Aerial view of Moscow’s outskirts or why all houses are cloned

Looks like i completely forgot about this blog, I’m sorry. Here’s something interesting i found – a bunch of pictures taken from a helicopter flying around the outskirts of Moscow.

 

All pictures are copyright of Ilya Varlamov and the full photo session can be found here, in his LiveJournal post.

What i also wanted to point out – if you look at the larger version of those picture, you’ll notice that there are rows by rows by rows of houses looking like they’ve been cloned with Photoshop. These are “sleeping districts” – areas of the city designed to hold only apartment houses and a bit of supporting infrastructure – place, where everyone are leaving for work in the morning and coming back to sleep in the evening. Hence the name. All Russian cities large enough to be separating living and working zones have these “sleeping districts”, and in every city they look the same, more or less. But why the hell those houses are identical?

There’s a long story that calls for another post, but I'll write the beginning here.

After the Worlds War II, Russia was utterly and completely devastated. Recovering from it took time, and after some of the most pressing matters were attended to and people began to breed again, another problem arose: there was not enough housing for everyone. After the war ended people kept living in communal housing, which meant whole families of 3-6 people living in a single room of a 3-4 room apartments, with almost no furniture. In small cities and countryside people could build houses – and everyone who was able to did so, alone or with the help of others – but in bigger cities it was impossible, so population was in dire need of housing.

When Stalin died, Nikita Khrushchev took over and during his 10 years of rule, USSR took on a governmental program to fix the problem by building a massive amount of affordable housing around the whole country. The program lead to fast urbanization of Russia and continued from 1959 to 1985, long after Khrushchev’s time. About a 290 millions of m² of living space was built during the program – 10% of all housing space in Russia by the end of it – which is a quite huge amount. These houses had to be cheap and fast to built, and they were popped out like soda cans out of a dispenser – built by the same blueprint over and over again. That’s why they look alike.

A house built during that program, or an apartment in such house is called  “khruschevka” (хрущевка, plural ends with -ky) by Russians, and these houses are still where most people are living even now.

Now, can you imagine, that not only half of your city looks identical save for names of those streets, but no matter to which city you go, the houses are still the same everywhere? People tend to go crazy in such environment – or make comedy movies about how a drunk chap misses his plane and goes to the wrong city, to a wrong apartment, completely unaware of the mistake, because everything is cloned around him - but that’s a story for another post.