The Whisperers

advantage – a new piece of clothing, a better piece of kitchenware, or some special food – could provoke aggression from the other residents, who naturally suspected that these goods had been obtained through blat. Neighbours formed alliances and continued feuds on the basis of these perceived inequalities. One woman, who still lives in the communal apartment in Moscow where she grew up in the 1930s,* recalls a long-running feud between her mother, who worked in a bakery, and the yardman’s wife, who was well known as an informer. Whenever cakes or buns appeared in the kitchen, the yardman’s wife would accuse her mother of theft or sabotage and threaten to denounce her to the authorities.58 Mitrofan Moiseyenko was a factory worker who supplemented his income by repairing furniture and windows and doing odd jobs for the residents of his communal block in Leningrad. In the spring of 1935, he was involved in an argument with his neighbours, who accused him of charging them too much for his repairs. His neighbours denounced him to the police, absurdly claiming that he had been hiding Trotsky in his workshop in the basement of the block. Mitrofan was arrested and sentenced to three years in a labour camp near Magadan.59

The kitchen was the scene of many arguments. In the evenings, when it was bustling with people, it was always prone to overheat. The kitchen was a common space, but within it, in most communal flats, each family had its own ring for cooking on the stove, its own private kitchen table, where meals were normally eaten and its own place for storing food in the kitchen cupboards, on the open shelves, or between the inner and the outer windows, where winter temperatures were as cold as in a fridge. This confusion between private and common space was a constant source of friction; using someone else’s cooking ring, their utensils or their supplies was enough to stoke a scandal. ‘They were not malicious arguments,’ recalls Minora Novikova. ‘We were all poor, and nobody had anything worth stealing. But there was never enough room, everyone was tense in the kitchen, and petty squabbles were unavoidable. Imagine thirty women cooking at one time.’60

The Reifshneiders’ room (38 square metres) in the Third House of Soviets, Sadovaia Karetnaia, Moscow

The lack of privacy was the greatest source of tension. Even in the family’s own room, there was no space to call one’s own. The room had many functions – bedroom, dining room, a place to receive guests, a study for the children to do their schoolwork, sometimes even a kitchen. ‘In our room,’ recalls Ninel Reifshneider,

there were no private things or bits of furniture, no special shelf or chair or table that belonged to anyone as property. Even my grandparents, who had their beds behind a curtain screen to give them some privacy, had nothing they could really call their own. My grandmother kept some special items in a trunk beneath her bed, but the table by her bed, for example, was used by all of us.

In many family rooms the younger children slept behind a makeshift screen, a bookcase or a wardrobe, to give them some quiet apart from the adults and their evening guests (and to stop them watching the adults when they got undressed and went to bed). Parents had to make love quietly in the middle of the night.61

In such close quarters, little was left to the imagination. Neighbours grew accustomed to seeing one another semi-naked in the corridor. They saw each other at their worst – in drunken or unguarded moments – without the mask that people wore to protect themselves in public areas. They knew when their neighbours had a visitor from the doorbell system (in which every room had its own set number or sequence of rings on the front-door bell). Rooms used for the most intimate functions (the bathroom, kitchen and toilet) were shared by everyone; inferences could easily be drawn from bits of evidence that were left behind. The clothes line in the kitchen, the personal items in the bathroom, the night-time trips to the toilet – these told neighbours everything. In this form of ‘public privacy’, private life was constantly exposed to collective scrutiny.62

People felt the lack of privacy in many different ways. Some resented the constant intrusions – neighbours entering the room, knocking on the bathroom door or spying on visitors. Others reacted to the constant noise, the lack of cleanliness or the sexual attentions of older men towards the girls. The toilet and the bathroom were a source of constant friction and anxiety. In the communal apartment where Elena Baigulova lived in Leningrad in the 1930s there was just one toilet for forty-eight people. People brought their own soap and toilet paper, which they kept in their room. In 1936, one of the inhabitants married a black man. ‘There was a scandal when he first appeared,’ recalls Elena. ‘People would not share a toilet or a bathroom with the man. They thought that he was dirty because he was black.’63

Private conversations were a particular problem. Talk was clearly audible between adjoining rooms, so families adapted by whispering among themselves. People were extremely careful not to talk to neighbours about politics (in some communal apartments the men would not talk at all).64 Families from a bourgeois or noble background were careful to conceal their origins. Alina Dobriakova, the granddaughter of a tsarist officer, grew up in a kommunalka in Moscow where all the other residents were factory workers and their families, ‘a conglomeration of unfriendly people’, as she recalls. Alina was forbidden to say a word to anyone about the photographs of her grandfather which were kept hidden in their room. Her mother joined the Party and took a job as an official to conceal their past. ‘If our neighbours knew who my mother’s father was,’ recalls Alina, ‘there would have been much unpleasantness… so we lived in a grave-like silence.’65 Talking in a communal apartment could be very dangerous. In the Khaneyevsky household, Nadezhda was practically deaf, but outspoken in her anti-Soviet views. She would explain to her daughters how life had been better under the tsar and would start to shout. Her husband Aleksei, who was terrified of the Sazonovs in the next room, would remind her not to shout: ‘Whisper, or we shall be arrested.’66

People battled for a modicum of privacy. They kept their towels and toiletries, their kitchen pots and pans, their dishes, cutlery, even salt and pepper in their rooms. They did their washing, cooking, eating, drying clothes in the privacy of their own room. Areas of common space were partly privatized: families might claim a place on the shelf; a patch of corridor; a section of the kitchen table; a peg or space for shoes by the front door in the hallway. All these arrangements were well known to the inhabitants, but a stranger coming into the apartment would not be aware of them. People dreamed of a private space where they might get away from their neighbours. Yevgeny Mamlin ‘yearned for a kitchen with a serving hatch connected to his room so that he could cook and take his meals without using the communal kitchen, but that was just a dream,’ recalls his daughter. The escape to the dacha in the summer months was a relief from the pressures of the communal apartment, for those who could afford to rent a country house.67

At its best the communal apartment fostered a sense of comradeship and collectivity among its inhabitants. Many people look back with nostalgia to their years in a communal apartment as a time when they shared everything with their neighbours. ‘Before the war we lived in harmony,’ recalls one inhabitant:

Everybody helped one another, and there were no arguments. No one was stingy with their money – they spent their wages as soon as they were paid. It was fun to live then. Not like after the war, when people kept their money to themselves, and closed their doors.

Part of this nostalgia is connected to recollections of childhood happiness, of a time when, despite material hardships, the yard was clean and safe for children’s games, and the communal apartment retained the atmosphere of an extended ‘family’. In the kommunalka children mixed with other families far more than their parents did: they played together and were always in each other’s rooms, so they experienced this togetherness more than anyone. ‘We lived as one big family,’ recalls Galina Markelova, who grew up in a communal apartment in Leningrad during the 1930s:

In those days everybody lived with their doors open, and we children had the run of the whole house. We would play in the corridor and run from room to room while the adults played at cards or dominoes. They didn’t play for money, just for fun. And there was always lots of laughter. There were too many adults for them all to play, so they would take turns, with some watching while the others played. We celebrated Soviet holidays together, like a family, with everybody bringing something nice to eat or drink. It was very jolly on birthdays, with lots of games and songs.68

But the closeness could be stifling. The film director Rolan Bykov, who grew up in a communal apartment