[HPN] Tight Space. No Privacy.

[Coalition on Homelessness, SF]

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I thought this might offer an interesting contrast to the LA Times 
story "Anaheim Council vs. the Working Poor."

peace,
chance

http://www10.nytimes.com:80/library/world/europe/020500russia-housing.html

February 5, 2000

Tight Space. No Privacy. Soviet Décor.

By MICHAEL WINES

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, Feb. 4 -- By the identifiably Russian logic of
Tanya Konyenko, there is a good reason why she must leave her apartment,
trudge five flights downstairs, cross Nevsky Prospekt, the city's
prosperous main street, and walk to the local bathhouse, all simply to
take a bath.

Her apartment doesn't have hot water, but that is not why. Actually, her
apartment doesn't have a bathtub. But that is not why either.

The reason is that if her apartment had a bathtub, and if the bathtub
had hot water, she would have to share it with two 20-ish men, a
17-year-old girl and her 18-year-old brother, their 40-year-old mother,
a 64-year-old woman, her 65-year-old husband, a 70-year-old babushka,
that woman's 72-year-old husband and, finally, with her own husband,
Yura.

"If there was a bathtub here I wouldn't use it," Mrs. Konyenko said,
"because other people would be washing their dirty underwear in it all
day. And I wouldn't like it."

It is the very essence of that most Soviet of Russian institutions, the
communal flat: a place so crammed with people and so devoid of privacy
that not having a bathtub can be considered an advantage.

Greta Garbo would have been miserable here. Mrs. Konyenko manages to be
alone a little while each day at the bathhouse, and insists she is not.

"I like it here," she said, then paused a beat to reflect on her
neighbors. "Of course, it would be much better if I could poison some of
them, and then I would have more room."

"Here" is flat 7 at Nevsky Prospekt 106, an ornate five-story building
constructed roughly 125 years ago to accommodate two floors of stores
and three rental units, one on each of the three upper floors.

There are still two floors of stores. The three remaining floors were
carved decades ago into veritable warrens of cubicles linked by
corridors of peeling checkerboard linoleum, stuffed to the brim and
beyond with lifetimes of musty, precious possessions.

Once the staircase was an airy wall of glass. Soviet engineers solved
that by hanging a steel tube of an elevator outside the staircase,
shutting out any light. Outside the flat, graffiti advertise sex and
politics; inside, by the front door, a wall scrawl inexplicably depicts
a skating mouse named Roller Rat.

The attic, so thick with a century's dust that the wooden floor is now a
thick gray carpet, has become a crash pad for homeless alcoholics.

Here the Konyenkos -- film critics, chain smokers, sometime actors and
jazz buffs in St. Petersburg's distinctly offbeat intelligentsia -- have
spent all but 3 of their 22 years of married life.

They and their vast collection of records, tapes, CD's and religious art
peacefully coexist in a space roughly 12 feet wide and 30 feet long,
split into two rooms by a false wall covered with a red carpet.

This is not their dream home. Like countless St. Petersburgers, the
Konyenkos are mired in the communal milieu by inertia, lack of choice
and outright poverty. For their patch of a barely habitable building
with a two-window view of the Adidas, Carnaby and TJ Collection shops
across Nevsky, they pay 140 rubles a month, about $4.50.

"If we had the money we'd live in the Hermitage," Mrs. Konyenko said
drily, referring to the czarist palace a few blocks away that houses
much of Russia's greatest art.

Given that they do not, they make do with 360 square feet in the center
of downtown, close to the clubs and movies they love, and try to keep
the door closed when they are home.

Real-estate-wise, this makes them the Trumps of flat 7. A few linoleum
squares away, past a broken bicycle and a collection of washing tubs and
pots, Galina and Boris Semyonovich Korneyev -- 30-year veterans here --
live in a dim room barely 7 feet wide and 14 feet long.

A little history: Russians have been living dormitory style at least
since Peter the Great began building workers' barracks in the 1600's.
But it was only in 1918 that the new Soviet government ordered thousands
of churches, mansions and private apartments carved up and thrown open
to peasants and factory workers, ostensibly to erase all vestiges of
class in the new Communist paradise.

They called it "uplotneniye" -- literally, compressing or tightening up
-- and with good cause. For eight decades that is how countless millions
of Russians have entered the world, lived and died: in makeshift
cubicles, sometimes split into two rooms by a false wall, a cupboard or
a bedspread hung from a rope, a supposed minimum of 65 square feet per
person.

Accurate figures are hard to come by, but it is how perhaps 10 million
Russians still live, including a million in St. Petersburg.

Residents in the city's kommunalki, as the flats are called, share
bathrooms, hallways and a common kitchen, often with several stoves and
sinks and a table for each family. A single telephone and, in most
cases, a single bathtub serve all tenants.

Official Soviet literature and film extolled kommunalki as the epitome
of socialist equality and brotherhood: happy group homes where loving
families shared all with neighbors and broke bread together in a spirit
of harmony and peace.

There are indeed some Kramden-Norton-style friendships erected on the
foundation of communal life, but only some, says Aleksandr Pozdnyakov, a
local expert on St. Petersburg architecture and history. For most
residents life in a communal flat was -- and remains -- one of the lower
rings of purgatory.

"There's a word, trushchoby," he said. "It's sort of a combination of
garbage dump and slum. In Khrushchev's time they called the flats
khrushchoby."

There is, for example, the filth that comes from sharing common areas
that are no one's responsibility: for years, families brought their own
handmade seats to the toilets. And there is the mental anguish of being
rubbed raw by neighbors one cannot stand but cannot escape. The common
kitchen can be a place to get even by spiking food with urine, salt and
even dead mice.

Families get sick of each other, too, but have fewer options. Husbands
and wives can divorce, but even now must live in the same tiny room for
years until a neighbor dies, freeing up space, or a private apartment
becomes available.

"Young people want to make love at night," Mr. Pozdnyakov said. "But the
babushka is snoring on the other side of the cupboard, and the young
baby is screaming. Big problems."

Olga Berggolts, a well-known St. Petersburg writer, described the misery
eloquently in a 1960 work: "Sound carried in the house so ideally that
if below, on the third floor, some people were playing blokhi or reading
little poems, then on the fifth floor I could already hear everything,
including the bad rhyming. These too-close forced relations with each
other in incredibly small nooks was very irritating and exhausting."

Tenants have been known to resort to extreme solutions. During Stalin's
rule, every kommunalka was peopled with informers, some of whom solved
petty disputes by reporting fellow tenants to the secret police.

After the fingered tenant vanished, sent to the firing squad or a labor
camp, the informer was allowed to add the victim's cubicle to his
real-estate holdings. Mothers had additional babies or even adopted
children to qualify for extra space.

Not long ago, Mr. Konyenko said, a St. Petersburg man pushed his
82-year-old mother off a kommunalka balcony, then moved his girlfriend
into the freed-up living area. "It's not black humor," Mr. Konyenko
said. "It's the truth."

Yet were the plight of most residents of kommunalki not so hapless, it
might draw smiles. Mrs. Konyenko, a tall, thin, 44-year-old redhead,
first moved into Nevsky 106 when she was 10 -- a brief stay, she
thought, while the Soviet government found a real apartment for her
father, a military man, and his wife.

The wait for an apartment stretched 15 years, and by the time father and
wife left, Tanya and Yura were ready to inherit the cubicle. At that
time, more than 20 people lived in the flat, and the scramble for living
space, and the privacy that comes with it, was relentless.

Mrs. Konyenko recalled the time nearly 30 years ago when the man who
inhabited one closet-sized cubicle died. By the time the government sent
a new tenant to scout out his new home a few days later, the closet was
gone entirely, its wallboard and studs ripped out and its territory
seized by the residents of the cubicle next door.

Then there was the family that inhabited a room near the Konyenko manse:
a couple who quickly bore three daughters, who then married and
eventually produced offspring of their own before the clan finally split
up. Toward the end, nine people in three generations lived in a room
roughly 10 by 18 feet.

When the eldest of the three daughters got married, the Konyenkos gave
the newlyweds a gift: the right to spend their wedding night in barely
secluded splendor in the second room of their apartment, on a twin bed
hard against the rug-covered divider.

Funny, yes. But the humor is bittersweet. The Konyenkos, an eclectic
couple, have turned a half-habitable lemon into stylish lemonade with a
plethora of posters and two decades of collectibles. Their money goes
not into property, but travel, nightclubs and movies.

Few kommunalka residents are so carefree. There is talk that the city
will soon evict the denizens of Nevsky 106, scattering them to private
apartments in the suburbs, as part of larger plan to eliminate the
kommunalki by 2003 -- a goal that now seems increasingly out of reach
given the state of the economy.

There are plans for a $300 million trade center in the block, a
sparkling collection of renovated offices, luxury apartments,
glass-roofed shopping malls and hanging gardens. Mrs. Konyenko has mixed
feelings.

"If you'd give me some flat in the suburbs, I wouldn't have it," she
said. "Here I'm close to everything. Yura's office is next door, across
the street. There are cinemas. I feel myself in the center of the city."

A few feet down the corridor, Galina Korneyev, the 64-year-old who has
spent almost half her life in flat 7, grabs her head, stunned by Mrs.
Konyenko's resistance.

"How can they do it faster?" she asks, referring to the city's grand
plans. "How can they do it sooner, so we can move sooner?"

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company

END FORWARD

**In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information
for non-profit research and educational purposes only.**



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