Authors
Ekaterina Mizrokhi1; 1 University of Cambridge, UK Discussion
In 2017, the sprawling landscapes of Soviet-era standardised housing districts in Moscow came under review when the municipality announced the Renovation: an urban redevelopment project that sought to demolish several thousand five-storey, standardised Soviet-era housing blocks (khrushchevki). Based on ethnographic research conducted with khrushchevka residents, this paper explores the amicably ambivalent relationships that residents began to develop with their homes since the Renovation was announced— relationships that resist both conventional critical analyses of standardised housing districts, along with the overwhelmingly successful opt-in rate to the demolition program. This paper investigates how a network of actors — including said residents, along with grassroots online activists, architects, memory agents and local cultural leaders — generated unexpected meanings and futures for Moscow’s khrushchevki. In a moment of stupor and suspension, this network of actors has, across varying scales, begun to renegotiate political possibilities along an ‘off-modern’ (Boym, 2008) temporal order: one where the khrushchevka is no longer obsolescent, anachronistic, and disavowed, but rather host to alternative and progressive urban futurities. The paper will argue that studying the evolution of the Moscow khrushchevka — as both structure and symbol — can equally help us decipher where the politics of time and urban change intersect in war-time Russia. 
