LIFE IN A KOMMUNALKA (communal apartment)

This assignment relies on images, snippets of Soviet literature, and brief excerpts from several films to illustrate life in a Kommunalka or communal apartment in the post-World War II period.

Communal apartments were a way of life for many throughout the Soviet period and have persisted into the post-Soviet period as well. In the aftermath of the 1917 Revolution the new Soviet state dealt with a major urban housing shortage by seizing the often spacious apartments of the elite and dividing the rooms into separate living quarters for several different families, who then shared a common kitchen and bathroom, giving rise to the phenomenon of the kommunalka. Boris Pasternak portrays this process quite well for example in Doctor Zhivago. Housing remained in short supply in the early Soviet decades and then especially after World War II in the parts of the USSR where the fighting took place. For example, the southern Russian city Rostov-on-the-Don lost approximately seventy-five percent of its housing as a result of the fighting that raged in and around the city, and it already had a severe housing shortage even before the war!