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Comment by zarro | Hacker News Reader

Those Soviet Khrushchyovkas are the most depressing, abysmal buildings built in the history of mankind and I for one cannot wait until the day they demolish the last one of those despicable creations.

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I've stayed in them several times, they're great. They're incredibly warm in winter and central heated, they're in park like areas with playgrounds and schools in between them.

For the climate of Russia apartments are good solutions, and having them set in clusters with excellent public transport links and their own set of services it's actually superior to a lot of western suburbs where kids can no longer walk to school because of the distances and dangers and have no playgrounds or limited family facilities.

For me they are beatiful. Because they allowed a lot of people to have their own house. It's incredible achievement. They should be replaced by better houses with time, of course.

That's a good point, after WW2 the Soviet Union had the double problem of a rapidly urbanising population and having to rebuild all the destruction. They needed a quick solution and what they chose worked.

It came with a high cost. Roughly 20 million died under forced labor camps, collectivization efforts and resulting famines, gulags, and resettlements.

I don't doubt it. It was a rapid modernisation and raising of living standards.

Are you saying it was necessary or justified? It sounds like your meaning is that such mass murder, combined with murder via incompetence, is a necessary part of modernization.

No, I didn't say that. I meant there was a lot of work pushed on the people by a ruthless government.

Mass murder DUE to incompetence - trying to justify the output is like putting makeup on a pig. Its thinking like this that led to the US golden age to be referred to as "Gilded Age" because it was felt that incompetence was marginalized and considered as viable to instead marginalize competence.

I'm from western Europe, but I've lived in one. Some of them are quite comfortable really and well-built.

The layout of mine was quite smart. Lots of sunlight inside, lots of green around it. City centre, close to everything. Cheap. What's not to like?

You might like https://www.reddit.com/r/UrbanHell/

But whenever a Soviet style building is posted there, someone who lived in that type of building posts that it wasn't so bad.

That subreddit is one of the most vile places on Reddit. All they do is post pictures of other people's homes and mock both the home and the people living them. If you're some antisocial type who can't live in a city nobody's stoping you from living in the suburbs.

The main problem with these apartment buildings is a lack of maintenance on the outside. If these buildings were painted and maintained properly then they would look just fine from the outside. The inside is what you make of it anyway.

I like them because they're cheap (and am living in one).

They are not terrible, not great either.

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