migrant workers from smaller towns and rural areas. After long-term employment at an enterprise (around 20 years), a worker could be given an apartment (as opposed to an individual hostel room, which often shared a single bathroom and kitchen per floor and was ill-suited for family life), with permanent "propiska" rights to it. Millions of people were using this system. The system was introduced with the aim of social fairness in the allocation of housing which was in very short supply, and in a way replaced the Western system of mortgage (except that years of working at the person's workplace were used instead of money). Nevertheless, conditions in these hostels were often poor, worsened by the mandatory security outposts on the hostels' entrance, who would disallow any non-dwellers (without proper documents) to the hostel. While reducing the chances of the hostel being used for criminal purposes, it was a major hindrance for relations with the opposite sex and for planning, starting, and raising a family. There was usually no official gender segregation in the hostels, but since many jobs and student specialities were and are gender-imbalanced (the future teacher was usually female, and the future engineer, more or less usually male, with nearly exclusively males in all military schools), there was often de facto gender segregation in the hostels. Students from rural areas or smaller towns lived in very similar hostels, with the termination of right of abode in the hostel on graduation or on exclusion from their schools. The native populations of large cities like Moscow often despised these migrant workers ('limit-dwellers'), considering them rude, uncultured, and violent. The derogatory term "limita" (limit-scum) was used to refer to them. Details of propiska The verb "propisat" was used with both the passport and its owner as a direct object. Reciprocally, "propiska" became an object which one can have, e.g.: "to have a propiska in Moscow" (). The propiska was recorded both in the internal passport of a Soviet citizen and at local governmental offices. In cities it was a local office of a utility organisation, such as РЭУ (District Production Department), ЖЭК (Housing Committee Office), or ЖСК (Housing and Construction Cooperative). The passports were stamped at the local police precinct's Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) office, with the Military Comissariat (the draft body) also involved. In rural areas, it was a selsoviet, or "village council", a governing body of a