There was no place for homelessness in the land of widespread social equality - which is how propaganda presented the Soviet Union to the world. The existence of homelessness simply did not fit in with the image of an idyllic utopia. The reality, however, was far more bleak.
The short answer is - there were, of course, homeless people in Russia. However, the government persisted in making their existence out to be a myth. But how did you hide dozens or hundreds of people roaming the streets in search of food and shelter? Well, you didn’t - you simply gave it a different name.
How Stalin outlawed poverty
In the early days after the Revolution, the prevailing view was that the homeless and poor would in time disappear as a sad remnant of the old regime - as soon as the Soviets were done building a welfare state. The Bolsheviks even kept statistics of the issue. The 1926 census counted some 133,000 individuals begging in the streets. The beggars turned out to almost always be homeless.