districts look so depressed and desolate. That's compounded by the buildings exterirors rarely being cleaned or maintained properly meaning they are mostly a dull murky grey/white.
@@thatguyoverthere9634 if one doesn't do basic maintenance for 30 years, yes buildings look very dirty. but in recent years many of those houses have been renovated, thermal seams refit, windows replaced and made uniform, walls cleaned and repainted. and what can you say, it looks really neat then.
I'm a Russian urban researcher focusing on constructivism and living in Moscow. Your narrative is surprisingly exact, neutral and not ideologically coloured about the Soviet architecture like other American stories. I really appreciate it. Your example with the movie is very useful to understand the Soviet approach. It was a real solution of the housing deficit at that time.
How did y’all build houses in the country side if there wasn’t any private property. Like if you build a log cabin, did it have to be approved by some government dude in some far away city, or was the private property ban relaxed in the country side?
@@nikob1712 you had to join a gardening comradeship (садоводническое товарищество) or a country cooperative (дачный кооператив). It wasn't anarchy there, "dacha" was pretty solid private property and was a subject of discussion.
@@nikob1712 there were private houses, you could build a house yourself if you didn't want to wait in line for state individual housing (an interest-free loan was given), the USSR did not prohibit having individual housing in the property. My grandfather built a two-story house in 1970 in the village.
@@nikob1712 in Marxist terms, Private Property is something one owns which generates wealth (factory, hotel, restaurant, etc) Personal Property is something one owns, but does not generate wealth (house, clothes, bicycle, etc) Private Property was abolished in the USSR and replaced with Public ownership.
A Russian here. The cities and such planning really give your place a unique atmosphere, it is hard to explain. Imagine coming outside of your house and wishing 5 minutes of walking you can get to your school, play soccer with your friends outside, and go grocery shopping It is very common for kids to play soccer outside and then hear your mom calling you out of the window for dinner :)))
Я думаю планировка советских районов действительно очень удачная. Если бы не депрессивный вид, было бы вообще шикарно. Еще можно было бы в центре каждого подобного района создать что то типо мини делового центра, и на окраинах - производства, что бы не обязательно надо было ездить в центр на работу, и перегружать транспорт в направлении центра и окраин.
@@ладно-н2с4й имхо, депрессивный вид у них стал сейчас, начиная с перестройки об этих (да и вообще всех походу) зданиях никак особо не заботились, не облагораживали, не поддерживали внешний вид. Ладно еще лихие 90-е, но что за упорное игнорирование этого и сейчас я не очень понимаю, в микрорайоне где я вырос, построенный в начале 90х, уже сейчас здания выглядят всрато. Обратный пример - сейчас живу в Праге, тут многие эти советские панельки знатно облагородили, переделали фасад и вообще крайне приятными сделали, покрасили разноцветно, привели в ухоженный вид, глаз радуется, хотя внутри видно что по сути те же хрущевки
@@LeonserGT И тогда то же не норм они выглядели. Однообразные бетонные (ладно кирпичные) коробки. Ну а сейчас они еще почернели, обросли убогими балконами. В нашем городе с ними хоть что то пытаются сделать, обустривают дворы, и улицы напротив них, меняют крыши и стекло, облицовывают этой штучкой (хз как называется), но большинство конечно не тронуто с тех времен. Но тенденция к улучшннию есть.
I think it is important to mention that a huge part of the Soviet union was in total ruins after the war. Building a lot of identical and pragmatic buildings probably was the best solution to get dwellings to everyone fast. I would think so anyway. I really don't know.
Moreover, there was also fast urbanisation in this century. USSR had housing problem before the war had started. And a consistent way to solve the problem appeared only in 50-60-s, where relevant machinery was developed. Many early chrushjovkas were build by hands of bricklayers, lol.
@@кнтн It's fascinating, and I love the concept of the micro-district that's connected to other micro districts/areas by mass transit. It also shows why private car ownership was a luxury in the Soviet Union, versus a necessity in the US. It also highlights why the sudden fall of communism created so much societal disorder. So, businesses invariably try to centralize to take advantage of economies of scale. That efficiency loss doesn't really matter when all of your stores and services are state owned: they aren't profit making enterprises, they're public services like the Police or water. But, once you switch them to bring privately owned (and my understanding is that this happened *very* quickly in the Russian Federation), profit becomes a primary factor and is going to favor centralization and the loss of some services from a great many areas. On top of that, private ownership now means no one is carefully balancing what stores and services are where. So if you relied on teh micro-district next to you having (I'm pulling random business out of my head) a barber shop, and that shop closes, just about anything could replace it. I mean, supply and demand will eventually balance everything back out, but the downside of a free market economy is that it takes a long time (years) for that process to balance out supply and demand.
Hi from Siberia!) will add two things: 1) in the Soviet microrayons each house has a yard - a place with many trees for children to play and adults to communicate. Now many yards are filled with cars, but in my childhood, children played different games in the yards - there were slides, horizontal bars, a sandbox, etc., and adults played chess, dominoes, just talked; 2) on the territory of Soviet schools there is always not only the school building - there is a stadium, alleys, horizontal bars, etc - children and adults could walk and play, in winter they went skiing on the school grounds. Visiting cities in Europe and the USA, I was surprised that parents are forced to take their children to a park by car so that they can play - because there are no such yards and schools near the houses.
I wonder why no one mentions the number of libraries in each microdistrict? We still have them - fortunately, capitalism has not yet reached them. Only in my area I have 3 libraries for adults and 2 for children around the corner.
yeah, love the desdcription. i guess it was afordable too. here in brazil i live in a rental apartament, wich cost 1/5 of my income and i dont evn get to know my neighbors. its crazy to see westerners describing soviet housing in a demeanor way when all we see around are the concept of "tiny house", "tiny loft"and even people who lives in a car or so.
I don't know where to europe you went, but where I live there's definitely small parks everywhere. I think the absence of parks is mainly in the really dense metropolitan areas of places like Paris or Rome. The US has this problem much more than europe, because their cities were designed around single family houses and car traffick. They absolutely lack public spaces, but have a higher rate of private gardens due to their large suburbs
I live in a rather small soviet style neighborhood in Tallinn, Estonia and it's very interesting to see in here how the older side of the neighborhood has Stalinka style buildings and how they gradually change to the Khrushcheyovka style and in the other end of the neighborhood there are also some high rise towers. However most of these houses are now very nicely renovated and don't look anything like the ones showed in the video!
@@CityBeautiful I don't know about Russia, but in former Warsaw-Pact countries the Communist era housing has been massively renovated in many cases, with buildings covered in bright colours. It's actually really pleasant to look at. Although that's definitely not ubiquitous, it's mainly true in capital cities.
"Panelák" in Czechia are renovated too with bright colors. The flats are quite often merging into a bigger ones so it fits todays needs. You can either have huge 140m2 flat in this type of building or build small 100m2 house, its really not that bad nowaydays. But the acoustic though...
Wow, being Russian myself I was surprised by this video neutral non-political view and factual correctness of all data. You can literally see how deep digging work autor did here. This is really a great overview, thanks!
IKR? It's so hard to find anything that provides just an objective fact based analysis of Soviet life. 30 years later and the west still froths at the mouth if something even just neuteral is said.
Even claiming to be non-political, the author makes the mistake of saying that the big Stalinkas were only for the party elite. This is simply impossible, given how many of them were actually built, especially in large cities. In reality, both party members and citizens of the "middle class", as we are now saying, lived in them.
yes but the middle class still lived much better lives than the working class, simply because of the amount of comformity they showed towards the system, which in turn rewarded them.
It's just intuition that says those houses were cheap solution for poor, in USSR they were upper-middle class housing just too expensive to ever fit for all. Mentioned Moscow and Leningrad were explicitly two cities where USSR kept the highest standard of living it could ever achieve so at least most of citizens lived in such blocks. In general these blocks were for the more wealthy 40% of society. Even at the best plans to 2020 USSR didn't hope to replace all defunct housing with block buildings from the video. Also, one third of people lived in countryside in outright favelas, government never built even the cheapest housing for them while forbidding any private building companies, so people lived in just what they did with hands from random materials(typically cowshit, straw and clay on south)
@@ShinSheel this is simply not true, USSR built more and faster in Moscow because of its population and because Moscow was a central. Housing however was a solution for everyone. Everyone got free housing.
Of course it is a naive statement and generalist to large extend. Blocks were extremely poorly made, once they gave you keys to it, you had a crew fixing it. Blocks are very ugly and cities with many similar blocks look depressing. Very often what was happening, entire parts of old towns were demolished just to build new blocks. I was born in Eastern Europe so I know how crappy their planning was.
We need to do this. We need the government to get a load of mass-produced parts and assemble them into a few dozen designs that are different on the outside and match local styles. 5-10 stories, lots of parks, public transport, bike lanes, schools, GP clinics, pharmacies, etc. Getting all of the infrastructure and services and building 300,000 units per year for 10 years would solve the housing crisis and cost less than £50B per year, which could easily be raised with a moderate wealth tax
@@adamo1242 You don't need to limit yourself to copy pastying commie blocks to build 300k apartments a year in country as big as UK. Poland with 40 million population built about 215-230k new housing units a year from 2018-2023 with no government policies supporting and and next to none regional poliies/new social housing, basically just private companies building on their own to sell. That's about as much as UK despite having 65 mil population and only 213k new housing units, of which 42k comes not from private companies (social housings 38k, local authorities 4k) What's needed is law that makes it easier to build new apartment buildings, especially tall one in biggest cities, as well as normal apartment buildings basically in every place that it fits. Law reducing influence Nimbys have over everything woud help two-fold: more apartments in biggest cities where they['re needed as well as other places to work at so you don't have to li London like everywhere - instead if it wasn't for decrepit politicians and problematic Nimbys you'd have high speed rail and many people could live outside of London and if they needed to be there for a meating or w/e they would get there. But from what I know even normal trains suck in UK, no new rail built for decades. Trusting such politicians that project of building 80k new apartments wouldn't fail even though they failed completely so far is irresponsible. Good law is enough to fix lack of housing with smaller risk of corruption. Then largest cities with absurdly expensive rents may either on their own or with central gov build enough affordable housing in their cities to simply force prices down like Vienna in Austria and rest of Austria did.
@@adamo1242 all a wealth tax is is taxing money that has already been heavily taxed previously. It punishes people who make good decisions and rewards mediocrity (or worse). Attitudes like yours disgust me. Make your own money, don’t be a c0w@rd and take from others.
I was a little disappointed this video didn't touch on "dachas" - Russian country houses. People were expected to stay in their little city apartment during the week and have a small plot of land out side of the city to relax and have a garden. At times, a personal garden was an important part of the food supply
@@judsongaiden9878 that wasnt capitalist conformity, it was government planned and executed. Conformity is what happens when government is allowed reign.
As a guy from Romania 🇷🇴 I used to hate this socialist blocks (or communist blocks as we call them here.) I was believe they look horrible with no design at all. However, after I start to travel to Europe and I saw that even in Sweden they was have them I start to appreciate them more. Nowadays in Romania we paint them and refurbished them so they look a bit better I saw this in Poland too. But of course if you don’t maintain them after 40 years they will look horrible (grey and depressing) and that’s not the communist regime fault! It’s the fault of the regimes that follow after and didn’t bother to even paint them! However the apartments are quite cozy inside. Let’s be honest, in this times most of the people in Europe they don’t afford a real mansion anyway so they are quite ok for me. Also people who are bitching about so much tend to forget something: this apartments in Romania they use to be for FREE! Not to say that after the fall of the communist regime the government decided to sell the ones still in the state property with a value of 2 fucking Romanian salaries back then! Try now to buy an apartment with 2 salaries! It’s one of the things communists did good that explain why Romania has the highest ownership rate of apartments in all Europe. It’s because of this communist apartments. In this days you won’t get a cola for free! Back then the government was much more interested in everyone having a home and a job and less interested in the architecture/design style. Being a homeless is much worse than having a small apartment and a job! Also I like that this communists blocks have gardens around them with trees and small parks, grocery stores, schools, etc. basically there is a community there. Which I don’t find with the new ones this days that they remove as much is possible from space around in order to cut the costs! No trees, no parks, basically a prison type of building! Yeah, and people blame the communist?! What’s the point to start building mansions with beautiful design that cost 100.000€ if no one can afford them anyway?!
Well the bigger portion of people arguing against what you tell seem to be believing that it is completely normal that some dude - who's making more money per week than actual working people make in a year - just buys real estate to plant some ginormous mansion for himself and then only resides in it like 30 days a year while having this plot of land und 24/7 surveillance. For these people it's absolutely legitimate that those rich boys most of the time didn't do shit to get their starting capital but were just born into a family which already was wealthy to begin with - often this wealth is accumulated by exploitation, tax evasion and outright fraud. I mean they shall think what they want but just because they live in a mindset that's effectively just a sequel to feudalistic structures of the past doesn't mean they're right to force their beliefs onto everyone else...
Imagine having your kids go to a school that's only five minutes away, by foot! Unthinkable in the US. It's crazy how we don't even realize how much valuable life time we waste with driving and traffic.
Exactly. It does have its upsides. And in general to plan for the people to go out and socialize, not to live separated in their lairs. In Hungary I had my pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and elementary school all within 10 mins of walk, like all of my friends.
As someone who was born and raised in a Khrushchevka as part of a "mini-district", I have to say, I was pretty happy there. It's a giant city block with dozens of buildings and lots of trees between them, no car traffic, there were multiple playgrounds and soccer fields or basketball courts. My school was a 5 minute walk. Local clinic was like 15 minute walk. Supermarket was a 5 minutes away. 3 of us lived in a 2 bedroom small flat and that was considered "lots of space". There were literally 4 floor plans and all my friends had one of those 4 floorplans, so when I walked into a new apartment, i knew exactly where everything was. Kind of funny. Oh, and all the modern pictures of those grey, bleak, run down buildings - that wasn't the case in USSR. It was well-maintained - freshly painted and masonry fixed every few years. Lots of gardens and flowers. It wasn't terrible... still was poor compared to spaces in American suburban homes and multiple TVs and cars.
Even when maintained (not always) those buildings where designed to look rundown and bleak with most of facades decorated with gravel or simple bare concrete patterns. The lucky ones who got painted were choosing between 3 colors for the entire 1/6th of the planet : shitty red-brown, puking blue-green and light-blue.
I still live in Khrushchevka, and all those who are crying that it was shait: if community is run down cest pit of alcoholics - then of course it is going to be in a gutter, but if community is at least half competent, they will arrange their living space to be maintained. The idea behind madness, just like who soviet union was good, execution and lack of forward thinking - well it brought that system down. With not a small nudge from west.
@@rogerdinhelm4671 I don't think they were designed to look like that. They were designed to look white, clean. And I don't know what you have against red-brown,and the other colours. The red makes me feel cozy and the other ones light the building a little bit up.
@@rogerdinhelm4671 the bigger problem was in the health hazardous construction materials that were widely used, and are still in place today, such as radon emitting gravel, asbestos, led pipelines .. ect. And of course there was no sound proofing, if you sat quietly in the living room or bedroom, you could hear and understand everything your neighbors were saying or doing, if the neighbor from above took his slippers off, every step he made barefooted would make a loud thumping noise on your ceiling.
Well I moved from the UK to Moscow and Live in a Khrushcheyovka on an old Soviet period block, I can tell you, it's amazingly convenient and really green, you really come to appreciate it, it grows on you!
I grew up in a micro district like this in Romania. This video made me realize that indeed most of my life growing up was within this districts as you had everything you need there
@@matthewgoodman7588 I was born in 2000, but I lived 14-15 years in micro district That was very convenient, you could see your school through the window, it was like 3 min walking to get to school Shop were nearby, 1st soviet planned shopping building and 2nd shop was built in 2000's Planned micro district had a larger space, but after the fall of USSR, government sold some space for private businesses (So, that 2nd shop covered forest view from our window and it was very loud 24/7 because of the shop's huge refrigerators under the window) There were 3 apartments buildings and between them there were playgrounds, it was convenient for our mother, because she could see us playing from the window Sometimes it was claustrophobic, if you paid attention that your playground is sandwiched between 2 9floor apartments buildings, but overall it was fine Some ppl say that this planned apartments depress them Some of them makes you feel that you live inside a wall, Attack on Titan XD
@@matthewgoodman7588 Apologizing for my English. I lived until I was 18 years old in a similar 17-story apartment building, built in 1987, in a typical Soviet sleeping area on the outskirts of Moscow. A supermarket was built into the house, a school 5 minutes walk, a metro station 10 minutes walk, a clinic 5 minutes walk, a large shopping center where I hung out with friends was also 5 minutes walk, although it was built in 2006. In my area there was a huge market, 5 shopping centers, a bunch of shops, stalls, eateries, mcdonalds .. We are still building such housing, as the majority of the population has no money to afford housing in America or Western Europe. Now I live in such a house ruclips.net/video/rkF4J4OA4jA/видео.html
@@matthewgoodman7588 Its very well planned, schools are close, there is plenty of parks and green spaces between houses. Its quite silent and nice to live in the middle of such districts. You can bash them a lot, but compared to the garbage they build today it was really good, the house is simple and meh, but the district plan is great.
@Царь Батюшка I'm not going to argue with you when you clealy lying by showing me a building made in 1991 (not 70s) with high class custom designed appartment which less than 15% of people in Russia can afford.
@Царь Батюшка Reread my initial comment. I didn't lie, because that's not what I said. More typical building series is Khrushchyovka which has kitchens around 5 square meter in size. Which is a new standart for HK kitchen sizes. I merely pointed out that in Russia - which is incredibly big, you somewhat think that it's justified to compare it to one of the most densely populated areas in the world with tiny land area.
Yeah they’re not the most visually appealing housing, but the design makes so much sense. I love how everything you might need is literally almost all nearby. The convenience is intriguing
a small number of things in the Soviet Union were more efficient or better than in the West. But overall almost everything there was a disaster. That's why it all collapsed on itself so spectacularly.
I grew up in Yugoslavia, which had similar housing policies, now living in the West. The apartments in Eastern Europe were equal size as the ones in the West of that time, and bigger than the newly built Western ones. Also, in the socialist countries I never saw an apartment without a hallway/entry room, which is so widespread in the West (entering directly into the living room). Next, no building put a shade to another, even if you lived on the first floor you had sunshine...nowadays, with urban mafias, it's all stack next to each other. I'm grateful to have experienced that lifestyle, new generations will never know what they missed.
As an American living in Russia here's my take...... I used to own a house in the US and hated the idea of living in an apparent. First off most apartments I had rented were wood, so you got a lot more noise from your neighbors. Of course living in the burbs I had to take my car to buy most everything, but I never thought much about it. However I now live in a somewhat newer (but not brand new) Russian apartment building. I've gotten used to it. First I'll say noise from neighboring apartments isn't too bad. Yes, you do hear your neighbors sometimes, but it's not the same as in a wooden apartment building and I don't really notice it. Second what I do REALLY like about where I live, is that you can get everything you generally need for living within a 5 minute walk, and a lot of stuff is within a 1 minute walk. Generally the bottom level apartments have all been converted to stores. I can even buy stuff to replace a faucet or change the locks on my doors from stores a couple minutes away. It's super convenient.
@@MrLiquar I know a bit of Russian but I'm not particularly good at it. My wife is Russian however and my son speaks Russian. A lot of Americans seem to think that you will be treated poorly in Russia being an American. It's actually not even slightly true. I mean like every place else you can meet the occasional person that rubs you the wrong way, but the vast majority of people are nice enough.
@@zemlidrakona2915 This is great that you get treated like that. Of course, all countries have their own fair share of *ssholes . I am sure this opinion on russia will change someday in the future. If you speak a bit of Russian, how do you find work, do you work online or teach English? Is it hard to find job in Russia without speaking the language?
From the video, it may seem like living in such environment would be a dream to this day, but since the collapse of Soviet Union, some governments of the newly independent republics had no resources and time to maintain those buildings, and people still live in 50 to 70 year old houses without any renovation. Source: I live in a former soviet state, Kazakhstan.
@@DostoenVnimaniay almost every government in post Soviet countries has resources to buy houses in Western Europe and US. But they don't have resources for their own countries
This type of blocks planning is a luxury in capitalistic countries. And you forgot the silence and relaxing atmosphere like in a village, instead of noisy traffic 24 hours
I grew up in a typical micro district. As a kid I didn't notice or care all the buildings looking the same, built out of the same gray concrete panels, they were just normal homes. My parents were safe to let me wander around the district, because you could walk almost everywhere without crossing any roads, there were stores 1-2 minutes away and my school 5 minutes away. There were 3 playgrounds right outside my apartament building, it was a 5 section, 5 floor building built in the 1980s.
@@lukazupie7220 в те времена об этом меньше думали. Не стоит забывать о том, что потребности людей меняются, а также то, что в западных странах тоже не было современной звукоизоляции.
@@lukazupie7220 чтобы не слышать улицу достаточно заменить окна с деревянных на пластиковые (это массовый опыт), так что ваше замечание абсолютно бессмысленно, так как не зависит от строения, а зависит от времени.
I'm an American who has been to Russia several times, staying a few months each time. I have to say that the micro district model is kind of awesome. There are children who play in the courtyards, buses and consistent and affordable transport to get you everywhere (and I mean everywhere), and access to grocery stores, food, bakeries, and other shops within a 3 minute walk at all times. It is AMAZING to not need a car and have access to food and transport. Not everywhere, but many people take good care of their apartments because they own them and care about how they look and function. I lived in a block with probably 1,000 other apartments and it was quiet! Access to things like this is so rare here in America and I think we could benefit from a little bit of this. Great video.
I live in a post soviet courntry. I don't really know where there are there microdistricts in my cities. Maybe they are only in the major cities. From what I've heard, public transport isn't that great and especially consistent in other post soviet courntries. Many people rely on marshrutkas which are bad and that is because the official bus systems lack funding. I'm my country it is great but in other post soviet countries in Caucasus and Russia it is bad. Accessing to stuff fast by foot is great but it is always like that if it is high density. There is nothing new. Yes people take care of thier apartaments a lot. But the problem is that if it is not thier property (corridors or the entrance) they don't care of it too much. Because of quite cold winters and the terrible ouside look, most want to renovate the building. But some people for some reason refuse it and it is hard to get the permission do the renovation.
I live in Russia, here i live at microdistrict in Moscow. I studied urban science a lot by myself and at the university, that's why i can tell you something. Microdistricts is very ineffective in terms of land use - there is a lot of unused land there. Also, they were not designed to accommodate lots of private businesses - you can find a grocery shop there, bakery, but outside of that there are little suitable places for restaurantes for instance. After that this districts are very monofunctional, we call them "spal'niki", that can be translated as sleepy districts, cause the only thing that you can do there is sleep - that causes enormous transit out of the districts at mornings (just not enough workplaces near home). And the one more - they are so similar to each other so there is no feel that it is "your space", there is now territorial identity, people do not give a lot of value to their district because there are a lot of the same one. It's not the complete list of disadvantages of microdictricts, but for me it's enough to build blocks instead
@@jokubas3391 Tirana-Albania is solving this with electing a property administrator from the inhabitants and collecting maintenance fee from each unit. If they decide to do renovation they can apply to the municipality and they will get a grant for 50% of the total value of the renovation. The mayor, Erion Velia, studied political sciences in USA and EU Integration in UK.
I actually really like the planning put into the city design. Having everything available on foot sounds seriously awesome, and making and keeping the commitment to provide housing for all is a noble idea.
"Everything is built like a block in the USSR!" Walks around home town in Canada in neighborhoods built in the 80's... ah yes, we didn't make any block neighborhoods at all...
Or gentrified neighborhoods in American cities. Although the gentrified apartments tend to try to look "trendy" they all look the same, plus they tend to be built as cheaply as possible.
as a person who lived and lives in the remnants of these cities...I just love how the soviet style city planning involved a lot of vegetation in their street plans. Every time I go pass one of those areas I feel like i can breathe again. Every time I move through the newer parts...everything feels just jammed so tightly together that it crushes you down.
Every block has quite a lot of free space inside with houses on the outside. That free space which was usually taken by trees and other plants or shool/kindergarten before, in newer blocks is a few more buildings. My current home was built in space inside the block (which was very big because of ground quality in center, so still a lot of free space) One thing i loved before is being able to go to 16th floor and see most of district.
@@wumi2419 yeah a lot of places here,between the buildings got sold to private contractors and they erected new buildings there. Yeah still some free space, but although I'm no fan of communism but I do prefer the old city planning. But that was also connected with controlled city population. I know a guy who researches that era, and he said that usually every municipality would be built in such a way that there is a balance between city and village population. To the extent that you needed a permit to move and live in the city if you were from the villages. Someone might say that's really oppressive, but when you look at it now... cities are overcrowded and villages are getting abandoned and forgotten.
@@NikolaNevenov86 it is much harder for villages now because internet exists. Almost no villages have cable going to there and other ways of getting it are expensive, unreliable or both. And a lot of current society is built around internet. Cities being overcrowded also bring huge traffic problems. Plans did not include so many people having cars, so there's not much place for parking. Inside blocks it is very normal to have half of the road taken by parked there cars
Depends which developer was building and how expensive/ how far away from city center the houses are. And cities grow, those "big slab" soviet buildings were once standing in bare fields, now they are surrounded.
My mother's family: She, brother, Mother and Father received from the Evil and Terrible Soviet regime a four-room flat in a newly-built house in 1980. Her parents had been on the waiting list for housing for five years. Her Father worked in a factory as Machinist-Lathe. Her mother worked in a steel factory. A this flat is now worth a 35-years mortgage with avarage workers salary...
Soviet Firearm Philosophy: Simple, easy to manufacture, mass production is key Soviet Housing Philosophy: Simple, easy to manufacture, mass production is key
@@ansonang7810 actually, you didn't need to afford a new one. If you (really) need a bigger house, for example you have more kids on the way, you apply for new apartment and you're put in queue. One it's your turn, you're moved to a bigger apartment. That's more like my parents got our 3-roomer.
i live in poland, and seeing that every block looks exactly the same, that scenario is very possible. Thanks to the soviets, i dont have to ask my friends where the toilet is, since every apartment looks the same.
@@JakubB2000 they look depressing only due to dilapidated state they currently in and the lack of maintenance. A bucket of paint makes it lot better. Not to mention the spaces in between were looking like a garden when it was properly maintained, too.
4:30. No. The big houses were build not only for party elite. My grandparents have recived an apartment in "big stalinka" becouse they were cientists and engineers, as well as all their neighboors in this building
This is generally a stupid thesis in the video, if you count how many of these houses have been built and how many not only "party elite", but even just officials existed.
Look, in USSR 1% of population controlled 4% of goods. In modern Russia it's 51% of goods. USSR was the country of true equality. Yes, Stalin was cruel, but he BUILD it for future generations. And we fucked it up.
My mothers family lived in one of these microdistricts in Kabul called makroyan. It was built in the 60's by the soviets and I've been to makroyan in Kabul and the houses still stand up remarkably well despite their age and the war that devestated Afghanistan. It definitely still is the best place to live within in Kabul in my opinion as it actually has some greenery and is less buzy and poluted that the rest of the city, i do think these microdistricts could serve as a way of solving the housing shortage which many countries have without destroying traffic but I highly doubt that most governments are competent enough to do such a thing without either completely undercutting the amount of public transport or taking an eternity to complete it
Wow! As someone from that area, I'm amazed how accurate and well balanced this one is. Usually, westerners don't bother with details when talking about day-to-day life topics in USSR. However, I should point out few things missed out. 1. No mention of high push towards district heating and hot mains water supply in these houses. Larger area would get it's heating and hot water from big boiler house or electric power plant (waste heat utilisation) few km away. Which apparently is far more efficient than running individual boilers in every household. 2. Quite often people were awarded with small piece of land on the outskirts of the city (or further away from it) where they could do some gardening or grow homegrown vegetables. Or in some cases it would've piece of land where you could build a holiday house. Ps. The address in the film you mention is an interesting coincidence - it's not some generic street name (after some leader or significant person) it is 3rd Builders street.
@ Sometimes you might have some of your crops stolen. But since it was so common, there wasn't that much stealing before second half of the 80's. In terms of caloric intake, most Soviets were on par with american counterparts. However, americans invented fast-food chains and drive-through restaurants. And started eating way too much and moving too little. Communal gardens exist in modern day Britain and not a lot of looting here.
@ im actually impressed by this video and got me thinking, everything have a good side no matter what the ideology. taking the good from both side is better. micro district with modern fiture and connect them with mass transport system.
@@royk7712 You might be surprised that the people who referenced Communism most successfully have been Faschists... Unless you count the Germans polling well enough in 1883 to have their demands (public Healthcare, disability pay and retirement funds) implemented before election day and failed to gain any seats.
@@royk7712 The Soviet Union was a better place than people would like to admit. by the 80's it was actually pretty great from what i heard. disappointing to think of what it is now... the breakup really destroyed Russia
@@theduck3876 sorry for bad english well my mother leaved in 80`s she wasn`t available to buy any good clothing because they all was the same for like middle or typical figure in her country house they have to make glue for wallpapers themselves from like grain or something like that because there was any available wood for the this house was gathered on the railroad there was a lot of abandoned shack s main beams was made of old wooden railroad ties that was thrown away by railroad workers after they were changed for concrete ones cars was... well volga for example was made in 60`s inspired by ford from 50`s and it made to the fall of ussr in 1991 without major changes to the design so basicly 40 years old car in 1990 ussr is the place where government tells you what do you need and it will produce respectively to that so if government thinks that 40years old car for you is fine so you will drive 40 years old car if government thinks that you don`t need good clothing with a wide variety of colors and forms so you don`t get it of course government itself would produce better products for themselves that are not available for masses because government is not some kind of plebs right
The micro district idea is actually rather neat, as it allows for essential services to be nearby (cutting travel time and reducing need for transport infrastructure), as well as being modular, allowing for fairly extensive expansion... Thinking aloud, this could maybe be adapted, with a micro district with regularly used, easy to provide services in built (I.E convenience store, medical clinic, primary/secondary education...), whilst several micro districts come to form a larger district, which would have a centre where less frequently used services are located. This could also allow for different variants of micro districts based on need (I.E, residential, commercial, industrial...), allowing for a variable district makeup, without needing to vary the modular plan too much...
You don't need to ditch capitalism to obtain that, almost all European cities, post Soviet or not, achieved pretty similar results of having every necessity in your own neighborhood accessible by foot. You want to go to a shop walk 5 minutes, another shop in 7 minutes, haircut 10 minutes, clinic 15, school 20 and so on...
This is now the vision in Paris, creating/reinforcing the "15-min city", where you should be able to find everything you need within that time on foot. Brussels is interested in adopting it, too.
You basically just described a a neighborhood in New York. Micro district= neighborhood, bigger district= borough. Theres a reason they call them "corner stores" because they are usually on the corners of residential buildings. I've been to keiv as well as alot of different cities in america, and New York and seattle seem to be the closest in comparison to keiv, but you have to remember that america focused on greater metropolitan areas rather than inside the city itself. Essentially the city would be primarily commercial, retail, and industrial zones with some old residential zones as well, and then the majority of residents would live in suburbs and simply commute to the city. The reason for this is simply because america is capitalist. People had their own money, so they could spend it to buy a house that a private person built. In communism, no one is going to build houses for their people for free. Communism is all about doing the bare minimum, hence the tiny apartments.
venomkiler America lives in suburbs because of cars. Whole American life built around car. Everything by car, motel, diners, cinema, the whole Las Vegas architecture is design for cars (just signs on the road with hidden shed at the back), I’ve seen even atm drive through. Madness. People get fat without moving, barely walk, become very antisocial. Suburbia is social disaster, dream sold by car producers.
this has long and deep effect on Chinese urban planning, the idea of micro district and standardizing is still the prominent way we build our cities now.
Not just Soviet Union, but also Hong Kong, Japan... It's more confusing that a lot of Japanese scholars translate 小区 (microdistricts in Chinese) into Danchi (団地), though I do believe microdistricts and Danchi are somehow connected
@@grantourismo0109 Legally all land in China still belongs to the state. By what you may refer as 'purchasing a house/apartment', you are actually granted with only 70 years of usage rights of the property. And since the country itself just over 70 years old, the policy's hidden kerfuffle have not yet emerged. Nobody clearly knows how their properties would be treated when the time is up. Is it inheritable? Or your grand-children would have to ridiculously pay for the property again? All in all it is a worse-than-capitalism sh*tty policy with a socialism charade.
@@grantourismo0109 And talking about 'treated like investment', yes and no. Depending on the accessibility of public services, properties defers in their values. So your house is de facto investment, but de jure non-investments as implied by the government saying 'Equal rights to rental tenants and real estate buyers' ambiguously, which in reality is a total nonsense, especially during this COVID-19 thing. Many tenants from the hot zone were expelled from their former rental homes by local landlords, and in some cities you are not even allowed in unless you have certification of ownership of real estate in that city in the opening months of the pandemic.
Actually Soviet cities are perfectly positioned (better than most cities in the West) for green transition. They are designed to be dense (hence can be much more efficiently heated), in places where they have been preserved, they are orders of magnitude greener in terms of surface area dedicated to greenery, they encourage walking (hence less car traffic), socializing and sharing. In Eastern Europe they have started retrofitting these buildings with elevators when none existed in the original plan and adding more insulation. In right hands, Soviet cities can be turned into amazing places to live, and are hidden gems of city planning waiting to be rediscovered. P.S. When watching this film pay attention to how few of the images of Soviet cities are shot in spring and summer, most of them are shown during the winter where they look more derelict than they actually are. This is an old tradition in the West.
Also Soviet cities weren't build with cars in mind unlike American cities. There were very few parking available and people had to rely on public transport (which is a good thing if you ask me).
I agree and disagree with you at the same time. Yes, public transport was a almost alone type of trip in city, but at the same time Soviet Union's designed a wide highways in cities such as Leningrad's highway and Prospect Mira in Moscow. They thought "great future will begin soon and everyone has a private cars for trips". P.S. I'm from Moscow and I don't hate Soviet Union's architecture. I think it had a lot of advantage and disadvantage.
@@CityBeautiful I agree and disagree with you at the same time. Check my comment below and then you understand why. P.S. I live in Moscow and I learn architecture history in my city:)
They were some later cities that were in fact planed with massive car usage in mind, like Naberegnie Chelny (and Pripyat, if i remember correctly). Imagine LA filled with rows of similar 9 story panel buildings... Strange city (but wonderful people). Also, USSR mass transit was less then stellar, with poor reliability and extreme overcrowding.
Yeah as an upside the public transport is much better developed. In many Soviet cities you can comfortably live without a car, while in US in many places human life without cars is impossible, it's just endless seas of concrete. Although maybe some credit for the reliability of the public transport I use goes to post-collapse government.
I live in Poland and honestly, the buildings from the 50s and the 70s are much better than the buildings built by private investors, not to mention urban planning. What's been happening to our cities since the transformation is just a shit show, investors keep building more and more buildings while no one takes the responsibility to build more public infrastructure, so the same roads, hospitals and schools that were built in the socialist era are now supposed to somehow provide services to many more people.
@@egord9101 It seems the older people hate the USSR and everything they did. But many young people (like myself) are seeing that it isn't so black an white. Like Agnieszka said these new buildings and apartments are often built in the most bizzare places where you 100% need a car, there are no new services there. And honestly looking back at communism while Poland is getting richer the quality of new housing seems to be lower.
The same situation in Russia. More and more tall houses are built in smaller areas, infrastructure comes a lot later if even comes, schools and kindergartens are frequently finished after court hearings. But the quality of houses are better in average and apartments have better planning and are more convenient.
This video actually made me appreciate this sort of housing a bit more. Sure, they are ugly as hell, but I am always close to everything I need. (I'm from Latvia, btw)
@@billyrst I definitely can't. I probably wouldn't see a noticeable difference between Riga and Moscow. If it is possible, then you'd have to travel around the former Soviet Union a lot and have a good eye for detail.
The nice thing is that during Soviet times even those who wanted to have a garden, but had to live in a flat often got a peace of land in suburbs where they could indulge in gardening and growing vegetables. Moreover, the best of all, these areas also had public transportation.
@@carkawalakhatulistiwa it also depended on how big your family is and on your kind of work, for example, my family of 7 people worked at a factory that produced dishes and we got a five-room apartment with air conditioning in one of the rooms on the fifth floor next to the factory in Tajikistan. my family had to leave there after the collapse of the USSR and leave everything there, can say that the Tajiks kicked us out when everyone was divided, nationalism increased
As someone who lives in a suburb in australia, I wish our urban planning was as conciderate as this. You have to drive everywhere and everyone goes to the city for work and back out after. If you put all the jobs in one place, why are you wondering why there is so much traffic?
@@sten260 thats the urban planning part of it. Areas have to be zonned to have large office buildings or shopping centres put in them and by putting majority of those offices within a 10km radius (as the bird flies) they force all the surrounding people to congregate in a relatively small area. This causes ridiculous traffic and is a big problem in LA too from what I hear.
@@johnolsen8772 nobody is planning that stuff, it just happens naturally because private investors buy the land and they build the office spaces and malls etc next to center
@@sten260 zoning laws are still a thing though. The government won't build sky scrapers but you still have to be allowed too. For example, a few apartment buildings were declined from being built because the local infrastructure can't support that many more people from living in the area. Councils also have their own rules and in my area, they recently changed so you are allowed to build studio flats on your land if you have the space to increase density.
*pulls out the grill* *MURICA INTENSIFIES* Look, we shit on eachother constantly, right wrong, and my country has a whole host of faults but.... Dude. Open air cooking is pretty f'ing amazing.
4:21 My grandmother was a junior school teacher. My grandfather was a sailor. They were given a flat in a "stalinka" building of the class you describe "for the elites", right in the center of the city.
Sailors were elite. My whole family is sailors and there were so many perks because of that, even access to special shops that sold jeans and authorised trips abroad.
Grandfather of my friend was a sailor and got stalinka apartment too. My grandpa however was considered as a dissident (not supporting communist ways) and got prison cell.
Разные бывают ситуации. В июне 1941 года один из моих дедов служил в береговой артиллерии Балтфлота в звании полковника. Не матрос, но близко ;). Первую отдельную квартиру получил в 1955, уже после хрущевского сокращения. Дети уже успели вырасти. А семья другого деда жила как раз в сталинке... вот только на четверых была одна комната.
Author is definitely wrong about Stalin buildings were intended for communist elites, but countries elites lived there: scientists, artists, musicians, conventional store directors etc.
Quick note: Khrushchovkas' prototype was designed in France, and still can be seen in some cities, that were affected by WW2, like Brest. Also, keep in mind, that modern photos of Khrushchovkas you see are.. modern photos of buildings that were built in ~1970s and stood with no upkeep for 20 years following the fall of USSR. Same buildings in former GDR aged much better.
Khrushchovkas was built before 1970. I guess you are talking about Brezhnevkas. Yes, they look extremely ugly. But some homes get renovations. After renovations it looks pretty
They may have stood, but the amount of electricity and gas required to have a normal life in an apartment is too costly in the current age. I worked on modernizing these buildings in Kyiv from 2013 to 2018. The buildings required some structural improvements, but it was possible, in that economical climate, to improve the buildings in a cost efficient manner. However, the people living in those buildings had to pay a relatively small amount to have their building improved. It was noticeable that in areas where Russia had crushed the people more, getting these projects going was near impossible. Inhabitants who now we're owners of those buildings, still were of the opinion that the state has to pay it for them. Not just 80%. Kyiv was easy, Holodomor areas less so.
@@QnA22 Outside of typical 'Russia did it' argument, modern Ukraine had (and afaik still has) a shitty communal law that requires you to have written approval from 100% of building's owners to form a Homeowner Association and manage your building together. This includes owners of commercial premises like shops or offices located in this building. And a typical commieblock building can have up to 1000 flats with 1000 separate owners. And single one can ruin all your efforts. So, most buildings are still managed by the descendants of Soviet state communal management companies, but now they work on commercial basis, i.e. extracting profit. No surprise owners don't want to do anything with their building and wait that city or state does it for them - it is legally impossible to do anything.
@@QnA22 That's true. Our bills for small apartament (45 sq.m.) in khruschovka were the same as we pay now for big appartament (100 sq.m.) in new house (built around 2010). And it's much warmer here in winter. Lost of heat in khruschevka is insane
As a Western European this not only happenss with Soviet eastern european cities, I see American suburbs all the same too, they look like hundreds of copy and paste neighbourhoods, so weird.
I don't know what you're talking about. Suburbia in Russia just looks like a bunch of ugly clustered apartments boxed up in square city blocks with some type of community center in the middle. Most of American suburbia's are residential custom homes with a yard. There are some developers who make "cookie cutter" single home neighborhoods but they will be different than other developer neighborhoods. Apartment complexes are typically 3 stories and different from one to another too since each are made with different developer concept and designs. And those complexes are scattered around the single home neighborhoods. Inter-city sky rise apartment buildings can be as low as 3 stories on the outer edges up to 50 stories high or higher when closer to the center. So I don't see any real comparisons to the Russian formats other than the public housing districts which is a small region where maybe 1 percent of the metro population would reside at any time.
@Царь Батюшка I guess it's a different mindset between communal living compared to private living. Most homes do have backyard fencing for privacy and public parks are within driving distance. The commercial districts are typically grouped together in shopping centers instead of being peppered around the micro-communities. All the homes around me do look different though and yards are different looking(yet close to the same size) but I see your point in the comparison of contrast between yours and mine. I'm not saying one lifestyle is better than the other, but what I am saying is that they are not comparable like Rapa Nuii was insinuating. So basically you are agreeing with me but in an argumentative way.
Australian and American suburbs are copy/paste too. The individual houses are in some ways different, but architecturally desolate. The suburbs are identical in what facilities they have and that they are like some entry-level sim city on easy mode. And always car-centric. They are desserts of culture and beauty.
@@danellis-jones1591 That's my biggest issue with American cities, there are places simply not designed for you to walk through or skate through or even bike through - like it was designed with cars in mind, instead of humans. Other than that i tend to like the architectural style, definitely more than the soviet blocks, but this is a significant issue that i have
In my own studies, I've come across a few interesting related points: 1. In the 30s, a poll showed that housing was not a big concern for people. Yet, housing was a high priority for the state considering the rapid development in progress. 2. The housing of the Kruschev era was meant to be temporary. Economic stagnation led to them being used far longer than their intended lifespan. 3. Like "The Irony of Fate," it wasn't uncommon for Soviet films to make fun of aspects of the Soviet Union or even the political elites.
@the Achaean i also heard they were meant to be temporary, i think they wanted to replace them later but now they are here for far longer than they should've been here
Interesting, at 2,) I would mention that most "temporary" thing from the Soviet Union last 200 years. Our prefabs were only meant for like.. 50 years lol. But engineers tested the buildings and they say it's good to go for the next 200 years. A socialist microwave - that my aquiantance/guy - has lasted 40 years and it's still warms food like the same day it was made. Same with temporary school and hospital buildings. They are eternal. Today things that are supposed to last long.. don't really last long. Consumerism. They usually last like 10 years at best sorrowfully. 3,) People of the 60ies weren't pussies though. A rich soviet man didn't got offended cause you said he is rich and he got money for better shoes. You shouldn't mouth anyone, sure, but they didn't care. The people of the 60ies were much harder man, after the war. They didn't care about much. Cynical parodies and such were part of the culture. BUT. Not in the 70-80ies. Things changed. What was okay in the "dark-socialism", were not allowed in the new/light socialism. Every propaganda became subtle too.
@the Achaean my mother's parents were construction workers, both had 60+ years of experience behind their backs, were involved in construction of everything from make shift wooden and metal housing for sientists in the field, to few undisclosed military objects (one underground, one some gov thing in the middle of some big city). But mostly they were involved in construction of housing. So, currently I live in a house that was made in 1977 and was planned to be there for only 20 years. Was part of "clearing the middle of the city for renovation" program. All people who were ment to be moved into it were either construction workers (that's why we're here now) from other regions, or residents of city center who were ment to be moved back when renovation is complete. So, it was placed here only for 20 years, but from the start it had renovation plans for every 2 (minor) and 20 (big one) years, and was approved (as well as most houses) to house people up to 120 years, and for use for other means for 200 years. Just a "small" back up plan in case something happens to that renovation program. And something happened. It's a concrete reinforced with steel, it's a human made mountain with ton of caves in it. With proper care it'll last, well, not forever, but for a damn long time. And it's very easy to maintain it because how it is constructed. The only big downside is that local company, who supposed to take care of this building, was evading (using forgery and holes in laws) its duties from 1991 till 2010, so first 19 years of its existance. Thus house missed not only a lot of minor repairs, but also its frist big renovation, and the next one by modern plan is due 2033-2038. >_>
@the Achaean it wouldn't surprise me if the USSR just said that to try and hide their economic failings a bit by overselling the fact that those housing blocks were planned to still be up, even though they were supposed to be temporary. Like if you passed in a draft of a picture for art class because you didn't get the full thing done
Your third point is slightly true, during Khrushchev’s various thaws it was acceptable to criticise, but not too much. Then like someone has already said, the 70s and 80s were full of oppression from the KGB with Andropov’s suppression of dissidents and then monitoring of popular discontent. I do say tho, your other two points are spot on and the black market during the 70s and 80s was nicknamed the “second economy” and sold all sorts of Western goods so even though the state was still very authoritarian (70,000 people received a formal warning from the government during the 70s), people still had a lot more access to the West than their parents/grandparents in the Stalin era
I grew up in one of these micro-districts in a huge 10 floor building in T-shape. And living there was extremely comfortable, everything I ever need was within 2-5 minutes from my door. There was a supermarket built into the actual living quarters, lots of restaurants, a hospital, police department, storage units/gatages train station, kindergarten, clothing shops and even a bunker underneath the place I lived (but it wasn't maintained good, so it was halfway broken, so me and other kids used to sneak in and explore it) also all those building used to look the same from outside, but after fall of Soviet Union when people started becoming richer than started changing outside of their own apartments. So now most of those buildings look like badly made mosaic. Also all most of my friends/relatives had the same type of apartments in different cities.
@Brisbane Socialist Don't really get what you are saying, but it was very efficient. It had all types of things you would need like drinks, foods, clothes, toys, body wash type stuff, things for the garden. After living in the USA for a while I could say that the supermarket is more efficient for an everyday busy life. Because let's say it's 2 AM and you want some muffins, you can quickly run out and it will take you no time at all. So yes, I would say it was very efficient.
@Brisbane Socialist Markets produce the things that people want to buy. People "need" very little, so once you start making blanket value judgements about what kinds of things people need, you reduce people's abilities to actually actualize their own desires and dreams. Also, markets clearly produce way more food and essentials than a planned economy anyway - welfare helps the people that are on the margins and homeless shelters make it so basically nobody has to be on the street. Freedom does mean that some people will just be degenerates though and not do shit, the difference is they're not shipped off for forced labor.
Communist is a classless, stateless, moneyless society, it has never been built so it you can't say it doesn't work What you're talking about is socialist counties, and they "fail" because of the total economic and military pressure from greatest capitalist powers
I want Mario to pick up a Communist Mushroom power-up one day, but to be honest, he'd probably look the same, with his red clothes, working class overalls, his hammer, his stomping boots, and his clenched fist that can break bricks. Might cause the music to change to Mushroom Kingdom's rendition of The Internationale, though!
Well, I gotta say that the Soviet or Communist city planning was waaaaaaaaaaay better than what happens nowadays. I live in Romania and until age 7 I've lived in an industrial town that was built according to the Sovietic rules described in this video. Actually, the place were I use to live was called "Micro" followed by a number. If you compare the "micro-raions" with the current situation of city planning, you will be surprised to see that today, private investors are building without any care about life quality. The main interest today is MONEY. People might need a plot of green grass, maybe some trees around their place, there are some small things that can greatly increase the overall happiness of the people living in the new apartment blocks. But the investors are like: "whoaa... did you just said that you need a park in your neighborhood? get your ass to the country side and stfu. Instead of being grateful that you've received a parking lot for your junk, you are asking for parks with benches and trees and play grounds and stuff? pfff.... "
👍💯 Exactly my thoughts! Same in Kiev, Capital 🤦🏼♀️ of Ukraine :(( And the air is getting worse:( ... But those greedy capitalists building those high birdshits close to each other with "nice" view on some-guy-in-underwear-chilling-in-his-kitchen in the birdshit next to yours:)
What most people forgot is that they work hard to put people in house in Russia after 1917 and Romania after 1947 and 1977 earthquake. Before they have just one room, no electricity, toilet, kitchen and live like animals. Of course we speack about the 99% of the people who was poor. Now, after we drive from imediat need of house, we can thing about some improuvements in houses, amd of course the old one don't fit to our needs
Same in Hungary. What I appreciate the most in socialist housing, that there are usually larger spaces between the buildings. So you probably won't see you neighbour's butt when you look out on the window of your living room. Indeed, the ten (or more) storey buildings from house factories are not so good, but many newer housing estates are hell of a lot crappier.
@@cherrytofu8939 I agree but my favorite is social democracy Socialist policy, Democratic free elections, people can decide to ditch Socialism if they want to as well
Some tweaks: 1) the architecture of soviet cities wasn't built based on a socializm ideology with restricting private property. It was built to fit the needs of fast urbanization caused by fast industrialization. At the very beginning of young Soviet State it was among the urgent problems to solve - Russian Empire was definitely an agroindustrial(more agro then industrial) country with huge amount of rural population (Even in this video you can see the difference between late Russian Empire style and Stalin's epoch). Also ask anyone from post-soviet union about "kommunalka" or "obshchezhytiye". 2) After WW2 Soviet cities lied in ruins and once again the problem of living space was among urgent one. Khrushchyovka was an answer - cheap, unified, fast-to-built (especially panelled ones). Moreover - they were built as a substitute and were planned to be in use for 5 years, as a temporary measure, until things become better, and new better buildings with appartaments will be built and people will move to them. 3) indeed, soviet architecture school experienced heavy influence of western schools. The "Mikrorayon" or microdistrict is a compilation based on a famous Unit d'Habitation and modulor ideology. In conclusion, among other achievements (both good and bad) architecture of soviet cities is the unique case, where very prophetic ideas has been realized in improper environment)
Yea his emphasis on this vague 'equalising' idea is nonsense. The main reason for this housing is rural people (the majority of the population) moving to economic centres upon industrialisation. The choice of having everything nearby, as well as communalism, is just one of convenience and good design no matter the context.
At least these cities were planned, here in Brazil most cities are a jumbled mess of high-traffic avenues, overlapping bus lines, slums, luxurious high-income neighborhoods and sidewalks that barely fit the lamppost
Exactly! I was born in Ceará and can confirm.. But interesting: I moved to Brasília and, to some images shown in this video, I couldnt tell the difference hahah... funny that reading Niemeyer biography, it says his work was only influenced by european design...
brazilian main cities are mostly from the colonial era, they grew naturally you basically described the south zone of Rio, which is a byproduct of said natural growth, but in the very same city you have Barra da Tijuca and Recreio, two heavily planned (and depressing) neighborhoods I'd rather still live in the mess that the south zone is than to need a car to buy bread
Do you know Curitiba? For me, this city is awesome, coz there are great gardens parks, forest, a lot of trees and the air is fresh, except in downtown... kkkkk, but is gucci in relation with others south american cities
@@JoseEduardo999 Outside of historical cities and the old town of the main cities, very little of a place like Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo could be described as colonial. Also, to call Barra and Recreio planned in the comment section of this video seems to imply they are planned in the way soviet raions were, which they most certainly aren't outside of the system of avenues. Their entire urbanization of that region is based on private enterprise plopping buildings and gated communities for high income people expected to drive where needed.
I LOVE THE MICRO DISTRICT IDEA!! That’s so brilliant to have your housing and amenities within walking distance. Imagine having a public transportation system taking you from that cozy place to work and back? That would be incredible!! Cars would become non necessities!
@@lefunnyN1 Lol, I live in the glorious West. We have no shortage of old asbestos buildings and dirty buses that are underfunded and never come on time. It's not like any of that is unique to communism. The idea of not having to spend an hour on a dirty bus every time I need to buy groceries would be a life changer.
I live in an area in Finland that clearly took great inspiration from Soviet planning. My flat looks identical to the khrushcheyovka example and the area is easily divisible in micro districts with easy access to amenities such as grocery store, library, kindergartens and schools and lots and lots of different sports fields to all directions. I'm absolutely loving it, and it is true, I do not need to leave my district at all especially during these times of remote working. And when I do, the multiple methods of mass transit are literally at my doorstep taking me to the city centre fast via this arterial road, or alternatively I may choose to cycle following an excellent bicycle path. Although the building itself is cheap and ugly, there is so much beauty in the surrounding areas. It is like living in the woods or in a park, while actually living in a very highly populated area. When living in Britain, or even in a more traditional Finnish suburb, I absolutely hated the fact that to access any amenities one basically must drive a car, or at least take the bus. I think the Soviets were ahead of their time in this, my flat is allowing me to live in a very eco friendly way.
The biggest and most striking difference from living in a soviet city and a US city (NYC) is the vast amount of greenery the soviet city planners managed to stuff in between those housing. It's strips of housing, then trees, then playgrounds, then trees, then housing etc.. In New York the street scape is characterized by endless and varied stores and shops with nature pushed into designated areas aka the park and the social space is encased in shopping activity; even the European urban plazas are nowhere to be found with people having to hand out in Starbucks or a local McDonalds. In soviet cities, thruways (pedestrian and even driven) are mostly layered tree'd areas with those concrete building slabs peering out the top, with the commercial activity in this case stuck into designated areas, be it the corner store or the central shopping district.
that greenery is often not attended to, and filled with garbage. I don't live in Russia, but i live in Eastern Europe, and grew up in such a building. The problem is that they are ugly, and people treat them as such, there is no respect for your own home. Everybody throws cigarettes or even plastic wrappings out their window, and that green space near the block is filled with rubbish and rats. Also, the green space is not for usage, they are designed as islands to look at, but never walk through them, they are surrounded by bush fences, and as soon as you look over them you see the garbage. They make sense on paper, but fail in reality, like most things in communism.
i just visited dublin and it was similar to that, greenery EVERYWHERE, not just in certain little pockets. It's much more pleasant, especially compared to NYC
@@marius4iasi Soviet union fell 30 years ago and u still blame communism? How can u blame a system that hasn't been in place for over 30 years for not taking care of buildings and parks years after?
@@kkmarokkaan because I remember it as a kid, and it sucked. I also lived through the revolutions of 89, and the people rose up against it because it sucked.
Hello. A Greek living in Cephalonia island in Greece who has visited Gomel,Belarus six times (to spend time with my in laws). I live in 52 sqm,they live in 62 SQM. And the 10sqm difference feels like 20-25 because the effectiveness of the Brezhnev era flat they live is great. It's a 1978 building ,looking scruffy on the outside but tip top on the inside... Great and very informative video by the way....
One must remember that those Soviet buildings were much nicer-looking when they were newer; the realities of the collapse caught up with them. But even now, the more modern Russian buildings are much more well-connected to their surroundings than those in other countries. It's funny, I grew up in Russia, and I thought nothing could be more depressing than Khruzshevkas -- until I saw the US suburbs: flat and bland, chains and malls and parking lots, soooo many parking lots...
here in germany, rooms are 2,30 meter high. in chrustchowkas 2,60. stalinka 3,30. also here we look from our windows - into other windows. this did not happen with soviet houses.
@@David-cy5zu 2.30 meter high in Germany? I guess you have (a lot) more experience of life there than me but when I went to see family in Bavaria in two different appartments, the height was better than this (and I would have noticed as I am almost 2 meters high). One appartment was built in the 30s and one in the 80s. I also saw appartments of their friends. Maybe such appartments with ceilings at 2.30m exist but I do not think it is so common as it is more than terrible.
@@David-cy5zu I live in Khruschevka and height is 2.50. When I bought a new wardrobe I sterted to assemble it, it was liyeing on tht floor and then I suddenly realise, that I couldn't pich it up, because there would be not enouhgt space ( it is a corner section, 1.20*1.20*2.40) so I had do assembe it in upright position). That was actually funny.
@@pavelgordeev2631 HAHA :D But did you tilt in between walls too ? :) Diagonal etc. The best thing about chrustchowkas is actually compared to the west, that you dont look into other windows, but have a ``dvor``. Trust me, its really different in germany.
I still live in 5-storey Stalinka which is ~70 year old. My grandparents got it freely in times when country were rebuilding after WW2. And I like it. Pretty solid building. Build fully from the bricks, no concrete parts. 3+ meter tall ceiling. Very wide walls which prevent a lot of sounds from the neighbors. Etc. It is build so damn good that I believe it will stand another 70 years easily...
I'm from Russia. I received two apartments from my grandmother in a nine-story building built in 1963.The house was a cooperative (loan) and for 10 years you could pay for it, in addition to cooperative houses there were also free houses, and while you are in line you are given a hostel
Since you're stuck in them for many generations anyway, do you just make the best out of what you have and try to improve the environment by treating your neighbors (who are all stuck in the same boat as you) with dignity and respect, as "one with them", and as inseparable priceless assets (despite the noise and footsteps) by being best friends with them, always playing with them, and prefer and enjoy them to be there, or do they think your neighbors are burdens and would rather not have them there but the building still there so you get more space? So do you enjoy and prefer to live lifelong and multigenerational (sharing the building with your neighbors and their children for generations to come) in your condo (most Eastern Europeans own their unit) in a microdistrict, or would you rather live in a spacious leafy suburb with single-family houses or even on a grand farm house if you could freely choose and money was not a factor? Are you relaxed and totally satisfied from living in an osiedle? Also, how is your relationship with all the neighbors who totally surround you in super close proximity cheek-by-jowl? Do you think they are priceless assets with whom you enjoy, have great social activities frequently, and prefer to be with them, or do think they are burdens and wish they were not there but the building was so you get extra space? So do you enjoy and prefer to live lifelong and multigenerational (sharing the building with your neighbors and their children for generations to come) in your condo (most Eastern Europeans own their unit) in a microdistrict, or would you rather live in a spacious leafy suburb with single-family houses or even on a grand farm house if you could freely choose and money was not a factor? Are you relaxed and totally satisfied from living in an osiedle? Also, how is your relationship with all the neighbors who totally surround you in super close proximity cheek-by-jowl? Do you think they are priceless assets with whom you enjoy, have great social activities frequently, and prefer to be with them, or do think they are burdens and wish they were not there but the building was so you get extra space?
@@00crashtest In this house, many tenants have already changed and are constantly changing, buying an apartment.Personally, I'm tired of the city, but I live in the city only because of work
@@00crashtest you usually make the best out of the flat inside, but rarely do something to the common property. Neighbours... There are different people, we're friends with some, not friends with others and so on As for a surburb - definitely not in our climate. I mean you can use the yard only half a year, have to clean snow and maintain all around the year, outdoor pool is useless, and maintaining a private house in Russia is both expensive and worrying unless you have a billion dollars and have servants and guards for your palace.
I lived in moscow for 20 years and then in Northeast of US for 20 years. I want to say that while soviet buildings are ugly to look at the overall urban planning in large cities in USSR was superior. In most cities in US you need car, there is no other option, public transport is horrible, or , very often , not available at all. US houses are larger but in densely populated areas all you have is streets of 3 stories of essentially same houses/townhouses , roads and cars. There is no shops within walking distance, no parks. without a car you can walk miles and miles on exact same streets . yeah houses themselves are nicer, but living space around them is non existent. in Russia the multistory apartments themselves are horrible (often way worse than US projects), but you have a lot of green space, children and adult parks to walk around. City like new york has very few green spaces compared to amount of people living there. Moscow has huge amount of green spaces - large parks, small parks and simply courtyard squares everywhere. In us cities you typically have a few medium sized park for entire city, and thats it. Like boston commons or central park Us suburbs is another topic. But again same design -you cannot do anything fun if you just leave your house - there is nothing in walking distance. You need first get into car and drive somewhere
Meanwhile the government is murdering millions of people and starving Ukrainians as well. There is nothing good about communism and that is why communism has never worked and never will work. BUT AT LEAST WE HAVE OUR GREEN PARKS LOL ALL IS WELL NOW
@@russianman07 Well, you got slavery, genocide, riots, constant wars around the globe... AND NO GREEN PARKS. There is nothing good about US and that is why US has never worked and never will work.
@@grenadier6483 do you think mighty USSR could collapse? That's what we want you to think! Soon we will open our underground cities and whole world will learn the truth!
I still haven't seen it, but got hold of it as a project to watch whatever other countries watch on new year. Us Swedes watches Ivanhoe ruclips.net/video/G4xzNdTnESg/видео.html
@@ML-xp1kp in Russia we watch Home Alone every New Year too. It's a time for soviet comedies (The Irony of Fate is the main of them), Home Alone, Ice Age and so on (even on TV).
These micro districts are actually very green, like an endless Park with a few buildings strewn in. Very advantageous compared to the extremely dense and sealed ground developments we build in western Europe today.
yes especially when it comes to climate change and also mental health! having greenery all around is really good for your psyche, nature is very calming
@@pannihto7588 In my home city they require ZERO maintenance. In fact, since asphalt wasn't replaced for 20 years, it was destroyed by tree roots. The only maintained land we have are the guerrilla gardens created by babushkas. Nature all the way!
another Eastern European here... Thanks for all the effort put into this video and for all the documentation. However I must add some things. As somebody else mentioned in the comments, living in these kind of building is indeed atmospheric. The noise and the sounds are all a lot different than in Western cities. Also many of the neighborhoods are actually super green and they do have a peaceful vibe to them. I really dislike it when people from the West call these constructions dull or grey or identical. I mean yes, that is somewhat true, but that doesn't take away from their value. Whenever the socialists mass-produced something, they instantly became criticized (and still is for some reason, even though communism is 30 years in the past). But let's not forget that capitalism is also, even more so now, THE absolute mass-producer in the world. And the same people criticizing communism just seem to overlook this fact. As if mass-production is a problem only as long as the communists are doing it.
@@dannielz6 literally any american arguing againts "socialism" saw "socialist mass production" as a negative side effect of socialism. When all of their common products in the store are also mass produced, yet since they are made by "capitalist" that means they are better.
I live in khruschevka in Saint-Petersburg and I like it. My house is pretty old so the walls are thicker than the usual in khruschevka so I don’t hear anything from my neighbors! I also like that everything I need (hospitals, shops, bus stations, even metro station) is like 5 minutes away from my house on foot. Even if the kitchen is small, it is suitable for a family of 3 people. We also have a lot of parks, trees, infrastructure all around our district which is amazing. Even some people may say that these apartment buildings are ugly, they may look good is local management companies take care of them, as much as people who live in this houses. The houses also look good if they’re plastered and painted nicely! Also even if the house is not beautiful outside somehow it gives me such warm nostalgic vibes even though I was born after the USSR dissolution.
@@ASS_ault not really, it was built in 1961. Some early serial projects of khrushevkas have better characteristics than the newer ones (for example 1-527/1-528 I live in 1-527, though my mum lives in 1-335 which is made from panels and it has worse characteristics and it was built some time after) It is due to a law about emilitation of surpluses in projecting and building which Khruschev made, but before that they tried to make houses less expensive than stalinkas but not ugly and give it soooome details at least
same here, cheers from lithuania former ussr state. Not all here are rotten western supporters and love chaotic capitalism. I was born during ussr collapse, and still have insane nostalgia towards those times, maybe a bit comes from parents and grandparents who lived decent life back then, they werent in communist party or anything like that, but were hard workers and enjoyed equality and unity back then. I grew up in 1965 built brick soviets apartment, that was pretty unique for those times, since most were block based buildings, maybe it was yeah when ussr changed from khruschev to brezhnev era, so it moved to a bit modern ways of building, and i must say this building im living was amazing for more than 40 years, only started to have some problems in 2000s, but hey comparing to todays new buildings that collapse or need heavy repairs in 10 15 years its big difference. Brick apartments were superior to blocked if we talk comfort, sound isolation was way way better ( my grandma living in blocked and comparing them is crazy, you can hear so much behind those block walls), also during winter it was way warmer compared to blocks, and during summer its colder than in blocked ones. Also for westerns its impossible to understand how we grew up in those apartments and every day had 20 30 50 or even more kids to play in yards and playgrounds, depending on side of building (here in lithuania we mostly had 60-80 max 100 families in one building, i heard in russia/ st petterburg/moscow bigger cities numbers were way bigger), while in west if they lived in city centres it was just street and no playground, and in suburbans they had around few houses who they communicated, nothing even comes close to those adventure we had with our dozens and dozens of friends with all the nature between those buildings...
From Latin America, today I learned so much about your personal experience like ex-USSR urban citizen and Soviet Cities; maybe the city nearest to soviet urbanistic form in our land is Brasilia or Tenochtitlan hahaha. Thanks Rossiya!
@@NostalgicMem0ries You need to educate yourself, the capitalism in your country is far from being chaotic, and even in Russia the dissolution of Sovok has been very beneficial. Greetings from capitalist Russia.
All older buildings give off certain vibes. I am personally very attracted to many soviet and czarist designs because it gives you an glimpse of how people of the past lived really.
I love how historians often forget that Russia had 2 revolutions. Lenin did not overthrow the Zar Nicolas ll, but the provisional government led by kerensky.
@@mantis23101988 By the Grace of God, We Nicholas, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, of Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod; Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan, Tsar of Poland, Tsar of Siberia, Tsar of Tauric Chersonesus, Tsar of Georgia; Lord of Pskov, and Grand Prince of Smolensk, Lithuania, Volhynia, Podolia, and Finland; Prince of Estonia, Livonia, Courland and Semigalia, Samogitia, Bielostok, Karelia, Tver, Yugor, Perm, Vyatka, Bogar and others; Sovereign and Grand Prince of Nizhni Novgorod, Chernigov, Ryazan, Polotsk, Rostov, Jaroslavl, Beloozero, Udoria, Obdoria, Kondia, Vitebsk, Mstislav, and Ruler of all the Severian country; Sovereign and Lord of Iveria, Kartalinia, the Kabardian lands and Armenian province: hereditary Sovereign and Possessor of the Circassian and Mountain Princes and of others; Sovereign of Turkestan, Heir of Norway, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, Stormarn, Dithmarschen, and Oldenburg, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth.
I lived in a micro district in Minsk in 1980s. Our apartment had unmetered hot and cold water, same with heating in winter. Two schools within 10 minutes walk, a small shopping mall, childcare facilities and an easy access to public transport. My grandparents paid for the apartment in full from their savings and they were not rich by any means. So my parents had a mortgage free place for themselves before they turned 30.
🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻 🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝 ☝☝☝☝☝☝☝☝☝☝☝ 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍 СПАСИБО, ЧТО ОЗВУЧИЛИ НАСТОЯЩУЮ ПРАВДУ О НАШИХ " СТАЛИНКАХ" и " ХРУЩЕВКАХ" ☝☝☝!!!!!! На сегодня, посмотрев и пожив в новых современных домах 2020 года и им подобные ранее построенные - то скажу не только я, нл и все мои родные что это ГОВНОДОМА 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️ ☝ И ЛУЧШЕ КАЧЕСТВА ЧЕМ У "СТАЛИНКИ" И " ХРУЩЕВКИ" СЕЙЧАС НЕТ 6И У КОГО ☝☝☝😡!!!!!! А ТО, ЧТО И ИЗ ЧЕГО СТРОЯТ КОТТЕДЖИ - ТАК ЭТО ВОТБЩЕ МРАК 🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️! ПОЭТОМУ, ВСЕ КТО ОБСЕРАЕТ ГОВНОМ СССР И НАШИ СОВЕТСКИЕ МИКРОРАЙНЫ С БЕСПЛАТНЫМ И КАЧЕСТВЕННЫМ ЖИЛЬЕМ СТРОИВШИМИСЯ ВО ВРЕМЕНА СССР - ПЕРЕДАЮ ПЛАМЕННЫЙ ПРИВЕТ , УДАЧИ И ТЕРПЕНИЯ В БОРЬБЕ С ТАРАКАНАМИ, ТЕРМИТАМИ В ДОМУШКАХ ИЗ КАРТОНА И ПАЛОК, И ВОЗМОЖНОСТЬ ЗАНОВО КУПИТЬ НОВЫЙ ДОМ ПОМЛЕ ОЧЕРЕДНОГО ЬОРНАДА ИЛИ ЦУНАМИ 😁😁😁🤭🤭🤭!!!!!!
I lived in these apartments in Kazakhstan (4 different cities) over 7 years. The renovated old ones were generally much better than the apartments newly completed.
This type of blocks planning is a luxury in capitalistic countries. And you forgot the silence and relaxing atmosphere like in a village, instead of noisy traffic 24 hours
I lived in a Soviet style flat in Poland for the first 10 years of my life. We kept our building very clean and colorful. We planted flowers everywhere. I guess, as the saying goes- "how you make your bed, is how you're gonna sleep" or something to that effect 🌴
I spent half a day in East Berlin on a congressional trip while the wall was still up. There wasn't much in the stores, but there were flower boxes everywhere, and I was told it was a higher living std than Russia.
@@robertfeinberg748 definitely higher. My uncle was a mechanic serving in the army, stationed with his family in East Berlin. When they came over to visit they'd bring a lot of amazingly nice things, and I looked up to them, like they were from a different planet or something. He even brought back once, a couple of bananas. I remember as a kid I looked at that black fruit, and as I peeled it, and shared half with my sister, I was amazed at this new taste. Next banana I'd have would be in about 5 years from then.
@@napillnik I noticed that during my adult life bananas seemed to have lost their taste. I recently learned that it was due to a fungus blight. There's a video on it. As you know, bananas are the most popular product at W-M. I found they helped my digestion, but apparently they're actually bad for one's diet.
@@mwanikimwaniki6801 I know, right? :D This isolation was horrible. When I was reading the book "The making of the atomic bomb" or its sequel "The dark sun", I came across the testament of a scientist that left the USSR and started working for the US, and his motivation was that he just walked on the street and saw mountains of oranges on display right there, at dirt cheap prices, which to him was out of this world. I felt that. The USSR had cold winters all over, and bananas and other tropical plants wouldn't survive. Importing them would be very costly. We had plenty of sweets, like kakis, apples, pears, plums, cherries, peaches, all kinds of berries, etc. Just not bananas or other stuff that grows in warmer climates only.
Great unbiased video. Unfortunately we see Soviet housing criticized for it's unappealing facade rather then the close to complete elimination of homelessness that it achieved. This was great at highlighting both.
By 1980 only third of Soviet citizens owned an apartment, and by then it was already decrepit. You were often forced to move into an apartment with another family so yeah, imagine having some homeless failure living beside your daughter or wife? You tankies are so hilarious living in Western comfort pretending to care about Soviet homelessness. Go read a book kids.
Communist countries: We've eliminated almost all homelessness. Some idiot: But building ugly 🥺🥺🥺 When people have nothing to complain or criticize about something good, they'll make some stupid arguments like that. Then they'll turn around and call someone else a sensitive snowflake, smh
@@Veronica-zz7bp It was so good that people risked their life to escape it. Also you won't hear too much criticism from those time periods, thanks to the party control over communication and their habit of putting critics against the wall or into gulags.
I have lived in both a Stalinka (the larger variant), a Krushchyovka, and a Brezhnev era building. When it comes to kitchen, the ranking is as follows: 1. Brezhnev era 2. Large Stalinka 3. Krushchyovka (Although the difference between the latter two was very small!) I must say, this place has almost everything that a micro-district would need, with some exceptions as a result of being built between a railway line and a small village with a small river running through the northern side of the village.
Can confirm all of this. I'm from Europe and have lived in Russia for 6 months. In the 2 places that I lived (in Spb and Nizhny) I had supermarkets, schools, police stations, everything within a 5m walk, and the things that were too far, I could take the metro (3m walk, there is a metro every ~2 minutes from 5 am to midnight) or a bus (about 20 different lines passed by both my streets, both private and public owned bus companies, one every ~4m, identical ones every ~10-15m). Say whatever you want about the regime, but life there is much easier in terms of mobility. Edit: As pointed out in the comments, yes, unfortunately, it only applies in the bigger cities, just like in the rest of the world. And yes, Russia has technically part of its territory in Europe, although the cultural changes are big enough for me to consider it different from the rest of it.
The same applies to cities in former Yugoslavia. I live in Ljubljana in the 12 stories building that was built in 1965. Can't belive how Brezhnyev influenced our city planers. Buildings that are build after ww2 were built 4 stories and later 5 stories. I love how i can walk to the nearest shop, child center, school, post office, hospital movie theater, police station, senior center bar every 100 meters. Bus also every few minutes. But the distric sure didn't look good before renovation.
I live in a microrayon like that. And they're actually cool. What I've got within a 5 minute walk: a few supermarkets, a couple of schools and kindergartens, some bakeries and pizza/sushi places. Within a 10 minute walk, there's a children's polyclinic, 2 post offices, some private clinics, a public library. A 15 minute walk takes me to a polyclinic for adults and a gym. Two parks (one is with amusement rides) and a river within 5 to 15 minutes walk. I can get to a cinema within 20-25 minutes. There’re quite a few barbershops / hairdressers’... There're tons of places within a 1 to 20 minutes walk! I can't imagine living in an American suburb. You spend half of your life in traffic jams! Public transit is pretty good though still leaves much to be desired. But it covers most of my needs. I don't have to drive or even own a car. The architecture is not esthetically pleasing at all, that's true. But it's pretty functional. There could have been more different designs so that microrayons at least looked different. Most crtitisists call it "Soviet shit" but capitalists build the same "shit": esthetically their high rises aren't much better than the Soviet ones. Most people either can't afford single family homes or prefer living closer to where social activities happen. The ugly visual design is often commentated with a lot of greenery: trees, lawns, flowers everywhere. My city looks as if its highrises were sinking in a green sea. Many khruschevka districts look like parks with lots of thick trees planted decades ago. The Soviet city planning also provided for green belts between industrial and residential zones. In my city, one such zone has been cancelled or narrowed and is under residential development now. Capitalism!
That is very true!! Every word. I love how russian microdistricts just all in greenery and flowers. Its like you live in a park, what can't be said about new post soviet districts. Which I think could be easily called "Capitalist shit"
They look depressing as fuck. Unless they're renovated the winter in east Europe looks extremely bleak and ugly, no wonder the suicide rate is so high.
I suppose if that's what you're used to. I lived in Samara for a month, and I did not like it. In most American inner cities shops and things are close by. If you live in suburbs close shops really is not a priority, and you probably want a variety of choices anyway.
I live in a Soviet German "locker for workers" in the central micro-district. You were really able to synthesize your research into an explanation that truly speaks on the lived reality. I think a big factor in these tiny dorm flats - mine is one of 1.8 million identical units - is that it really was designed for us to just sleep and bio break in but we have opportunities for a robust life outside the flat. My building itself has a courtyard for the residents to touch grass, hang laundry, and plant in a raised bed. On the next block is a small park with a playground. The next block over from that has the kindergarten, another playground, a community center, a grocery shop, pharmacy, and multidisciplinary doctor center. I used to live in an American city that was addressing its housing crunch with tiny flats that didn't even have kitchens, but was just bulldozing all the park land and making absurd "loitering" laws. This kind of living is not sustainable without those opportunities to be outside in your community. Even just the walk 2 blocks to your housing block's grocery store is the fresh air needed to make tiny flat living tolerable. Going from tiny living box to transport box on wheels to work box then back in the evening... kills the soul, man. Not even owning a car because everything that's not 1500m from your flat is 200m from the transit corridor 500m away... that's such a load off! Since this kind of living forces us all out into common areas, I have developed connections with my neighbors that I haven't experienced since the good old Gen-X childhood days. Even though we are in a central district of a major city, I'm the odd man out because I lock my door! The cashiers at the block's grocery store know me since I'm able to just pop in for bread on the way home and know I'm still struggling with German, so they're patient and kind. I think one thing that colors a western view of these "standard buildings" 😉 is rental terms in most cities. The idea of having a generic concrete cube _is_ depressing when you can't paint, hang shelves, and will have to renew every year or two. The lease I'm enjoying now is essentially lifelong (cancelation on either side is quite a process) and I have the freedom to do whatever I desire inside, as long as it's returned to a white concrete cube when I move out. Once you pass by the other cubes and open my door, there is no question of whose flat it is! I find my living space to be very individual. This is the first time I've ever been allowed to have my own curtains instead of the provided blinds. With the need to purchase my own fridge, I got a very energy efficient one so my electric bill is pretty great. Despite the pre-fab construction that was replicated over and over across a good third of this world, my tiny Soviet box is genuinely the most "me" dwelling I have ever had.
Lol, the kitchen at 5:38 that you call 'tiny' is actually bigger than the kitchen in my family home in the UK, where my mum would cook for me and my 5 siblings! Americans must be used to very large kitchens. Also I really like the idea of the micro-district, I've always thought that's how cities should be planned normally
@@agustinvenegas5238 Its weird, but in the end it kills any variability. Theres one store in your district and store of the same size in all the districts around you. You feel trapped in uniformity and if you want somenthing different, you have to travel quite far. But hey, the schools, kindergatens, basic healthcare etc in your vicinity is awesome. And boring 🙃 But its changing now, every such a district tries tobdistingquish itself from each other (shops, cafes etc) so it feels somewhat more natural. Basically, the disctrict is fine, but not if there are tens of similar districts around you.
Here's a fun fact for you. The street with trees on it in the center of the shot at 8:36 is called "ulitsa Marii Ulyanovoy". It was named that in 1963 after Vladimir Lenin's sister Maria Ulyanova. But from 1958 to 1963 it was called "Tretya ulitsa Stroiteley", i.e. Third Street of Construction Workers. Incidentally, Irony of Fate protagonists both live on Tretya ulitsa Stroiteley (though the film was shot at a different location). Looks like it was Fate that guided your hand when you were choosing the photos to illustrate your video. :-)
Most of the Irony of Fate was shot in the studio. Mostly because real flat would not fit filming equipment of a time. Could be filmed in real flat with modern equipment, because it is more compact.
One beautiful thing about Soviet city planning was that I as a child could come home after school drop off my backpack knock on my friend/classmates apartment door and and just play right outside. This meant a GOOD CHILDHOOD, where we exercised independency from adults as well as legit frienship bonding with other kids. Everything was in such a close proximity to each other that we didn't have to rely on our parents driving us everywhere (not like we had cars lol) Unlike when I first came to USA as an exchange student back in 2006 to a small town in Michigan, I literarily had to wait for my host mother to arrive from work and take me somewhere and everything was in such a long distance and a simple idea of knocking on somebody's door was very unacceptable. The family that I was living with in the states had two little kids, and I always felt bad for them - you guys have no clue what the real childhood means. I would never let my kids grow up in America.
arktseytlin we did bike rides to local park but literarly were alone the whole time as no kids other than us were present in the park and michigan has some great frickin parks with the most beautiful trees i have ever seen
@@andrapik2709 As someone who came to the US as a baby, basically you came here when kids started not playing outside anymore. I'd say around the 90s was the last time kids REALLY stopped playing outside...after that, it went downhill to playing video games constantly. TV and video games...and even the kids TV is so stupid now. I am sure many older Americans know what I mean. Doug and Rugrats...or even Wizards of Waverly Place and Victorious...those were good shows...not they put drivel on to dumb down American kids. 2006 was about the end of things...such as kids TV being decent and not slowing the development of the brain. I would love to see them do an MRI of a two children of equal IQ watching Rugrats vs some new cartoon. The results would be scary.
@@daniilgergiev3999 except every new generation consistently has higher IQ scores on average than the last because education is getting better. Scary. In any case, I'll be here enjoying character and plot development in my cartoons and shows. Have fun eating fiber and watching the mentalist.
I grew up in Canada in a relatively poor family. Being poor meant no car to whiz around in, meaning my social life was much worse than the other kids at my school. The privileged people who influence change (or lack thereof) are blissfully unaware that their childhoods were premised on wealth inequality. And that's in Canada, where we sometimes seem "socialist" in comparison to the USA.
I grew up in Moscow and now I live in London. And especially this winter I have missed the comfort of Soviet apartments. They might look ugly from the outside but they are so comfy ones you are in and the most important thing is they are super warm compared to British houses and flats, on top of that you never have to worry about running out of hot water, it's literally unlimited. A colleague of mine, the same age as me (37), grew up in Manchester, not a small city by any means, but he didn't have hot water in his house at all, he told me they washed once a week. Honestly, I was shocked. The other guy told me, he fills a bottle with hot water and puts it in his bed to make the bed warm. It feels like some basic things have been turned into luxury in Britain.
It is not architecture, it is called “urban planning”. The soviet architecture is nice though, just google for Stalin architecture, or for soviet Houses of Culture. It is different from the European because most cities in Union were build in the industrial era, so they didn’t have the architectural background You can read some history about soviet architecture. There was a funny moment with Khrushchev when he was building up USSR with his blockhouses. He once said that soviet people do not need an excess architecture, so he started plucking off pattern and plaster from old houses in Moscow
During 20th, soviet architecture was focused on experiments, during Stalin's era - on some massive neoclassics. Later, with all the urbanisation, with migration of peasants into cities, lack of houses in the cities became too big, many people lived in shared appartments, or some temporary buildings. Such typical constructions actually were invented in Europe by such people as Le Corbusier, although adapted for the Soviet environment by local architects. And yes, they were the simplest way to give housing to many millions of people, and do it fast. There was no aim to make it all look similar, it was an inevitable downside of extremely fast development. But, there were made quite nice murals and mosaics on the building walls, especially in the republics if USSR. And what was the best - it was the amount of free space, grass and trees around and inside the microdistricts.
That’s what a micro district is. When I was in school in the 70s, from my house I could walk to 4 neighboring schools in 10 minutes. The same can be said about kindergartens, shops, pharmacies, hospitals, etc. Add a good public transportation system here. In general, living in an "evil empire" was not so bad as you might think.
Indeed we would build houses adapted with todays technology in soviet district planning with added electric trains and underground parking places it would be greatly superior to any todays house.
Its the best . Very good design philophies every country should look into. More walking better health. Less waste of petrol, better for the environment. Less time stuck in traffic. Better time utilization. I expected some terrible urban planning before the video I was pleasantly surprised.
The idea behind microdistricts is not as much your convenience than to limit your movement. You see, we'd rather you don't leave your house. I think the past months should tell you that we are very serious about keeping you inside. But when you do go out, then we'd rather you stay in your neighborhood. If you can't find what you need in your neighborhood, then we'd rather you stay in the city. And so on, the idea is we want to limit your movements because it lets us allocate surveillance and control resources better and it also diminishes social contacts within the population.
@@statinskill tinfoil hat alert. Yeah its horrid design murican suburban districts are better, more cars needed more fuel more expenses means more consumption and stronger economy.
Они отличные - просто нужно не забыть что они считались временным решением и что просто были не достаточно качественные - Но в итоге - ссср нет - а они стоят - хотя уже пережили свой срок слубы в 30-50 лет
This type of blocks planning is a luxury in capitalistic countries. And you forgot the silence and relaxing atmosphere like in a village, instead of noisy traffic 24 hours
i was born in poland, but moved out of the country. i have to say, i miss this sort of communist blocks. everything is so close and practical, and i feel like you know your neighbors more
@@zwiebelface185 I agree. I like them too. High density, cheap housing and since everyone lives almost at the same place, you need far less shops compared to if everyone had an individual house to themselves... The convenience is really what matters a lot in daily life
No. I feel it’s more like nostalgia. Cause Western European blocks are so much friendlier. Imagine dozens of 5-12 stories buildings with NO businesses, no infrastructure. Just benches with old ladies and alcoholics and sad playgrounds and wet clothes drying on the racks. Want to go to a park? Ride a trolleybus
@A B not true, you can have a business inside on of the blocks, for example I used to go to a therapist and he was in one of the blocks... the only requirement is most likely the noise level. You can't have a shop there because lot of people come in and that could make a lot of noise.
Want to add that the main reason of building such huge amount of standardized housing was ww2 during which lots of cities were completely destroyed... This buildings were great solution to supply houses for huge amount of people, which we can compare with population of Italy during such a short period of time. So if you will ever need to build a full city and have not enough time, I advice you to learn their experience :)
It was a reason in some cities, but there were many cities which has not been destroyed, like Moskow or Leningrad (now St. Petersburg ), but those cities actually has "copypasted" houses too. Moreover, I'm living in Volgograd that called Stalingrad during WW2 and many people think that this city was totally destroyed, but many buildings was restored or reconstructed, and it was built many new buildings in constructivism style. There was other reason. In the beginning of 20th centure most of people in Russian empire lived in a country side. But the industrial revolution has happened and peopla started move from villages to cities to get a job on factories. And most cities was not ready to accept so many workers therefore in some small flat could live two or three families. Stalin cuntinued the industrial revolution and population of cities was encreased in 2-3 times, but housing issue still here and it was really nessessary to do smthn with it. Use common project and build a houses from big blocks, created on the factory is much cheaper than use an individual project each time, and in country where most of population is living in communalkas (one flat for several families) it is a good way to give people a housing in a short time. BTW, khrushevkas was planned as a temporary solution for 10-15 years, but actually they still here for a half of century and more.
@Царь Батюшка If we are talking about "wild" developers from 90s, I totally agree with you. But nowadays khrushchevkas have almost worst conditions in whole housing market. I'm renting a flat in khrushevka and i hear how stomping a neighbours upper, how talking neighbours on my flour. There are no ventilation and I have to open a window to get a fresh air. There are no fire evacuation exits, all communications a very old, a water pressure on the 2nd flour is pretty low, and I have to wait for 2-3 minutes to fill a teapot btw, a quality of water got worse and now I'm using water in bottels. Any other newer house has to much better conditions. But in my opinion a private house in suburban is a best choice.
They also create high population density. I remember scrolling into medium sized Russian towns on maps which were about the area of maybe a 50k town in the west, but were actually like 100-200k cities I never heard of Or sometimes more extreme. I was once zooming in to this industrial town in the far east called Novokuzhnetsk. When zoomed to see the whole city on google earth, you could see individual tower blocks. It looked to me like a ~200k medium city. It turns out Novokuzhnetsk has >500k people. These aren't the only examples. Try Kemerovo or Naberezhnye Chelny yourself (both 500k+ cities), or Tolyatti (700k+, also probably one of the most depressing Russian cities, built as mass housing for workers of the massive Lada factory)
@@Ag3nt0fCha0s Yeah maybe. I was once zooming in to this industrial town in the far east called Novokuzhnetsk. When zoomed to see the whole city on google earth, you could see individual tower blocks. It looked to me like a ~200k medium city. It turns out Novokuzhnetsk has >500k people. These aren't the only examples. Try Kemerovo or Naberezhnye Chelny.
By "the West" do you mean Europe or US/Canada? Density can be hugely different between the two: comparing places I've lived, Bristol, UK and Lafayette, IN, US are about the same physical size, but Bristol has 500k pop and Lafayette only 100k
North America and the former USSR are basically the complete opposite in this regard. NA cities are the least dense, because of suburban sprawl; while ex-USSR cities are super dense because of all of those commie-blocks. The densest or most compact city I've been to has gotta be Yekaterinburg, it has about 1.5 million people, but it's super small.
I live in a micro-district (we call them blocks here) of New Belgrade, a Soviet-style planned district of Belgrade, Serbia, former Yugoslavia (never a part of Soviet Union but a communist country with planned economy nevertheless). I can testify that it's a positive and pleasant environment for living, especially for raising a family. It's very peaceful, very safe, everyone knows everyone else, there's a lot of open space between the buildings where children can play and people can hang out, and indeed all that you need in everyday life is within couple hundred meters.
So do you enjoy and prefer to live lifelong and multigenerational (sharing the building with your neighbors and their children for generations to come) in your condo (most Eastern Europeans own their unit) in a microdistrict, or would you rather live in a spacious leafy suburb with single-family houses or even on a grand farm house if you could freely choose and money was not a factor? Are you relaxed and totally satisfied from living in an osiedle? Also, how is your relationship with all the neighbors who totally surround you in super close proximity cheek-by-jowl? Do you think they are priceless assets with whom you enjoy, have great social activities frequently, and prefer to be with them, or do think they are burdens and wish they were not there but the building was so you get extra space?
@@00crashtest Well, the "lifelong and multigenerational" living is a thing of the past, nowadays life here is very fluent (for all the good and bad reasons that you can imagine and more than that), so it's a matter of convenience and different life choices and priorities. I'm in my late 30s, with a wife and two small kids, and in an explosive phase of career growth, earning good money and increasing my investment portfolio aggressively. So for me time and people are critical resources. Also, I've been always a city-boy type (although I was born in the countryside) - and I still very much enjoy going night out in many Belgrade clubs and 'kafana's, dining in fine restaurants, going to festivals, concerts, museums, theaters, galleries, and the like (of course, when the time allows - I pray God every evening for 36 hours a day). Most of my neighbors are of roughly similar age, interests, and status. Most of us have kids of similar age. As you can imagine, I consider it a great opportunity for my kids to grow in a healthy environment with lot of friends. When they grow up a little, there are a few good schools within half a mile, 2 or 3 sport centers, couple of libraries, a science center is planned nearby, and the university is not too far. By then I'll possibly grow tired of all the hassle, in which case I'll most likely wish to move away somewhere closer to nature (leaving my condo to the kids, renting it out, selling, whatever). For the price of my 3-bedroom, slightly less than 100 m2 (approx. 1000 square feet) apartment, I can easily get 250 - 400 m2 suburban home. On the other hand, my parents already own 2 houses in a small town, if I wanted to I could move into one at any time. So in my case it's entirely a matter of convenience and lifestyle. Speaking of ranches - there's only a few of them here (it's Europe, we don't have nearly as much land as the US or Canada) and they only recently became a thing for ultrarich and famous, they often come with orchards, vineries, distilleries, stables for breeding race horses, and other vanities for the top percent of a percent. Prices are in tens of millions, and that's far beyond my reach and likely to stay so.
As a Russian it was super heartwarming to see you start the video talking about the "Irony of Fate" watching tradition =]. Generally very well presented video. I really miss the micro-districts in the USA (even after a decade of living here), having most shops 5 minutes away, that and the regularity / dependability of public transport which lets you be spontaneous and not have to plan your trip ahead of time to make sure you don't miss that once in an hour bus after taking a half an hour train ride after taking a 20 minute walk to the closest train station. I gotta admin I really dread having to use the car here for getting almost anywhere.
Russian elite (in Russia) doesn't live in micro-districts: they live in McMansions in the suburbs (just like Americans) and drive SUVs to get anywhere (just like Americans); only the working-class live in micro-districts; and you're a bullshitter
I'm from the United States and I moved to Moscow in September of 2019. For 8 months, my wife and I lived with her parents and grandmother in a small Khrushchyovka apartment. I was charmed by it, and I thought it was interesting how several of our friends in their 30's and 40's also lived with their parents and grandparents in similar small apartments. As noted in the video, everything we would ever need is totally within walking distance, in terms of medical, grocery, electronics, bars, restaurants, banking, government offices, etc. And every micro district has a similar living environment. We live in a house now just outside of Moscow, and we're much more comfortable, but I'm glad I got to have the experience of living in a Khrushchyovka style apartment for a while. I get to re-live it all again whenever we visit our friends. Crowded kitchen parties in those small apartments are a lot of fun. Thanks for the great video!
The micro district system makes so much sense and is exactly how I imagined an ideal city would be planned. In the US, depending on where you live, you can't really go too far without a car since the infrastructure was built around major roads so you can end up super far away from important places. The micro district for the most part eliminates the need to have a car to get somewhere which means less traffic jams, pollution, and dependence on cars. Having a car is nice but when you don't have one, it sucks in the US.
blitzwaffe if I remember correctly the reason America has such poor public transport and car focused infrastructure was due to lobbying by car companies that prevented this
Transportation is all about storeys and density. Soviet 'microdistricts' are depressive and suicidal as hell. Ideal = soulless. Urban sprawls and microdistricts are two different extremes. The best cities are the ones that grow more naturally and have an optimum combination of privacy and community. Less standardized 'European' quarter type is the optimal manner.
In fact, I think the concept is identical to how city services will position themselves *naturally*, if everyone walked. - see ruclips.net/video/3PWWtqfwacQ/видео.html by Wendover that discusses the suburban version of this effect. On the other hand, the car culture certainly shaped modern American cities, rather than the other way round. I see both as natural products of their respective ways of living.
@@alth000 You could easily develop on the micro district concept so it wouldn't be depressing and soulless. The whole, everything within walking distance in the community has a lot of benefits - just combine it with built environments that are diverse and nice to be in and caters for both privacy and community.
@Царь Батюшка Soviet Union did a good job on you. Most people don't appreciate hearing one neighbor beating his wife, while the other getting drunk, while someone SOMEWHEREIN THE BUILDING, is always drilling something. Most people don't appreciate "panoramic views" of other, equally depressing copy-paste concrete blocks.
They laughed at the Soviets, told children that in the Soviet Union a family lived in a cramped apartment and shared their car. Now they tell workers about how great it is to live in a small coop without healthcare and then pay some more to used an car sharing app. Feels like the worst of both worlds.
And that part of the world was always impoverished. Russia was gangster-capitalism before 1917 and it is gangster-capitalism after 1991. Another type of capitalism is not possible for Russia, like much of the world, and real progress only possible when all exploitation ends. And how much better are we off now? Not by much, for most of us,
@@raylast3873 Another type of capitalism is not possible* There is no gangster capitalism. It is just capitalism. Adding crony, corporate, gangster, etc whatever adjective of that type to capitalism only tries to obscure the fact that capitalist incentives inherently create corruption, monopoly, gangsterism, cronyism, etc.
And they also laughed at how all the products people bought in Soviet shops were wrapped into biodegradable sheets of paper and how people had to carry their own shopping bags while the "civilized capitalist" countries had plastic bags at the stores... Now everyone whining about ecology, trying to persuade the public to stop using plastic. If we want to save the humanity and our planet, we, the workers, should unite!
"Market Stalinism" where you're under constant surveillance by everything and you live in a tiny hole-in-the-wall apartment, but, hey, at least it's the free market doing it?
Ngl the micro-district hits really different when you're a kid. I remember it being so fun when all of the kids gathered in the park in the middle and we would play.
As if kids didn't play in suburban playgrounds? Now playgrounds are replaced with parking spaces because "genius" Soviet planners didn't expect that poor Soviet people would all own a car. And Russian cities are now also impossible to navigate without a car because of terrible public transportation.
It’s interesting that you say that because that’s what any American who was raised between 1950 and 1980 will say about the suburbs too! I’m really interested in studying and learning about the differences and similarities between American and Soviet mid-century life, and it’s crazy how, in so many ways, they kind of seem to be two sides of the same coin (that being said, there’s a lot that that sentiment does not apply to, as well, so I really hope that you don’t take this comment as being belittling or over-simplified at all!)
@@brotpros2306 bro the soviets dont exist any more... if you want to blame current lack in public transportation on someone blame it on the current regime and who tf even said anything about suburbs
@@NikELbErGErBergel Kid, I'm not your "bro". Soviet planners were terrible this is why there are huge traffic jams in each Russian city and they are impossible to live in without a car. They also destroyed all historic looks of Russian cities, they look the same. As for suburbs, I was responding to comment above implying as if micro-district is the only form of city planning where kids can gather - now in Russia all kids are behind a screen because playgrounds are replaced by parking spaces. At least the Scandinavins were smart enough to build underground parking in their 60s-70s projects...
@@brotpros2306 That's on the system in the sense that everyone owning a car is a US thing. Appropriate public transport would alleviate that. It's Russia now being more like the west and atomizing its citizens that has led to this, not bad city planning as most still active socialist countries rely on public transport.
"Kitchens were tiny" *shows a kitchen twice the size of the one I share with four other tenants here in the UK*
Lmao
@Vladimir "...live on the streets?" - like Americans do... БОМЖИ не по своей воле... Да уж, а я раньше мечтала там жить, вот дурко:)
My bedroom is double the size of my kitchen in my student house haha
@Vladimir not really, one housing at communist countries can hold three generations of family at one time
@@LastBastion what makes you think a capitalist housing couldn't hold three generations of family? Look at India, Mexico, Brazil or any other capitalist, but non top-of-the-ladder economic predator country. Not to mention you actually project post-communist experience on a communist country.
as one who live in a khrushchevka, when i first launched The Sims i was very confused that kitchen and dinner should be two different room, lol
Воистину ))
That's the norm outside of North America. Unless we're speaking about the upper classes
Kruznetsov
for most working class, table is in the kitchen
I would be very confused to and I don't live in a Soviet era building.
Important thing was that the blocks were all unfenced, if you left the house you found yourself immediately surrounded by open alleys and greenery like in a park, wchich always was close by. The streets were never in the way, only small ones to get to the parking lots, so you didn't really worry about cars. I never had more than 5 minutes way to the store, to school, to the park, to any playing field. And we kids all knew each other even from different blocks because we were running around all over the place. I only appreciate it now that I'm older and living in a deeply fenced part of town favoring cars and streets above all else. It's a nightmare.
Only problem was in a lot of the soviet union the trees were only green for a short part of the year.
@@Mutanninja that's not something you could change.
@@cypdashuhn1603 true but that's probably why 99% of the time these housing districts look so depressed and desolate. That's compounded by the buildings exterirors rarely being cleaned or maintained properly meaning they are mostly a dull murky grey/white.
@@thatguyoverthere9634 if one doesn't do basic maintenance for 30 years, yes buildings look very dirty. but in recent years many of those houses have been renovated, thermal seams refit, windows replaced and made uniform, walls cleaned and repainted. and what can you say, it looks really neat then.
@@Mutanninja I don't think this is a "Soviet Union" exclusive problem...
I'm a Russian urban researcher focusing on constructivism and living in Moscow. Your narrative is surprisingly exact, neutral and not ideologically coloured about the Soviet architecture like other American stories. I really appreciate it. Your example with the movie is very useful to understand the Soviet approach. It was a real solution of the housing deficit at that time.
How did y’all build houses in the country side if there wasn’t any private property. Like if you build a log cabin, did it have to be approved by some government dude in some far away city, or was the private property ban relaxed in the country side?
@@nikob1712 you had to join a gardening comradeship (садоводническое товарищество) or a country cooperative (дачный кооператив). It wasn't anarchy there, "dacha" was pretty solid private property and was a subject of discussion.
Niko B , Private property is a huge term, what was abolished in Socialism was private property over the means of production. Not your car or shoes
@@nikob1712 there were private houses, you could build a house yourself if you didn't want to wait in line for state individual housing (an interest-free loan was given), the USSR did not prohibit having individual housing in the property. My grandfather built a two-story house in 1970 in the village.
@@nikob1712 in Marxist terms, Private Property is something one owns which generates wealth (factory, hotel, restaurant, etc)
Personal Property is something one owns, but does not generate wealth (house, clothes, bicycle, etc)
Private Property was abolished in the USSR and replaced with Public ownership.
A Russian here. The cities and such planning really give your place a unique atmosphere, it is hard to explain. Imagine coming outside of your house and wishing 5 minutes of walking you can get to your school, play soccer with your friends outside, and go grocery shopping
It is very common for kids to play soccer outside and then hear your mom calling you out of the window for dinner :)))
Я думаю планировка советских районов действительно очень удачная. Если бы не депрессивный вид, было бы вообще шикарно. Еще можно было бы в центре каждого подобного района создать что то типо мини делового центра, и на окраинах - производства, что бы не обязательно надо было ездить в центр на работу, и перегружать транспорт в направлении центра и окраин.
@@ладно-н2с4й имхо, депрессивный вид у них стал сейчас, начиная с перестройки об этих (да и вообще всех походу) зданиях никак особо не заботились, не облагораживали, не поддерживали внешний вид. Ладно еще лихие 90-е, но что за упорное игнорирование этого и сейчас я не очень понимаю, в микрорайоне где я вырос, построенный в начале 90х, уже сейчас здания выглядят всрато.
Обратный пример - сейчас живу в Праге, тут многие эти советские панельки знатно облагородили, переделали фасад и вообще крайне приятными сделали, покрасили разноцветно, привели в ухоженный вид, глаз радуется, хотя внутри видно что по сути те же хрущевки
@@LeonserGT И тогда то же не норм они выглядели. Однообразные бетонные (ладно кирпичные) коробки. Ну а сейчас они еще почернели, обросли убогими балконами. В нашем городе с ними хоть что то пытаются сделать, обустривают дворы, и улицы напротив них, меняют крыши и стекло, облицовывают этой штучкой (хз как называется), но большинство конечно не тронуто с тех времен. Но тенденция к улучшннию есть.
Lovely. I wish to get a chance to live in such a settlement.
@@harshalgurav7474 What do you like in it?
I think it is important to mention that a huge part of the Soviet union was in total ruins after the war. Building a lot of identical and pragmatic buildings probably was the best solution to get dwellings to everyone fast. I would think so anyway. I really don't know.
absolutely correct.
Honestly we have the same thing in the UK, just vast wasteful suburbs with individual houses for nuclear families
completely correct. Application of material conditions etc Despite that the buildings were very well built.
Moreover, there was also fast urbanisation in this century. USSR had housing problem before the war had started. And a consistent way to solve the problem appeared only in 50-60-s, where relevant machinery was developed. Many early chrushjovkas were build by hands of bricklayers, lol.
@@кнтн It's fascinating, and I love the concept of the micro-district that's connected to other micro districts/areas by mass transit. It also shows why private car ownership was a luxury in the Soviet Union, versus a necessity in the US. It also highlights why the sudden fall of communism created so much societal disorder.
So, businesses invariably try to centralize to take advantage of economies of scale. That efficiency loss doesn't really matter when all of your stores and services are state owned: they aren't profit making enterprises, they're public services like the Police or water. But, once you switch them to bring privately owned (and my understanding is that this happened *very* quickly in the Russian Federation), profit becomes a primary factor and is going to favor centralization and the loss of some services from a great many areas.
On top of that, private ownership now means no one is carefully balancing what stores and services are where. So if you relied on teh micro-district next to you having (I'm pulling random business out of my head) a barber shop, and that shop closes, just about anything could replace it.
I mean, supply and demand will eventually balance everything back out, but the downside of a free market economy is that it takes a long time (years) for that process to balance out supply and demand.
Hi from Siberia!) will add two things: 1) in the Soviet microrayons each house has a yard - a place with many trees for children to play and adults to communicate. Now many yards are filled with cars, but in my childhood, children played different games in the yards - there were slides, horizontal bars, a sandbox, etc., and adults played chess, dominoes, just talked; 2) on the territory of Soviet schools there is always not only the school building - there is a stadium, alleys, horizontal bars, etc - children and adults could walk and play, in winter they went skiing on the school grounds. Visiting cities in Europe and the USA, I was surprised that parents are forced to take their children to a park by car so that they can play - because there are no such yards and schools near the houses.
Capitalism stupidity. And they think they are the best and free.
I wonder why no one mentions the number of libraries in each microdistrict? We still have them - fortunately, capitalism has not yet reached them. Only in my area I have 3 libraries for adults and 2 for children around the corner.
@@keiralum1797 bcs of propaganda you will never hear something good that are from is not from the western states(usa,eu,nato).....
yeah, love the desdcription. i guess it was afordable too. here in brazil i live in a rental apartament, wich cost 1/5 of my income and i dont evn get to know my neighbors. its crazy to see westerners describing soviet housing in a demeanor way when all we see around are the concept of "tiny house", "tiny loft"and even people who lives in a car or so.
I don't know where to europe you went, but where I live there's definitely small parks everywhere. I think the absence of parks is mainly in the really dense metropolitan areas of places like Paris or Rome. The US has this problem much more than europe, because their cities were designed around single family houses and car traffick. They absolutely lack public spaces, but have a higher rate of private gardens due to their large suburbs
I live in a rather small soviet style neighborhood in Tallinn, Estonia and it's very interesting to see in here how the older side of the neighborhood has Stalinka style buildings and how they gradually change to the Khrushcheyovka style and in the other end of the neighborhood there are also some high rise towers. However most of these houses are now very nicely renovated and don't look anything like the ones showed in the video!
Glad to hear that they've been renovated!
@@CityBeautiful I don't know about Russia, but in former Warsaw-Pact countries the Communist era housing has been massively renovated in many cases, with buildings covered in bright colours. It's actually really pleasant to look at. Although that's definitely not ubiquitous, it's mainly true in capital cities.
@@jbjaguar2717 the only way to renovate that tho really is to knock it down am I not right?
"Panelák" in Czechia are renovated too with bright colors. The flats are quite often merging into a bigger ones so it fits todays needs. You can either have huge 140m2 flat in this type of building or build small 100m2 house, its really not that bad nowaydays. But the acoustic though...
hanbanaroda czechia? né to ne. prosím. aspoň czech republic. 😂
Wow, being Russian myself I was surprised by this video neutral non-political view and factual correctness of all data. You can literally see how deep digging work autor did here. This is really a great overview, thanks!
IKR? It's so hard to find anything that provides just an objective fact based analysis of Soviet life. 30 years later and the west still froths at the mouth if something even just neuteral is said.
Even claiming to be non-political, the author makes the mistake of saying that the big Stalinkas were only for the party elite. This is simply impossible, given how many of them were actually built, especially in large cities. In reality, both party members and citizens of the "middle class", as we are now saying, lived in them.
@@masteryoba359, yes, but it's the only one. There were Stalinka dorms (hotels) build for party members, actually, I've been to one.
@Skyle Andria I'd say Soviet Architecture beats the hell out of mass US homelessness.
yes but the middle class still lived much better lives than the working class, simply because of the amount of comformity they showed towards the system, which in turn rewarded them.
The key thing here is that they promised housing for everyone, and kept their promise. The houses were not pretty, but they served their purpose.
but building look bad, they were also the red bad guys in bond movies
@@fragglegir9811 LMAOOOO
It's just intuition that says those houses were cheap solution for poor, in USSR they were upper-middle class housing just too expensive to ever fit for all. Mentioned Moscow and Leningrad were explicitly two cities where USSR kept the highest standard of living it could ever achieve so at least most of citizens lived in such blocks. In general these blocks were for the more wealthy 40% of society.
Even at the best plans to 2020 USSR didn't hope to replace all defunct housing with block buildings from the video.
Also, one third of people lived in countryside in outright favelas, government never built even the cheapest housing for them while forbidding any private building companies, so people lived in just what they did with hands from random materials(typically cowshit, straw and clay on south)
@@ShinSheel this is simply not true, USSR built more and faster in Moscow because of its population and because Moscow was a central. Housing however was a solution for everyone.
Everyone got free housing.
Of course it is a naive statement and generalist to large extend. Blocks were extremely poorly made, once they gave you keys to it, you had a crew fixing it. Blocks are very ugly and cities with many similar blocks look depressing. Very often what was happening, entire parts of old towns were demolished just to build new blocks. I was born in Eastern Europe so I know how crappy their planning was.
When I compare this to the state of housing in the UK this kind of urban planning honestly sounds like a dream.
We need to do this. We need the government to get a load of mass-produced parts and assemble them into a few dozen designs that are different on the outside and match local styles. 5-10 stories, lots of parks, public transport, bike lanes, schools, GP clinics, pharmacies, etc. Getting all of the infrastructure and services and building 300,000 units per year for 10 years would solve the housing crisis and cost less than £50B per year, which could easily be raised with a moderate wealth tax
@@adamo1242 You don't need to limit yourself to copy pastying commie blocks to build 300k apartments a year in country as big as UK. Poland with 40 million population built about 215-230k new housing units a year from 2018-2023 with no government policies supporting and and next to none regional poliies/new social housing, basically just private companies building on their own to sell.
That's about as much as UK despite having 65 mil population and only 213k new housing units, of which 42k comes not from private companies (social housings 38k, local authorities 4k)
What's needed is law that makes it easier to build new apartment buildings, especially tall one in biggest cities, as well as normal apartment buildings basically in every place that it fits. Law reducing influence Nimbys have over everything woud help two-fold: more apartments in biggest cities where they['re needed as well as other places to work at so you don't have to li London like everywhere - instead if it wasn't for decrepit politicians and problematic Nimbys you'd have high speed rail and many people could live outside of London and if they needed to be there for a meating or w/e they would get there. But from what I know even normal trains suck in UK, no new rail built for decades.
Trusting such politicians that project of building 80k new apartments wouldn't fail even though they failed completely so far is irresponsible.
Good law is enough to fix lack of housing with smaller risk of corruption. Then largest cities with absurdly expensive rents may either on their own or with central gov build enough affordable housing in their cities to simply force prices down like Vienna in Austria and rest of Austria did.
@@adamo1242 all a wealth tax is is taxing money that has already been heavily taxed previously. It punishes people who make good decisions and rewards mediocrity (or worse).
Attitudes like yours disgust me. Make your own money, don’t be a c0w@rd and take from others.
We have so much land in Russia - we build skyscrapers HORISONTALLY
then those aren't skyscrapers but groundscrapers lol
@@kira22.12 WIDE SKYSCRAPERS just like Putin
@@Vitaly__-hq2oq lmao, exactly.
Russia dose not have that much land you can build on.
@@neoconwarhawk1001 nice name you've got there
I was a little disappointed this video didn't touch on "dachas" - Russian country houses. People were expected to stay in their little city apartment during the week and have a small plot of land out side of the city to relax and have a garden. At times, a personal garden was an important part of the food supply
there is no way americans can understand the beauty of "dacha". no way. only soviets, only hardcore :)
I believe that the dachas were an enormous help to many families during food shortages throughout the post 91 collapse
I appreciate u sharing this
In Poland, most people still own these. We call it „działka’s”
They still exist. Some pensioners don’t get enough money so they grow their own food
Mid century Soviet Union: Duplicated apartment blocks
Mid century United States: Duplicated suburban houses
Communist conformity versus capitalist conformity.
Where is non-conformity less punished, celebrated even? Though our non-conformists demand conformity. Figures, yeah?
@@judsongaiden9878 that wasnt capitalist conformity, it was government planned and executed.
Conformity is what happens when government is allowed reign.
Current United States*
Yeah I'd pick a suburban house over an apartment any day
As a guy from Romania 🇷🇴 I used to hate this socialist blocks (or communist blocks as we call them here.)
I was believe they look horrible with no design at all.
However, after I start to travel to Europe and I saw that even in Sweden they was have them I start to appreciate them more.
Nowadays in Romania we paint them and refurbished them so they look a bit better I saw this in Poland too.
But of course if you don’t maintain them after 40 years they will look horrible (grey and depressing) and that’s not the communist regime fault! It’s the fault of the regimes that follow after and didn’t bother to even paint them!
However the apartments are quite cozy inside. Let’s be honest, in this times most of the people in Europe they don’t afford a real mansion anyway so they are quite ok for me.
Also people who are bitching about so much tend to forget something: this apartments in Romania they use to be for FREE!
Not to say that after the fall of the communist regime the government decided to sell the ones still in the state property with a value of 2 fucking Romanian salaries back then!
Try now to buy an apartment with 2 salaries!
It’s one of the things communists did good that explain why Romania has the highest ownership rate of apartments in all Europe.
It’s because of this communist apartments. In this days you won’t get a cola for free!
Back then the government was much more interested in everyone having a home and a job and less interested in the architecture/design style.
Being a homeless is much worse than having a small apartment and a job!
Also I like that this communists blocks have gardens around them with trees and small parks, grocery stores, schools, etc. basically there is a community there.
Which I don’t find with the new ones this days that they remove as much is possible from space around in order to cut the costs!
No trees, no parks, basically a prison type of building! Yeah, and people blame the communist?!
What’s the point to start building mansions with beautiful design that cost 100.000€ if no one can afford them anyway?!
Well the bigger portion of people arguing against what you tell seem to be believing that it is completely normal that some dude - who's making more money per week than actual working people make in a year - just buys real estate to plant some ginormous mansion for himself and then only resides in it like 30 days a year while having this plot of land und 24/7 surveillance.
For these people it's absolutely legitimate that those rich boys most of the time didn't do shit to get their starting capital but were just born into a family which already was wealthy to begin with - often this wealth is accumulated by exploitation, tax evasion and outright fraud.
I mean they shall think what they want but just because they live in a mindset that's effectively just a sequel to feudalistic structures of the past doesn't mean they're right to force their beliefs onto everyone else...
👍👍
AMEN TO THAT!!
this destroys the economy and have severe effects, if you cater to the poor, it destroys the economy and the world
@@SJRS700 and that's where you're wrong.
Imagine having your kids go to a school that's only five minutes away, by foot! Unthinkable in the US. It's crazy how we don't even realize how much valuable life time we waste with driving and traffic.
I was living in stalinka until my 17 years, my school and kindergarten were less than 5 minutes away))
Exactly. It does have its upsides. And in general to plan for the people to go out and socialize, not to live separated in their lairs.
In Hungary I had my pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and elementary school all within 10 mins of walk, like all of my friends.
Do small towns exist in the US? Like 5-20k with a center that has a couple shops, restaurants etc. Or is it all suburbs and cities?
@@blanco7726 Of course such towns exist, but they aren't densely populated, so you still need to drive a lot.
I couldnt understand why in america you had school buses when I was a kid since I had 2 schools across the street.
As someone who was born and raised in a Khrushchevka as part of a "mini-district", I have to say, I was pretty happy there. It's a giant city block with dozens of buildings and lots of trees between them, no car traffic, there were multiple playgrounds and soccer fields or basketball courts. My school was a 5 minute walk. Local clinic was like 15 minute walk. Supermarket was a 5 minutes away. 3 of us lived in a 2 bedroom small flat and that was considered "lots of space". There were literally 4 floor plans and all my friends had one of those 4 floorplans, so when I walked into a new apartment, i knew exactly where everything was. Kind of funny. Oh, and all the modern pictures of those grey, bleak, run down buildings - that wasn't the case in USSR. It was well-maintained - freshly painted and masonry fixed every few years. Lots of gardens and flowers. It wasn't terrible... still was poor compared to spaces in American suburban homes and multiple TVs and cars.
Even when maintained (not always) those buildings where designed to look rundown and bleak with most of facades decorated with gravel or simple bare concrete patterns. The lucky ones who got painted were choosing between 3 colors for the entire 1/6th of the planet : shitty red-brown, puking blue-green and light-blue.
Roger Dinhelm THIS, especially in Soviet republics like Poland they were Wayyyyy less maintained
I still live in Khrushchevka, and all those who are crying that it was shait: if community is run down cest pit of alcoholics - then of course it is going to be in a gutter, but if community is at least half competent, they will arrange their living space to be maintained. The idea behind madness, just like who soviet union was good, execution and lack of forward thinking - well it brought that system down. With not a small nudge from west.
@@rogerdinhelm4671 I don't think they were designed to look like that. They were designed to look white, clean. And I don't know what you have against red-brown,and the other colours. The red makes me feel cozy and the other ones light the building a little bit up.
@@rogerdinhelm4671 the bigger problem was in the health hazardous construction materials that were widely used, and are still in place today, such as radon emitting gravel, asbestos, led pipelines .. ect. And of course there was no sound proofing, if you sat quietly in the living room or bedroom, you could hear and understand everything your neighbors were saying or doing, if the neighbor from above took his slippers off, every step he made barefooted would make a loud thumping noise on your ceiling.
-This sounds familiar...
**looks out of the window**
-Oh yeah, that's why!
Lmao
Yeah dude that's the sad truth I feel at home everywhere in the soviet union, there are different countries now but it's all the same shit 🤷♂️
Yeah, but is it guaranteed to everyone to get one?
@@josephgeorge5741 not anymore))
me as a east-german lmao
Well I moved from the UK to Moscow and Live in a Khrushcheyovka on an old Soviet period block, I can tell you, it's amazingly convenient and really green, you really come to appreciate it, it grows on you!
Just put color in bulding .🎉Made new
“Moved from UK to Moscow” - what a prominent stupidity. You pay taxes and sponsor the war and genocide of Ukrainians.
I've been in a Kruszczew style communist estate in Warsaw for a year. I hate it.
I grew up in a micro district like this in Romania. This video made me realize that indeed most of my life growing up was within this districts as you had everything you need there
Is that convenient? Claustrophobic? Or something else?
@@matthewgoodman7588 I was born in 2000, but I lived 14-15 years in micro district
That was very convenient, you could see your school through the window, it was like 3 min walking to get to school
Shop were nearby, 1st soviet planned shopping building and 2nd shop was built in 2000's
Planned micro district had a larger space, but after the fall of USSR, government sold some space for private businesses
(So, that 2nd shop covered forest view from our window and it was very loud 24/7 because of the shop's huge refrigerators under the window)
There were 3 apartments buildings and between them there were playgrounds, it was convenient for our mother, because she could see us playing from the window
Sometimes it was claustrophobic, if you paid attention that your playground is sandwiched between 2 9floor apartments buildings, but overall it was fine
Some ppl say that this planned apartments depress them
Some of them makes you feel that you live inside a wall, Attack on Titan XD
@@matthewgoodman7588 Apologizing for my English. I lived until I was 18 years old in a similar 17-story apartment building, built in 1987, in a typical Soviet sleeping area on the outskirts of Moscow. A supermarket was built into the house, a school 5 minutes walk, a metro station 10 minutes walk, a clinic 5 minutes walk, a large shopping center where I hung out with friends was also 5 minutes walk, although it was built in 2006. In my area there was a huge market, 5 shopping centers, a bunch of shops, stalls, eateries, mcdonalds ..
We are still building such housing, as the majority of the population has no money to afford housing in America or Western Europe. Now I live in such a house ruclips.net/video/rkF4J4OA4jA/видео.html
@@matthewgoodman7588 Its very well planned, schools are close, there is plenty of parks and green spaces between houses. Its quite silent and nice to live in the middle of such districts. You can bash them a lot, but compared to the garbage they build today it was really good, the house is simple and meh, but the district plan is great.
@@pavel94732 Thanks for the response! Your English is good. Much better than my Romanian :p
“Kitchens were tiny”
HK Resident: *LAUGHS IN HONG KONG*
Russians expect large kitchens. They don't understand what the rest of the world isn't looking like suburban America.
You'd be surprised, how many are pretty similar to HK ones in size. Also HK is small, population is large. How big was Russia again?
@Царь Батюшка I'm not going to argue with you when you clealy lying by showing me a building made in 1991 (not 70s) with high class custom designed appartment which less than 15% of people in Russia can afford.
@Царь Батюшка Reread my initial comment. I didn't lie, because that's not what I said. More typical building series is Khrushchyovka which has kitchens around 5 square meter in size. Which is a new standart for HK kitchen sizes. I merely pointed out that in Russia - which is incredibly big, you somewhat think that it's justified to compare it to one of the most densely populated areas in the world with tiny land area.
@@dirzz Singapore is smaller but they handle their housing issues 10x better than HK
Yeah they’re not the most visually appealing housing, but the design makes so much sense. I love how everything you might need is literally almost all nearby. The convenience is intriguing
it's horrible. Hateful, depressing, soul breaking gray concrete.
@@mattbanks3517 no it really isn't most of them get painted and i reaaally prefer the convenience of this style over the western style
@@mattbanks3517 it all depends on the landscape design.
a small number of things in the Soviet Union were more efficient or better than in the West. But overall almost everything there was a disaster. That's why it all collapsed on itself so spectacularly.
No, it is horrible.
I grew up in Yugoslavia, which had similar housing policies, now living in the West. The apartments in Eastern Europe were equal size as the ones in the West of that time, and bigger than the newly built Western ones. Also, in the socialist countries I never saw an apartment without a hallway/entry room, which is so widespread in the West (entering directly into the living room). Next, no building put a shade to another, even if you lived on the first floor you had sunshine...nowadays, with urban mafias, it's all stack next to each other. I'm grateful to have experienced that lifestyle, new generations will never know what they missed.
Breaking that system was easy...
@@birdsofkerala-in And the current system is on the way of destruction...
@birdsofkerala-in Behold the defensive anxiety of the sociopath who prefers competition to cooperation
That system didn't break. The country fell apart due to nationalists' wars.
@@1merkur✔️🎯
As an American living in Russia here's my take...... I used to own a house in the US and hated the idea of living in an apparent. First off most apartments I had rented were wood, so you got a lot more noise from your neighbors. Of course living in the burbs I had to take my car to buy most everything, but I never thought much about it.
However I now live in a somewhat newer (but not brand new) Russian apartment building. I've gotten used to it. First I'll say noise from neighboring apartments isn't too bad. Yes, you do hear your neighbors sometimes, but it's not the same as in a wooden apartment building and I don't really notice it. Second what I do REALLY like about where I live, is that you can get everything you generally need for living within a 5 minute walk, and a lot of stuff is within a 1 minute walk. Generally the bottom level apartments have all been converted to stores. I can even buy stuff to replace a faucet or change the locks on my doors from stores a couple minutes away. It's super convenient.
Where do you live?
@@MrLiquar Krasnodar
@@zemlidrakona2915 got it. Never been there. So do you speak Russian and Ooverall how does it feel living as an American in Russia?)
@@MrLiquar I know a bit of Russian but I'm not particularly good at it. My wife is Russian however and my son speaks Russian. A lot of Americans seem to think that you will be treated poorly in Russia being an American. It's actually not even slightly true. I mean like every place else you can meet the occasional person that rubs you the wrong way, but the vast majority of people are nice enough.
@@zemlidrakona2915 This is great that you get treated like that. Of course, all countries have their own fair share of *ssholes . I am sure this opinion on russia will change someday in the future. If you speak a bit of Russian, how do you find work, do you work online or teach English? Is it hard to find job in Russia without speaking the language?
The Soviet Union was playing City skylines with Cheats
You can achieve this without mods, just zone grids the same size buildings. Or using copy paste on Move It or plopping the same building over and over
Citizen: "complains about smt"
USSR: "GO TO GULAG"!!!
@@deathbygrapes5 "you can do it without mods. Just use this mod to do it"
more like workers and resources: soviet republic
@@prototype_585 well yeah that's the goal of the game so yeah
"Kitchens were tiny, only 6 square metres" ,,, cries in British housing
British renters shouldn't pay rent to their landlords, British landlords should pay compensation to their renters.
6 square meters seems like a decent size. Then again I'm American.
@@GRANOLA77 hahaha
Granola77 yeah 6 square meters is actually a pretty good size for a kitchen in an apartment
@Vassilios Pupkios
Yeah the picture they showed gave me the idea
From the video, it may seem like living in such environment would be a dream to this day, but since the collapse of Soviet Union, some governments of the newly independent republics had no resources and time to maintain those buildings, and people still live in 50 to 70 year old houses without any renovation. Source: I live in a former soviet state, Kazakhstan.
yes, it is yet another instance of capitalism killing post soviet countries
The Government of Kazakhstan has the resources to buy houses in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Turkey.
@@DostoenVnimaniay almost every government in post Soviet countries has resources to buy houses in Western Europe and US. But they don't have resources for their own countries
@@gladiatorone9023 They have resources. They have no desire.
This type of blocks planning is a luxury in capitalistic countries.
And you forgot the silence and relaxing atmosphere like in a village, instead of noisy traffic 24 hours
I grew up in a typical micro district. As a kid I didn't notice or care all the buildings looking the same, built out of the same gray concrete panels, they were just normal homes. My parents were safe to let me wander around the district, because you could walk almost everywhere without crossing any roads, there were stores 1-2 minutes away and my school 5 minutes away. There were 3 playgrounds right outside my apartament building, it was a 5 section, 5 floor building built in the 1980s.
u got a nice name
So when one kid plays basketball 100s of people listen??:) great!!:)
@@lukazupie7220 в те времена об этом меньше думали. Не стоит забывать о том, что потребности людей меняются, а также то, что в западных странах тоже не было современной звукоизоляции.
@@lukazupie7220 чтобы не слышать улицу достаточно заменить окна с деревянных на пластиковые (это массовый опыт), так что ваше замечание абсолютно бессмысленно, так как не зависит от строения, а зависит от времени.
The western part of the USSR was devastated by WW2, they didn't have the luxury of picking and choosing for housing for the people made the homeless.
and siberia was hard to live in, so the soviets plus the eastern block were in a tough situation
@@themaniac2448 your username and profile picture go hand in hand
@@San_Deep2501 eh
That plus rapid industrialisation and urbanisation meant lots of people moving to big cities or their outskirts.
@@Pandamasque About 20 million. So, yea. This and about 1500 scorched to the ground towns and cities in WWII.
I'm an American who has been to Russia several times, staying a few months each time. I have to say that the micro district model is kind of awesome. There are children who play in the courtyards, buses and consistent and affordable transport to get you everywhere (and I mean everywhere), and access to grocery stores, food, bakeries, and other shops within a 3 minute walk at all times. It is AMAZING to not need a car and have access to food and transport. Not everywhere, but many people take good care of their apartments because they own them and care about how they look and function. I lived in a block with probably 1,000 other apartments and it was quiet! Access to things like this is so rare here in America and I think we could benefit from a little bit of this. Great video.
I live in a post soviet courntry. I don't really know where there are there microdistricts in my cities. Maybe they are only in the major cities. From what I've heard, public transport isn't that great and especially consistent in other post soviet courntries. Many people rely on marshrutkas which are bad and that is because the official bus systems lack funding. I'm my country it is great but in other post soviet countries in Caucasus and Russia it is bad.
Accessing to stuff fast by foot is great but it is always like that if it is high density. There is nothing new.
Yes people take care of thier apartaments a lot. But the problem is that if it is not thier property (corridors or the entrance) they don't care of it too much. Because of quite cold winters and the terrible ouside look, most want to renovate the building. But some people for some reason refuse it and it is hard to get the permission do the renovation.
@@jokubas3391 where do you live?
@@spacy9571 Kaunas, Lithuania
I live in Russia, here i live at microdistrict in Moscow. I studied urban science a lot by myself and at the university, that's why i can tell you something. Microdistricts is very ineffective in terms of land use - there is a lot of unused land there. Also, they were not designed to accommodate lots of private businesses - you can find a grocery shop there, bakery, but outside of that there are little suitable places for restaurantes for instance. After that this districts are very monofunctional, we call them "spal'niki", that can be translated as sleepy districts, cause the only thing that you can do there is sleep - that causes enormous transit out of the districts at mornings (just not enough workplaces near home). And the one more - they are so similar to each other so there is no feel that it is "your space", there is now territorial identity, people do not give a lot of value to their district because there are a lot of the same one. It's not the complete list of disadvantages of microdictricts, but for me it's enough to build blocks instead
@@jokubas3391 Tirana-Albania is solving this with electing a property administrator from the inhabitants and collecting maintenance fee from each unit. If they decide to do renovation they can apply to the municipality and they will get a grant for 50% of the total value of the renovation. The mayor, Erion Velia, studied political sciences in USA and EU Integration in UK.
I actually really like the planning put into the city design. Having everything available on foot sounds seriously awesome, and making and keeping the commitment to provide housing for all is a noble idea.
"Everything is built like a block in the USSR!"
Walks around home town in Canada in neighborhoods built in the 80's... ah yes, we didn't make any block neighborhoods at all...
most residential neighborhoods in the U.S. have standard houses...
Oh, yeh, and who names streets with the same name in different cities? Like 1st street, 2nd street, 3rd street. So original!
Or gentrified neighborhoods in American cities. Although the gentrified apartments tend to try to look "trendy" they all look the same, plus they tend to be built as cheaply as possible.
It's not the same
standardization isn't bad
as a person who lived and lives in the remnants of these cities...I just love how the soviet style city planning involved a lot of vegetation in their street plans. Every time I go pass one of those areas I feel like i can breathe again. Every time I move through the newer parts...everything feels just jammed so tightly together that it crushes you down.
Every block has quite a lot of free space inside with houses on the outside. That free space which was usually taken by trees and other plants or shool/kindergarten before, in newer blocks is a few more buildings. My current home was built in space inside the block (which was very big because of ground quality in center, so still a lot of free space)
One thing i loved before is being able to go to 16th floor and see most of district.
@@wumi2419 yeah a lot of places here,between the buildings got sold to private contractors and they erected new buildings there. Yeah still some free space, but although I'm no fan of communism but I do prefer the old city planning. But that was also connected with controlled city population. I know a guy who researches that era, and he said that usually every municipality would be built in such a way that there is a balance between city and village population. To the extent that you needed a permit to move and live in the city if you were from the villages.
Someone might say that's really oppressive, but when you look at it now... cities are overcrowded and villages are getting abandoned and forgotten.
@@NikolaNevenov86 it is much harder for villages now because internet exists. Almost no villages have cable going to there and other ways of getting it are expensive, unreliable or both. And a lot of current society is built around internet.
Cities being overcrowded also bring huge traffic problems. Plans did not include so many people having cars, so there's not much place for parking. Inside blocks it is very normal to have half of the road taken by parked there cars
Depends which developer was building and how expensive/ how far away from city center the houses are. And cities grow, those "big slab" soviet buildings were once standing in bare fields, now they are surrounded.
"I feel like i can breathe again." Yes, enjoy the asbestos.
Soviet cities? We’re one step closer to you talking about Pyongyang
You devil Un, I knew youd end up on YT eventually.
I'm getting there...
City Beautiful I love your channel!
Yes!!! Kimmy we havnt seen you in a while!
Calm down, un.
My mother's family: She, brother, Mother and Father received from the Evil and Terrible Soviet regime a four-room flat in a newly-built house in 1980. Her parents had been on the waiting list for housing for five years.
Her Father worked in a factory as Machinist-Lathe.
Her mother worked in a steel factory.
A this flat is now worth a 35-years mortgage with avarage workers salary...
Soviet Firearm Philosophy: Simple, easy to manufacture, mass production is key
Soviet Housing Philosophy: Simple, easy to manufacture, mass production is key
Soviet Everything Philosophy: Simple, easy to manufacture, mass production is key
its free, but you can't afford a new one low salary and business was illegal, its not your ideal smart house but its big gift.
@@ansonang7810 actually, you didn't need to afford a new one. If you (really) need a bigger house, for example you have more kids on the way, you apply for new apartment and you're put in queue. One it's your turn, you're moved to a bigger apartment. That's more like my parents got our 3-roomer.
@@RyszardRudy you forgot to mention how much years you had to wait in the queue
@@VelvetSage from 15 to 50 years usually. My parents get a place in a queue in 1971 and they doesn't get an appartment yet.
i live in poland, and seeing that every block looks exactly the same, that scenario is very possible.
Thanks to the soviets, i dont have to ask my friends where the toilet is, since every apartment looks the same.
Yeah but seeing those apartment blocks everywhere us incredibly depressing
@@JakubB2000 Is it better to die homeless or live in the ghetto, like many in the USA?
@@JakubB2000 lmao honestly looking at those blocks just symbolizes power, i like it.
@@JakubB2000 they look depressing only due to dilapidated state they currently in and the lack of maintenance. A bucket of paint makes it lot better. Not to mention the spaces in between were looking like a garden when it was properly maintained, too.
@@cianakril Yep, everyone here in Lithuania painted the grey block houses white and refurbished them. They look incredible to live in now.
4:30. No. The big houses were build not only for party elite. My grandparents have recived an apartment in "big stalinka" becouse they were cientists and engineers, as well as all their neighboors in this building
This is generally a stupid thesis in the video, if you count how many of these houses have been built and how many not only "party elite", but even just officials existed.
They surely were important to the Party. How many other engineers got to live in cramped building with other proletariats?
Look, in USSR 1% of population controlled 4% of goods.
In modern Russia it's 51% of goods.
USSR was the country of true equality.
Yes, Stalin was cruel, but he BUILD it for future generations.
And we fucked it up.
@@GoklasM zero plus zero equals zero. Nobody believes this communist fallacy
@@yurieu5872, completely debunked me, m8 :D
My mothers family lived in one of these microdistricts in Kabul called makroyan. It was built in the 60's by the soviets and I've been to makroyan in Kabul and the houses still stand up remarkably well despite their age and the war that devestated Afghanistan. It definitely still is the best place to live within in Kabul in my opinion as it actually has some greenery and is less buzy and poluted that the rest of the city, i do think these microdistricts could serve as a way of solving the housing shortage which many countries have without destroying traffic but I highly doubt that most governments are competent enough to do such a thing without either completely undercutting the amount of public transport or taking an eternity to complete it
What you think about Soviet Afgan. the pick of Afganistan gdp percapital
Wow! As someone from that area, I'm amazed how accurate and well balanced this one is. Usually, westerners don't bother with details when talking about day-to-day life topics in USSR.
However, I should point out few things missed out.
1. No mention of high push towards district heating and hot mains water supply in these houses. Larger area would get it's heating and hot water from big boiler house or electric power plant (waste heat utilisation) few km away. Which apparently is far more efficient than running individual boilers in every household.
2. Quite often people were awarded with small piece of land on the outskirts of the city (or further away from it) where they could do some gardening or grow homegrown vegetables. Or in some cases it would've piece of land where you could build a holiday house.
Ps. The address in the film you mention is an interesting coincidence - it's not some generic street name (after some leader or significant person) it is 3rd Builders street.
@ Sometimes you might have some of your crops stolen. But since it was so common, there wasn't that much stealing before second half of the 80's.
In terms of caloric intake, most Soviets were on par with american counterparts. However, americans invented fast-food chains and drive-through restaurants. And started eating way too much and moving too little.
Communal gardens exist in modern day Britain and not a lot of looting here.
@ im actually impressed by this video and got me thinking, everything have a good side no matter what the ideology. taking the good from both side is better. micro district with modern fiture and connect them with mass transport system.
@@royk7712
You might be surprised that the people who referenced Communism most successfully have been Faschists... Unless you count the Germans polling well enough in 1883 to have their demands (public Healthcare, disability pay and retirement funds) implemented before election day and failed to gain any seats.
@@royk7712 The Soviet Union was a better place than people would like to admit. by the 80's it was actually pretty great from what i heard. disappointing to think of what it is now... the breakup really destroyed Russia
@@theduck3876 sorry for bad english
well my mother leaved in 80`s
she wasn`t available to buy any good clothing because they all was the same for like middle or typical figure
in her country house they have to make glue for wallpapers themselves
from like grain or something like that because there was any available
wood for the this house was gathered on the railroad there was a lot of abandoned shack
s
main beams was made of old wooden railroad ties that was thrown away by railroad workers after they were changed for concrete ones
cars was... well volga for example was made in 60`s inspired by ford from 50`s and it made to the fall of ussr in 1991 without major changes to the design
so basicly 40 years old car in 1990
ussr is the place where government tells you what do you need and it will produce respectively to that
so if government thinks that 40years old car for you is fine so you will drive 40 years old car
if government thinks that you don`t need good clothing with a wide variety of colors and forms so you don`t get it
of course government itself would produce better products for themselves that are not available for masses
because government is not some kind of plebs right
The micro district idea is actually rather neat, as it allows for essential services to be nearby (cutting travel time and reducing need for transport infrastructure), as well as being modular, allowing for fairly extensive expansion...
Thinking aloud, this could maybe be adapted, with a micro district with regularly used, easy to provide services in built (I.E convenience store, medical clinic, primary/secondary education...), whilst several micro districts come to form a larger district, which would have a centre where less frequently used services are located. This could also allow for different variants of micro districts based on need (I.E, residential, commercial, industrial...), allowing for a variable district makeup, without needing to vary the modular plan too much...
You don't need to ditch capitalism to obtain that, almost all European cities, post Soviet or not, achieved pretty similar results of having every necessity in your own neighborhood accessible by foot. You want to go to a shop walk 5 minutes, another shop in 7 minutes, haircut 10 minutes, clinic 15, school 20 and so on...
This is now the vision in Paris, creating/reinforcing the "15-min city", where you should be able to find everything you need within that time on foot. Brussels is interested in adopting it, too.
You basically just described a a neighborhood in New York. Micro district= neighborhood, bigger district= borough. Theres a reason they call them "corner stores" because they are usually on the corners of residential buildings. I've been to keiv as well as alot of different cities in america, and New York and seattle seem to be the closest in comparison to keiv, but you have to remember that america focused on greater metropolitan areas rather than inside the city itself. Essentially the city would be primarily commercial, retail, and industrial zones with some old residential zones as well, and then the majority of residents would live in suburbs and simply commute to the city. The reason for this is simply because america is capitalist. People had their own money, so they could spend it to buy a house that a private person built. In communism, no one is going to build houses for their people for free. Communism is all about doing the bare minimum, hence the tiny apartments.
venomkiler America lives in suburbs because of cars. Whole American life built around car. Everything by car, motel, diners, cinema, the whole Las Vegas architecture is design for cars (just signs on the road with hidden shed at the back), I’ve seen even atm drive through. Madness. People get fat without moving, barely walk, become very antisocial. Suburbia is social disaster, dream sold by car producers.
Basically, a normal district but worse
this has long and deep effect on Chinese urban planning,
the idea of micro district and standardizing is still the prominent way we build our cities now.
your comment was more thought provoking than this whole video lol
Not just Soviet Union, but also Hong Kong, Japan... It's more confusing that a lot of Japanese scholars translate 小区 (microdistricts in Chinese) into Danchi (団地), though I do believe microdistricts and Danchi are somehow connected
but in China housing is privately owned and very expensive , treated like investment
@@grantourismo0109 Legally all land in China still belongs to the state. By what you may refer as 'purchasing a house/apartment', you are actually granted with only 70 years of usage rights of the property. And since the country itself just over 70 years old, the policy's hidden kerfuffle have not yet emerged. Nobody clearly knows how their properties would be treated when the time is up. Is it inheritable? Or your grand-children would have to ridiculously pay for the property again? All in all it is a worse-than-capitalism sh*tty policy with a socialism charade.
@@grantourismo0109 And talking about 'treated like investment', yes and no. Depending on the accessibility of public services, properties defers in their values. So your house is de facto investment, but de jure non-investments as implied by the government saying 'Equal rights to rental tenants and real estate buyers' ambiguously, which in reality is a total nonsense, especially during this COVID-19 thing. Many tenants from the hot zone were expelled from their former rental homes by local landlords, and in some cities you are not even allowed in unless you have certification of ownership of real estate in that city in the opening months of the pandemic.
Actually Soviet cities are perfectly positioned (better than most cities in the West) for green transition. They are designed to be dense (hence can be much more efficiently heated), in places where they have been preserved, they are orders of magnitude greener in terms of surface area dedicated to greenery, they encourage walking (hence less car traffic), socializing and sharing. In Eastern Europe they have started retrofitting these buildings with elevators when none existed in the original plan and adding more insulation. In right hands, Soviet cities can be turned into amazing places to live, and are hidden gems of city planning waiting to be rediscovered.
P.S. When watching this film pay attention to how few of the images of Soviet cities are shot in spring and summer, most of them are shown during the winter where they look more derelict than they actually are. This is an old tradition in the West.
Also Soviet cities weren't build with cars in mind unlike American cities. There were very few parking available and people had to rely on public transport (which is a good thing if you ask me).
Yes, definitely!
I agree and disagree with you at the same time. Yes, public transport was a almost alone type of trip in city, but at the same time Soviet Union's designed a wide highways in cities such as Leningrad's highway and Prospect Mira in Moscow. They thought "great future will begin soon and everyone has a private cars for trips".
P.S. I'm from Moscow and I don't hate Soviet Union's architecture. I think it had a lot of advantage and disadvantage.
@@CityBeautiful I agree and disagree with you at the same time. Check my comment below and then you understand why.
P.S. I live in Moscow and I learn architecture history in my city:)
They were some later cities that were in fact planed with massive car usage in mind, like Naberegnie Chelny (and Pripyat, if i remember correctly). Imagine LA filled with rows of similar 9 story panel buildings... Strange city (but wonderful people). Also, USSR mass transit was less then stellar, with poor reliability and extreme overcrowding.
Yeah as an upside the public transport is much better developed. In many Soviet cities you can comfortably live without a car, while in US in many places human life without cars is impossible, it's just endless seas of concrete.
Although maybe some credit for the reliability of the public transport I use goes to post-collapse government.
I live in Poland and honestly, the buildings from the 50s and the 70s are much better than the buildings built by private investors, not to mention urban planning. What's been happening to our cities since the transformation is just a shit show, investors keep building more and more buildings while no one takes the responsibility to build more public infrastructure, so the same roads, hospitals and schools that were built in the socialist era are now supposed to somehow provide services to many more people.
Thank you for insight. Most of the comments from polish people on legacy of USSR, that I see on youtube, are full of hate. Nice to see a positive one.
@@egord9101
Simply cause it was mostly absolute shit. Doesnt mean modern people cant come up with even worse shit(tho most things are better) ; p
@@egord9101 It seems the older people hate the USSR and everything they did. But many young people (like myself) are seeing that it isn't so black an white. Like Agnieszka said these new buildings and apartments are often built in the most bizzare places where you 100% need a car, there are no new services there. And honestly looking back at communism while Poland is getting richer the quality of new housing seems to be lower.
I live in macedonia and there are buildings from Jugoslavian time,i think they're aesthetic.
The same situation in Russia. More and more tall houses are built in smaller areas, infrastructure comes a lot later if even comes, schools and kindergartens are frequently finished after court hearings. But the quality of houses are better in average and apartments have better planning and are more convenient.
The micro districts are kinda cute in a weird way. It’s like The Soviet Union was playing Cities Skylines
This video actually made me appreciate this sort of housing a bit more. Sure, they are ugly as hell, but I am always close to everything I need. (I'm from Latvia, btw)
@@kristapsvalainis1671 can you tell the difference of soviet era housing between every ssr?
@@billyrst I definitely can't. I probably wouldn't see a noticeable difference between Riga and Moscow. If it is possible, then you'd have to travel around the former Soviet Union a lot and have a good eye for detail.
@@kristapsvalainis1671 Moscow buildings are usually taller and longer. That is all.
The nice thing is that during Soviet times even those who wanted to have a garden, but had to live in a flat often got a peace of land in suburbs where they could indulge in gardening and growing vegetables. Moreover, the best of all, these areas also had public transportation.
people say Soviet architecture is depressing, but you know what's more depressing? homelessness.
Welcome the army!
@@PSP27699 Soviet give 36m² home for free.
@@carkawalakhatulistiwa it also depended on how big your family is and on your kind of work, for example, my family of 7 people worked at a factory that produced dishes and we got a five-room apartment with air conditioning in one of the rooms on the fifth floor next to the factory in Tajikistan. my family had to leave there after the collapse of the USSR and leave everything there, can say that the Tajiks kicked us out when everyone was divided, nationalism increased
At the very least they were walkable and livable unlike the US and Canada
I lived in khrustjevska too until 2012. It renovated and taken care of they are just fine, as any block in the west :)
As someone who lives in a suburb in australia, I wish our urban planning was as conciderate as this. You have to drive everywhere and everyone goes to the city for work and back out after. If you put all the jobs in one place, why are you wondering why there is so much traffic?
nobody "put" all the jobs in one place, its just people naturally move closer to each other for work
@@sten260 thats the urban planning part of it. Areas have to be zonned to have large office buildings or shopping centres put in them and by putting majority of those offices within a 10km radius (as the bird flies) they force all the surrounding people to congregate in a relatively small area. This causes ridiculous traffic and is a big problem in LA too from what I hear.
@@johnolsen8772 nobody is planning that stuff, it just happens naturally because private investors buy the land and they build the office spaces and malls etc next to center
@@sten260 zoning laws are still a thing though. The government won't build sky scrapers but you still have to be allowed too. For example, a few apartment buildings were declined from being built because the local infrastructure can't support that many more people from living in the area. Councils also have their own rules and in my area, they recently changed so you are allowed to build studio flats on your land if you have the space to increase density.
Soviet cities were similar but ppl took transit instead of drove. The micro district was for all other needs like schooling and shopping.
"Kitchens were small"
Mexican rural areas: THE ENTIRE FUCKING YARD IS MY KITCHEN MIJO
Carne en la Parilla yeeeeeeeaaaaah!
Africa has the same mentality
@@l-kin3480 and North America
*pulls out the grill*
*MURICA INTENSIFIES*
Look, we shit on eachother constantly, right wrong, and my country has a whole host of faults but.... Dude. Open air cooking is pretty f'ing amazing.
@@singletona082 open air cooking with people is THE way humans are supposed to eat. Pretty amazing all across the world tbh
4:21 My grandmother was a junior school teacher. My grandfather was a sailor. They were given a flat in a "stalinka" building of the class you describe "for the elites", right in the center of the city.
Sailors were elite. My whole family is sailors and there were so many perks because of that, even access to special shops that sold jeans and authorised trips abroad.
Grandfather of my friend was a sailor and got stalinka apartment too.
My grandpa however was considered as a dissident (not supporting communist ways) and got prison cell.
Разные бывают ситуации. В июне 1941 года один из моих дедов служил в береговой артиллерии Балтфлота в звании полковника. Не матрос, но близко ;). Первую отдельную квартиру получил в 1955, уже после хрущевского сокращения. Дети уже успели вырасти. А семья другого деда жила как раз в сталинке... вот только на четверых была одна комната.
Author is definitely wrong about Stalin buildings were intended for communist elites, but countries elites lived there: scientists, artists, musicians, conventional store directors etc.
What a small world it is to find a former coworker under a random RUclips video I watched :D Hi from Stuttgart!
Quick note: Khrushchovkas' prototype was designed in France, and still can be seen in some cities, that were affected by WW2, like Brest.
Also, keep in mind, that modern photos of Khrushchovkas you see are.. modern photos of buildings that were built in ~1970s and stood with no upkeep for 20 years following the fall of USSR. Same buildings in former GDR aged much better.
Khrushchovkas was built before 1970. I guess you are talking about Brezhnevkas. Yes, they look extremely ugly. But some homes get renovations. After renovations it looks pretty
They may have stood, but the amount of electricity and gas required to have a normal life in an apartment is too costly in the current age. I worked on modernizing these buildings in Kyiv from 2013 to 2018. The buildings required some structural improvements, but it was possible, in that economical climate, to improve the buildings in a cost efficient manner. However, the people living in those buildings had to pay a relatively small amount to have their building improved. It was noticeable that in areas where Russia had crushed the people more, getting these projects going was near impossible. Inhabitants who now we're owners of those buildings, still were of the opinion that the state has to pay it for them. Not just 80%. Kyiv was easy, Holodomor areas less so.
@@QnA22 Outside of typical 'Russia did it' argument, modern Ukraine had (and afaik still has) a shitty communal law that requires you to have written approval from 100% of building's owners to form a Homeowner Association and manage your building together. This includes owners of commercial premises like shops or offices located in this building. And a typical commieblock building can have up to 1000 flats with 1000 separate owners. And single one can ruin all your efforts. So, most buildings are still managed by the descendants of Soviet state communal management companies, but now they work on commercial basis, i.e. extracting profit. No surprise owners don't want to do anything with their building and wait that city or state does it for them - it is legally impossible to do anything.
@@QnA22 That's true. Our bills for small apartament (45 sq.m.) in khruschovka were the same as we pay now for big appartament (100 sq.m.) in new house (built around 2010). And it's much warmer here in winter. Lost of heat in khruschevka is insane
@@QnA22 Central heating wipes out the need for electrical heating, you should look at the bills a private home generates.
As a Western European this not only happenss with Soviet eastern european cities, I see American suburbs all the same too, they look like hundreds of copy and paste neighbourhoods, so weird.
I don't know what you're talking about. Suburbia in Russia just looks like a bunch of ugly clustered apartments boxed up in square city blocks with some type of community center in the middle. Most of American suburbia's are residential custom homes with a yard. There are some developers who make "cookie cutter" single home neighborhoods but they will be different than other developer neighborhoods. Apartment complexes are typically 3 stories and different from one to another too since each are made with different developer concept and designs. And those complexes are scattered around the single home neighborhoods. Inter-city sky rise apartment buildings can be as low as 3 stories on the outer edges up to 50 stories high or higher when closer to the center. So I don't see any real comparisons to the Russian formats other than the public housing districts which is a small region where maybe 1 percent of the metro population would reside at any time.
@Царь Батюшка I guess it's a different mindset between communal living compared to private living. Most homes do have backyard fencing for privacy and public parks are within driving distance. The commercial districts are typically grouped together in shopping centers instead of being peppered around the micro-communities. All the homes around me do look different though and yards are different looking(yet close to the same size) but I see your point in the comparison of contrast between yours and mine. I'm not saying one lifestyle is better than the other, but what I am saying is that they are not comparable like Rapa Nuii was insinuating. So basically you are agreeing with me but in an argumentative way.
@Царь Батюшка And on top of that there is no concept of microrayon which makes american suburbs unlivable tbh
Australian and American suburbs are copy/paste too. The individual houses are in some ways different, but architecturally desolate. The suburbs are identical in what facilities they have and that they are like some entry-level sim city on easy mode. And always car-centric. They are desserts of culture and beauty.
@@danellis-jones1591 That's my biggest issue with American cities, there are places simply not designed for you to walk through or skate through or even bike through - like it was designed with cars in mind, instead of humans. Other than that i tend to like the architectural style, definitely more than the soviet blocks, but this is a significant issue that i have
In my own studies, I've come across a few interesting related points:
1. In the 30s, a poll showed that housing was not a big concern for people. Yet, housing was a high priority for the state considering the rapid development in progress.
2. The housing of the Kruschev era was meant to be temporary. Economic stagnation led to them being used far longer than their intended lifespan.
3. Like "The Irony of Fate," it wasn't uncommon for Soviet films to make fun of aspects of the Soviet Union or even the political elites.
@the Achaean i also heard they were meant to be temporary, i think they wanted to replace them later but now they are here for far longer than they should've been here
Interesting, at 2,) I would mention that most "temporary" thing from the Soviet Union last 200 years. Our prefabs were only meant for like.. 50 years lol. But engineers tested the buildings and they say it's good to go for the next 200 years. A socialist microwave - that my aquiantance/guy - has lasted 40 years and it's still warms food like the same day it was made. Same with temporary school and hospital buildings. They are eternal.
Today things that are supposed to last long.. don't really last long. Consumerism. They usually last like 10 years at best sorrowfully.
3,) People of the 60ies weren't pussies though. A rich soviet man didn't got offended cause you said he is rich and he got money for better shoes. You shouldn't mouth anyone, sure, but they didn't care. The people of the 60ies were much harder man, after the war. They didn't care about much.
Cynical parodies and such were part of the culture. BUT. Not in the 70-80ies. Things changed. What was okay in the "dark-socialism", were not allowed in the new/light socialism. Every propaganda became subtle too.
@the Achaean my mother's parents were construction workers, both had 60+ years of experience behind their backs, were involved in construction of everything from make shift wooden and metal housing for sientists in the field, to few undisclosed military objects (one underground, one some gov thing in the middle of some big city). But mostly they were involved in construction of housing.
So, currently I live in a house that was made in 1977 and was planned to be there for only 20 years. Was part of "clearing the middle of the city for renovation" program. All people who were ment to be moved into it were either construction workers (that's why we're here now) from other regions, or residents of city center who were ment to be moved back when renovation is complete. So, it was placed here only for 20 years, but from the start it had renovation plans for every 2 (minor) and 20 (big one) years, and was approved (as well as most houses) to house people up to 120 years, and for use for other means for 200 years. Just a "small" back up plan in case something happens to that renovation program. And something happened.
It's a concrete reinforced with steel, it's a human made mountain with ton of caves in it. With proper care it'll last, well, not forever, but for a damn long time. And it's very easy to maintain it because how it is constructed. The only big downside is that local company, who supposed to take care of this building, was evading (using forgery and holes in laws) its duties from 1991 till 2010, so first 19 years of its existance. Thus house missed not only a lot of minor repairs, but also its frist big renovation, and the next one by modern plan is due 2033-2038. >_>
@the Achaean it wouldn't surprise me if the USSR just said that to try and hide their economic failings a bit by overselling the fact that those housing blocks were planned to still be up, even though they were supposed to be temporary. Like if you passed in a draft of a picture for art class because you didn't get the full thing done
Your third point is slightly true, during Khrushchev’s various thaws it was acceptable to criticise, but not too much. Then like someone has already said, the 70s and 80s were full of oppression from the KGB with Andropov’s suppression of dissidents and then monitoring of popular discontent. I do say tho, your other two points are spot on and the black market during the 70s and 80s was nicknamed the “second economy” and sold all sorts of Western goods so even though the state was still very authoritarian (70,000 people received a formal warning from the government during the 70s), people still had a lot more access to the West than their parents/grandparents in the Stalin era
I grew up in one of these micro-districts in a huge 10 floor building in T-shape. And living there was extremely comfortable, everything I ever need was within 2-5 minutes from my door. There was a supermarket built into the actual living quarters, lots of restaurants, a hospital, police department, storage units/gatages train station, kindergarten, clothing shops and even a bunker underneath the place I lived (but it wasn't maintained good, so it was halfway broken, so me and other kids used to sneak in and explore it) also all those building used to look the same from outside, but after fall of Soviet Union when people started becoming richer than started changing outside of their own apartments. So now most of those buildings look like badly made mosaic. Also all most of my friends/relatives had the same type of apartments in different cities.
@Brisbane Socialist Don't really get what you are saying, but it was very efficient. It had all types of things you would need like drinks, foods, clothes, toys, body wash type stuff, things for the garden. After living in the USA for a while I could say that the supermarket is more efficient for an everyday busy life. Because let's say it's 2 AM and you want some muffins, you can quickly run out and it will take you no time at all. So yes, I would say it was very efficient.
@Brisbane Socialist Markets produce the things that people want to buy. People "need" very little, so once you start making blanket value judgements about what kinds of things people need, you reduce people's abilities to actually actualize their own desires and dreams. Also, markets clearly produce way more food and essentials than a planned economy anyway - welfare helps the people that are on the margins and homeless shelters make it so basically nobody has to be on the street. Freedom does mean that some people will just be degenerates though and not do shit, the difference is they're not shipped off for forced labor.
What you call restaurants in USSR?)
@@BadhopRUS It used to be "Столовая" which means a public cafeteria. But now most of them have been bought out.
@@BadhopRUS ресторант, I think...
That video was actually objective and not ideologically biased against USSR, I like it, thank you
commumism never works
Communist is a classless, stateless, moneyless society, it has never been built so it you can't say it doesn't work
What you're talking about is socialist counties, and they "fail" because of the total economic and military pressure from greatest capitalist powers
I want Mario to pick up a Communist Mushroom power-up one day, but to be honest, he'd probably look the same, with his red clothes, working class overalls, his hammer, his stomping boots, and his clenched fist that can break bricks. Might cause the music to change to Mushroom Kingdom's rendition of The Internationale, though!
@@chompythebeast okay
I WANT THAT
@@mushroomcommunist3888 and also because of gorbachev
Well, I gotta say that the Soviet or Communist city planning was waaaaaaaaaaay better than what happens nowadays.
I live in Romania and until age 7 I've lived in an industrial town that was built according to the Sovietic rules described in this video. Actually, the place were I use to live was called "Micro" followed by a number.
If you compare the "micro-raions" with the current situation of city planning, you will be surprised to see that today, private investors are building without any care about life quality. The main interest today is MONEY.
People might need a plot of green grass, maybe some trees around their place, there are some small things that can greatly increase the overall happiness of the people living in the new apartment blocks.
But the investors are like: "whoaa... did you just said that you need a park in your neighborhood? get your ass to the country side and stfu. Instead of being grateful that you've received a parking lot for your junk, you are asking for parks with benches and trees and play grounds and stuff? pfff.... "
👍💯 Exactly my thoughts! Same in Kiev, Capital 🤦🏼♀️ of Ukraine :(( And the air is getting worse:( ... But those greedy capitalists building those high birdshits close to each other with "nice" view on some-guy-in-underwear-chilling-in-his-kitchen in the birdshit next to yours:)
What most people forgot is that they work hard to put people in house in Russia after 1917 and Romania after 1947 and 1977 earthquake. Before they have just one room, no electricity, toilet, kitchen and live like animals. Of course we speack about the 99% of the people who was poor. Now, after we drive from imediat need of house, we can thing about some improuvements in houses, amd of course the old one don't fit to our needs
Same in Hungary.
What I appreciate the most in socialist housing, that there are usually larger spaces between the buildings.
So you probably won't see you neighbour's butt when you look out on the window of your living room.
Indeed, the ten (or more) storey buildings from house factories are not so good, but many newer housing estates are hell of a lot crappier.
@@cherrytofu8939 Market economy, I get it, but capitalism isn't always the best for the ordinary people's interest. We need regulated capitalism.
@@cherrytofu8939 I agree but my favorite is social democracy Socialist policy, Democratic free elections, people can decide to ditch
Socialism if they want to as well
Some tweaks:
1) the architecture of soviet cities wasn't built based on a socializm ideology with restricting private property. It was built to fit the needs of fast urbanization caused by fast industrialization. At the very beginning of young Soviet State it was among the urgent problems to solve - Russian Empire was definitely an agroindustrial(more agro then industrial) country with huge amount of rural population (Even in this video you can see the difference between late Russian Empire style and Stalin's epoch). Also ask anyone from post-soviet union about "kommunalka" or "obshchezhytiye".
2) After WW2 Soviet cities lied in ruins and once again the problem of living space was among urgent one.
Khrushchyovka was an answer - cheap, unified, fast-to-built (especially panelled ones). Moreover - they were built as a substitute and were planned to be in use for 5 years, as a temporary measure, until things become better, and new better buildings with appartaments will be built and people will move to them.
3) indeed, soviet architecture school experienced heavy influence of western schools. The "Mikrorayon" or microdistrict is a compilation based on a famous Unit d'Habitation and modulor ideology.
In conclusion, among other achievements (both good and bad) architecture of soviet cities is the unique case, where very prophetic ideas has been realized in improper environment)
ППКС
Yea his emphasis on this vague 'equalising' idea is nonsense. The main reason for this housing is rural people (the majority of the population) moving to economic centres upon industrialisation. The choice of having everything nearby, as well as communalism, is just one of convenience and good design no matter the context.
Yeah for 5 years... Most people still live in such block buildings
@@costasvrettakos nothing lasts longer than the temporary:)
At least these cities were planned, here in Brazil most cities are a jumbled mess of high-traffic avenues, overlapping bus lines, slums, luxurious high-income neighborhoods and sidewalks that barely fit the lamppost
Exactly! I was born in Ceará and can confirm.. But interesting: I moved to Brasília and, to some images shown in this video, I couldnt tell the difference hahah... funny that reading Niemeyer biography, it says his work was only influenced by european design...
@@isabelaoliveira2932 Niemeyer was a communist, so there is some truth to "european design", he just forgot to mention that it was eastern europe
brazilian main cities are mostly from the colonial era, they grew naturally
you basically described the south zone of Rio, which is a byproduct of said natural growth, but in the very same city you have Barra da Tijuca and Recreio, two heavily planned (and depressing) neighborhoods
I'd rather still live in the mess that the south zone is than to need a car to buy bread
Do you know Curitiba? For me, this city is awesome, coz there are great gardens parks, forest, a lot of trees and the air is fresh, except in downtown... kkkkk, but is gucci in relation with others south american cities
@@JoseEduardo999 Outside of historical cities and the old town of the main cities, very little of a place like Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo could be described as colonial.
Also, to call Barra and Recreio planned in the comment section of this video seems to imply they are planned in the way soviet raions were, which they most certainly aren't outside of the system of avenues. Their entire urbanization of that region is based on private enterprise plopping buildings and gated communities for high income people expected to drive where needed.
I LOVE THE MICRO DISTRICT IDEA!! That’s so brilliant to have your housing and amenities within walking distance. Imagine having a public transportation system taking you from that cozy place to work and back? That would be incredible!! Cars would become non necessities!
from one concrete and asbestos tower to another concrete and asbestos tower in a dirty bus,
that's the reality
@@lefunnyN1and can survive tank attacks, unlike usa paper houses
@@carkawalakhatulistiwa hello sirs
actually those commie blocks crumble when exposed to high stress,
do you have indoor plumbing tho?
@@lefunnyN1 Better than being homeless, bootlicker.
@@lefunnyN1 Lol, I live in the glorious West. We have no shortage of old asbestos buildings and dirty buses that are underfunded and never come on time. It's not like any of that is unique to communism. The idea of not having to spend an hour on a dirty bus every time I need to buy groceries would be a life changer.
I live in an area in Finland that clearly took great inspiration from Soviet planning. My flat looks identical to the khrushcheyovka example and the area is easily divisible in micro districts with easy access to amenities such as grocery store, library, kindergartens and schools and lots and lots of different sports fields to all directions. I'm absolutely loving it, and it is true, I do not need to leave my district at all especially during these times of remote working. And when I do, the multiple methods of mass transit are literally at my doorstep taking me to the city centre fast via this arterial road, or alternatively I may choose to cycle following an excellent bicycle path.
Although the building itself is cheap and ugly, there is so much beauty in the surrounding areas. It is like living in the woods or in a park, while actually living in a very highly populated area. When living in Britain, or even in a more traditional Finnish suburb, I absolutely hated the fact that to access any amenities one basically must drive a car, or at least take the bus. I think the Soviets were ahead of their time in this, my flat is allowing me to live in a very eco friendly way.
I feel like the micro district could be an amazing type of city planing if they had the time and resources to make them more aesthetically pleasing
we are building these over there in Prague to this day and they are considered a very premium type of districts!
Currently it’s very aesthetically but yes, those time was hard, so it as not possible 😔
That`s what we do now in Moscow Region.
If you look at new developments in Poland, you’ll see a lot of 3-4 floor buildings with greenery around.
Therefore you get China
The biggest and most striking difference from living in a soviet city and a US city (NYC) is the vast amount of greenery the soviet city planners managed to stuff in between those housing. It's strips of housing, then trees, then playgrounds, then trees, then housing etc..
In New York the street scape is characterized by endless and varied stores and shops with nature pushed into designated areas aka the park and the social space is encased in shopping activity; even the European urban plazas are nowhere to be found with people having to hand out in Starbucks or a local McDonalds.
In soviet cities, thruways (pedestrian and even driven) are mostly layered tree'd areas with those concrete building slabs peering out the top, with the commercial activity in this case stuck into designated areas, be it the corner store or the central shopping district.
that greenery is often not attended to, and filled with garbage. I don't live in Russia, but i live in Eastern Europe, and grew up in such a building. The problem is that they are ugly, and people treat them as such, there is no respect for your own home. Everybody throws cigarettes or even plastic wrappings out their window, and that green space near the block is filled with rubbish and rats. Also, the green space is not for usage, they are designed as islands to look at, but never walk through them, they are surrounded by bush fences, and as soon as you look over them you see the garbage. They make sense on paper, but fail in reality, like most things in communism.
@@marius4iasi lol lmao communism is when you build green spaces
not the party's fault your local government didnt put greater budget on groundskeeping
i just visited dublin and it was similar to that, greenery EVERYWHERE, not just in certain little pockets. It's much more pleasant, especially compared to NYC
@@marius4iasi Soviet union fell 30 years ago and u still blame communism? How can u blame a system that hasn't been in place for over 30 years for not taking care of buildings and parks years after?
@@kkmarokkaan because I remember it as a kid, and it sucked. I also lived through the revolutions of 89, and the people rose up against it because it sucked.
Hello. A Greek living in Cephalonia island in Greece who has visited Gomel,Belarus six times (to spend time with my in laws). I live in 52 sqm,they live in 62 SQM. And the 10sqm difference feels like 20-25 because the effectiveness of the Brezhnev era flat they live is great. It's a 1978 building ,looking scruffy on the outside but tip top on the inside... Great and very informative video by the way....
yeah, you forgot to mention how you can hear your neigbour fart in the night as well ;)
One must remember that those Soviet buildings were much nicer-looking when they were newer; the realities of the collapse caught up with them. But even now, the more modern Russian buildings are much more well-connected to their surroundings than those in other countries. It's funny, I grew up in Russia, and I thought nothing could be more depressing than Khruzshevkas -- until I saw the US suburbs: flat and bland, chains and malls and parking lots, soooo many parking lots...
here in germany, rooms are 2,30 meter high. in chrustchowkas 2,60. stalinka 3,30. also here we look from our windows - into other windows. this did not happen with soviet houses.
@@David-cy5zu 2.30 meter high in Germany? I guess you have (a lot) more experience of life there than me but when I went to see family in Bavaria in two different appartments, the height was better than this (and I would have noticed as I am almost 2 meters high). One appartment was built in the 30s and one in the 80s. I also saw appartments of their friends. Maybe such appartments with ceilings at 2.30m exist but I do not think it is so common as it is more than terrible.
@@David-cy5zu I live in Khruschevka and height is 2.50.
When I bought a new wardrobe I sterted to assemble it, it was liyeing on tht floor and then I suddenly realise, that I couldn't pich it up, because there would be not enouhgt space ( it is a corner section, 1.20*1.20*2.40) so I had do assembe it in upright position). That was actually funny.
@@pavelgordeev2631 HAHA :D But did you tilt in between walls too ? :) Diagonal etc. The best thing about chrustchowkas is actually compared to the west, that you dont look into other windows, but have a ``dvor``. Trust me, its really different in germany.
America #1
I still live in 5-storey Stalinka which is ~70 year old. My grandparents got it freely in times when country were rebuilding after WW2. And I like it. Pretty solid building. Build fully from the bricks, no concrete parts. 3+ meter tall ceiling. Very wide walls which prevent a lot of sounds from the neighbors. Etc. It is build so damn good that I believe it will stand another 70 years easily...
не хвались. в Европе и восточной Америке здания 300+ лет стоят
@@0grik Only if a rich person agrees to upkeep it!
@@0grik с капремонтами. У нас тоже могут стоять.
@@0grik it won't be maintained even if it's just 50 years old, left to rot and make a new cheap building like the stalinka
After all, it's a STALINka
Варламов конечно молодец, совсем без акцента говорит!
XD komel ты подожди, он следующий видос про Мурино выпустит))
Он ещё и подстригся специально для этого видео
он чувака из Skyeng нанял для закадровой озвучки, сам лицом на камеру шевелит
Ему бы надо ещё тему постсоветской точечной застройки и муравейников раскрыть в следующей серии.
I know, right?
I'm from Russia. I received two apartments from my grandmother in a nine-story building built in 1963.The house was a cooperative (loan) and for 10 years you could pay for it, in addition to cooperative houses there were also free houses, and while you are in line you are given a hostel
Since you're stuck in them for many generations anyway, do you just make the best out of what you have and try to improve the environment by treating your neighbors (who are all stuck in the same boat as you) with dignity and respect, as "one with them", and as inseparable priceless assets (despite the noise and footsteps) by being best friends with them, always playing with them, and prefer and enjoy them to be there, or do they think your neighbors are burdens and would rather not have them there but the building still there so you get more space?
So do you enjoy and prefer to live lifelong and multigenerational (sharing the building with your neighbors and their children for generations to come) in your condo (most Eastern Europeans own their unit) in a microdistrict, or would you rather live in a spacious leafy suburb with single-family houses or even on a grand farm house if you could freely choose and money was not a factor? Are you relaxed and totally satisfied from living in an osiedle? Also, how is your relationship with all the neighbors who totally surround you in super close proximity cheek-by-jowl? Do you think they are priceless assets with whom you enjoy, have great social activities frequently, and prefer to be with them, or do think they are burdens and wish they were not there but the building was so you get extra space?
So do you enjoy and prefer to live lifelong and multigenerational (sharing the building with your neighbors and their children for generations to come) in your condo (most Eastern Europeans own their unit) in a microdistrict, or would you rather live in a spacious leafy suburb with single-family houses or even on a grand farm house if you could freely choose and money was not a factor? Are you relaxed and totally satisfied from living in an osiedle? Also, how is your relationship with all the neighbors who totally surround you in super close proximity cheek-by-jowl? Do you think they are priceless assets with whom you enjoy, have great social activities frequently, and prefer to be with them, or do think they are burdens and wish they were not there but the building was so you get extra space?
@@00crashtest In this house, many tenants have already changed and are constantly changing, buying an apartment.Personally, I'm tired of the city, but I live in the city only because of work
@@00crashtest you usually make the best out of the flat inside, but rarely do something to the common property. Neighbours... There are different people, we're friends with some, not friends with others and so on
As for a surburb - definitely not in our climate. I mean you can use the yard only half a year, have to clean snow and maintain all around the year, outdoor pool is useless, and maintaining a private house in Russia is both expensive and worrying unless you have a billion dollars and have servants and guards for your palace.
I lived in moscow for 20 years and then in Northeast of US for 20 years. I want to say that while soviet buildings are ugly to look at the overall urban planning in large cities in USSR was superior.
In most cities in US you need car, there is no other option, public transport is horrible, or , very often , not available at all. US houses are larger but in densely populated areas all you have is streets of 3 stories of essentially same houses/townhouses , roads and cars. There is no shops within walking distance, no parks. without a car you can walk miles and miles on exact same streets . yeah houses themselves are nicer, but living space around them is non existent.
in Russia the multistory apartments themselves are horrible (often way worse than US projects), but you have a lot of green space, children and adult parks to walk around.
City like new york has very few green spaces compared to amount of people living there. Moscow has huge amount of green spaces - large parks, small parks and simply courtyard squares everywhere. In us cities you typically have a few medium sized park for entire city, and thats it. Like boston commons or central park
Us suburbs is another topic. But again same design -you cannot do anything fun if you just leave your house - there is nothing in walking distance. You need first get into car and drive somewhere
Meanwhile the government is murdering millions of people and starving Ukrainians as well. There is nothing good about communism and that is why communism has never worked and never will work.
BUT AT LEAST WE HAVE OUR GREEN PARKS LOL ALL IS WELL NOW
@@russianman07 Well, you got slavery, genocide, riots, constant wars around the globe... AND NO GREEN PARKS.
There is nothing good about US and that is why US has never worked and never will work.
@@russianman07 Бендяжки, украинцы у них голодали, а вот русские сидели и жареный стейк закусывали с кофе?
@@centaur900 Sorry? What's that? I can't hear you over the sound of STILL EXISTING. *Laughs in 1991*
@@grenadier6483 do you think mighty USSR could collapse? That's what we want you to think! Soon we will open our underground cities and whole world will learn the truth!
I actually remember “The Irony of Fate” being on repeat every year around Christmas/New Year every year as a child.
Still is for me (first gen Canadian but Russian parents). I kind of see it as the Russian equivalent of Home Alone at this point.
The irony of the "Irony of fate" is that it showed a very particular project of a residential building. Only 3 such buildings exist (all in Moscow).
I still haven't seen it, but got hold of it as a project to watch whatever other countries watch on new year. Us Swedes watches Ivanhoe ruclips.net/video/G4xzNdTnESg/видео.html
@@sjukfan In my country we watch american movies and here it doesn't even snow 😭😭😭😭
@@ML-xp1kp in Russia we watch Home Alone every New Year too. It's a time for soviet comedies (The Irony of Fate is the main of them), Home Alone, Ice Age and so on (even on TV).
These micro districts are actually very green, like an endless Park with a few buildings strewn in. Very advantageous compared to the extremely dense and sealed ground developments we build in western Europe today.
The problem is that these large green territories require lots of resources for proper maintenance
yes especially when it comes to climate change and also mental health! having greenery all around is really good for your psyche, nature is very calming
Russia is much less dense than western europe, so it can afford to have large grass plots like america.
@@pannihto7588 In my home city they require ZERO maintenance. In fact, since asphalt wasn't replaced for 20 years, it was destroyed by tree roots. The only maintained land we have are the guerrilla gardens created by babushkas. Nature all the way!
@@MegaKiri11 That's exactly what I'm talking about. Soviet blocks look hideous today
another Eastern European here... Thanks for all the effort put into this video and for all the documentation. However I must add some things. As somebody else mentioned in the comments, living in these kind of building is indeed atmospheric. The noise and the sounds are all a lot different than in Western cities. Also many of the neighborhoods are actually super green and they do have a peaceful vibe to them. I really dislike it when people from the West call these constructions dull or grey or identical. I mean yes, that is somewhat true, but that doesn't take away from their value. Whenever the socialists mass-produced something, they instantly became criticized (and still is for some reason, even though communism is 30 years in the past). But let's not forget that capitalism is also, even more so now, THE absolute mass-producer in the world. And the same people criticizing communism just seem to overlook this fact. As if mass-production is a problem only as long as the communists are doing it.
They call it ugly only because Communists build it...
Facts
@Thomas What? America is one of the most industrialised countries in earth. What Americans criticize mass production?
@@dannielz6 literally any american arguing againts "socialism" saw "socialist mass production" as a negative side effect of socialism. When all of their common products in the store are also mass produced, yet since they are made by "capitalist" that means they are better.
I live in khruschevka in Saint-Petersburg and I like it. My house is pretty old so the walls are thicker than the usual in khruschevka so I don’t hear anything from my neighbors! I also like that everything I need (hospitals, shops, bus stations, even metro station) is like 5 minutes away from my house on foot. Even if the kitchen is small, it is suitable for a family of 3 people. We also have a lot of parks, trees, infrastructure all around our district which is amazing. Even some people may say that these apartment buildings are ugly, they may look good is local management companies take care of them, as much as people who live in this houses. The houses also look good if they’re plastered and painted nicely! Also even if the house is not beautiful outside somehow it gives me such warm nostalgic vibes even though I was born after the USSR dissolution.
@@ASS_ault not really, it was built in 1961. Some early serial projects of khrushevkas have better characteristics than the newer ones (for example 1-527/1-528 I live in 1-527, though my mum lives in 1-335 which is made from panels and it has worse characteristics and it was built some time after) It is due to a law about emilitation of surpluses in projecting and building which Khruschev made, but before that they tried to make houses less expensive than stalinkas but not ugly and give it soooome details at least
same here, cheers from lithuania former ussr state. Not all here are rotten western supporters and love chaotic capitalism. I was born during ussr collapse, and still have insane nostalgia towards those times, maybe a bit comes from parents and grandparents who lived decent life back then, they werent in communist party or anything like that, but were hard workers and enjoyed equality and unity back then. I grew up in 1965 built brick soviets apartment, that was pretty unique for those times, since most were block based buildings, maybe it was yeah when ussr changed from khruschev to brezhnev era, so it moved to a bit modern ways of building, and i must say this building im living was amazing for more than 40 years, only started to have some problems in 2000s, but hey comparing to todays new buildings that collapse or need heavy repairs in 10 15 years its big difference. Brick apartments were superior to blocked if we talk comfort, sound isolation was way way better ( my grandma living in blocked and comparing them is crazy, you can hear so much behind those block walls), also during winter it was way warmer compared to blocks, and during summer its colder than in blocked ones.
Also for westerns its impossible to understand how we grew up in those apartments and every day had 20 30 50 or even more kids to play in yards and playgrounds, depending on side of building (here in lithuania we mostly had 60-80 max 100 families in one building, i heard in russia/ st petterburg/moscow bigger cities numbers were way bigger), while in west if they lived in city centres it was just street and no playground, and in suburbans they had around few houses who they communicated, nothing even comes close to those adventure we had with our dozens and dozens of friends with all the nature between those buildings...
From Latin America, today I learned so much about your personal experience like ex-USSR urban citizen and Soviet Cities; maybe the city nearest to soviet urbanistic form in our land is Brasilia or Tenochtitlan hahaha. Thanks Rossiya!
@@NostalgicMem0ries You need to educate yourself, the capitalism in your country is far from being chaotic, and even in Russia the dissolution of Sovok has been very beneficial. Greetings from capitalist Russia.
All older buildings give off certain vibes. I am personally very attracted to many soviet and czarist designs because it gives you an glimpse of how people of the past lived really.
I love how historians often forget that Russia had 2 revolutions. Lenin did not overthrow the Zar Nicolas ll, but the provisional government led by kerensky.
Tsar Nicolas ll
Well, he did say that Lenin overthrew the successor government to Tsar Nicholas II's monarchy
@@0legmakarenk0 Emperor Nicolas ll
He helped to overthrow both
@@mantis23101988 By the Grace of God, We Nicholas, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, of Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod; Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan, Tsar of Poland, Tsar of Siberia, Tsar of Tauric Chersonesus, Tsar of Georgia; Lord of Pskov, and Grand Prince of Smolensk, Lithuania, Volhynia, Podolia, and Finland; Prince of Estonia, Livonia, Courland and Semigalia, Samogitia, Bielostok, Karelia, Tver, Yugor, Perm, Vyatka, Bogar and others; Sovereign and Grand Prince of Nizhni Novgorod, Chernigov, Ryazan, Polotsk, Rostov, Jaroslavl, Beloozero, Udoria, Obdoria, Kondia, Vitebsk, Mstislav, and Ruler of all the Severian country; Sovereign and Lord of Iveria, Kartalinia, the Kabardian lands and Armenian province: hereditary Sovereign and Possessor of the Circassian and Mountain Princes and of others; Sovereign of Turkestan, Heir of Norway, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, Stormarn, Dithmarschen, and Oldenburg, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth.
I lived in a micro district in Minsk in 1980s. Our apartment had unmetered hot and cold water, same with heating in winter. Two schools within 10 minutes walk, a small shopping mall, childcare facilities and an easy access to public transport. My grandparents paid for the apartment in full from their savings and they were not rich by any means. So my parents had a mortgage free place for themselves before they turned 30.
Выплатили в смысле это был кооперативный дом?
@@andbelov правильно, кооперативный.
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☝☝☝☝☝☝☝☝☝☝☝
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СПАСИБО, ЧТО ОЗВУЧИЛИ НАСТОЯЩУЮ ПРАВДУ О НАШИХ " СТАЛИНКАХ" и " ХРУЩЕВКАХ" ☝☝☝!!!!!!
На сегодня, посмотрев и пожив в новых современных домах 2020 года и им подобные ранее построенные - то скажу не только я, нл и все мои родные что это ГОВНОДОМА 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️ ☝ И ЛУЧШЕ КАЧЕСТВА ЧЕМ У "СТАЛИНКИ" И " ХРУЩЕВКИ" СЕЙЧАС НЕТ 6И У КОГО ☝☝☝😡!!!!!!
А ТО, ЧТО И ИЗ ЧЕГО СТРОЯТ КОТТЕДЖИ - ТАК ЭТО ВОТБЩЕ МРАК 🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️!
ПОЭТОМУ, ВСЕ КТО ОБСЕРАЕТ ГОВНОМ СССР И НАШИ СОВЕТСКИЕ МИКРОРАЙНЫ С БЕСПЛАТНЫМ И КАЧЕСТВЕННЫМ ЖИЛЬЕМ СТРОИВШИМИСЯ ВО ВРЕМЕНА СССР - ПЕРЕДАЮ ПЛАМЕННЫЙ ПРИВЕТ , УДАЧИ И ТЕРПЕНИЯ В БОРЬБЕ С ТАРАКАНАМИ, ТЕРМИТАМИ В ДОМУШКАХ ИЗ КАРТОНА И ПАЛОК, И ВОЗМОЖНОСТЬ ЗАНОВО КУПИТЬ НОВЫЙ ДОМ ПОМЛЕ ОЧЕРЕДНОГО ЬОРНАДА ИЛИ ЦУНАМИ 😁😁😁🤭🤭🤭!!!!!!
@Kex true, people are able to acquire an apartment without paying mortgage is a real nightmare for development businesses, bankers and landlords.
But how they bought it if private property didn't exist?
I lived in these apartments in Kazakhstan (4 different cities) over 7 years. The renovated old ones were generally much better than the apartments newly completed.
This type of blocks planning is a luxury in capitalistic countries.
And you forgot the silence and relaxing atmosphere like in a village, instead of noisy traffic 24 hours
@@Frivals totally agree. The insulation did wonders. You made me realise I lived next to main roads but never had noise problem.
America: CRTL+C CRTL+V Suburbs
Russia: CRTL+C CRTL+V Apartments
*round 5 sounds* fetch me their souls ты что тут по клавиатуре проходишься, Обама ты молочный
@@АлександрРубанов-и1у скройся
Yeah. But at least the American houses actually look nice.
@@wdwuccnxcnh7022 That's debatable.
Same with UK suburbs
I lived in a Soviet style flat in Poland for the first 10 years of my life. We kept our building very clean and colorful. We planted flowers everywhere. I guess, as the saying goes- "how you make your bed, is how you're gonna sleep" or something to that effect 🌴
I spent half a day in East Berlin on a congressional trip while the wall was still up. There wasn't much in the stores, but there were flower boxes everywhere, and I was told it was a higher living std than Russia.
@@robertfeinberg748 definitely higher. My uncle was a mechanic serving in the army, stationed with his family in East Berlin. When they came over to visit they'd bring a lot of amazingly nice things, and I looked up to them, like they were from a different planet or something. He even brought back once, a couple of bananas. I remember as a kid I looked at that black fruit, and as I peeled it, and shared half with my sister, I was amazed at this new taste. Next banana I'd have would be in about 5 years from then.
@@napillnik I noticed that during my adult life bananas seemed to have lost their taste.
I recently learned that it was due to a fungus blight. There's a video on it. As you know,
bananas are the most popular product at W-M. I found they helped my digestion, but
apparently they're actually bad for one's diet.
@@napillnik I come from Kenya and I'm amazed because bananas are so common down here.
@@mwanikimwaniki6801 I know, right? :D This isolation was horrible. When I was reading the book "The making of the atomic bomb" or its sequel "The dark sun", I came across the testament of a scientist that left the USSR and started working for the US, and his motivation was that he just walked on the street and saw mountains of oranges on display right there, at dirt cheap prices, which to him was out of this world. I felt that.
The USSR had cold winters all over, and bananas and other tropical plants wouldn't survive. Importing them would be very costly. We had plenty of sweets, like kakis, apples, pears, plums, cherries, peaches, all kinds of berries, etc. Just not bananas or other stuff that grows in warmer climates only.
Great unbiased video. Unfortunately we see Soviet housing criticized for it's unappealing facade rather then the close to complete elimination of homelessness that it achieved. This was great at highlighting both.
the soviet did not eliminate. homelessness especially not in rural areas
@@kylehankins5988 hey, can you give me the source? Being homeless or jobless was illegal in communist countries.
By 1980 only third of Soviet citizens owned an apartment, and by then it was already decrepit. You were often forced to move into an apartment with another family so yeah, imagine having some homeless failure living beside your daughter or wife? You tankies are so hilarious living in Western comfort pretending to care about Soviet homelessness. Go read a book kids.
Communist countries: We've eliminated almost all homelessness.
Some idiot: But building ugly 🥺🥺🥺
When people have nothing to complain or criticize about something good, they'll make some stupid arguments like that. Then they'll turn around and call someone else a sensitive snowflake, smh
@@Veronica-zz7bp It was so good that people risked their life to escape it. Also you won't hear too much criticism from those time periods, thanks to the party control over communication and their habit of putting critics against the wall or into gulags.
Your recent hexagon grid video led me to this one.
Got me thinking of a mashup of the two.
“The Kitchens were tiny”
*LAUGHS IN NYC*
Move to Texas the kitchens there are probably bigger than your whole apartment.
If you choose to live in a metropolis where you need to share a single city with millions of people don't complain the living space is tiny lol
I have lived in both a Stalinka (the larger variant), a Krushchyovka, and a Brezhnev era building. When it comes to kitchen, the ranking is as follows:
1. Brezhnev era
2. Large Stalinka
3. Krushchyovka
(Although the difference between the latter two was very small!)
I must say, this place has almost everything that a micro-district would need, with some exceptions as a result of being built between a railway line and a small village with a small river running through the northern side of the village.
@@EatMyShortsAU Have you seen the size of Texans? They don't design their kitchens for people but for cows.
Oh please, New York apartments are four times as late as here in Hong Kong.
Can confirm all of this. I'm from Europe and have lived in Russia for 6 months. In the 2 places that I lived (in Spb and Nizhny) I had supermarkets, schools, police stations, everything within a 5m walk, and the things that were too far, I could take the metro (3m walk, there is a metro every ~2 minutes from 5 am to midnight) or a bus (about 20 different lines passed by both my streets, both private and public owned bus companies, one every ~4m, identical ones every ~10-15m). Say whatever you want about the regime, but life there is much easier in terms of mobility.
Edit: As pointed out in the comments, yes, unfortunately, it only applies in the bigger cities, just like in the rest of the world. And yes, Russia has technically part of its territory in Europe, although the cultural changes are big enough for me to consider it different from the rest of it.
If you live in the countryside it isn't ^^. What you are talking about is only in big cities^^.
@@fjellyo3261 well yes, you'll face the same in the middle of texas
Hugo Costa Russia is Europe as well you know 😂
The same applies to cities in former Yugoslavia. I live in Ljubljana in the 12 stories building that was built in 1965. Can't belive how Brezhnyev influenced our city planers. Buildings that are build after ww2 were built 4 stories and later 5 stories. I love how i can walk to the nearest shop, child center, school, post office, hospital movie theater, police station, senior center bar every 100 meters. Bus also every few minutes. But the distric sure didn't look good before renovation.
'm' for miles or meters, or did you mean km?
I live in a microrayon like that. And they're actually cool. What I've got within a 5 minute walk: a few supermarkets, a couple of schools and kindergartens, some bakeries and pizza/sushi places. Within a 10 minute walk, there's a children's polyclinic, 2 post offices, some private clinics, a public library. A 15 minute walk takes me to a polyclinic for adults and a gym. Two parks (one is with amusement rides) and a river within 5 to 15 minutes walk. I can get to a cinema within 20-25 minutes. There’re quite a few barbershops / hairdressers’... There're tons of places within a 1 to 20 minutes walk! I can't imagine living in an American suburb. You spend half of your life in traffic jams!
Public transit is pretty good though still leaves much to be desired. But it covers most of my needs. I don't have to drive or even own a car.
The architecture is not esthetically pleasing at all, that's true. But it's pretty functional. There could have been more different designs so that microrayons at least looked different. Most crtitisists call it "Soviet shit" but capitalists build the same "shit": esthetically their high rises aren't much better than the Soviet ones. Most people either can't afford single family homes or prefer living closer to where social activities happen.
The ugly visual design is often commentated with a lot of greenery: trees, lawns, flowers everywhere. My city looks as if its highrises were sinking in a green sea. Many khruschevka districts look like parks with lots of thick trees planted decades ago.
The Soviet city planning also provided for green belts between industrial and residential zones. In my city, one such zone has been cancelled or narrowed and is under residential development now. Capitalism!
That is very true!! Every word. I love how russian microdistricts just all in greenery and flowers. Its like you live in a park, what can't be said about new post soviet districts. Which I think could be easily called "Capitalist shit"
They look depressing as fuck. Unless they're renovated the winter in east Europe looks extremely bleak and ugly, no wonder the suicide rate is so high.
I suppose if that's what you're used to. I lived in Samara for a month, and I did not like it. In most American inner cities shops and things are close by. If you live in suburbs close shops really is not a priority, and you probably want a variety of choices anyway.
@@Vii905 to me they are and I'm so grateful every day I left the depressing hell that is the east.
@@Vii905 These things are linked. Artificial usage of land like that induces it to be used below its marginal value, therefore poverty.
I live in a Soviet German "locker for workers" in the central micro-district. You were really able to synthesize your research into an explanation that truly speaks on the lived reality.
I think a big factor in these tiny dorm flats - mine is one of 1.8 million identical units - is that it really was designed for us to just sleep and bio break in but we have opportunities for a robust life outside the flat. My building itself has a courtyard for the residents to touch grass, hang laundry, and plant in a raised bed. On the next block is a small park with a playground. The next block over from that has the kindergarten, another playground, a community center, a grocery shop, pharmacy, and multidisciplinary doctor center.
I used to live in an American city that was addressing its housing crunch with tiny flats that didn't even have kitchens, but was just bulldozing all the park land and making absurd "loitering" laws. This kind of living is not sustainable without those opportunities to be outside in your community. Even just the walk 2 blocks to your housing block's grocery store is the fresh air needed to make tiny flat living tolerable. Going from tiny living box to transport box on wheels to work box then back in the evening... kills the soul, man. Not even owning a car because everything that's not 1500m from your flat is 200m from the transit corridor 500m away... that's such a load off!
Since this kind of living forces us all out into common areas, I have developed connections with my neighbors that I haven't experienced since the good old Gen-X childhood days. Even though we are in a central district of a major city, I'm the odd man out because I lock my door! The cashiers at the block's grocery store know me since I'm able to just pop in for bread on the way home and know I'm still struggling with German, so they're patient and kind.
I think one thing that colors a western view of these "standard buildings" 😉 is rental terms in most cities. The idea of having a generic concrete cube _is_ depressing when you can't paint, hang shelves, and will have to renew every year or two. The lease I'm enjoying now is essentially lifelong (cancelation on either side is quite a process) and I have the freedom to do whatever I desire inside, as long as it's returned to a white concrete cube when I move out. Once you pass by the other cubes and open my door, there is no question of whose flat it is! I find my living space to be very individual. This is the first time I've ever been allowed to have my own curtains instead of the provided blinds. With the need to purchase my own fridge, I got a very energy efficient one so my electric bill is pretty great. Despite the pre-fab construction that was replicated over and over across a good third of this world, my tiny Soviet box is genuinely the most "me" dwelling I have ever had.
Lol, the kitchen at 5:38 that you call 'tiny' is actually bigger than the kitchen in my family home in the UK, where my mum would cook for me and my 5 siblings! Americans must be used to very large kitchens.
Also I really like the idea of the micro-district, I've always thought that's how cities should be planned normally
Micro districts are not a very good idea. Trust me, I live in Russia.
@@CHE6yp why?
@@CHE6yp it's not a very good idea to you, but trust me, or anyone else, that it is a lot better than the alternative.
@@agustinvenegas5238 Its weird, but in the end it kills any variability. Theres one store in your district and store of the same size in all the districts around you. You feel trapped in uniformity and if you want somenthing different, you have to travel quite far.
But hey, the schools, kindergatens, basic healthcare etc in your vicinity is awesome. And boring 🙃 But its changing now, every such a district tries tobdistingquish itself from each other (shops, cafes etc) so it feels somewhat more natural.
Basically, the disctrict is fine, but not if there are tens of similar districts around you.
@@hanbanaroda every thing is boring if you think of it or you just depressed
Here's a fun fact for you. The street with trees on it in the center of the shot at 8:36 is called "ulitsa Marii Ulyanovoy". It was named that in 1963 after Vladimir Lenin's sister Maria Ulyanova. But from 1958 to 1963 it was called "Tretya ulitsa Stroiteley", i.e. Third Street of Construction Workers. Incidentally, Irony of Fate protagonists both live on Tretya ulitsa Stroiteley (though the film was shot at a different location). Looks like it was Fate that guided your hand when you were choosing the photos to illustrate your video. :-)
your eye for detail is impressive, спасибо
Most of the Irony of Fate was shot in the studio. Mostly because real flat would not fit filming equipment of a time. Could be filmed in real flat with modern equipment, because it is more compact.
That's where I live! On the intersection of Krupskoy and Prospekt Vernadskogo
One beautiful thing about Soviet city planning was that I as a child could come home after school drop off my backpack knock on my friend/classmates apartment door and and just play right outside. This meant a GOOD CHILDHOOD, where we exercised independency from adults as well as legit frienship bonding with other kids. Everything was in such a close proximity to each other that we didn't have to rely on our parents driving us everywhere (not like we had cars lol)
Unlike when I first came to USA as an exchange student back in 2006 to a small town in Michigan, I literarily had to wait for my host mother to arrive from work and take me somewhere and everything was in such a long distance and a simple idea of knocking on somebody's door was very unacceptable.
The family that I was living with in the states had two little kids, and I always felt bad for them - you guys have no clue what the real childhood means.
I would never let my kids grow up in America.
you can give your kids bikes and that would make them more mobile, but yes you are largly correct
arktseytlin we did bike rides to local park but literarly were alone the whole time as no kids other than us were present in the park and michigan has some great frickin parks with the most beautiful trees i have ever seen
@@andrapik2709 As someone who came to the US as a baby, basically you came here when kids started not playing outside anymore. I'd say around the 90s was the last time kids REALLY stopped playing outside...after that, it went downhill to playing video games constantly. TV and video games...and even the kids TV is so stupid now. I am sure many older Americans know what I mean. Doug and Rugrats...or even Wizards of Waverly Place and Victorious...those were good shows...not they put drivel on to dumb down American kids. 2006 was about the end of things...such as kids TV being decent and not slowing the development of the brain. I would love to see them do an MRI of a two children of equal IQ watching Rugrats vs some new cartoon. The results would be scary.
@@daniilgergiev3999 except every new generation consistently has higher IQ scores on average than the last because education is getting better. Scary. In any case, I'll be here enjoying character and plot development in my cartoons and shows. Have fun eating fiber and watching the mentalist.
I grew up in Canada in a relatively poor family. Being poor meant no car to whiz around in, meaning my social life was much worse than the other kids at my school. The privileged people who influence change (or lack thereof) are blissfully unaware that their childhoods were premised on wealth inequality. And that's in Canada, where we sometimes seem "socialist" in comparison to the USA.
I grew up in Moscow and now I live in London. And especially this winter I have missed the comfort of Soviet apartments. They might look ugly from the outside but they are so comfy ones you are in and the most important thing is they are super warm compared to British houses and flats, on top of that you never have to worry about running out of hot water, it's literally unlimited.
A colleague of mine, the same age as me (37), grew up in Manchester, not a small city by any means, but he didn't have hot water in his house at all, he told me they washed once a week. Honestly, I was shocked.
The other guy told me, he fills a bottle with hot water and puts it in his bed to make the bed warm. It feels like some basic things have been turned into luxury in Britain.
It is very easy to return this “comfort” - return back to Russia and die in trenches in Ukraine, go on
French architecture: art
British architecture: art
Italian architecture: art
Soviet Union architecture: tetris
It is not architecture, it is called “urban planning”. The soviet architecture is nice though, just google for Stalin architecture, or for soviet Houses of Culture. It is different from the European because most cities in Union were build in the industrial era, so they didn’t have the architectural background
You can read some history about soviet architecture. There was a funny moment with Khrushchev when he was building up USSR with his blockhouses. He once said that soviet people do not need an excess architecture, so he started plucking off pattern and plaster from old houses in Moscow
@@ivan4ik2003 привет мой друг
Technically I would consider tetris to be a form of art
Literaly
@@radiantsquare007jrdeluxe9 the shit i poop can be considered art
During 20th, soviet architecture was focused on experiments, during Stalin's era - on some massive neoclassics. Later, with all the urbanisation, with migration of peasants into cities, lack of houses in the cities became too big, many people lived in shared appartments, or some temporary buildings.
Such typical constructions actually were invented in Europe by such people as Le Corbusier, although adapted for the Soviet environment by local architects. And yes, they were the simplest way to give housing to many millions of people, and do it fast.
There was no aim to make it all look similar, it was an inevitable downside of extremely fast development.
But, there were made quite nice murals and mosaics on the building walls, especially in the republics if USSR.
And what was the best - it was the amount of free space, grass and trees around and inside the microdistricts.
That’s what a micro district is. When I was in school in the 70s, from my house I could walk to 4 neighboring schools in 10 minutes. The same can be said about kindergartens, shops, pharmacies, hospitals, etc. Add a good public transportation system here. In general, living in an "evil empire" was not so bad as you might think.
Indeed we would build houses adapted with todays technology in soviet district planning with added electric trains and underground parking places it would be greatly superior to any todays house.
Its the best . Very good design philophies every country should look into. More walking better health. Less waste of petrol, better for the environment. Less time stuck in traffic. Better time utilization. I expected some terrible urban planning before the video I was pleasantly surprised.
The idea behind microdistricts is not as much your convenience than to limit your movement. You see, we'd rather you don't leave your house. I think the past months should tell you that we are very serious about keeping you inside. But when you do go out, then we'd rather you stay in your neighborhood. If you can't find what you need in your neighborhood, then we'd rather you stay in the city. And so on, the idea is we want to limit your movements because it lets us allocate surveillance and control resources better and it also diminishes social contacts within the population.
@@statinskill Do you mean the COVID-19 epidemic?
@@statinskill tinfoil hat alert.
Yeah its horrid design murican suburban districts are better, more cars needed more fuel more expenses means more consumption and stronger economy.
Они отличные - просто нужно не забыть что они считались временным решением и что просто были не достаточно качественные - Но в итоге - ссср нет - а они стоят - хотя уже пережили свой срок слубы в 30-50 лет
This type of blocks planning is a luxury in capitalistic countries.
And you forgot the silence and relaxing atmosphere like in a village, instead of noisy traffic 24 hours
@@Frivals я сам с Ташкента - город строили современным - и проект "Дом Жемчуг" вот то что реально круто
i was born in poland, but moved out of the country. i have to say, i miss this sort of communist blocks. everything is so close and practical, and i feel like you know your neighbors more
No
@@interneteris everyone who actually experienced the buildings in the comments seems to like them. 🤔
@@zwiebelface185 I agree. I like them too. High density, cheap housing and since everyone lives almost at the same place, you need far less shops compared to if everyone had an individual house to themselves...
The convenience is really what matters a lot in daily life
No. I feel it’s more like nostalgia. Cause Western European blocks are so much friendlier. Imagine dozens of 5-12 stories buildings with NO businesses, no infrastructure. Just benches with old ladies and alcoholics and sad playgrounds and wet clothes drying on the racks. Want to go to a park? Ride a trolleybus
@A B not true, you can have a business inside on of the blocks, for example I used to go to a therapist and he was in one of the blocks... the only requirement is most likely the noise level. You can't have a shop there because lot of people come in and that could make a lot of noise.
Want to add that the main reason of building such huge amount of standardized housing was ww2 during which lots of cities were completely destroyed... This buildings were great solution to supply houses for huge amount of people, which we can compare with population of Italy during such a short period of time. So if you will ever need to build a full city and have not enough time, I advice you to learn their experience :)
It was a reason in some cities, but there were many cities which has not been destroyed, like Moskow or Leningrad (now St. Petersburg ), but those cities actually has "copypasted" houses too. Moreover, I'm living in Volgograd that called Stalingrad during WW2 and many people think that this city was totally destroyed, but many buildings was restored or reconstructed, and it was built many new buildings in constructivism style. There was other reason. In the beginning of 20th centure most of people in Russian empire lived in a country side. But the industrial revolution has happened and peopla started move from villages to cities to get a job on factories. And most cities was not ready to accept so many workers therefore in some small flat could live two or three families. Stalin cuntinued the industrial revolution and population of cities was encreased in 2-3 times, but housing issue still here and it was really nessessary to do smthn with it. Use common project and build a houses from big blocks, created on the factory is much cheaper than use an individual project each time, and in country where most of population is living in communalkas (one flat for several families) it is a good way to give people a housing in a short time. BTW, khrushevkas was planned as a temporary solution for 10-15 years, but actually they still here for a half of century and more.
@Царь Батюшка If we are talking about "wild" developers from 90s, I totally agree with you. But nowadays khrushchevkas have almost worst conditions in whole housing market. I'm renting a flat in khrushevka and i hear how stomping a neighbours upper, how talking neighbours on my flour. There are no ventilation and I have to open a window to get a fresh air. There are no fire evacuation exits, all communications a very old, a water pressure on the 2nd flour is pretty low, and I have to wait for 2-3 minutes to fill a teapot btw, a quality of water got worse and now I'm using water in bottels. Any other newer house has to much better conditions. But in my opinion a private house in suburban is a best choice.
Home for 60 .000.000 people only 10. Yers
Берлин и многие другие города тоже чуть ли не до основания снесли бомбежками и танками, и почему-то выглядят эти европейские города нормально.
They also create high population density. I remember scrolling into medium sized Russian towns on maps which were about the area of maybe a 50k town in the west, but were actually like 100-200k cities I never heard of
Or sometimes more extreme.
I was once zooming in to this industrial town in the far east called Novokuzhnetsk. When zoomed to see the whole city on google earth, you could see individual tower blocks. It looked to me like a ~200k medium city. It turns out Novokuzhnetsk has >500k people. These aren't the only examples. Try Kemerovo or Naberezhnye Chelny yourself (both 500k+ cities), or Tolyatti (700k+, also probably one of the most depressing Russian cities, built as mass housing for workers of the massive Lada factory)
These soviet micro districts can easily get to 10 000 people in sq km.
So what you are saying is that they are more efficient
@@Ag3nt0fCha0s Yeah maybe. I was once zooming in to this industrial town in the far east called Novokuzhnetsk. When zoomed to see the whole city on google earth, you could see individual tower blocks. It looked to me like a ~200k medium city. It turns out Novokuzhnetsk has >500k people. These aren't the only examples. Try Kemerovo or Naberezhnye Chelny.
By "the West" do you mean Europe or US/Canada? Density can be hugely different between the two: comparing places I've lived, Bristol, UK and Lafayette, IN, US are about the same physical size, but Bristol has 500k pop and Lafayette only 100k
North America and the former USSR are basically the complete opposite in this regard. NA cities are the least dense, because of suburban sprawl; while ex-USSR cities are super dense because of all of those commie-blocks. The densest or most compact city I've been to has gotta be Yekaterinburg, it has about 1.5 million people, but it's super small.
I live in a micro-district (we call them blocks here) of New Belgrade, a Soviet-style planned district of Belgrade, Serbia, former Yugoslavia (never a part of Soviet Union but a communist country with planned economy nevertheless). I can testify that it's a positive and pleasant environment for living, especially for raising a family. It's very peaceful, very safe, everyone knows everyone else, there's a lot of open space between the buildings where children can play and people can hang out, and indeed all that you need in everyday life is within couple hundred meters.
So do you enjoy and prefer to live lifelong and multigenerational (sharing the building with your neighbors and their children for generations to come) in your condo (most Eastern Europeans own their unit) in a microdistrict, or would you rather live in a spacious leafy suburb with single-family houses or even on a grand farm house if you could freely choose and money was not a factor? Are you relaxed and totally satisfied from living in an osiedle? Also, how is your relationship with all the neighbors who totally surround you in super close proximity cheek-by-jowl? Do you think they are priceless assets with whom you enjoy, have great social activities frequently, and prefer to be with them, or do think they are burdens and wish they were not there but the building was so you get extra space?
@@00crashtest Well, the "lifelong and multigenerational" living is a thing of the past, nowadays life here is very fluent (for all the good and bad reasons that you can imagine and more than that), so it's a matter of convenience and different life choices and priorities. I'm in my late 30s, with a wife and two small kids, and in an explosive phase of career growth, earning good money and increasing my investment portfolio aggressively. So for me time and people are critical resources. Also, I've been always a city-boy type (although I was born in the countryside) - and I still very much enjoy going night out in many Belgrade clubs and 'kafana's, dining in fine restaurants, going to festivals, concerts, museums, theaters, galleries, and the like (of course, when the time allows - I pray God every evening for 36 hours a day). Most of my neighbors are of roughly similar age, interests, and status. Most of us have kids of similar age. As you can imagine, I consider it a great opportunity for my kids to grow in a healthy environment with lot of friends. When they grow up a little, there are a few good schools within half a mile, 2 or 3 sport centers, couple of libraries, a science center is planned nearby, and the university is not too far. By then I'll possibly grow tired of all the hassle, in which case I'll most likely wish to move away somewhere closer to nature (leaving my condo to the kids, renting it out, selling, whatever). For the price of my 3-bedroom, slightly less than 100 m2 (approx. 1000 square feet) apartment, I can easily get 250 - 400 m2 suburban home. On the other hand, my parents already own 2 houses in a small town, if I wanted to I could move into one at any time. So in my case it's entirely a matter of convenience and lifestyle. Speaking of ranches - there's only a few of them here (it's Europe, we don't have nearly as much land as the US or Canada) and they only recently became a thing for ultrarich and famous, they often come with orchards, vineries, distilleries, stables for breeding race horses, and other vanities for the top percent of a percent. Prices are in tens of millions, and that's far beyond my reach and likely to stay so.
@@aleksandarrudic3694 Glad you enjoy your neighbors then.
@@aleksandarrudic3694 You go to nightlife with small children?!
@@TheBrazilRules You have no idea what party animals my little ones are! Joke aside - why wouldn't I?
As a Russian it was super heartwarming to see you start the video talking about the "Irony of Fate" watching tradition =].
Generally very well presented video. I really miss the micro-districts in the USA (even after a decade of living here), having most shops 5 minutes away, that and the regularity / dependability of public transport which lets you be spontaneous and not have to plan your trip ahead of time to make sure you don't miss that once in an hour bus after taking a half an hour train ride after taking a 20 minute walk to the closest train station. I gotta admin I really dread having to use the car here for getting almost anywhere.
Russian elite (in Russia) doesn't live in micro-districts: they live in McMansions in the suburbs (just like Americans) and drive SUVs to get anywhere (just like Americans); only the working-class live in micro-districts; and you're a bullshitter
@@ireneuszpyc6684 did he say anything at all about the elite?
@@ireneuszpyc6684 What country's elite doesn't live like that?
He also got my heart with his mentioning.
Would be worse if he mentioned the sequel :)
I'm from the United States and I moved to Moscow in September of 2019. For 8 months, my wife and I lived with her parents and grandmother in a small Khrushchyovka apartment. I was charmed by it, and I thought it was interesting how several of our friends in their 30's and 40's also lived with their parents and grandparents in similar small apartments. As noted in the video, everything we would ever need is totally within walking distance, in terms of medical, grocery, electronics, bars, restaurants, banking, government offices, etc. And every micro district has a similar living environment. We live in a house now just outside of Moscow, and we're much more comfortable, but I'm glad I got to have the experience of living in a Khrushchyovka style apartment for a while. I get to re-live it all again whenever we visit our friends. Crowded kitchen parties in those small apartments are a lot of fun. Thanks for the great video!
right choice to move out of moscow, moscow region is much better for living
The micro district system makes so much sense and is exactly how I imagined an ideal city would be planned. In the US, depending on where you live, you can't really go too far without a car since the infrastructure was built around major roads so you can end up super far away from important places. The micro district for the most part eliminates the need to have a car to get somewhere which means less traffic jams, pollution, and dependence on cars. Having a car is nice but when you don't have one, it sucks in the US.
blitzwaffe if I remember correctly the reason America has such poor public transport and car focused infrastructure was due to lobbying by car companies that prevented this
Transportation is all about storeys and density. Soviet 'microdistricts' are depressive and suicidal as hell.
Ideal = soulless. Urban sprawls and microdistricts are two different extremes. The best cities are the ones that grow more naturally and have an optimum combination of privacy and community. Less standardized 'European' quarter type is the optimal manner.
In fact, I think the concept is identical to how city services will position themselves *naturally*, if everyone walked. - see ruclips.net/video/3PWWtqfwacQ/видео.html by Wendover that discusses the suburban version of this effect. On the other hand, the car culture certainly shaped modern American cities, rather than the other way round. I see both as natural products of their respective ways of living.
@@alth000 You could easily develop on the micro district concept so it wouldn't be depressing and soulless. The whole, everything within walking distance in the community has a lot of benefits - just combine it with built environments that are diverse and nice to be in and caters for both privacy and community.
@Царь Батюшка Soviet Union did a good job on you. Most people don't appreciate hearing one neighbor beating his wife, while the other getting drunk, while someone SOMEWHEREIN THE BUILDING, is always drilling something. Most people don't appreciate "panoramic views" of other, equally depressing copy-paste concrete blocks.
They laughed at the Soviets, told children that in the Soviet Union a family lived in a cramped apartment and shared their car. Now they tell workers about how great it is to live in a small coop without healthcare and then pay some more to used an car sharing app. Feels like the worst of both worlds.
And that part of the world was always impoverished. Russia was gangster-capitalism before 1917 and it is gangster-capitalism after 1991. Another type of capitalism is not possible for Russia, like much of the world, and real progress only possible when all exploitation ends.
And how much better are we off now? Not by much, for most of us,
@@raylast3873 Another type of capitalism is not possible*
There is no gangster capitalism. It is just capitalism. Adding crony, corporate, gangster, etc whatever adjective of that type to capitalism only tries to obscure the fact that capitalist incentives inherently create corruption, monopoly, gangsterism, cronyism, etc.
Capitalism is a form of Slavery. Without any welfare system it's work or die.
And they also laughed at how all the products people bought in Soviet shops were wrapped into biodegradable sheets of paper and how people had to carry their own shopping bags while the "civilized capitalist" countries had plastic bags at the stores... Now everyone whining about ecology, trying to persuade the public to stop using plastic.
If we want to save the humanity and our planet, we, the workers, should unite!
"Market Stalinism" where you're under constant surveillance by everything and you live in a tiny hole-in-the-wall apartment, but, hey, at least it's the free market doing it?