“In the distress and resentment…”
a Revolutionary solution to the housing problem started with the “requisition of flats of the rich to relieve the needs of the poor”. In 1919, the national health Committee has identified the sanitary norm of living space per person 18 square feet (9,1 m). All “surpluses” were subject to seizure and distribution among the workers. Started “housing and redistribution”, from which the word “house” for many years was replaced by a hitherto unheard of “living space” and “square meters”.
How “housing problem” spoil the life of Muscovites in the late nineteenth century
I try As “bourgeois” to protect your way of life, “snowplains” – that is, writing to his relatives and friends, the neighborhood with the proletariat could not be avoided. Poetess Irina Odoevtseva who came in the summer of 1921 in Moscow, Basmanny, with horror, wrote: “…in the apartment of six rooms and twenty single tenant – all ages and all genders – are crowded and mad”1.
Hunger and requisitions of war communism, greed era of the NEP, industrialisation and forced collectivisation drove huge human flows in major cities. After the ordeal at the courts newcomers settled in communal apartments.
health standards in 1930 was reduced to 5.5 sq m in Moscow, a 3.5 – in Chelyabinsk, a 3.4 – in Krasnoyarsk, and in the Donbass at all to 2.2!2
the Acute housing crisis embodied in the slogan of the 1920-ies:
Oh, we live at ease
in the coffins of the dead
my wife in the chest sleep,
Mother-in-law in the washstand.
the call of the individual…
the Family lived in monastic cells, stables, cellars, closets, infinite has shared a Suite of rooms by plywood partitions. Zoshchenko was not exaggerating when he placed his hero in the manor bathroom. “Only one uncomfortable complained that “lucky man” – in the evenings, communal residents climb into the bathroom to wash. At this time, the whole family falls into the corridor to go”3. “New housing policy” 1921-1926 years weakened the control over the distribution and therefore slightly changed the social composition of the “seals”: the housing can be removed for money, but for large – even with a “surplus”. But at the end of 1927 by the Resolution of the Council of people’s Commissars “Nouveau riche” was thrown out of the nationalized houses, and everything was back to normal.
… the kitchen.
it Seems that the Professor of Transfiguration “heart of a Dog” that escaped the seal in the early 1920s, in the first five years still had to make room.
“the Nervous people” by Mikhail Zoshchenko – “mirror” communal life.”The people are very much nervous…”
the Communal life of the 1920-ies became the leitmotif of creativity Averchenko, Zoshchenko, Bulgakov, Ilf and Petrov, Kharms… Writer M. L. Slonimsky claimed that Zoshchenko own special language learned in a communal apartment House of the arts, and “so absorbed the language that no other writing could not”4. “Rookery” by I. Ilf and E. Petrov has become synonymous with communal apartments. By the way, as the “apartment number three, which was inhabited by Lokhankin”, Petrov immortalized his Moscow communal apartment in Kropotkinskaya переулке5. Well, the couple do not live Bulgakov with 16 neighbors in apartment No. 50 on Bolshaya Sadovaya, 10, world literature would not recognize neither “bad” nor “Zoyka” apartments.
Communal-political implications of an argument between Joseph Stalin and Josip Broz Tito
Yesterday’s peasants and aristocrats, servants and landlords, intellectuals, proletarians and “senior officials” fromchilis to coexist peacefully, to cook in the shared kitchen, to bathe in the common bath, if any, and, finally, to use the common restroom. In another apartment the number of residents could reach a hundred, with an average of 25-50 people. Into use immediately came the expression “to quarrel, as Housewives in the communal kitchen”. Insignificant occasion could provoke scurtiny scandal. “People are very nervous – was diagnosed with Mikhail Zoshchenko. – Upset over small trifles. Hot. It is, of course, after the civil war nerves, they say, the people always loose”6.
However, relations between neighbours were regulated by the “internal Rules of the houses and apartments” and the apartment steward, who was elected by residents and was responsible for compliance with these rules for settlement of accounts and in General looked out for neighbors. But the “Rules” helped little, and Conciliation-disputes Committee for housing Affairs, which appeared in 1927.
the Poet David Samoilov aptly: “Communal apartment of the twenties was an unusual field for passions, often lowland, the scene of the tragedy, the ground for corruption and crime… the Violence, which was the main method of the revolution, he said, and here the forced team-building. Only at the next stage, after the NEP, it began to be formed in the environment”7.
By the late 1920s it became clear that, unlike NEP, communal – do “the long haul”.
the war generation of communal
By the beginning of 1930-ies in the old Fund are almost no “separate” apartments, and those that were built were the exclusive privilege of the new Soviet elite – party leadership, the workers, outstanding figures of culture. The inhabitants of communal apartments became accustomed to the enforced good neighborliness. As noted by E. S. Ventsel, “living so long together and there it is impossible to remain strangers… Between neighbors leads to a kind of kinship, not love, rather grumpy, but still related. They fight, they insult each other, failureyut on one another of their nervous anger – and yet they’re family. Sick neighbors buy what you need, bring the kettle warm”8.
the struggle for the meters in the prestigious Dorm was involved even Stalin*
the same was recalled historian J. L. Immortal: “Although the relationship between different tenants have been uneven, in hard times, all came to each other for help. This happened not only when someone was sick. Compassion is clearly felt in the terrible days of arrests 37-38 years. The targets were then five of the seven families who lived in our apartment”9. Often, however, there were other examples when the neighbors denunciations were trying to improve their own living conditions.
birthday in a communal gathered the kids around the house. Often guests come to your dishes. Photo: from family archive
growing up the children of the communal – is the first generation that perceived collective being as a matter of course. These children grow up with their peers under the supervision of neighbours, staying in the neighboring rooms and has not experienced the mental anguish from the inability of privacy as their parents. For them was the norm close room separated by plywood or a curtain parent’s “bedroom”, with products, hung from the Windows in the shopping bag; kitchen, closely lined with tables with stoves; weekly cleaning of common areas; often unlocked common door, and the long list of tenants with an indication of to whom how many times to call; somebody’s nanny or housekeeper, sleeping in the hallway, cluttered with bundles of firewood, cabinets, bicycles and pots; the bulbs and the meters on the door of each room and a shared telephone.
…At thirty-eight komnatok only one…”
“All lived together, modestly so: system corridor
At thirty-eight komnatok only one”
– sang grew up in a communal “First Meshchansky at the end of the” Vladimir Vysotsky.
it was All a living space the vast majority of urban children. They grew up, got families and moved to the new communal.
But tomorrow was the war… And, according to veteran Samoilov, “the notion of the inevitability of living together, of mutual assistance”, “on adaptability and sociability,” helped “children of communal” on the front.
One family. The residents of the “standard houses” in the background of his house. A standard home – communal corridor system. 1950-s. Photo: from family archive of Alexander Turbinenhalle the neighborhood
the Great Patriotic war has led to a new round of “seals”. During the war years and German occupation, the country has lost about 70 million sqm of housing. Evacuees were hooked in a densely populated communal apartment, and returning home, found his rooms occupied by new owners. This fate befell even soldiers, despite the fact that the living space established for them by law. Entire families had to live in mud huts and barracks – even by the beginning of 1952 in the barracks lived 3 million 758 thousand people, and a room in a communal apartment in these conditions was везением10.
As a General Bonch-Bruevich struggled with Shvonder per square fathoms
Gradually the country was being rebuilt, a huge communal was replaced by a small two-bedroom, and after that unprecedented luxury of “economic well-appointed apartments for the settlement of one family.” Slow, hard – but leaving seemed to be in oblivion “carrion crows Slobodka” was to be remembered with warmth and love. A wicked satire gave way to lyrics about the “Golden door”
In nashenskie apartment utilities
the Kitchenette was a confessional,
the orchestra And all the pots, separated
And judgment, truly national,
– nostalgia Yevgeny Yevtushenko in 1983. At the same time was released elegiac Comedy “the Pokrovskie gate”, forever enveloped communal life veil of romance, and “Exodus of the Muscovites out of their flats to private ones” bright sadness for the lost good-neighbourliness, reciprocity, participation…
Daniil Granin wrote: “Museums of cities should probably keep the flats are not only great people, but just people. I wanted to keep and communal living difficult of the thirties and forties…”11 Daniel would be happy: today there is a communal museums in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Podolsk, Ivanovo, Kolomna, Krasnokamsk.
TWO worlds
from the film “I step through Moscow”Mansion Galina Polish
From the audience asked what the Soviet star apartment. Gali [Galina Polish] was dvenadtsatimilnuju room in the communal apartment where they lived four: Daniel, her husband, daughter and mother Galina. But Gale promised to give the New year a room of 20 metres. And she gave the dream for the reality and said:
Twenty – five square meters!
in St. Petersburg are housed in communal
the Translator didn’t know what the “square meters”, and translated:
Twenty – five rooms.
the room roared indignantly. Our immigrants because they understood that the French mistranslated, and the French – because surprised. A gentleman shouted that he was disappointed in socialism: these apartments, even the French stars no.
G. Daneliya “Stowaway”.
a Resident of St. Petersburg opened Museum of communal
1. Odoevtseva I. On the banks of the Neva. On the banks of the Seine. M. 2016. P. 370.
2. Orlov I. B. Sovetskaya housing in the 1920s-1930s: between class line and sustainability.// Modern problems of service and tourism. Vol. 8. 2014. N 2. P. 81.
3. Zoshchenko M. Crisis. //Favorites. M. 1978. P. 120.
4. K. I. Chukovsky’s Diary. 1901-1969. Vol. 2. 1930-1969. M., 2003. P. 6.
5. Ardov, V. Sketches to portraits. M., 1983. P. 88.
6. Zoshchenko. M. Nervous people.// Favorites. M. 1960. P. 14.
7. Samoilov D. Aide-Memoire // Banner. 1990. N 9. P. 155-156.
8. I. Grekova. Widow steamer // M, 1998. P. 209.
9. Immortal Yu. l. on 22 June 1941. Extracts from diaries // Odysseus. Man in history. 1993. M., 1994. P. 232-239.
10. The Soviet life. 1945-1953/ Comp. E. Y. Zubkov. M., 2003. P. 178.
11. Granin D. it’s a strange life. M. 1975. P. 59.
