When Spaces of Transit Fail Their Designers

This chapter looks at the mass housing program launched by the Soviet leadership in the late 1950s from the perspective of urban planning and management. It looks into the transit spaces of new socialist neighborhoods, focusing on the stairwells of Soviet apartment blocks. Designed as utilitarian spaces for the fast passage of people from home to work to leisure activities, they revealed an ability to accumulate people and connect them in various ways, which Soviet authorities and intellectuals often interpreted as threatening to the public good. The Soviet stairwell established different affective regimes of Soviet people's interactions with urban space and provoked some of the hidden social conflicts of late socialism that became reflected in socially dominant structures of the Soviet self. The communities discussed in the chapter are predominantly male. The material and social conditions of late socialism provoked different regimes and forms of masculinity, which is another important topic of this book.