The article deals with the implementation of the complex of political and socio-economic measures of the Soviet state, called the policy of “war communism” in the cities of the Steppes and Turkestan in 1918-1921. Based on materials gleaned from various sources, the author endeavours to explore the processes of socialization and municipalization of private houses and dwellings, the nationalization of private property, which took place in the cities of the KazASSR and tassr; highlight some of the issues related to the subject policy of “war communism” in the cities of Kazakhstan. Various restrictive decrees and orders of the Soviet power in this period, aimed at limiting commodity-money relations and the prohibition of the right to private property put people into a rigid framework of survival. Approved in the sphere of public life, the ideology of “war communism” inevitably left its mark on the life of the city. This ideology was a special sociocultural phenomenon, strengthening other social psychology and ethics which propagandized the need to destroy the old “bourgeois” culture and create a new “proletarian culture”. “War Communism” as opposed to “bourgeois individualism” principles of the socialist community, broske vital foundations of society.
A characteristic feature of this period is the legitimization of violence and its use as a universal remedy of solving all problems. Under the pressure of revolutionary changes the sense of justice in society underwent considerable transformation. The right to inviolability of private property was completely ignored. The ruling regime no longer recognized the existing legal mechanisms, replacing them with the amorphous concept of “revolutionary legality.”
