became extremely acute during the war period. To assist in its solution, the Soviet Power completely expropriated all the houses belonging to capitalist landlords and handed them over to the urban soviets. It effected mass settlements of workers from the suburbs in the bourgeois dwellings. It handed over the best of these dwellings to the workers’ organisations, arranging for the upkeep of the houses at the cost of the State; it undertook to provide the workers’ families with furniture, etc.
The Russian Communist Party, without doing anything contrary to the interests of non-capitalist house-owners, must use its utmost endeavours to discover and apply the best means for the improvement of the housing conditions of the working masses; for putting an end to the over-crowding and the unsanitary condition of the older quarters of the cities; for the destruction of dwellings unfit for habitation, the renovation of old houses, and the building of new houses suitable to the new conditions of working-class life; in general for the rational rehousing of the workers.[§125& 126.]