NOTES FROM ACADEME
Communism at Uncomfortably Close Quarters
By Bryon Macwilliams
St. Petersburg, Russia
The outdated wallpaper is in a bright-turquoise pattern,
involving flowers on a manila background. The balcony is framed by musty
green curtains overlaid by what appear to be stalks of wheat. A far corner
of the ceiling - to which is affixed the ornate base of a long-gone chandelier
- is stained yellow from water leakage. Exposed pipes run between the
ceiling and floor, where a thin rug covers a large burn spot.
But don't blame Ilya
Utekhin.
The philologist from St. Petersburg no longer lives in the partitioned
room off a long, dark corridor in the kommunalka, or communal apartment,
at 44 B Kamennoostrovsky Prospect. For 30 years of his life, though, this
was the center of activity for his family and, later, him alone.
In the early 1920s, the apartment - originally owned by Mr. Utekhin's
grandfather - was home to 56 people. By the late 1960s, when he was born,
some 35 people lived here. Today, 16 to 20 people share its lone kitchen,
its lone bathtub; no one knows for sure how many people occupy the other
rooms.
"In the downtown areas of St. Petersburg, more than one-fifth of the population
still lives this way," he says. "The communal apartment was the key to
Soviet civilization. The elements of everyday [Soviet] life are still
present, in the most concentrated way, in the communal apartment."
Mr. Utekhin moved out in 1999, after he remarried. He has remained involved
in communal life, however, by chronicling its minutiae through observations,
interviews, and photographs, which last year were compiled in a book,
Essays on Communal Life. (Some of the chapters are available in
English at http://utekhin.da.ru)
"Most of the people I interviewed told me that they believed kommunalkas
were a design of the Bolsheviks to put us together, but really it was
just an outcome, a byproduct, of a failed policy," says Mr. Utekhin, an
assistant professor in the ethnology department at the European University
in St. Petersburg, a private institution founded in 1994 that specializes
in the humanities.
Serious research on the kommunalka was impossible in the Soviet
era, he says, "because the communal apartment was a symbol of the inefficiency
of the Soviet state. It was something to be concealed. Those unnoticed,
everyday things were not really studied. There was no science done until,
well, ... me."
A kommunalka is not a commune: The people have not chosen to live
together, but were ordered to do so by the government. Living conditions
are often so dreadful that, as a Russian saying goes, one must laugh through
tears.
Not that it's all bad. Anyone who has ever lived in a communal apartment
has their favorite stories about the experience. Such tales have been
committed to literature, largely as satire, by authors like Mikhail Bulgakov
and Mikhail Zoshchenko. The oral tradition is being kept up, daily, by
today's inhabitants.
On a recent Sunday evening, steam billows from an electric kettle on a
table near the main door of Mr. Utekhin's former room. Yan Levchenko,
a philologist from Estonia, is living in the more spacious section. Alisher
Sharipov, assistant to the director of the library at European University,
lives on the other side of a partition, in a space the size of a walk-in
closet.
Mr. Levchenko pours strong, black tea from a small teapot into five ceramic
mugs, and adds boiling water. Fresh, sugary pastries are laid out on saucers
and eaten with teaspoons. Mr. Utekhin, seated next to his teenage son,
Arsenio, is content to listen to the conversation, which turns to the
professor and his book.
"We are all objects of research by virtue of living here," Mr. Levchenko
says. He chuckles. So do his guests. They are, they say, laughing through
tears.
The previous night he had been awakened by smoke in the hallway. A neighbor,
drunk, had returned home around midnight, began cooking, and fell asleep
without turning off the gas burner. Neither Mr. Levchenko nor Mr. Sharipov
woke the culprit or shut off the gas. Instead they walked downstairs and
into the street for beers at a nearby kiosk.
"Everything stinks anyway," says Mr. Levchenko.
"Yeah, even if no one is cooking," says Mr. Sharipov. His skin smells
of the alcohol he drank that night to numb the pain from a concussion
he had sustained while boxing.
Only the other day a neighbor, upon seeing Mr. Levchenko at a food market,
said she wanted "to kill" Mr. Sharipov for playing his bongos into the
night. "People live at different rhythms," the librarian says.
Still, rhythms are dictated by rules: One may shut off the water, without
notice, if someone has been occupying the shower for more than 40 minutes;
it is improper to walk the halls without slippers or while wearing a towel
in lieu of a bathrobe; everyone must clean the common areas, according
to a schedule.
The rules for the kommunalnaya uborka, or overall cleaning, have
changed as the number of residents has fallen, Mr. Utekhin writes.
Floors are swept and polished twice a week at most. Thorough cleanings
are impossible: Household appliances, like old refrigerators and televisions,
are strewn about the hallways; chronically clogged pipes and leaky faucets
have left permanent stains on walls and ceilings.
Each resident has a separate shelf in the bathroom, although Mr. Levchenko
no longer keeps his toiletries there, since his shower gel was stolen.
An empty can for cigarette butts sits on the cement floor next to the
toilet. In lieu of toilet paper, scraps from old magazines and newspapers
are stuffed into a worn canvas pocket on the back of the door. There is
no toilet seat. Once, most families had their own toilet seats, which
they would hang on the bathroom wall when not in use, Mr. Utekhin writes.
The first communal apartments arose in keeping with one of the slogans
following the revolution: "Dvortsy - Rabochim!" or "Palaces to
the Workers!"
"It's interesting, because the workers did not need anything like that,"
says Mr. Utekhin. "They worked on the outskirts of the city, they weren't
accustomed to operating domestic appliances, they had no money for wood,
and they didn't have any money for transport. They had to cohabit, often,
with the original owners. This meant that representatives of the [wealthier]
classes had to live with those who hated them."
The kommunalkas' peak came in the 1930s, when some 68 percent of
the population lived in such apartments in this city, then known as Leningrad.
Communal life spawned its own language, some terms of which have complements
in English, such as the domovoi komitet, or housing committee.
A chyornaya lestnitsa, or "dark stairway" leads to the courtyard
outside.
The condition of the dark stairways is often so revolting that even local
uchastkovyi, or beat cops, avoid them. Mr. Utekhin's book includes
an interview with Zoya Levonovna, an elderly Armenian woman who was hospitalized
for a broken leg after slipping on feces in a dark stairway.
One aspect of Mr. Utekhin's book focuses on what he calls "the poetics
of complaint." "It is interesting that many normal Soviet citizens ...
did not know how to write a letter, but they knew how to write a complaint,
a semi-official document, in the tone found in newspaper editorials,"
he says.
The book also delves into theft, sex and privacy. One unidentified woman
interviewed by Mr. Utekhin described the communal atmosphere as that of
"being evaluated every moment, from head to foot: what you are wearing,
where your mother works, who comes to visit you, what you eat, whether
you have spare time, what clothes you wash, and what your underwear looks
like hanging on the clothesline."
After the tea and pastries, Mr. Utekhin and his son
walk to an unlocked room, or pustaya komnata, where residents dry
their clothes and store their stray junk. The overhead light does not
work. In the flickering light of a borrowed cigarette lighter, they gather
up old letters, photographs, and children's books for Mr. Utekhin's infant
daughter, Mariya.
For Mr. Levchenko, the 300 rubles ($10) a month for the room is of small
account in order to live modestly and write his dissertation. "There were
not any psychological problems moving in here, because I spent five years
in a dormitory at the University of Tartu [in Estonia]," he says, adding
that he still has something of a soft spot for Communism.
He notes, however, that the environment is very stressful for loners who
need their space.
For Mr. Sharipov, the room is a bargain: "I have very few things. I am
not obligated to anyone. I have no history here - neither a past nor a
future. Such as it is, it is a kind of freedom."
Mr. Utekhin, though, prefers a different kind of freedom. He gathers his
things and walks down a dark stairway and out into the cold. He is going
home to a large apartment with two bedrooms, living room, kitchen, bathroom,
and a den in which he will write well into the middle of the night - without
bongos echoing down the corridor.
http://chronicle.com
Section: International
Page: A56
