stylistic:style_transfer, quality:correction
Russia and the USSR

After the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861, major cities experienced a large influx of former peasants who sought jobs as industrial workers in rapidly developing Russian industry. These people often lived in harsh conditions, sometimes renting a room shared between several families. There also was a large number of shelterless homeless people. Immediately after the October Revolution a special program of "compression" (уплотнение) was enabled: people who had no shelter were settled in flats of those who had large (4, 5, or 6-room) flats with only one room left to previous owners. The flat was declared state property. This led to a large number of shared flats where several families lived simultaneously. Nevertheless, the problem of complete homelessness was mostly solved as anybody could apply for a room or a place in a dormitory (the number of shared flats steadily decreased after the large-scale residential building program was implemented starting in the 1960s).

By 1922 there were at least seven million homeless children in Russia as a result of nearly a decade of devastation from World War I and the Russian Civil War. This led to the creation of a large number of orphanages. By the 1930s the USSR declared the abolition of homelessness and any citizen was obliged to have a propiska – a place of permanent residency. Nobody could be stripped of propiska without substitution or refuse it without a confirmed permission (called "order") to register in another place. If someone wanted to move to another city or expand their living area, he had to find a partner who wanted to mutually exchange the flats. The right to shelter was secured in the Soviet constitution. Not having permanent residency was considered a crime.

After the breakup of the USSR, the problem of homelessness sharpened dramatically, partially because of the legal vacuum of the early 1990s with some laws contradicting each other, and partially because of a high rate of fraud in the realty market. In 1991 articles 198 and 209 of the Russian criminal code which instituted a criminal penalty for not having permanent residence were abolished. In Moscow, the first overnight shelter for homeless people was opened in 1992. In the late 1990s, certain amendments in law were implemented to reduce the rise in homelessness, such as the prohibition of selling last flats with registered children. In 2002, there were 300,000 homeless people in Moscow.

Nevertheless, the state is still obliged to give permanent shelter for free to anybody who needs better living conditions or has no permanent registration, because the right to shelter is still included in the constitution. Several projects of special cheap 'social' flats for those who failed to repay mortgages were proposed to facilitate the mortgage market.

In 2022, it was reported that Russian authorities were targeting homeless people to conscript them into the war in Ukraine.