The urban household in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1900–2000: Patterns of family formation in a turbulent century Sergey Afontsev a , Gijs Kessler b, ⁎ , Andrei Markevich c,d , Victoria Tyazhelnikova b , Timur Valetov e a Institute for World Economy and International Relations, Russia b International Institute of Social History, The Netherlands c New Economic School, Russia d University of Warwick, United Kingdom e Moscow State University, Russia Abstract Starting from census data on co-residence and household composition, the authors analyse principles of family organisation and family formation in twentieth-century urban Russia and the Soviet Union. The article uses an adapted version of the classification of households developed by Peter Laslett and Eugene Hammel to study variation in household structure for successive population censuses. Changes in this variation between cross-sections are explained with the help of additional quantitative and qualitative data and are linked to the fundamental demographic, social and economic shifts which took place in Russian society in the course of the twentieth century. The article finds a family system characterised by a tendency towards nuclear family formation, but incorporating a fairly stable element of household extension. Co-residence of three generations was both an answer to a perennial housing problem and offered important advantages in the sphere of childcare and care for the elderly. Variation and fluctuation in household structure are found to be most pronounced during the turbulent first half of the century. After a period of stability during the post-war decades of Soviet rule, post-Soviet transformations provoke new changes. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Household; Family; Urban; Russia; Soviet Union; Twentieth century; Gender; Migration; Housing 1. Introduction The timeframe of this investigation spans the three main periods of 20th-century Russian history — the period up to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the long Soviet era (1917–1991) and the post-communist years (starting in 1991). Together, these periods account for the country's transformation from an agricultural to a post-industrial society, but this longer-term process took place against the background of intense and often dramatic short-term and mid-term change and fluctuation. To start with, Russian statehood went through three different political incarna- tions. It entered the 20th century as an autocratic empire that spanned a territory from Warsaw in the west to Manchuria in the east. This huge empire dissolved in revolution and civil war between 1917 and 1922 to be eventually reassembled by the victors as a union state of nominally independent republics — the Soviet Union. In 1991 the Available online at www.sciencedirect.com History of the Family 13 (2008) 178 – 194 ⁎ Corresponding author. International Institute of Social History, P.O. Box 2169, 1000 CD Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail address: gke@iisg.nl (G. Kessler). 1081-602X/$ - see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.hisfam.2008.05.007