Not surprising, really, that "communal" aspects of life in the Soviet Union did not resemble my own communal experience in Western Mass. For Americans in the 60s and beyond, communal households meant working out shared responsibilities, meeting to discuss problems and disagreements, voting on who gets to move in and who doesn't.
Those who remember the "Housing Committee" in Bulgakov's novella Heart of a Dog (1920s, first published 1987!) know that the ideal American situation -- rational people, working together deliberately to make a life together -- was not the Soviet experience.
Instead, uplotnenie -- literally consolidation or compression -- happened by decree, not by choice. People who had "too much" living space received "neighbors," packed into their former living rooms, dining rooms, etc. I like the Oxford dictionary definition of uplotnenie kvartiry: "reduction of space per person in living accommodation." In further Sovietese, zhilploshchad' represented the amount of space each person was "due" in the Soviet Union -- about 5 square meters. If you had more, get ready for neighbors. Would you really want these people (see image, right) to be in charge of telling you how to live your life? No wonder the Soviets got grumpy about the constant "housing shortage" and its "communal" solution.
Not that there were no problems in American communal living -- there were, and always will be. Especially around the usual issues of life: noise, cleanliness, sexuality. Just as in college dormitories, communards had to deliberate what was tolerable and what was simply not. Forgetting a towel in the bathroom -- okay. Sleeping with my girlfriend -- not so much.
But Soviet (and post-Soviet) life was rarely about self-determination, and much more often about someone else making decisions. If a person climbed into the bureaucracy in order to have some power over how things happened, that person was no longer "one of us," but instead became an officious meddler, like Shvonder and Co. of the Bulgakovian house committee who tell the medical professor:
I can testify to some komunalka (Sovietese for "communal apartment," after uplotnenie) situations from my days in Leningrad in the mid-1980s. One set of friends lived over a communal kitchen of some sort, and their own kitchen was overrun with cockroaches. I encouraged them to fight the invasion (after all, I was a veteran of college life in Houston, so I knew from cockroaches), but they insisted it was pointless: no matter how clean they kept their kitchen, the vermin would come up from downstairs. This was a "small" communal apartment -- a kitchen, a bathroom, a toilet, a hallway, and only one additional family. My friends lived in two rooms (husband, wife, mother-in-law, daughter) and there was an alcoholic living in an adjacent room. Generally pretty calm situation, especially since the alcoholic was often asleep, or merely depressed, and rarely laid claim to the cooking or bathing facilities.
Another of my friends lived in one room with her son (her estranged husband was registered there too, but lived with his girlfriend and never came around). The second room in her apartment was also occupied by an alcoholic, but one who frequently spent time in prison. When he was away, the bathtub-in-the-kitchen wasn't much of a problem, but when he was home my friend feared he might influence, or injure, her son in some way. Paranoid? Maybe. But if you don't like the guy, and he's washing his clothes or taking a bath in the bathtub while you're making soup for your child, it's not the kind of "communal living" that would make one nostalgic.
Or might it? In search of images of a bathtub in the kitchen (why didn't I take pictures back in the day?), I did run across a fairly nostalgic post about communal apartment. It included this image of kitchen sinks:
And in a way the image says it all: no communal instinct here, every family with their own sink and their own dishes (all identical). You can imagine the nightmare of trying to wash up after supper.
East versus west. Worth thinking further about the differences. As Americans we come at Soviet (and post-Soviet) life from our own perspective, but in doing so, we will never understand what is going on today. And I am pretty invested in trying to understand. It's a professional imperative, but also a personal one.
Those who remember the "Housing Committee" in Bulgakov's novella Heart of a Dog (1920s, first published 1987!) know that the ideal American situation -- rational people, working together deliberately to make a life together -- was not the Soviet experience.
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| From the film "Heart of a Dog": the Housing Committee, Shvonder and Co. |
Not that there were no problems in American communal living -- there were, and always will be. Especially around the usual issues of life: noise, cleanliness, sexuality. Just as in college dormitories, communards had to deliberate what was tolerable and what was simply not. Forgetting a towel in the bathroom -- okay. Sleeping with my girlfriend -- not so much.
But Soviet (and post-Soviet) life was rarely about self-determination, and much more often about someone else making decisions. If a person climbed into the bureaucracy in order to have some power over how things happened, that person was no longer "one of us," but instead became an officious meddler, like Shvonder and Co. of the Bulgakovian house committee who tell the medical professor:
We have come to speak to you precisely about your dining room and your examining room. The general committee requests that you voluntarily, as a disciplined worker, give up your dining room. No one in Moscow has a dining room.As much as I think back on my communal days with fondness, it is also the case that just as with my Russian experience, I kind of parachuted into that farmstead -- a month in the summer, even if for several years in a row, meant that I wasn't participating in all the house meetings, arguing over who didn't chip in their utility payment, nor indeed about who was sleeping with whom.
I can testify to some komunalka (Sovietese for "communal apartment," after uplotnenie) situations from my days in Leningrad in the mid-1980s. One set of friends lived over a communal kitchen of some sort, and their own kitchen was overrun with cockroaches. I encouraged them to fight the invasion (after all, I was a veteran of college life in Houston, so I knew from cockroaches), but they insisted it was pointless: no matter how clean they kept their kitchen, the vermin would come up from downstairs. This was a "small" communal apartment -- a kitchen, a bathroom, a toilet, a hallway, and only one additional family. My friends lived in two rooms (husband, wife, mother-in-law, daughter) and there was an alcoholic living in an adjacent room. Generally pretty calm situation, especially since the alcoholic was often asleep, or merely depressed, and rarely laid claim to the cooking or bathing facilities.
Another of my friends lived in one room with her son (her estranged husband was registered there too, but lived with his girlfriend and never came around). The second room in her apartment was also occupied by an alcoholic, but one who frequently spent time in prison. When he was away, the bathtub-in-the-kitchen wasn't much of a problem, but when he was home my friend feared he might influence, or injure, her son in some way. Paranoid? Maybe. But if you don't like the guy, and he's washing his clothes or taking a bath in the bathtub while you're making soup for your child, it's not the kind of "communal living" that would make one nostalgic.
Or might it? In search of images of a bathtub in the kitchen (why didn't I take pictures back in the day?), I did run across a fairly nostalgic post about communal apartment. It included this image of kitchen sinks:
And in a way the image says it all: no communal instinct here, every family with their own sink and their own dishes (all identical). You can imagine the nightmare of trying to wash up after supper.
East versus west. Worth thinking further about the differences. As Americans we come at Soviet (and post-Soviet) life from our own perspective, but in doing so, we will never understand what is going on today. And I am pretty invested in trying to understand. It's a professional imperative, but also a personal one.
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