Close Quarters: The Rise & Fall of the Kommunalka

Navigating Irida Antonova’s apartment is more than just a visit, it’s an adventure. The long, dilapidated, poorly-lit corridors bend and turn, always revealing ever more rooms and ever more inhabitants. None of them are her relatives, however, and most have little to say to each other, only rushing by to see to their own affairs.

Seven families, totaling 20 people, live with Irida in a kommunalka — or communal apartment, a Soviet-era phenomenon where from two to 10 families have their own room and share a single bathroom and kitchen. The ornate fireplace, awkwardly cramped in the hallway and covered with various household junk, belies the brilliance of the tsarist-era, when the apartment had a radically different interior design and belonged to just one family.

Irida’s apartment, which dates from the turn of the century, has a total of 365 square meters of space, with 176 square meters as living space. That breaks down to nine square meters per person, or three times less than the European average.

“At dinner time, the 20 of us must fit into one kitchen,” says Irida. Although quite large and equipped with three stoves, three sinks, and ten counters for food preparation, she complains that it is still too crowded. The situation with the toilet and bath tub, however, are even worse, with only one for all 20.

“It’s difficult for all of us to live here,” says Irida. “Not because any of us are bad people, but because you cannot cram so many people into one apartment. We inevitably get into each other’s way, coming and going, making noise.”

History bears heavy on Irida. Nee Golitsina, she proudly shows the few family relics that have survived Russia’s revolutions, wars and repression. Among them are a silver spoon given to her at birth in 1912, inscribed with “Irichka,” the diminutive of her name.

Born into the relatively well-to-do family of a Russian military officer, Irida enjoyed a certain prosperity that disappeared with the events of 1917. Before that year, Irida lived with her parents in a spacious four-room apartment in Yalta, while her aunt had a five-room apartment in St. Petersburg. Needless to say, both had servants. Now, as the 20th century draws to a close, home for Irida is a small state-owned room in this St. Petersburg kommunalka.

Few things in Russia are as shocking as the kommunalka. And such astonishment is not just limited to hapless foreigners. Many from around the former Soviet Union, especially those from rural areas or inhabitants of cities built after the War, are bewildered by this bizarre fixture of life in the big cities.

“Before I moved here, I could never have imagined that something like a kommunalka could exist,” said Irina, a current St. Petersburg kommunalka resident, originally hailing from Tbilisi. “Back home in Georgia, everyone has their own apartment or house.”

The kommunalka is the archetypal attribute of urban Soviet life, an attempt to come to terms with the housing shortage, and demonstrative of the Soviet regime’s inability and unwillingness to properly care for its citizens. But the kommunalka was also a central facet of Soviet social ideology, aiming to foster a feeling of socialist brotherhood, not to mention a convenient device for social control, as neighbors were encouraged to report on each other.

Long epitomizing the Soviet-era, and immortalized in numerous films such as The House Which I Live In, (1958), or The Pokrovsky Gate (1983), as well as the songs of popular bards and contemporary pop music groups, the kommunalka is alive and well, ready to persist well into the 21st.

Just how many of them remain is hard to say. Any statistic in Russia is guesswork, and  housing officials lament the absence of strict accounting. Still, most sources agree that St. Petersburg, with a population of five million, is Russia’s most communal city, with between 200,000 and 300,000 kommunalki housing about 15 to 20 percent of the population, or between 750,000 and one million people.

In Moscow, with a population of about 11 million, there are approximately 180,000 kommunalki, home for about five percent of the population, or 500,000 souls.

Today, nationwide, when one calculates all those living in kommunalki, barraki (small houses where about a half dozen or so families each have a room, but running water and the toilet are outside in the yard), and obshchezhitiye (worker’s dormitories), about seven percent of the population—ten million Russians—live communally.

Such figures, however, are a vast improvement from the days of Stalin, when nearly all inhabitants of large cities, except for the communist Party elite, knew only communal life. That only began to change in the 1960s, when new housing was first built for the masses by Nikita Khrushchev - poorly built five-story homes, dubbed khrushchyovki, began to dot the urban landscape. Under Brezhnev, twelve and fourteen story apartment buildings began to tilt up in the suburbs of large cities. But, by the late 1980s, less free housing was being erected, and the situation is even worse today.

For those who hope for better housing, the “ochered” (queue) still exists.  But it is a cruel fiction; few will ever receive the free state housing that they have long been promised. Today, apartments are for those with money. And, since most kommunalki dwellers are on the bottom of Russia’s socio-economic totem pole, one can say they remain stuck in the USSR.

The first kommunalka I lived in was shared with two babushkas, one whose kindness and simplicity still haunt me today. The other was entirely the opposite, a predator, and probably insane. She terrorized the other babushka, hogging the right to take any of the useful leftovers from my garbage.

In the second kommunalka, I shared a room with my fiancé and her grandmother. Certainly, the idea of living with my future grandmother-in-law made me blush. Such embarrassment, however, was put aside when she told me about the 15 years she spent in the same room with her husband, her parents, as well as other assorted relatives, and still managed to give birth. “But after a while I came to think of my husband as merely my brother,” she admitted, attributing the birth of only one child to such a predicament.

The ‘heyday’ of kommunalki, when up to six family members shared one room, and newlyweds consummated their marriages with great stealth, are gone for the most part. Today, most large families can receive a second or even third room, giving parents and children some privacy. And children are often willing to do anything, everything to find their own place.

But unlike most kommunalka inhabitants, who have to endure life with people they’d rather not, I could leave mine to rent a better place. Some people have spent all their lives in a kommunalka.

Nikolai Schmidtt-Fogelevich, a 74 year old St. Petersburg kommunalka tenant was born in the same room he now calls home. His relatively well-to-do tsarist-era middle class family welcomed the Reds, but nevertheless suffered. Many relatives were forced to emigrate. Those who stayed were eventually given their own flat on Leningrad’s Petrograd Side, a central city district near the Peter and Paul Fortress. Some 15 members of his family shared the apartment’s five rooms.

But when they returned from evacuation after the blockade of Leningrad, other neighbors had taken over most of the rooms, and only Nikolai’s immediate family was allowed to return, having to face the suspicions of the new tenants. Indeed, it is the quality of one’s neighbors that can make or break life in a kommunalka. “A kommunalka is a good thing if you have good neighbors,” says Nikolai. “But if there is just one bad apple, then that person can make life hell for everyone.”

Murphy’s Law is alive and well in Russia. Every kommunalka seems to have one alcoholic, criminal, or psychopath. Gulla, a young woman from Kazakstan living for over ten years in a kommunalka, recalls how the ex-husband of one neighbor, in the course of several years, would incessantly call and ring the doorbell late at night. Several times he even showed up with an ax or knife. Eventually, he was taken to a psychiatric hospital, but still calls from there.

Another neighbor was an alcoholic, living with his second wife, though his ex-wife lived in the room next door. At first, both women quarreled often, but eventually his alcoholism united them and they joined efforts to send him to a treatment center.

The first kommunalka dates to 1918, and the very name reflects the goals of the new communist regime. According to Alexander Pozdnyakov, a St. Petersburg film critic and “krayeved” (amateur local historian), the first kommunalki in Russia appeared in August 1918 in St. Petersburg, at the Gerbovo Bassein Cooperative on Grecheskaya Ulitsa.

The process of creating kommunalki was called uplotnenie, awkwardly translated as “increasing the number of inhabitants in one space.”

“It began right after the Bolshevik Revolution with the slogan, ‘Peace to the Shanties, and War to the Palaces,” said Pozdnyakov, who, as a child in the 1950s, lived in a 45 square meter room with six other family members, as well as with numerous neighbors in the other rooms.

For the benefit of factory workers who previously had been living in barracks or in basements, the new regime carved up the large apartments in city centers belonging to members of the aristocratic and professional classes who had since emigrated or who were executed. Uplotnenie was convenient: the Revolutionary authorities could solve the cities’ housing problems and mold the new Soviet Man. For the lower classes, a new era was dawning.

One of the authors of uplotnenie was Anatoli Lunacharsky, the Bolshevik leader who headed the Commissariat of Enlightenment. He celebrated this revolutionary change in social living, with his screenplay for the film titled, appropriately, Uplotnenie.

Uplotnenie was the first Soviet feature film, debuting on November 7, 1918, the first anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The film told the story of workers moving into the large apartment of a sympathetic professor, who welcomes them with open arms.

While Lunacharsky’s film disappeared into obscurity, uplotnenie received a more accurate and memorable depiction in Mikhail Bulgakov’s banned 1925 story, Heart of a Dog (Sobachye Serdtse), which was made into a film in 1988, the year after it was first published in Russia. Unlike Lunacharsky’s socially-conscious professor, Bulgakov’s protagonist defends the sanctity of private property, furiously resisting proletarian attempts to move workers into his apartment.

“With uplotnenie, private life was destroyed,” says Pozdnyakov. “Only the collective lifestyle would be allowed. One of the reasons was to have total control over people’s life. Kommunalki allowed for more social control where neighbors and dvorniki, yard workers, could keep track of each other.”

Indeed, during the Stalinist era, control of housing was in the hands of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, NKVD, and it was not uncommon that neighbor denounced neighbor for the sweet reward of receiving the accused’s room.

Sinister intrigue aside, forcing disparate people to live under the same roof often lead to violence and even murder, and the situation has hardly improved today. According to the Moscow weekly, Moskovskiye Novosti, one-third of all household crimes in Moscow take place in kommunalki.

While there’s no need to convince a contemporary Russian of the horrendous side of communal life, somehow nostalgia for it persists. Perhaps it is a residue effect of the Soviet propaganda that portrayed the kommunalka as a place where strangers were gelled into one loving family. Or perhaps it is simply a memory of simpler times, when closer quarters forced greater civility and common purpose.

“Some people remember it as the happiest time of their life because, in a kommunalka, you did not have to lock doors, everyone had the same bed, dresser, tableware and no one would steal anything,” recalled Pozdnyakov. “If you were sick, your neighbor could bring you medicine or take your child to school, and if you had no salt, your neighbor would give you some. There was a sense of brotherhood, the very realization of the idea of socialism. People felt that they were not alone.”

Indeed, the testimony of current kommunalki dwellers still bears witness to this sentiment. “In general I don’t complain about the other family because, since I had a heart attack last summer, they take care of me and bring me medicine,” said Nikolai Schmidtt-Fogelevich, who nevertheless admits that the kommunalka is an atrocious institution. “Even a dog should have his own place to call home,” added Nikolai, who worked all his life as an economist in a top-secret defense factory, only referred to as Post Office Box 181.

Gulla also shares Nikolai’s schizophrenic love-hate relation of her Soviet abode. “Even though I want my own flat, the thought frightens me, because I don’t want to be alone. At least in a kommunalka I know that someone is next door, that if something happens I can turn to them. In some way, they take the role of my family, which is far away.”

Yet, like Nikolai, in the next breath Gulla curses it. “The problems of one person in a kommunalka become everyone’s problems,” she said. “Nothing can be worse than living in a kommunalka, because chance has thrown you in with people you did not chose to live with and who might be radically different from you.”

Still, there is a certain romance to a kommunalka, especially to someone conscious of, and fascinated by, the country’s history. Sometimes hidden away in one are the most interesting personalities or trinkets from an age long-past. Nikolai’s apartment is one of those rare treats. Crammed into his two small rooms is one of the leading St. Petersburg museums, home to his collection of 150,000 post cards and photographs of old St. Petersburg, as well as several thousand books on the city’s history. Some of them date to the time of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, and are unique and rare copies.

A constant flow of historians, architects, and city officials beat their way to his door, hoping to find some forgotten view of the city for use as illustrations in a book, or to complete restoration work on an old building. The National Library and the Museum of the City of St. Petersburg, recently battled to be the collection’s heir – the latter won out. In a country plagued by the absence of civic spirit, Nikolai is indeed a rare species, spending all his money on the acquisition of new items that he hopes to preserve for posterity.

Living in a kommunalka carries no stigma among Russians. However, in front of foreigners, a certain embarrassment is noticed. When I enter the kitchen, Nikolai’s neighbor, Yuri, immediately starts to apologize for the conditions — the ceiling is falling down, paint is peeling off the walls, pipes and wires lie exposed. An engineer and a master of all trades, Yuri is trying to bring the apartment into order. “We have to depend on ourselves to fix this place up,” he says. “The state doesn’t do anything anymore.”

Despite the hardships, the kommunalka still performs an important social function, giving poorer migrants from the villages and provincial cities a cheap housing opportunity. Starting a new life in the big city, most are unable to rent, or buy, a separate apartment. Monthly rent for one room in a kommunalka, however, goes for 500 rubles ($25), while the sale of a room goes for between $6,000 and $9,000.

Many kommunalka, however are being gobbled up wholesale, falling prey to Russia’s middle and upper classes, who cherish these spacious, enchanting apartments in the city center. Before the August crisis, it was a common site in the city center to see babushkas standing on the sidewalk as their life’s belongings were loaded into a moving van, then shuttled to their new apartment. Sadly, not all such moves were voluntary and, in some notorious cases, predatory murder was used to empty communal apartment spaces.

The purchase and clearing out of kommunalki, in a process known in Russian as rasseleniye, has slowed considerably since August. Present economic reality makes buying an entire kommunalki too expensive: $800-1000 a square meter (in St. Petersburg).  Also, most kommunalki are in an advanced state of disrepair, cost too much to renovate, or are simply in undesirable locations.

So, most tenants can only find hope in the Russian Constitutional Court’s decision last November allowing for the privatization of their individual rooms. While apartment privatization in Russia dates back to 1991, prior to the November ruling a kommunalka could only be privatized in its entirety. The new law allows a tenant to privatize his part of a kommunalka, plus it allows elderly citizens to bequeath their room to other family members. Before, one’s room would revert to the state if no living relative was registered as living in the room.

The new law is relief for people like Irida. For the past four years the police, who, as in Stalinist times, have final word over who can live in one’s apartment whether privatized or not, had refused to register her son in her room. The police colonel accused Irida of trying to swindle the state by registering her son Nikolai there — de facto bequeathing the room.

In the end Irida did not privatize the room, but Nikolai was registered. The drawback with privatization, she noticed, is that tenants take on added financial burdens, having to pay market rates for communal services and maintenance, while the other tenants can still count on cheaper state-subsidized rates.

Determined to pull the city out of the Soviet-era, the St. Petersburg city administration is working to put an end to the kommunalka. Governor Vladimir Yakovlev has instructed the Housing Policy Committee to come up with a plan for doing so. “Dislodging is a top priority, tied to reconstruction of the historical center of St. Petersburg leading up to the city’s 300th anniversary in 2003,” said Tatyana Vassiliyeva, a ranking city housing official.

Despite such plans, however, the kommunalka does not want to die. “It is still too early to speak about the end of the kommunalka,” Vassiliyeva said, “because on the one hand, while some are being dislodged, the circumstances in some people’s lives are forcing the creation of new kommunalki.” This happens when a family breaks apart, either through divorce or sibling conflict, but continue to live in the same apartment for lack of the means to swap, buy or rent another apartment. Through a court order, the apartment is divided and a new kommunalka is legally created. Former family members then go about their lives, independent of each other, with separate door bells and locks on their door.

Vassiliyeva quips that the need for a museum of communal living will hardly ever be necessary. Indeed, after eighty years, the kommunalka is a dying breed in Russia, but does not look likely to disappear any time soon. Too many complex economic realities necessitate a slower, more tortuous death. Most Russians will be glad to see it go. But certainly not all. It is, after all, an integral, and deeply personal part of this century’s history.