(4 of 10)
Nevertheless, the notion persists in the West that the Russians are an austere people who spurn material possessions. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The average Soviet citizen today has an almost obsessive hankering for stylish clothes, appliances and simple conveniences that Westerners take almost for granted. "The Russians don't want to be Spartans, and they aren't," wrote TIME Senior Editor Henry Grunwald after a recent swing through the Soviet Union. "They are Athenians who haven't made it."
For Ivan Ivanovich, Russia's man in the street, the crudest blow of all in the past two years has been the government's sharp curtailment of a construction drive aimed at ending the nation's abysmal housing shortage by 1970. Some experts doubt that this would have been possible even in 25 years. Today, however, outside of a few showcase cities with their bleak barracks rows of new apartment buildings, urban residential construction has clearly lost its momentum. As a result of population increases and the continuing drift of workers from farm to factory jobs, the city dweller actually has less living space today than he had in 1923. By official reckoning, he occupies an average 68 sq. ft.—just two-thirds of the area considered minimal for human requirements by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.
Twenty Minutes from Town. In most apartment buildings, kitchens and bathrooms have to be shared by all the families on each floor. The perennial proximity of relatives and neighbors has made claustrophobia a national disease. On a typical parents' evening recently at a Moscow school, teachers' complaints about the children could nearly all be traced to their housing problems. Cramped quarters are widely blamed for broken families—but divorce offers little solace to many couples, who have no choice but to go on sharing the same room.
Officially, any citizen with less than 14 sq. ft. of living space can demand different quarters; in practice, he uses pull or just puts his name on a waiting list, where it may remain for ten years or more. Most Muscovites pin their hopes on a grey, 17¢ weekly magazine called Bulletin for the Exchange of Living Space. The most avidly read sheet in Moscow, it is probably the only Soviet publication that carries not a word of Communist propaganda. On the contrary, the hundreds of appeals for new quarters ("single room anywhere," "two separate rooms, may be w/o bath") in its tightly packed columns suggest a degree of desperation that speaks volumes about Marxism in action.
The housing problem is still of little moment to the great majority of all Russians who live outside the cities, mostly in crowded one-room isbas, unplumbed wooden dwellings that have barely changed since the peasants were serfs. "The early 19th century," says one old Moscow hand, "is only 20 minutes from Moscow." Along millions of unpaved village streets, women still haul water from communal wells, shoo geese and chickens, scoop up cow dung for their gardens. The "hungry jackdaws," as Tolstoy once called the peasants, venture fearfully into the cities to sell their