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A Virtual Museum of Soviet Everyday Life

119 points by smacktoward 7y ago

yters 7y ago
Living in Russia is always associated with the Soviet union, like China is always associated with the Communist government. But communism has formed a very small part of these countries' histories. I wonder why the focus on just the communist aspects of these countries.
- forgotmypw 7y ago
  Because pre-Communism ended about 100 years ago, and post-Communism is approaching 20 years ago?
  - smacktoward 7y ago
    And lots of the housing stock in Russia was built during the Communist era, so the impact of Communist housing policy hung on long after Communism itself had passed. (Lots of the stories, documents, etc. in the linked site come from after 1991.)
- vkou 7y ago
  Because the pre-communism period was in most respects, even worse. China had a century of occupation and decades of civil war. Russia was a backwater, with constant repression and terrorism of it's population. Hell, it had serfdom until the mid 19th century. (Which was reintroduced in all but name through the kolhoz system.) The repression of the regimes that followed didn't spring up in a vaccum, but was a natural evolution of the political environment they operated in.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >China had a century of occupation and decades of civil war Plus millennia of a very rich civilization, for the majority of which it was the richest economy in the world, a lot more advanced than the cruder rest of the world, and with a very intricate society and culture. >Russia was a backwater, with constant repression and terrorism of it's population. Hell, it had serfdom until the mid 19th century. Well, the US had slavery until the mid 19th century, Jim Crow until the 40s, and segregation until the 70s, so there's that.
    - eng888888 7y ago
      Hope I don't get downvoted to hell, but I guess it's remarkable that Russia had serfdom until mid 19th century because by then it was well established that white people shouldn't enslave, or attach to land, other white people.
      - notyourday 7y ago
        Not only that but one's net worth was largely a derivative of the number of serfs one owned. I highly recommend reading "Dead Souls" -- it is a fantastic novel about that period.
        hamilyon2 7y ago
        Dead souls is a gem.
      - coldtea 7y ago
        >because by then it was well established that white people shouldn't enslave, or attach to land, other white people. Well, you'd be surprised. A large part of Europe (Germany, Austria, etc) halted serfdom only a few decades before Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom#Dates_of_emancipation_from_serfdom_in_various_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom#Dates_of_emancipation_...
      - wongarsu 7y ago
        > because by then it was well established that white people shouldn't enslave, or attach to land, other white people That's not how Europe works. Virtually everyone around here is "white". That doesn't prevent racism, it's just racism against Gypsies, or Albanians, or Itelmens, or Jews, or now (often white) muslims. And of course in Europe we had a big thing for using class differences instead of using race differences as our justification for such things as serfdom.
  - yters 7y ago
    Did the pre-communism period engage in widespread religious persecution and send millions of Russians to the gulags to be worked to death?
    - the_af 7y ago
      Yes: From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom > A pogrom is a violent riot aimed at the massacre or persecution of an ethnic or religious group, particularly one aimed at Jews. The Russian term originally entered the English language in order to describe 19th and 20th century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire (mostly within the Pale of Settlement).
      - yters 7y ago
        While that is religious persocution, it is persecution of a particular religion. The Soviets oppressed all religions since theism threatened the state's power. Same as in China today.
        the_af 7y ago
        Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims#Russian_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims#Russian... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassian_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassian_genocide then?
        yters 7y ago
        Certainly bad, but does not seem at the scale or intent of the gulags. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag At least it is hard to see how the Soviets were an improvement on the past.
        the_af 7y ago
        Peasants, workers and people from non-aristocratic families could rise to the top?
- disordinary 7y ago
  Because communism accelerated development and living standards. A lot of the infrastructure is a legacy of this.
  - toiletfuneral 7y ago
    People are downvoting this? Is HN a capitalist safe space or something?
  - yters 7y ago
    How do you know communism was responsible, vs riding on the back of general industrial progress during that period? Plus, living standards in ex-Soviet countries do not seem very high, compared to non-communist countries.
systematical 7y ago
I've spent a lot of time in hostels. It's not so bad. Difference is, that was by choice.
coldtea 7y ago
So, slightly better than current San Francisco situation!
dkural 7y ago
Most ordinary Russians in large cities still live in very cramped conditions with multiple families sharing a 3-bedroom apartment. I've visited such an apartment that my friend was living in, in the suburbs of Moscow. All the rooms became bedrooms due to lack of space in the evening, no such thing as a living room etc.
- vkou 7y ago
  My family had a four room apartment for six people (2 children). My mother's family had a three room apartment for four people (no children). We had some relatives living alone in one-room apartments, some that had three room apartments for a couple and children, great-grandparents who lived in a four-room home in the countryside. By the end of Khrushev's tenure, most people were no longer living in communal housing.
- orthoxerox 7y ago
  That's incorrect. Multiple generations often share a flat, related families might share a flat, but usually temporarily, unrelated families sharing a flat (communal flats) are rather rare now in big cities. Lack of dedicated bedrooms is a thing, though. Couches that fold out into beds are the norm in Russia.
- notyourday 7y ago
  You are thinking about "komunalka" with individual rooms having their own locks, a shared kitchen and a shared bathroom.
- cpursley 7y ago
  Yeah... I currently live in Russia. This is not even close to true. Maybe there's a few communal apartments still in St Petersburg. But most Russian families not only have their own private apartment, buy they outright own it (no mortgage) unlike Americans who are up to their eyeballs in debt.
  - varjag 7y ago
    Several generations living in very cramped conditions in the same apartment is extremely common in Russia. Precisely because they can't afford to buy anything, mortgage or not.
anvarik 7y ago
I grew up in CCCP Kazakhstan with my grandparents, we had a 1bd apartment at the 5th floor of a 5 story building. None of my relatives were sharing housing afai remember - it was a small town around Qaraghandy. I still go and visit them time to time.
youdontknowtho 7y ago
I know that we are all supposed to be "communism is teh bad", but the history of the Soviet Union is more complicated than just saying it was Communist, right? I'm actually kind of asking in hopes that someone who knows something about the subject can respond. I don't think that you can divorce what happened in the Soviet Union from the term Communism, just like you can't say that "real capitalism" has never been tried. I just imagine that it's way more complicated than "Commie == Bad".
- barnesto 7y ago
  It’s not complicated. If the number of people that does because of communism doesn’t simplify this for you, I’m not sure what to tell you. Also, the “real” angle skews perspective. It is what it is. That angle is about indoctrination.
- eng888888 7y ago
  Although not officially declared, I understand the early years of Israel were the closest a society ever got to true communism
  - manuel_w 7y ago
    Why is that?
- asveikau 7y ago
  It's already been mentioned in this thread that the pre-1917 Russia had a lot of people living in poor conditions and had fallen behind Western Europe. I am also not an expert, but my understanding is that they made some progress on things like education and literacy rate. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_Soviet_Union It doesn't excuse the many things that went wrong during the period. But my intuition is you cannot say it was composed 100% of bad actors and total maliciousness or even incompetence.
  - romwell 7y ago
    And human rights, actually. No-fault divorce, universal suffrage, equality of races - at least in official policy - all at once, by the 1920s. It was unprecedented. And it worked, to a certain extent at least. Women got education and entered the (educated, professional) work force (and, during the war, combat divisions). The change for Jewish people (officially oppressed with race-specific laws in Imperial Russia) was immense (Trotsky, one of the top guys, was Jewish - as were many others, before Stalinism). There was an explosion in arts: a revolution in cinema, music, literature, poetry, architecture, visual arts. Basically, a lot of the bad things that people associate with Communism are Stalinism, but that came in the 30s, and went away by the 60s. Now, a lot of other bad things were there from day 0, and some developed post-Stalin. But there were a lot of changes from 1917 to the 20s, to Stalinism, to WW2, and then to Khruschev and Brezhnev. The country stabilized in the Kruschev-Brezhnev era, and remained static for so long that even those who liked the regime got tired of it. But it's important to see what the changes were.
trhway 7y ago
The communal housing in USSR appeared mostly as a result of "working class" (in wide sense, i.e. peasants, workers, low level clerks/bureaucrats) moving into the large and very large apartments (like an apartment taking whole floor of a building) where a "class enemy" (aristocracy, rich and/or high positioned people from pre-Revolution who had emigrated if they were lucky or got killed otherwise as result of the Revolution and the Civil War) lived before. Giving whole such an apartment to a family of a worker would be too much from a social and practical point of view. Also the USSR was supposedly building a worker paradise and communal living was like a virtue as well as a virtue building process. The new and smaller housing, especially the even smaller mass apartments of Khruschev times almost never was communal except for the cases of very tight hosing situation in the town or some other relatively rare situations.
- heneryville 7y ago
  Given that the revolution was in 1917, and how much the working class urbanized following the revolution, I'd have a hard time believing that pre-revolution housing stock was sufficient beyond the first decade. Surely much built-to-suit communal housing must have been made in the 60+ years of communist rule.
  - trhway 7y ago
    I was talking about that USSR specific "kommunalka". And there was another, more traditional, form of communal housing - dormitories - usually associated with specific factories/organizations and which especially took off during industrialization. With time the dormitories became the dominant form of housing pressure resolution. While intended to be temporary some people/families had to live there for years.
  - hamilyon2 7y ago
    No, gp is right. New-style buildings had other names, like stalinka.
mcprwklzpq 7y ago
There are still a lot of "communalkas" in russia. In Saint Petersburg there were 76 600 of them in 2017 [1] and in Moscow 58 000 in 2008 (down from 118 000 in 1998) [2]. These are only that "communalkas" that are owned by the people that live in them. You can imagine how hard it is to turn a "communalka" into a flat that is owned by a single family. If somebody tries to buy the whole "communalka" any owner can refuse to sell and every owner has the "first right" to any part of the "communalka" so owners that want to sell their part have to get signed refusals of that right from all other owners. There are also flats that have single owner but rented as "communalkas" to multiple families, and number of these flats is growing. You can see "communalkas" in many soviet and russian movies, for example in "The Pokrovsky Gate" (1982) [3]. 1 [rus] - https://mirndv.ru/blog/peterburg-gorod-mostov-belyh-nochej-i-kommunalok/ https://mirndv.ru/blog/peterburg-gorod-mostov-belyh-nochej-i... 2 [rus] - https://www.cian.ru/novosti-v-rossii-po-prezhnemu-mnogo-kommunalok-230249/ https://www.cian.ru/novosti-v-rossii-po-prezhnemu-mnogo-komm... 3 [rus] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo5PiDzYQCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo5PiDzYQCg
amai 7y ago
But basically every family also had a Dacha outside of the city: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacha#Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacha#Soviet_Union .
- notyourday 7y ago
  That's incorrect.
  - amai 7y ago
    The Russians I asked cannot recall anyone who didn't have a dacha in Soviet times. Maybe the dacha was legally owned by an uncle or by grand parents. But everyone had access to one.
- knd775 7y ago
  Basically every family? That doesn't seem right. The wikipedia page you linked says that nearly all affluent families had dachas, making up about a third of the overall urban population.
  - mantas 7y ago
    Most families living in urbanised locations had access to "communal gardens". For the general public, it'd be a tiny patch of land where you may build a tiny shack to put your tools in. Now if you're working for a prestigious institution in high-up position, that patch of land gets bigger, you may be able to pull together resources to build a summer house there and the whole communal garden might be a prime location surrounding a lake, bordering a forest and so on.
  - amai 7y ago
    This is a bit unclear. If every family had a dacha, and a family consist on average of 3-4 persons, then 25-33% of the total population had a dacha, consistent with the last part of the sentence.
zarro 7y ago
Those Soviet Khrushchyovkas are the most depressing, abysmal buildings built in the history of mankind and I for one cannot wait until the day they demolish the last one of those despicable creations.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  For me they are beatiful. Because they allowed a lot of people to have their own house. It's incredible achievement. They should be replaced by better houses with time, of course.
  - disordinary 7y ago
    That's a good point, after WW2 the Soviet Union had the double problem of a rapidly urbanising population and having to rebuild all the destruction. They needed a quick solution and what they chose worked.
    - ineedasername 7y ago
      It came with a high cost. Roughly 20 million died under forced labor camps, collectivization efforts and resulting famines, gulags, and resettlements.
      - disordinary 7y ago
        I don't doubt it. It was a rapid modernisation and raising of living standards.
        ineedasername 7y ago
        Are you saying it was necessary or justified? It sounds like your meaning is that such mass murder, combined with murder via incompetence, is a necessary part of modernization.
        deleted 7y ago
richardhod 7y ago
This website appears to have been designed in about 1997
ineedasername 7y ago
I'm fascinated by cold war era details about Russia. It has so many parallels to the west, but it's just different enough that there's a strange uncanny valley effect.
m0zg 7y ago
I lived in one of these for 3 years. It wasn't too bad but only because I happened to have a room with a very tall ceiling (easily 3m) and was young. Think of it as a small studio with a shared kitchen and bathroom, or a better variant of a dorm, except your neighbors are mostly hostile to you, and some of them are alcoholics. Another saving grace was that it was 10 minute leisurely walk from the university I was attending at the time. How people raised families in the worse variants of these I will never know, thankfully. The only real snag was, I eventually had to move my fridge into my room, because neighbors would steal my food otherwise. Not because they didn't have their own, but because of "Soviet mentality" where private property wasn't really respected, and everyone stole what they could. This is the period of my life I recall when some latte-sippin' macbook pro totin' millenial here in the US tells me that socialism wouldn't be too bad.
- toiletfuneral 7y ago
  “when some latte-sippin' macbook pro totin' millenial” This is the most tired boomer shit, seriously come up with something new.
jhallenworld 7y ago
You must also watch Ushanka Show: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClXTAMdHwvWdmFyOlQmEtpQ/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClXTAMdHwvWdmFyOlQmEtpQ/vid...

119 points by smacktoward 7y ago

Living in Russia is always associated with the Soviet union, like China is always associated with the Communist government. But communism has formed a very small part of these countries' histories. I wonder why the focus on just the communist aspects of these countries.

forgotmypw 7y ago
Because pre-Communism ended about 100 years ago, and post-Communism is approaching 20 years ago?
- smacktoward 7y ago
  And lots of the housing stock in Russia was built during the Communist era, so the impact of Communist housing policy hung on long after Communism itself had passed. (Lots of the stories, documents, etc. in the linked site come from after 1991.)
vkou 7y ago
Because the pre-communism period was in most respects, even worse. China had a century of occupation and decades of civil war. Russia was a backwater, with constant repression and terrorism of it's population. Hell, it had serfdom until the mid 19th century. (Which was reintroduced in all but name through the kolhoz system.) The repression of the regimes that followed didn't spring up in a vaccum, but was a natural evolution of the political environment they operated in.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >China had a century of occupation and decades of civil war Plus millennia of a very rich civilization, for the majority of which it was the richest economy in the world, a lot more advanced than the cruder rest of the world, and with a very intricate society and culture. >Russia was a backwater, with constant repression and terrorism of it's population. Hell, it had serfdom until the mid 19th century. Well, the US had slavery until the mid 19th century, Jim Crow until the 40s, and segregation until the 70s, so there's that.
  - eng888888 7y ago
    Hope I don't get downvoted to hell, but I guess it's remarkable that Russia had serfdom until mid 19th century because by then it was well established that white people shouldn't enslave, or attach to land, other white people.
    - notyourday 7y ago
      Not only that but one's net worth was largely a derivative of the number of serfs one owned. I highly recommend reading "Dead Souls" -- it is a fantastic novel about that period.
      - hamilyon2 7y ago
        Dead souls is a gem.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >because by then it was well established that white people shouldn't enslave, or attach to land, other white people. Well, you'd be surprised. A large part of Europe (Germany, Austria, etc) halted serfdom only a few decades before Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom#Dates_of_emancipation_from_serfdom_in_various_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom#Dates_of_emancipation_...
    - wongarsu 7y ago
      > because by then it was well established that white people shouldn't enslave, or attach to land, other white people That's not how Europe works. Virtually everyone around here is "white". That doesn't prevent racism, it's just racism against Gypsies, or Albanians, or Itelmens, or Jews, or now (often white) muslims. And of course in Europe we had a big thing for using class differences instead of using race differences as our justification for such things as serfdom.
- yters 7y ago
  Did the pre-communism period engage in widespread religious persecution and send millions of Russians to the gulags to be worked to death?
  - the_af 7y ago
    Yes: From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom > A pogrom is a violent riot aimed at the massacre or persecution of an ethnic or religious group, particularly one aimed at Jews. The Russian term originally entered the English language in order to describe 19th and 20th century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire (mostly within the Pale of Settlement).
    - yters 7y ago
      While that is religious persocution, it is persecution of a particular religion. The Soviets oppressed all religions since theism threatened the state's power. Same as in China today.
      - the_af 7y ago
        Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims#Russian_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims#Russian... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassian_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassian_genocide then?
        yters 7y ago
        Certainly bad, but does not seem at the scale or intent of the gulags. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag At least it is hard to see how the Soviets were an improvement on the past.
        the_af 7y ago
        Peasants, workers and people from non-aristocratic families could rise to the top?
disordinary 7y ago
Because communism accelerated development and living standards. A lot of the infrastructure is a legacy of this.
- toiletfuneral 7y ago
  People are downvoting this? Is HN a capitalist safe space or something?
- yters 7y ago
  How do you know communism was responsible, vs riding on the back of general industrial progress during that period? Plus, living standards in ex-Soviet countries do not seem very high, compared to non-communist countries.

systematical 7y ago

I've spent a lot of time in hostels. It's not so bad. Difference is, that was by choice.

coldtea 7y ago

So, slightly better than current San Francisco situation!

dkural 7y ago

Most ordinary Russians in large cities still live in very cramped conditions with multiple families sharing a 3-bedroom apartment. I've visited such an apartment that my friend was living in, in the suburbs of Moscow. All the rooms became bedrooms due to lack of space in the evening, no such thing as a living room etc.

vkou 7y ago
My family had a four room apartment for six people (2 children). My mother's family had a three room apartment for four people (no children). We had some relatives living alone in one-room apartments, some that had three room apartments for a couple and children, great-grandparents who lived in a four-room home in the countryside. By the end of Khrushev's tenure, most people were no longer living in communal housing.
orthoxerox 7y ago
That's incorrect. Multiple generations often share a flat, related families might share a flat, but usually temporarily, unrelated families sharing a flat (communal flats) are rather rare now in big cities. Lack of dedicated bedrooms is a thing, though. Couches that fold out into beds are the norm in Russia.
notyourday 7y ago
You are thinking about "komunalka" with individual rooms having their own locks, a shared kitchen and a shared bathroom.
cpursley 7y ago
Yeah... I currently live in Russia. This is not even close to true. Maybe there's a few communal apartments still in St Petersburg. But most Russian families not only have their own private apartment, buy they outright own it (no mortgage) unlike Americans who are up to their eyeballs in debt.
- varjag 7y ago
  Several generations living in very cramped conditions in the same apartment is extremely common in Russia. Precisely because they can't afford to buy anything, mortgage or not.

anvarik 7y ago

I grew up in CCCP Kazakhstan with my grandparents, we had a 1bd apartment at the 5th floor of a 5 story building. None of my relatives were sharing housing afai remember - it was a small town around Qaraghandy. I still go and visit them time to time.

youdontknowtho 7y ago

I know that we are all supposed to be "communism is teh bad", but the history of the Soviet Union is more complicated than just saying it was Communist, right? I'm actually kind of asking in hopes that someone who knows something about the subject can respond. I don't think that you can divorce what happened in the Soviet Union from the term Communism, just like you can't say that "real capitalism" has never been tried. I just imagine that it's way more complicated than "Commie == Bad".

barnesto 7y ago
It’s not complicated. If the number of people that does because of communism doesn’t simplify this for you, I’m not sure what to tell you. Also, the “real” angle skews perspective. It is what it is. That angle is about indoctrination.
eng888888 7y ago
Although not officially declared, I understand the early years of Israel were the closest a society ever got to true communism
- manuel_w 7y ago
  Why is that?
asveikau 7y ago
It's already been mentioned in this thread that the pre-1917 Russia had a lot of people living in poor conditions and had fallen behind Western Europe. I am also not an expert, but my understanding is that they made some progress on things like education and literacy rate. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_Soviet_Union It doesn't excuse the many things that went wrong during the period. But my intuition is you cannot say it was composed 100% of bad actors and total maliciousness or even incompetence.
- romwell 7y ago
  And human rights, actually. No-fault divorce, universal suffrage, equality of races - at least in official policy - all at once, by the 1920s. It was unprecedented. And it worked, to a certain extent at least. Women got education and entered the (educated, professional) work force (and, during the war, combat divisions). The change for Jewish people (officially oppressed with race-specific laws in Imperial Russia) was immense (Trotsky, one of the top guys, was Jewish - as were many others, before Stalinism). There was an explosion in arts: a revolution in cinema, music, literature, poetry, architecture, visual arts. Basically, a lot of the bad things that people associate with Communism are Stalinism, but that came in the 30s, and went away by the 60s. Now, a lot of other bad things were there from day 0, and some developed post-Stalin. But there were a lot of changes from 1917 to the 20s, to Stalinism, to WW2, and then to Khruschev and Brezhnev. The country stabilized in the Kruschev-Brezhnev era, and remained static for so long that even those who liked the regime got tired of it. But it's important to see what the changes were.

trhway 7y ago

The communal housing in USSR appeared mostly as a result of "working class" (in wide sense, i.e. peasants, workers, low level clerks/bureaucrats) moving into the large and very large apartments (like an apartment taking whole floor of a building) where a "class enemy" (aristocracy, rich and/or high positioned people from pre-Revolution who had emigrated if they were lucky or got killed otherwise as result of the Revolution and the Civil War) lived before. Giving whole such an apartment to a family of a worker would be too much from a social and practical point of view. Also the USSR was supposedly building a worker paradise and communal living was like a virtue as well as a virtue building process. The new and smaller housing, especially the even smaller mass apartments of Khruschev times almost never was communal except for the cases of very tight hosing situation in the town or some other relatively rare situations.

heneryville 7y ago
Given that the revolution was in 1917, and how much the working class urbanized following the revolution, I'd have a hard time believing that pre-revolution housing stock was sufficient beyond the first decade. Surely much built-to-suit communal housing must have been made in the 60+ years of communist rule.
- trhway 7y ago
  I was talking about that USSR specific "kommunalka". And there was another, more traditional, form of communal housing - dormitories - usually associated with specific factories/organizations and which especially took off during industrialization. With time the dormitories became the dominant form of housing pressure resolution. While intended to be temporary some people/families had to live there for years.
- hamilyon2 7y ago
  No, gp is right. New-style buildings had other names, like stalinka.

mcprwklzpq 7y ago

There are still a lot of "communalkas" in russia. In Saint Petersburg there were 76 600 of them in 2017 [1] and in Moscow 58 000 in 2008 (down from 118 000 in 1998) [2]. These are only that "communalkas" that are owned by the people that live in them. You can imagine how hard it is to turn a "communalka" into a flat that is owned by a single family. If somebody tries to buy the whole "communalka" any owner can refuse to sell and every owner has the "first right" to any part of the "communalka" so owners that want to sell their part have to get signed refusals of that right from all other owners. There are also flats that have single owner but rented as "communalkas" to multiple families, and number of these flats is growing. You can see "communalkas" in many soviet and russian movies, for example in "The Pokrovsky Gate" (1982) [3]. 1 [rus] - https://mirndv.ru/blog/peterburg-gorod-mostov-belyh-nochej-i-kommunalok/ https://mirndv.ru/blog/peterburg-gorod-mostov-belyh-nochej-i... 2 [rus] - https://www.cian.ru/novosti-v-rossii-po-prezhnemu-mnogo-kommunalok-230249/ https://www.cian.ru/novosti-v-rossii-po-prezhnemu-mnogo-komm... 3 [rus] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo5PiDzYQCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo5PiDzYQCg

amai 7y ago

But basically every family also had a Dacha outside of the city: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacha#Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacha#Soviet_Union .

notyourday 7y ago
That's incorrect.
- amai 7y ago
  The Russians I asked cannot recall anyone who didn't have a dacha in Soviet times. Maybe the dacha was legally owned by an uncle or by grand parents. But everyone had access to one.
knd775 7y ago
Basically every family? That doesn't seem right. The wikipedia page you linked says that nearly all affluent families had dachas, making up about a third of the overall urban population.
- mantas 7y ago
  Most families living in urbanised locations had access to "communal gardens". For the general public, it'd be a tiny patch of land where you may build a tiny shack to put your tools in. Now if you're working for a prestigious institution in high-up position, that patch of land gets bigger, you may be able to pull together resources to build a summer house there and the whole communal garden might be a prime location surrounding a lake, bordering a forest and so on.
- amai 7y ago
  This is a bit unclear. If every family had a dacha, and a family consist on average of 3-4 persons, then 25-33% of the total population had a dacha, consistent with the last part of the sentence.

zarro 7y ago

Those Soviet Khrushchyovkas are the most depressing, abysmal buildings built in the history of mankind and I for one cannot wait until the day they demolish the last one of those despicable creations.

vbezhenar 7y ago
For me they are beatiful. Because they allowed a lot of people to have their own house. It's incredible achievement. They should be replaced by better houses with time, of course.
- disordinary 7y ago
  That's a good point, after WW2 the Soviet Union had the double problem of a rapidly urbanising population and having to rebuild all the destruction. They needed a quick solution and what they chose worked.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    It came with a high cost. Roughly 20 million died under forced labor camps, collectivization efforts and resulting famines, gulags, and resettlements.
    - disordinary 7y ago
      I don't doubt it. It was a rapid modernisation and raising of living standards.
      - ineedasername 7y ago
        Are you saying it was necessary or justified? It sounds like your meaning is that such mass murder, combined with murder via incompetence, is a necessary part of modernization.
        deleted 7y ago

richardhod 7y ago

This website appears to have been designed in about 1997

ineedasername 7y ago

I'm fascinated by cold war era details about Russia. It has so many parallels to the west, but it's just different enough that there's a strange uncanny valley effect.

m0zg 7y ago

I lived in one of these for 3 years. It wasn't too bad but only because I happened to have a room with a very tall ceiling (easily 3m) and was young. Think of it as a small studio with a shared kitchen and bathroom, or a better variant of a dorm, except your neighbors are mostly hostile to you, and some of them are alcoholics. Another saving grace was that it was 10 minute leisurely walk from the university I was attending at the time. How people raised families in the worse variants of these I will never know, thankfully. The only real snag was, I eventually had to move my fridge into my room, because neighbors would steal my food otherwise. Not because they didn't have their own, but because of "Soviet mentality" where private property wasn't really respected, and everyone stole what they could. This is the period of my life I recall when some latte-sippin' macbook pro totin' millenial here in the US tells me that socialism wouldn't be too bad.

toiletfuneral 7y ago
“when some latte-sippin' macbook pro totin' millenial” This is the most tired boomer shit, seriously come up with something new.

jhallenworld 7y ago

You must also watch Ushanka Show: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClXTAMdHwvWdmFyOlQmEtpQ/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClXTAMdHwvWdmFyOlQmEtpQ/vid...