Ideology does not just exist in linguistic form; it also appears in material structures. The Soviet party-state believed architecture to have a transformative effect and promoted communal dwellings in order to mould a new socialist way of life. What was the outcome?Using the examples of the communal hostel and the courtyard, the article suggests that we should take account of the eventual everyday sociality but also go beyond it to investigate how the imagination worked in such places. The material structure did not generate the socialist values quite as intended. Imaginative literature and satire are used to show that architecture acted, rather, like a prism. Ideas were deflected from it, yet not in a random way.The relation between early Soviet ideology and infrastructure appears straightforward -yet it has a breathtaking audacity if one thinks about it. According to Marxist materialism, the base determines the superstructure, and the task of Soviet construction was to build material foundations that would mould nothing less than a new society. This reminds us that ideology is found not only in texts and speeches; it is a political practice that is also manifest in constructing material objects. After the Revolution, architecture became one of they key arenas of ideology. In the 1920s, it was actually believed that carefully designed living quarters, for example, could eliminate the conditions for individualistic and meshchanskie (petty-minded bourgeois) ways of life, and on this basis a new human type would become the norm: Socialist Man and Socialist Woman. 1 A new kind of building, the House Commune (dom kommuna), would provide the infrastructure. Previous ('obsolete') social groupings, such as the patriarchal family, the private firm, or the peasant household, would give way to the new ideal, the labour collective. 2 For anthropology, the Soviet case is significant because it makes clear not only that political ideology can take material form, but also that artefacts are not material objects divorced from social relations. The latter point has long since been made with regard to 'the house', which, as Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995) have argued, both embodies and generates sociality. But the house built by people for themselves is different from the case of state construction projects in which housing is allocated and the inhabitants are mere passive recipients (Semenova 2004). What the Soviet example requires us to think about is the particular situation where there is a definite pronounced intention of the state to make use of the materiality of dwelling

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