The decree 'On the Development of Housing Construction in the USSR' committed the state to ending the housing shortage within ten to twelve years by giving every family its own separate flat. It prescribed industrialised means to get there: standard type-series, prefabricated large panels, dedicated house-building combines and strict cost norms per square metre. Ornament, generous ceilings, lifts and circulation space were cut accordingly, and five storeys became the ceiling because taller blocks required lifts. The resulting khrushchyovka was produced from 1957 into the 1970s, after which taller panel series took over on the same industrial basis.
It delivered the largest housing programme of the twentieth century, tens of millions of flats, and replaced the communal apartment with the family flat — a change in Soviet domestic life as much as in urban form. It also fixed the mikrorayon of free-standing slabs in open green space as the built form of a sixth of the planet, exported from Berlin and Warsaw to Ulaanbaatar, Havana and Hanoi.
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