Written by Olivia Hiskett
31/10/2024
Kommunalka: the colloquial term for kommunalnaya kvartira; the shared apartments that became the most common form of housing in the Soviet Union following the “Great Patriotic War”. The dormitory-like apartments forged relationships between the most unlikely of neighbours and created lifelong artificial communities. Oral testimonies stress the chronic lack of privacy between families sharing a confined space. Was this private-lessness a Soviet ideological invention, simply a product of necessity in the face of housing shortages, or was this concept of communal living an example of a prevailing pre-revolutionary peasant culture?
As thousands migrated from the countryside to the USSR, communities industrialised and as much of the housing was destroyed in the Second World War, the issue of how the state was going to provide homes to a population, to which it had promised prosperity, was urgent. The solution imagined by Stalin’s regime was the expansion of the Kommunalka system. The earliest examples of the Kommunalka emerged alongside the October Revolution, as Moscow apartments were requisitioned by the Bolsheviks. Forms of communal flats still exist in the capital today. Until the middle of the 1960s and well into Khrushchev’s housing reform, as much as eighty per cent of the population of Moscow lived in this style of home. Khruschev himself even lived a Kommunalka as a young man, demonstrative of the social diversity of the housing. These living spaces created a unique social space, wherein privacy was reinvented.
Although the creation of these cramped and noisy glorified hallways was certainly pragmatic in its housing problem-solving, it also served an ideological purpose. Kommunalka acted as the embodiment of Soviet ideology in everyday life. The architecture of these corridor homes made the boundary of public and private indistinguishable so that a Soviet citizen’s behaviour could always be visible to others. Although the private sphere officially existed within the walls of a family’s room, this divide was not firmly upheld by the thin and recently fitted partitions. The telephone was shared and generally audible to everyone. The kitchen became a space of huge contention as a private possession could quickly turn into another’s. This contributed to a sense that one’s belongings and private dominion had to be constantly monitored, as any neighbour’s actions could be a threat to one’s precious space. Therefore, while the Kommunalka existed to fill housing needs, the proximity of residents served a dual purpose.
A culture of paranoia and distrust quickly grew between neighbours. To denounce a neighbour in order to gain living space was not an uncommon occurrence. In this way, the Kommunalka, purposefully or not, motivated neighbours to watch for dissident behaviours or suspicious activities as they could be directly rewarded for reporting them. More significantly, paid informants or members of the KGB were often housed within the apartments themselves. In this sense, the Kommunalka acted as another government tool to instil a communist morality and behaviour into private life, which was by virtue public life. This excerpt from an oral history of the Kommunalka reveals the paradox of the total publicity of one’s life alongside constant secrecy. The interviewee states that in her small communal apartment, “all were agents’ families, linked to Comintern in one way or another, but no one knew precisely what the others’ activities were.” Her husband was eventually arrested and shot but she does not choose to reveal why. Therefore, the Kommunalka was a dangerous place for those who had anything to hide. However, even those who had no dissident sympathies could still be at risk, as neighbours betrayed each other to get a chance to extend into their rooms.
Despite the suffocating proximity, the families that co-habituated were not in permanent conflict with each other. The apartments could create opportunities for solidarity and strong friendships to be made. The diversity of Kommunalka’s population forged a melting pot of people that formed social dynamics that would otherwise never exist. These relationships were international, intergenerational, and distinctly personal. Not only would neighbours share all the smells and noises of life, but also in marriages, births and deaths. Especially if one had no immediate family living with them, then neighbours became an important social network. In this way, the Kommunalka acts as the antithesis of the Western understanding of modern living within an individual nuclear family cell. An account of life in a Moscow Kommunalka exposes how “despite the screams and dramas of this one and that one, it was very merry and congenial. It is where my daughter grew up.” Perhaps the Kommunalka created not merely paranoia, but also community. A former inhabitant revealed that: “Everyone was interested in what happened to the others. We would compare boyfriends and shared cakes. The women compared their baking talents. Each night, after having dinner in our respective rooms, we would all reunite in the kitchen, everyone would sit where they could, and the day’s tales would start”.
In this way, the Kommunalka could create a familiarity among strangers and produced a space of close community. Perhaps scholarship addressing the Kommunalka for a Western readership has been influenced by a cultural aversion to its lack of privacy? Perhaps it fails to account for the positive elements of collectiveness.
The idea of privacy prominent in the West is far from universal. It has been suggested that the Kommunalka finds its cultural origins in the Russian concept of Sobornost. This term has no direct translation but can be compared to ideas of communitarianism based on love, generosity and unity This was a more common conceptual framework for housing and community in the re-revolution era, and the Kommunalka suggest that this mindset persisted into the mid-20th century and beyond. The concept developed from Orthodox Christianity but has been noted as a feature of Russian national consciousness. The transcendence of this mindset within Russian culture is demonstrated by the lack of translation for the concept of privacy in the Russian language. The meaning of privacy was foreign in Russia except those within the pre-revolutionary bourgeoise classes. Therefore, the communality of living within these apartments was not a forged through a Soviet ideology, rather it represents a peasant and working-class tradition. However, the USSR did not miss the opportunity to promote this collective living as they aligned the concept of privacy with old inequalities and solitude, rather than shared prosperity for which communism claimed to stand for. However, the normality with which the Kommunalka were received into literature, film alongside the lack of scholarship on them from within Soviet spaces suggests that they were an accepted part of everyday life and that the shared space quickly became far from alien.
Although there is evidence of a tradition of collective identities in Russia, the Kommunalka itself was a Soviet invention. While the mindset of Sobornost may have been active in the period of collective housing, this concept was adopted and obscured by the USSR to suit its ideological goals of uniformity and collectivisation. Furthermore, the Kommunalka was implemented far from the geographic and cultural boundaries of pre-revolution Russia. The examples of community built around the Kommunalka are unfortunately rare, and the lack of privacy in such a culture of mistrust more frequently bred betrayal than brotherhood. Therefore, the Kommunalka was, and has been remembered as, another arena of imposed political performance in Soviet everyday life.
Bibliography
Figes, Orlando. The Whisperers Penguin. 2008
Messana, Paola. Soviet Communal Living: An Oral History of the Kommunalka. Palgrave Macmillan. 2011
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday life in Russia Past and Present, Indiana University Press. 2015
Shlogel, Karl. The soviet century: Archaeology of a lost world. Princetown University Press. 2017
Lossky, Nikolay. History of Russian Philosophy. International University Press. 1951
Note: All oral testimonies from Messana, 2011
Image Credit: Colgate University, “Various items are stored in a room with traces of a leak on the ceiling. Laundry is also dried there. 1997” Accessed 25/10/2024 at: https://kommunalka.colgate.edu/cfm/photos.cfm
Retrospect Journal 