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[Second Issue of the Day]
#2
Baltimore Sun
July 1, 2002
Class struggle in new Russia
Housing: In a communal apartment building in St. Petersburg, the capitalist
present coexists uneasily with the socialist past.
By Douglas Birch
Sun Foreign Staff
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia - At the Tolstoy House, a luxury apartment building on the Fontanka Canal, the socialist system may be dead, but the class struggle lives.
A Communist-turned-entrepreneur who owns a sprawling $600,000 apartment uses Marxist jargon to complain about the messy "lumpen proletariat" among his low-income neighbors, who live in single rooms, sharing kitchens and baths in the building's communal apartments.
A working mother, whose family of four once squeezed into one room of a cramped communal flat, denounces what she calls the building's wealthy "New Russians" for parking their Mercedes-Benzes in the courtyard, where children used to play.
A grandmother squabbles with one of the three other families sharing her communal apartment as they clash over chores, water on the bathroom floor and use of the common phone.
"These are the kinds of perfectly senseless conflicts that are going on in my apartment," she sighs.
Communal apartments, called kommunalki, are typically tiny, one-room spaces that serve as home to an entire family and their possessions. The families share their kitchen, bath and toilet with anywhere from a half-dozen to 30 or more strangers.
Inspired by a post-revolution housing shortage in Russia, contempt for private property and a desire to attack the bourgeoisie by forcing them to share their apartments with workers, these cramped quarters also provided a convenient way to get people to keep an eye on one another.
They were the scene of epic squabbles and legendary discomfort. Millions of Russians lived in them. President Vladimir V. Putin grew up in one here. And they became a central symbol of the folly and failures of Soviet society and its ideals.
Stubborn survivors
Yet 10 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, kommunalki stubbornly survive in Russia's major cities, especially St. Petersburg, where about 700,000 of the city's 4.5 million residents still live in state-owned communal housing.
Built between 1910 and 1914 by a relative of the author of War and Peace, Tolstoy House - a complex of eight-story Style Moderne buildings - is one of St. Petersburg's most prestigious addresses. Its wealthy residents fled, were crowded aside or arrested after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the new Soviet authorities doled out their apartments to workers a couple of hundred square feet at a time.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the government allowed tenants to claim ownership of their communal apartments and sell or trade them. During Russia's roaring economy in the mid-1990s, tycoons bought kommunalki in central St. Petersburg and converted them into huge apartments.
Then came the collapse of the ruble in 1998, and the pace of conversion slowed. Many ordinary Russians saw their savings and pensions wiped out. They found themselves stuck in their communal flats, where they still pay rent of about $13 a month for a single room. The result? In many buildings here, Russia's capitalist present coexists uneasily with its socialist past.
Yevgenia Petrova, a 45-year-old lighting specialist with St. Petersburg's Mussorgsky Theater, moved into one room of a five-family kommunalka in Tolstoy House with her husband in 1980, sharing the place with as many as 15 people.
Her two children were born there. For a while, her son slept between a cupboard and the wall. Her marriage collapsed.
"We divorced because it was impossible to live properly," she says.
Luckily for her, a neighbor died and Petrova was able to acquire a second room. Today, hers is one of four families, eight people altogether, who occupy the apartment.
As in many communal apartments, the public spaces in Petrova's - the halls, kitchen, bath and toilet - are dirty, dingy and dimly lit. But some of the battered doors hide tidy, refurbished rooms.
In a typical communal apartment, adults sleep on a fold-out couch, children sleep on cots, there's a small wardrobe for everyone's clothes, a bookcase, a folding table for meals and often a refrigerator. Hardly any space is left for a child to play.
Although she lives at one of St. Petersburg's most fashionable addresses, Petrova would like to move. One unemployed family in a nearby communal apartment tosses its garbage out the window, letting it rot on the roof of a neighboring garage. Then there are what she calls her snobbish neighbors, who fill her apartment with exhaust when they start their expensive foreign cars in the morning.
"They ignore the environment, and they ignore us."
Conflicts that snowball
Another family in the kommunalka, led by Maria Fedorenko, 78, is trying to buy out the other five residents and turn it into a private dwelling.
Fedorenko, who grew up in Siberia after her father was exiled by Josef Stalin, offered Petrova $8,000 for her two rooms. Petrova agreed, then reconsidered and is now demanding $14,000. Tensions rose.
"We quarrel," says Petrova. "We have a lot of small conflicts, which, like a snowball, grow and grow."
Fedorenko went to the bathroom a few days ago and came out looking for Petrova. "Why do you put so much water on the floor?" she demanded. "Why don't you clean it up?"
Petrova shot back that Fedorenko failed to clean the bathroom the week before, as she was scheduled to do.
Of course she didn't clean the bathroom, Fedorenko replied. The city had shut off the hot water, as it does every summer for about a month.
"I will wait until there is hot water!" she said.
Petrova fumes that Fedorenko and her family "are always unhappy that there is too little space for them. They feel that if they bought a room, they bought all the other communal rooms, too, and consider it their private property."
Fedorenko is likewise indignant. "She shows no respect for my age," she says.
The 'New Russian'
The wealthy Russians who are gradually buying up the apartments at Tolstoy House have their own complaints. Slim, dark-haired Sergei Marfin, 40, was a young Communist Party member and mining engineer in Siberia in the 1980s. Today, he is the owner of two factories and a restaurant.
He acquired an 11-room kommunalka in Tolstoy House three years ago by purchasing apartments elsewhere for its five families and moving them out. Then he hired an interior designer who spent 18 months rebuilding the 6,750-square-foot flat from floor to ceiling.
The result is a vast, airy and ultramodern apartment that Marfin shares with his wife and two infant daughters. He has a sauna and whirlpool, a playroom, and a built-in espresso machine in the kitchen. He estimates that the apartment is worth $600,000, a fortune in Russia, where the average monthly wage is about $130.
He says there is tension between the wealthy residents and some old-timers, especially those he calls "lumpen proletariat," a Marxist term that means the undeserving poor.
"I'm always after those who throw garbage into the staircase," he says. "I pay a person to clean the staircase from my own pocket. And some people, they do not care."
Marfin predicts that all of Tolstoy House's communal apartments will be gone in six years. He won't be sorry.
Anxious to escape
Alexandra Grigoreva, 17, one of Marfin's neighbors, is anxious to leave. She lives in a sparsely furnished cubicle in a five-family communal flat. The tall, red-haired student, who is studying to work in the printing business, has lived her whole life in this kommunalka. It has sometimes been an ordeal.
The kitchen is crowded at mealtimes, especially on holidays, when residents entertain. The bath and separate toilet are often occupied. Many of the walls are made of plywood, and tenants overhear one another. For several years, one of her neighbors beat his wife every weekend. The victim's screams echoed through the flat.
"We would lock the doors and stay in our rooms," Grigoreva says.
Grigoreva's family and the three others in the apartment have signed an agreement with a real estate agent. If the agent can sell the place for $115,000, she'll buy individual apartments elsewhere for the current residents. It would be the answer to Grigoreva's prayers.
"In your own apartment, it is all your own," she says. "Here, nothing belongs to you."
Not everyone at Tolstoy House, though, is eager to escape communal living. Valentina Makhmadova, 77, lives on the third floor of what may be one of the largest communal apartments in St. Petersburg. Ten families, more than 30 people, live in a dozen rooms off a single hallway. They share two bathrooms, though each room has its own tiny kitchen.
Unlike many communal apartments, there is no discarded furniture, trash or peeling wallpaper in the common areas. Astonishingly, several residents say they get along.
"We never quarrel," says Makhmadova, a survivor of the 900-day Nazi siege of Leningrad, St. Petersburg's name during the Soviet period.
Makhmadova's communal apartment is probably too big for any single person to buy: There would be too many people to relocate. But change is coming to her flat, too. Workers are installing a new kitchen and separate bath in one of the smaller rooms. A real estate agent plans to rent it for $40 a night to Western tourists and business executives.
Some of the old-timers at Tolstoy House welcome their wealthy new neighbors.
Painter Alla Brouchina, 42, doesn't live in the complex but owns a studio on the eighth floor of one of the buildings. It was given to her, free of charge, by the artists union. She sees the changes in Tolstoy House every day on her way to her studio. And she's impressed.
"The New Russians, they make the apartments beautiful," she says. "They do a useful job. They repair doors, they put down carpets, they fix things up."
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