The Soviet Communal Apartment: 1917-2017 Free Housing for the 99%
Elisheva Levy (Dissertation in Preparation)
https://kommunalka.colgate.edu/ 2006-2008 Utekhin, Nakhimovsky, Paperno, Ries. All rights reserved.
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DISSERTATION
The 1917 Petrograd Housing Revolution remains largely unknown in urban studies, urban revolutions, and public housing research. This vast phenomenon led to the appropriation, de-privatization, and communalization of nearly all of Petersburg, including its hotels, shops, railway stations, bridges, communication hubs, and, most importantly, the city's entire housing stock. One urban mansion after another was confiscated, as the city's infrastructure and architecture were claimed by the state. Initially, opulent homes were seized by crowds, then redistributed to those in need through a bureaucratic process based on Marxian principles of egalitarianism, turning into Kommunalki: Communal Apartments.
The transformation of private luxury homes into communal, multifamily Kommunalki spread rapidly across Soviet territory. Wherever housing was communalized, communism as a tangible, political method of distribution and communal living took root. Housing over 300 million people throughout the 20th century, the kommunalka became the largest experiment in public, governmental housing in history—and it was essentially free. People paid a minimal fee and were guaranteed housing for life. Everyone, from poets and prostitutes to intellectuals, bureaucrats, and dethroned aristocrats, ended up living in a kommunalka. A small percentage of people lived in private apartments, but the majority of Soviet citizens experienced the shared reality of kommunalka living firsthand—its smells, its feel, its atmosphere.
My dissertation explores the outcomes of the Housing Revolution by analyzing interviews, photographs, floorplans, and essays from the Archive “Communal Living in Russia” an online ethnographic museum created by anthropology professor Ilya Utekhin. Through the data on the website, I bring to light the lived reality of Soviet communism as experienced by the residents of the Kommunalki and seek to recover the lessons learned—the knowledge developed—on how to live together in a shared house.