Formation of managerial personnel of the USSR housing and tenant cooperatives in the 1920s–1930s

Abstract

The article is devoted to the process of formation of management of Soviet housing and tenant cooperative societies in 1920–1930s. Since consideration of this problem from the standpoint of social history can not fully illuminate the root causes of the emergence of a particular layer of housing managers, the author attempts a methodological synthesis based on economic history. Th e transfer of part of municipalized housing to rental housing in 1924 was due to the state’s lack of resources to maintain housing in proper condition. Under these circumstances the new economic managers were faced with the task of finding resources to repair the houses. Th e complexity of the task demanded
great organizational talent from the managers and chairmen of the boards in the economic realities of the 1920s and 1930s. Diffi culties in managing housing caused both by the housing crisis and by the subjective characteristics of the new managers, who sought to ensure their own comfortable existence, provoked discontent with the housing and tenant cooperatives and their economic managers.
The campaigns for purging cooperatives of “non-proletarian elements” failed to improve the material and economic condition of the cooperatives, so one of the factors that led to the liquidation of the housing and tenant cooperatives in 1937, should be considered the desire to prevent the strengthening of the quasi-bourgeois relations in the housing sphere.