“In the meantime, we need to move up”: the housing shortage in the information agenda of Tomsk during the Civil War (1918-1919)
At a time of the First World War, Revolution and the following downfall of Russian Empire, the disintegration of the old social order, the economic crisis, massive internal migrations, and the outbreak of military-political confrontation in Siberia, housing problems have sharply worsened. Thus, the situation in Tomsk reflected general tendencies of manifestation and overcoming of the housing crisis both in Siberia and in the east of Russia as a whole. In the new, extreme conditions of the Civil war, there was happening a redesign of the old and formation of the new institutions and practices that normalize, regulate, and constitute housing relations. The city press played an important, if not key, role in the construction of socially significant meanings and discursive institutionalization. The objective of this paper is as follows: on the example of Tomsk (that was the administrative center of the Tomsk province during the Civil war), firstly, to reveal the evolution, dynamics, and forms of manifestation of the housing issue during a crucial era of wars and revolutions. Secondly, to determine the features of discursive construction and institutionalization of one of the most important, complex, and sensitive city problems of that time. This paper is based mostly on the materials of local city periodicals that went out in Tomsk from summer 1918 till the end of 1919, such as “Sibirskaya Zhisn”, “Narodnaya Gazeta”, “Vestnik Tomskoy Gubemii”, “Golos Naroda”, “Golos Sibiri”, “Trud”, “Segodnya”, “Zarya”, “Rabochee Znamya”, “Narodniy Vestnik” and others. We selected and analyzed about 240 newspaper articles, interviews, essays, notes and feuilletons in which the topic of “housing difficulties” was touched upon in one way or another. We presume that periodicals of approximately the same political orientation formed a common semantic field, generated similar meanings, and set similar models for interpreting problems at both local and national levels. Besides the above-mentioned sources, we used records and other documents of the Tomsk Housing Commission. Upon the conducted research we came to the conclusion, that the housing shortage became an important social issue both on national level and among local city communities of the Russian East. Tomsk, like other Siberian cities, developed its own administrative mechanisms for regulating housing relations. Administrative organizational forms also determined the state-bureaucratic nature of the main algorithms for regulating the housing issue in that period. At the same time, the systematic work of municipal bodies was combined with emergency measures and arbitrariness of military and civilian officials. The city press played an important role in discursive institutionalization of the existing administrative mechanisms and practices of regulating housing relations. It constructed boundaries and set models of their interpretation (so-called ‘framing’), giving them social meaning and significance.