The Whisperers

The Khaneyevsky household was not overcrowded by comparison with the majority of communal apartments in Moscow and Leningrad. Yevgeny Mamlin grew up in a kommunalka with sixteen families (fifty-four people), each one living in a single room, and all sharing one kitchen. There were two toilets, and two basins with cold water, but no bathroom.48 Minora Novikova grew up in a communal apartment in Moscow. There were thirty-six rooms – each with at least one family – on a corridor that ran round three sides of the house. In her room there were ten people living in a space of only 12.5 square metres. ‘How we slept is hard to say,’ recalls Minora.

There was a table in the room, on which my grandmother slept. My brother, who was six, slept in a cot underneath the table. My parents slept in the bed by the door. My other grandmother slept on the divan. My aunt slept on a large feather mattress on the floor with her cousin on one side, while my sister (who was then aged sixteen), my cousin (ten), and I (eleven) somehow squeezed in between them – I don’t remember how. We children loved sleeping on the floor: we could slide our bodies underneath our parents’ bed and have a lot of fun. I don’t imagine that it was much fun for the adults.49

Nina Paramonova lived in a similar ‘corridor system’ in Leningrad. The apartment occupied the whole floor of a house that had been requisitioned from a German baron by the Institute of Trade in 1925, and Nina moved there in 1931 with her husband, a ship designer, when she took a job as an accountant in the Leningrad railway administration. The apartment had seventeen rooms, with at least one family in each. Altogether there were over sixty people, who all shared a kitchen, a toilet and a shower room (with cold water).50

At the other end of the social spectrum, the Third House of Soviets, a communal apartment for government workers in the centre of Moscow, also had a ‘corridor system’. The brother of Stalin’s wife, Fyodor Alliluev, lived with his mother in a room on the second floor. Ninel Reifshneider, the daughter of a veteran Bolshevik and political writer, lived with her parents, her grandparents, her brother and her sister in one of the nine rooms on the floor below, a living space of 38 square metres for six people, not counting her father, who usually slept in the Metropol Hotel, where he also kept a room. There were thirty-seven people living in the nine rooms of the corridor. They shared a large kitchen, where there was a shower and a bath behind a screen on one

Communal apartment (‘corridor system’), Dokuchaev Lane, Moscow, 1930– 64

side and a toilet cubicle on the other side. There were two other toilet cubicles at the end of the corridor. In the yard there was a communal woodshed, with wood for heating the cookers and the stoves. The house was conceived as an experiment in collective living but it had the services expected by the Soviet elite. There was a playground for the children, a club-house and a cinema in the basement. On each corridor there was a cleaner, a housekeeper and a nanny, paid for by the residents collectively.51

The communal apartment was a microcosm of the Communist society. By forcing people to share their living space, the Bolsheviks believed that they could make them more communistic in their basic thinking and behaviour. Private space and property would disappear, family life would be replaced by Communist fraternity and organization, and the private life of the individual would be subjected to the mutual surveillance and control of the community. In every communal apartment there were shared responsibilities, which the inhabitants would organize between themselves. Bills for common services, such as gas and electricity, or the telephone, were distributed equally, either on the basis of usage (e.g. the number of telephone calls, or how many light bulbs there were in each room) or on the basis of room or family size. Repair costs were also paid collectively, although there were often arguments about individual responsibility that usually had to be resolved by a meeting of the residents. The cleaning of the common spaces (the hall, the entrance, the toilet, bathroom and kitchen) was organized by rota (usually displayed in the hall). Everybody had ‘their day’ for washing clothes. In the mornings there were queues for the bathroom, also organized by a list of names. In this mini-state, equality and fairness were to be the ruling principles. ‘We divided everything as equally as possible,’ recalls Mamlin. ‘My father, who was the elder of our household, worked out everything to the last kopeck, and everybody knew how much they had to pay.’52

The post of elder (otvetstvennyi kvartoupolnomochennyi) was established in 1929, when the communal apartment was legally defined as a social institution with specific rules and responsibilities to the state: the enforcement of sanitary regulations; tax collection; law enforcement; and informing the police about the private life of the inhabitants.53 The elders were supposed to be elected by the residents, but in fact it was more common for them to elect themselves and to be accepted by the residents, either through the force of their personality or else their standing in society. Nina Paramonova remembers that their elder ‘ran the household like a dictatorship. We all respected her because she was so strict. We were afraid of her. Only she had the authority to make people do the cleaning when it was their turn.’54 A new law of 1933 placed the elders in sole charge of the communal apartment; their links to the police were reinforced; and they were given the command of the yardmen (dvorniki), notorious informers, who cleaned the staircase and the yard, patrolled the household territory, locked the courtyard gates at night and kept an eye on everyone who came and went. Through the elders and yardmen, the household management became the basic operational unit of the police system of surveillance and control.

By the middle of the 1930s the NKVD had built up a huge network of secret informers. In every factory, office, school, there were people who informed to the police.55 The idea of mutual surveillance was fundamental to the Soviet system. In a country that was too big to police, the Bolshevik regime (not unlike the tsarist one before it) relied on the self- policing of the population. Historically, Russia had strong collective norms and institutions that lent themselves to such a policy. While the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century sought to mobilize the population in the work of the police, and one or two, like the Stasi state in the GDR, managed for a while to infiltrate to almost every level of society, none succeeded, as the Soviet regime did for sixty years, in controlling a population through collective scrutiny.

The kommunalka played a vital role in this collective system of control. Its inhabitants knew almost everything about their neighbours: the timetable of their normal day; their personal habits; their visitors and friends; what they purchased; what they ate; what they said on the telephone (which was normally located in the corridor); even what they said in their own room, for the walls were very thin (in many rooms the walls did not extend to the ceiling). Eavesdropping, spying and informing were all rampant in the communal apartment of the 1930s, when people were encouraged to be vigilant. Neighbours opened doors to check on visitors in the corridor, or to listen to a conversation on the telephone. They entered rooms to ‘act as witnesses’ if there was an argument between man and wife, or to intervene if there was too much noise, drunken behaviour or violence. The assumption was that nothing could be ‘private’ in a communal apartment, where it was often said that ‘what one person does can bring misfortune to us all’. Mikhail Baitalsky recalls the communal apartment of a relative in Astrakhan where there was a particularly vigilant neighbour living in the room next door: ‘Hearing the sound of a door being unlocked, she would thrust her pointed little nose into the corridor and pierce you with a photographic glance. Our relative assured us that she kept a card index of his vistors.’56

In the cramped conditions of the communal apartment there were frequent arguments over personal property – foodstuffs that went missing from the shared kitchen, thefts from rooms, noise or music played at night. ‘The atmosphere was poisonous,’ recalls one inhabitant. ‘Everyone suspected someone else of stealing, but there was never any evidence, just a lot of whispered accusations behind people’s backs.’57 With everybody in a state of nervous tension, it did not take a lot for fights to turn into denunciations to the NKVD. Many of these squabbles had their origins in some petty jealousy. The communal apartment was the domestic centre of the Soviet culture of envy, which naturally arose in a system of material shortages. In a social system based on the principle of equality in poverty, if one person had more of some item than the other residents, it was assumed that it was at the expense of everybody else. Any sign of material