Housing and communal construction in Kemerovo during the II and III five-year plans (1933–1940)

In Russia, the housing issue, one of the main ones for meeting the most important human needs, has always been a burning problem. In the history of the Soviet state, the approach to housing and communal construction, as a secondary sphere in the national economy, formed back in the years of the first five-year plans, despite its periodic adjustment, was a difficult legacy for future generations to overcome. The purpose of the article is to consider the so far poorly studied complex of problems associated with the construction of housing and communal facilities in Kemerovo, which the city authorities faced and solved with varying success during the construction of the largest coal and chemical complex in the USSR on its territory. The historical and comparative method and functional analysis of the materials of the local press and documents of the regional archive, reflecting the approaches of the authorities to providing the population with housing and utilities, made it possible to find out the capacity of the local construction base, changes in the structure of the housing stock, problems associated with the construction of new facilities. It was concluded that in the II and III five-year plans, a significant increase in the housing stock did not correspond to the scale of industrial development of Kemerovo. In the context of a shortage of financing for construction, rapid growth of the urban population and low-power enterprises of the local construction industry, the construction of communal facilities did not chronically "fit" in the planned time frame and acquired a "transitional" character from year to year. Providing the working population with new square meters went along the path of building a quarter of semi-landscaped stone high-rise buildings and villages near large enterprises with temporary departmental wooden barracks. At the same time, three quarters of the urban housing stock were private peasant-type wooden houses, huts and dugouts, located, among other things, in the areas of numerous «cheats». Further study of the experience of housing and communal construction in Kemerovo is promising in connection with the search for effective solutions for the further growth of its modern industrial and sociocultural potential.