The “Soviet” factor: exploring perceived housing inequalities in a midsized city in the Donbas, Ukraine

Abstract

In this paper, I revisit the role of Soviet legacy factors in explaining today’s housing inequalities in a midsized post-Soviet city by investigating social, demographic, economic and geographic determinants of perceived housing quality. Building on a sample survey dataset (n = 3,000) that brings together both Soviet legacy effects and more universal influences on housing inequality, it is shown that various aspects of Soviet housing policy can be traced as well-preserved legacies today. The survey was conducted in 2009 in Stakhanov, Ukraine, and the method of analysis is binomial logistic regression. By capturing both the social costs attributed to the post-Soviet transition crisis as well as the underlying legacy factors inherited from the Soviet epoch, the findings suggest that any analysis of housing inequalities or residential segregation in the post-socialist city must come to terms with the impacts of socialist-era economic priorities on the urban social landscape.

Keywords:

• housing inequalities
• landscapes of priority
• socialist city
• post-socialist city
• shortage economy
• Ukraine; Donbas

Acknowledgement

An early draft of this paper was written while the author was based at the Department of Geography and Economic History, Umeå University, Sweden.

Notes

1. The political-ideological context is well described elsewhere, see, for example, Parkins (1953), Bater (1980), Smith (1989), French (1995).

2. This does not mean that 70% of the population resident 20 years ago remains in place. During these years, many have left the city, or died.

3. This refers to the pro-European protests centered on Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) that started in November 2013 and culminated on 22 February 2014, when the then president, Viktor Yanukovich, fled to Russia. The revolution was sparked by Yanukovich’s decision to “pause” an association agreement with the European Union, signaling an unpopular eastward geopolitical U-turn.

4. Lugansk is the Russian version of Luhansk.

5. This is neither a civil war nor an outright international conflict: Ukrainian Government forces are currently fighting a mix of local separatists armed by the Russian Federation, Russian volunteers and “green men”, which are considered to be regular forces from Russia.

6. On the other hand, the official figures underestimate the magnitude and age/sex selectivity of out-migration (see Gentile, Ferlander, & Mäkinen, 2009; Gentile & Marcińczak, 2012, for a more detailed discussion on the issue of sample representativeness in the SHIS2009).

7. The survey was approved by the chairman of the State Statistical Service of Ukraine in Kiev.

8. The survey’s conditions and context are extensively discussed in Gentile et al. (2009).

9. The original question for this variable is “How do you consider your family’s current material standard of living?”

10. These years denote the periods during which the architectural styles associated with Stalin and Khrushchev prevailed, not the actual years of their reign.

11. The coefficients (Exp(B)) are interpreted as odds ratios (antilogged logits) vis-à-vis a reference category, whereas the Wald test describes each variable’s contribution to the models, reflecting statistical significance. The Nagelkerke r² is an approximate measure of the model’s explanatory power, whereas the likelihood ratio and Hosmer–Lemeshow tests represent the model diagnostics. A “good fit” is achieved when the Hosmer–Lemeshow test results as insignificant.

12. While some land may have been allocated for the exclusive use of members of specific socio-professional groups who were also provided with extensive support by their employers for building so-called “cottages” (particularly in the late 1980s, see Gentile, 2003), the so-called “private sector” was generally not the object of the industrial enterprises’ concern other than when it occupied space that was intended for the future expansion of their production facilities (Domański 1997).