Khrushchyovka

Chruschtschowka (Russian хрущёвка ) is a common in Russia and other successor states of the Soviet Union colloquial name for a mostly built in the 1960s or 1970s, five story concrete. Once such tenements ( hence the name ) for the common people in cities and urban-type settlements were on endorsement Nikita Khrushchev masse built to eliminate housing shortage as cost -saving and fast. Because of its cheap construction and the associated low living comfort the houses ( a play on words or portmanteau word from Хрущёв ( Khrushchev ) and трущоба ( truschtschoba = slum ) Russian хрущоба, ) are often referred to as Chruschtschoba.

Special

Under a Chruschtschowka you do not understand each plate, but one typical of his time, slab type, a number of special features, owing to its relatively inexpensive construction, most of which adversely affect the quality of living. These characteristics are mainly the following:

  • The building materials of a Chruschtschowka are usually precast concrete panels ( " panels " construction in the narrower sense), but sometimes brick, - in the latter case, the comfort and the life of the building are slightly higher than is the case in concrete structures in general;
  • The houses have five ( rare: three or four) floors including the ground floor and no attic;
  • The houses have neither an elevator nor a garbage disposal;
  • The ceiling height in the apartments is only 2.5 meters (compared to the usual for confectioner buildings three to four meters );
  • Very low thermal and acoustic insulation of the exterior and interior walls.

Genesis

Collectivization and the resulting mass- exodus in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, but also the destruction during the Second World War, led in all Soviet cities to a devastating housing shortage, had to suffer from the particularly larger families. Due to the housing shortage, simple citizens had namely each with a room in the so-called Kommunalkas satisfied, ie a kind of " forced community homes," where had to share a kitchen, a bathroom and a toilet several families in general. The huge and ever- growing demand for living space could not be fulfilled with the practiced, solid construction.

With this high up the issues of necessity invention "of the " low-cost tenement for the little guy now hit the mid-1950s the birth of the prefabricated building. The design of the simple unit construction goes back to the engineer and Shchusev student Vitaly Lagutenko. 1955 gave the Council of Ministers of the USSR with his decree " on the development of housing construction in the USSR" green light to the plate in the Soviet Union. The first Chruschtschowkas in 1958 in Moscow Birdcherrylands new neighborhood, where at the site of a former village tentatively an entire residential neighborhood was built with the new five-story new construction. A few years later they began to set up a similar residential area in all other regions of the country.

Initially, the new housing was still considered popular as a home of their own - regardless of quality - for a simple Soviet citizen that time represented still a rarity. Your derogatory term given the Chruschtschowkas until decades later, when increased the quality of the prefabricated generally considerably and the living room was not quite so tight. Chance Chruschtschowkas but were constructed until well into the 1980s.

Presence

On the territory of modern Russia a total of 290 million square meters of living space built in the form of Chruschtschowkas during the Soviet era. A significant part of it is used to this day and makes up about 10 percent of the total area of the country. The problem here is that many Chruschtschowkas were intended at the time of its emergence as a kind of temporary solution, so that their expected useful life of each should be only about 20 years. Thus, many of the still in use today Chruschtschowkas have significantly exceeded their service life and represent a danger for its inhabitants, quite apart from their low and no longer contemporary living quality and usually also the clearly visible outer decay.

In Moscow and some other cities we stepped up efforts in recent years is to demolish the oldest Chruschtschowkas and implement their population in newly constructed replacement dwellings. Poorer cities can not afford financially, so that the Chruschtschowkas be there until further include the cityscape, the however.

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