| Squalid communal houses should have gone out
with the fall of communism.
But in St Petersburg, 300,000 families are still forced to live
like this.
Communal living in the UK may bring to mind a temporary and impecunious
stint in student digs, but in Russia, thousands of people spend their
entire lives sharing a kitchen and bathroom with relative strangers. The
apartments are known as kommunalki - President Putin grew up in one - and
St Petersburg has more than any other city.
After the revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks abolished private property.
The grand houses in town centres across Russia were commandeered to
accommodate the maximum number of people possible, with as many as 10
families in each house, one family to a room. Since the demise of the
old
Soviet system, Moscow and other cities have dismantled most of their
kommunalki, selling the apartments to wealthy families who pay for the
residents to resettle in the sprawling suburbs. But in St Petersburg,
communal apartments linger on - a last vestige of the crumbled system.
Lack of investment in new construction has led to a severe shortage
of
accommodation in Russia's second city. According to the local housing
committee, 300,000 families live in kommunalki.
The photographer Francoise Huguier spent six months in St Petersburg
documenting the lives of the inhabitants of these overcrowded dwellings.
'They are the theatre of human dramas,' she says. 'Sociologists and
psychologists are very interested in the life here because it encourages
a
form of paranoia, as well as leading to behavioural problems.' Huguier
has
witnessed drug-taking, prostitution and alcoholism, often occurring in
the
middle of ordinary family life.
Macha is in her early seventies and has lived in the same kommunalka
since
1947. 'We might be only 100 metres from the Hermitage museum,' she says,
'but we live in an unhealthy apartment - the bathroom tiles date from
the
revolution.'
She brought her entire family up in one room, and recalls washing her
children in the communal kitchen sink. Now her grandson, a biologist,
lives
with her too. But despite the disrepair and overcrowding, she would rather
live here than in the suburbs, two hours away from the city centre.
The residents come from a variety of social backgrounds. Sharing the
house
with Macha, who used to work as a docker, is a university professor, a
painter, a life model and a retired doctor. For the most part, they coexist
in harmony, but quarrels can break out about excessive use of electricity
or if someone cooks with rancid oil - the smell of which permeates all
the
rooms.
Strict rules govern the cleaning of the communal areas and use of the
shower, and transgressions are punished immediately: if pots are not washed
and left in the kitchen they are unceremoniously dumped outside the
culprit's door. And if someone jumps the queue for the shower, the hot
water is promptly turned off.
Not surprisingly, residents fiercely guard what privacy they have, and
locks are fitted to the doors of their rooms. But, as in most family
houses, the kitchen is the centre of communal life; the place where
residents stop and pass the time of day beneath lines of drying laundry
crisscrossing a once grand corniced ceiling
See also:
Housing
and Utilities Reform
| 