How they lived in Soviet communal apartments: Showers on schedule, named toilet seats and other unspoken laws

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

In the film "The Golden Calf", the neighbors in the communal apartment whipped Vasisualiy Lokhankin for not putting out the light on time. This story, perhaps, is exaggerated, but it has a fairly realistic basis. Of course, in Soviet communal apartments it didn’t come to the rod, but it was easy to run into the dissatisfaction of “roommates” because of non-observance of generally accepted rules. By the way, the code of housing laws often ran counter to the official legislation. It was worse to argue with experienced tenants. And newcomers were quickly shown their place.

The diversity of the communal apartment

Initially, communal apartments were conceived as a temporary measure to improve living conditions. There were communal apartments in Russia before the revolution, they survived the entire Soviet era, and continue to exist a quarter of a century after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the maximum popularity came to communal apartments after 1917 - during the period of the so-called "seals". Then the young Soviet state, which decided to equalize citizens in their rights and welfare, took away their private property. Surplus living space was also subject to seizure.

Therefore, the first residents of Soviet communal apartments were yesterday's capitalists, whose property became public. Then they were joined by those people who could not afford a separate apartment or did not want to. So by the middle of the last century, the public in communal apartments was the most motley. All this contributed to the formation of a very specific living environment, a special communal mentality, often sinning with conflicts, untidiness, disrespect for someone else's personal space, and even denunciation.

Foundations of the communal "family"

In the Soviet Union, the universal document "Rules for the use of housing premises" was in force. This instruction was created to regulate the life of the apartment. In communal apartments, this text was often prominently displayed with red ink underlined points to attract the attention of residents. Special attention was paid to the observance of silence. For example, after 20:00 it was impossible to watch TV loudly and talk in a raised voice.

Newcomers were often not satisfied with such barracks rules, but usually they had to come to terms with the opinion of the majority. Fearless violators of this kind of rules were only alcoholics, periodically arranging loud "speeches" in communal apartments after heavy abuse. So the existence of the regulations did not at all guarantee their strict observance.

The so-called quarterly representative, elected by the tenants and acting as a liaison with the housing office, could be the instance supervising the observance of the order. In the absence of such a person, the inhabitants of communal apartments had to organize themselves. And due to collective imagination and many opinions, the set of rules often grew to unimaginable subtleties.

Own and "nobody's"

The space of communal apartments was tacitly divided into its own and common. The first category included individual rooms of residents. Space without an owner was considered to be shared places - corridors, bathrooms and a kitchen. In fact, it usually turned out that no one was responsible for the public areas. Therefore, in most cases, such places looked dull.

Everything that failed or took on an unsightly appearance in the common areas could not be put in order for years. In narrow, cluttered corridors, clothes were dried, rarely used and unnecessary things were stored, which hindered the maintenance of order. We cleaned the common rooms according to duty schedules that were often not followed. And then the living space turned into a pigsty. Even the cleanest tenants gave in to the undisciplined neighbors, letting cleanliness and order take their course.

To the table - on schedule

In the most exemplary communal apartments with a friendly climate, people cooked and sat down to the table together, preliminarily discussing the menu. But more often the order was set in the common kitchen, which was regulated by the corresponding schedule on the wall. Much depended on the kitchen area. The very cramped rooms contained only a couple of stoves and one dining table. In such cases, the burners were divided directly - one for each tenant. Therefore, the surface of the same hob was full of contrasts. Part of it could be kept clean, separated by the unspoken border of the neighboring layer of fat.

In the refrigerator, if any, the products were signed or stored on the shelves assigned to each separate room. In winter, in order to avoid misunderstandings and even theft, shopping bags with food could be hung out of the windows of their rooms. The bright clusters of mesh bags scattered across the facade of the building unmistakably indicated that it was a communal apartment.

Personalized toilet seats

The painful places of the Soviet communal apartments were a toilet with a bath. Baths in such apartments were often not taken at all, considering this procedure unhygienic. Were limited to a regular shower in the sequence established by the schedule. Scrupulous neighbors allowed themselves to control the "bath" regulations, calculating who and when comes to bathe and how long stays in the shower. Excessive duration of water procedures was stopped by persistent knocking on the door. If bathing in a bath in a communal “family” was allowed, then possible queues and evening scandals were prevented by the same hourly schedule. Moreover, the program for visiting the shower and bath was not the same, since in the second case it took much more time for each tenant.

A separate practice dealt directly with the toilets of the Soviet communal apartment. The walls of this room were usually hung with personalized toilet seats - each family had its own. Toilet paper was signed according to the same principle from the moment of its introduction into civilian life. On this occasion, there is a joke about how in the totally suspicious Stalinist 30s the residents of the Soviet communal apartment organized a denunciation of their neighbors. The latter were accused of "Trotskyism with a right-wing bias" due to the use of newspapers with portraits of the leader in the toilet.

Today, not everyone remembers, but it turns out that communal apartments were even in GUM, in the very center of Moscow.