The Moscow Housing Renovation Programme: Responsiveness, Redistribution, and Regime Stability in Russia

The King's Russia Institute is pleased to invite you to a discussion of:

The Moscow Housing Renovation Programme: Responsiveness, Redistribution, and Regime Stability in Russia
with Regina Smyth Indiana University

In early 2018, President Putin and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin held a televised meeting in which they announced a large-scale urban reconstruction project. Aimed at a class of buildings constructed in the 1950s and 1960s, the project involved demolishing 5,800 apartment houses and relocating more than 1.6 million residents. While the risky policy did prompt some protest in Spring 2018, it also garnered significant popular support. Drawing on a collaborative research project and new survey and focus group data collected in the winter of 2018-19, Smyth compares the nature of the support for the programme across three groups: those whose houses were included, those who were excluded, and those who were not eligible for consideration. The analysis demonstrates that the support for the programme varied across these three groups. The findings illustrate the regime's capacity to respond to social demands, construct policy processes, and redistribute wealth to secure support without alienating Muscovites who did not directly benefit from the programme.