"Tear of Socialism" in St. Petersburg: How Soviet Writers Lived in a House Built on the Principle of a Commune

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

This gray apartment building in St. Petersburg, or rather, Leningrad, was supposed to symbolize the new life of a citizen of the Soviet country - modest, no frills, organized on the principle of a commune. And no one was settled there, but young writers. However, time has shown that such features of housing as "everything in common" and "toilet on the floor" is not a step into the future, but stupidity. It is no coincidence that the townspeople almost immediately began to call this house "The Tear of Socialism."

Experimental commune

An idea so strange for a modern person, but quite logical for a builder of communism, was implemented by a group of young engineers and writers designed by the famous architect Andrey Olya.

The apartment building on Troitskaya Street (now Rubinstein) was supposed to represent a commune and symbolize the struggle against the old, bourgeois way of life. The new way of life, according to the creators, looked like this: the toilet is not in every separate apartment, but a common one - on the floor, the dining room is also common, and the acoustics is wonderful (just like in the Moscow hostel of Ilf and Petrov's “12 chairs”). After all, proletarian writers have nothing to hide from each other!

The house is designed in the constructivist style and consists of 52 apartments. On one side it has five floors, on the other - six, and the roof is double: the pitched part of the sixth floor turns into the flat part of the fifth. On this site, as conceived by the authors of the project, you can walk and (if you're lucky with the weather) sunbathe.

On the ground floor, in addition to a dining room for 200 people and a common kitchen block, a library-reading room and children's rooms were supposed.

The beginning of construction was marked by an article published in Bytovaya Gazeta with a loud headline "From a fortress house to a commune house." It said that this would be a transitional option from the individualist bourgeois chorus to the public communes of the future.

The work began in 1929 and in 1931 the first tenants - Soviet writers and engineers - were already settled in the house. They were young, naive and full of faith in a bright future. To dine in the common dining room, while sunbathing and drying baby diapers on the common roof seemed very romantic to them at first. Don't have a private bathroom? Yes, this is not the main thing! More importantly, the country will come to communism very soon. This is how the members of the experimental commune reasoned.

In the first two years, the housewives did not even need to cook: each family handed in food cards to the dining room, contributed money for a month in advance, and for this they received three meals a day. There was also a paid buffet in the house, in which the writers themselves worked alternately.

You can't look without tears

But very soon the young tenants realized that everyday life is not at all a secondary part of life. Over time, this awareness became more and more acute, because children began to be born in young families, which required both a separate bath, and a kitchen, and silence. But it was already too late, so the tenants had to put up with the living conditions that they themselves praised so much just a few years ago. Clothes and diapers were hung on the common roof, since the balconies were small and few. We cut vegetables and rolled out the dough on the windowsill in the room, since the common kitchen could not accommodate so many housewives.

Leningraders immediately dubbed the new building "Tear of Socialism", and its inhabitants - "Tears". It was an allusion to their miserable life, which could only cause tears, and to the fact that, as it turned out, in the building, besides other "joys", leaks were constantly occurring. I must say, even the residents of the house themselves called him that, because now they openly criticized all his inconveniences. Even a convinced Komsomol member, poet Olga Berggolts, who lived in Tear until 1943, repeatedly criticized it, calling it “the most ridiculous house in Leningrad”.

By the way, among the tenants of the house were such famous Soviet writers as Wolf Erlich, Pavel Astafiev, Alexander Stein, but there were even more no less talented, but not so famous. Subsequently, Evgeny Kogan even published a book called "The House of Forgotten Writers." In it, he collected works written by these young Soviet authors at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, many of which have never been published since that time.

There was no bright future

During the Great Patriotic War, the residents of the house, like the rest of the townspeople, survived the blockade. Many deaths happened here - for example, Olga's second husband Berggolts died of hunger.

In the early 1960s, the authorities finally figured out a redevelopment in Tear. Each apartment has its own kitchen and bathroom. Public institutions such as the dining room, reading room and hairdresser have disappeared.

Now the house is inhabited mainly by the descendants of those very writers and engineers who once believed in a bright future, survived the blockade and preserved their natural intelligence.

Some time ago, residents turned to the city authorities with a request to open the Olga Berggolts Center for Patriotic and Cultural Education on the first floor of the house, which would acquaint young people with the history of this building, its famous residents-blockade and foster love for their native city and their country.

Despite the unsightly appearance, the authorities decided not to demolish the "Tear of Socialism". The house received the status of an architectural monument, because its history is very interesting and instructive for posterity.

Perhaps our descendants will add some mystical stories about this house, and it will be included in the list legends of St. Petersburg