Professional Affiliation

Professor of Modern Russian and European History, University of Mary Washington

Expert Bio

Steven E. Harris is professor of modern Russian and European history at the University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, Virginia, and author of Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Woodrow Wilson Center Press and the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). He is writing a book on the history of Aeroflot and authoritarianism in the Russian jet age, from Stalin to Putin.

Wilson Center Project

Moving to the Separate Apartment: A Social and Cultural History of Housing in the Soviet Union

Project Summary

Focuses upon the social and cultural aspects of the Soviet Union’s housing construction campaign and urban residents’ relocation from communal apartments to separate apartments. Looks at the impact on the way that people shaped their lives and experienced a broader transition out of Stalinism and into the thaw period. Demonstrates that the separate apartment was at the center of social and cultural change.