In the 1920's, the group of Soviet Constructivist architects known as OSA produced among the most radical housing schemes designed to promote a socialist form of life. To mark the centenary of the launch of Sovremennaya Arkhitektura (SA), the official journal by OSA, Romain Barth’s essay focuses on one of its key events: the 1927 Comradely Competition. Through projects by Moisei Ginzburg, Alexander Pasternak and others, this competition aimed to define OSA’s theoretical foundations for the communal house (dom-komuna). The OSA’s domestic research reached its peak in 1929, when the Bolshevik Party commissioned OSA to conduct a typological study of standardized apartments that aimed to be industrialized and easily built on a national scale. Barth’s argument is that a persistent tension arose within the projects of OSA. While they wanted their practices to be fully committed to the socialist cause and to the Party, they could not entirely remove their formalist background which implied the idea of the designer as independent ‘free’ artist/architect. Barth attempts to show that this tension lay at the root of a divorce between OSA and the Party, which tragically led to the dissolution of OSA and its SA magazine in the early 1930s.