SUMMARY
The type of housing referred to as "communal apartment" (kommunal'naya kvartira) has appeared as result of the Soviet housing policy aimed at the redistribution of the living space in the cities in favour of the working class. As the first step of this policy, in August 1918, the private property on real estate was abolished in Russian cities. Early in 1930s, overpopulated state-owned apartments with several non-kin tenants (and sometimes the former owner of the flat among them) became the predominant type of urban dwelling. Since most important criterion for the distibution of the living space by the authorities was that of "sanitary norm", in most cases the tenants belonged to different social groups. The order of everyday life was prescribed by officially adopted regulations and was being enforced by so called kvartupolnomochennyi, the person elected by the collective of tenants as representative of the apartment before housing administration. In 1999, no less than 15 per cent of the population of St Petersburg still lived in communal apartments (CA).
Living together in a very close interaction with neighbours has brought about cultural devices for coping with daily problems. Although the stereotypes of behaviour specific to CAs have been evolving during eighty years, the main features of communal mentality remained up to the end of the socialist system. They did not change substantially until the 1990s, when mainly due to the drop of population density in CAs, the unusual weakness of administrative control, and the intensive processes of social change the communal way of living underwent serious transformations. Field study was conducted precisely in that period, in 1992-99, by means of participant observation and interviewing? in order to describe the practices of everyday life in big CA located in the central part of St Petersburg.
In CAs, the public areas of the "places of common use" (kitchen, corridor, bathroom, toilets etc.) is opposed to relatively private areas of the tenants' rooms. The current design of the apartment is usually a result of re-building and repeated partitioning performed in the early years of the CA existence. The partitioning was aimed at dividing of the living space of former big rooms and halls between several users. In the description of CA space structure that is proposed in this book, our main task has been to reveal the meanings of the elements of environment, as it is interpreted by CA dwellers in their mundane routines. CA environment is transparent, that is, it provides for a high level of neighbours' acquaintance with each others' daily life. The environment is closed, that is, one cannot escape communication in public areas and avoid meeting the challenge of certain amount of daily problems. The living space and the zones of public space that are given to tenants for individual use are regarded by CA inhabitants as a sort of limited resource. The elements of interior decoration and the appliance installed in public areas show a high degree of conservatism. They tend to remain unchanged in their places as survivals long after having lost their original functional value.
The collective storage room is a phenomenon of the last decades of CA history. After some tenants had moved elsewhere, sometimes their former room was given to the collective of CA tenants for joint use as storage area. Usually such collective storage facility is filled with all kinds of old and broken artefacts, ranging from furniture to old footwear and empty jars. It is also used for smoking or, sometimes, for drying clothes.
The maintenance of a proper state of environment in CA public places follows the principle of minimal sufficient effort: no one tries to achieve the cleanest possible state. The responsibility is distributed between the members of the community, who perform the duties of cleaning by turn. The turns follow the sequence of the rooms of the apartment, which also determines the sequence order in all the lists of tenants used for calculation of costs and for other purposes.
Due to the limited availability of resources, on the one hand, and to the existence of a definite amount of necessary costs and efforts, on the other, the fair sharing of goods and costs is implied in most part of everyday activities. Queuing is an important dimension of everyday neighbours' relations; it has often been institutionalised by means of written schedules of activities intended to prescribe the order of the use of bathroom as well as the order of the duties such as cleaning. Sharing facilities and distributing responsibilities is heavily emotionally charged with envy. People are extremely sensitive to the fairness of the distribution: no one will agree to work more - or to get less than others. The idea of "Limited Good" that represents all the goods as coming from one source and, therefore, subject to a strictly controlled distribution, is useful to conceive some aspects of CA dwellers' mentality. Such means of symbolic sharing as ugoshchenie (inviting to taste a meal) and ceremonial "presentation" of new clothes or footwear are usual practices intended to prevent eventual destructive by-products of envy (theft, damage, evil eye).
The particular organisation of privacy in CA originated from the lack of space that led to a situation when several persons - usually belonging to the same family - lived in the same room. Alongside with such intra-familiar almost complete transparency of life, CA is quite transparent for neighbours regards, for all everyday practices, concerns and events are perceived by other tenants who can see, hear and smell all that which other tenants do or have. The fact that in public areas a neighbour's possessions cannot be permanently controlled by the owner gives birth to continuous state of alert. It is mainly related to acute sensation of vulnerability of the private sphere - and not necessarily associated with the material value of the things. The disputes which at the first glance seem to be about property often turn out to have the covert content of privacy matters.
Neglected privacy has always led to an oversensitivity to violations of privacy and its substitutes. The constant being "on stage" is combined in CA life with specific practices of hygiene because of sharing the same toilet, bathroom and kitchen facilities. That which is public can never be clean enough - and so it requires a modification. Thus, in the bathroom, people wash themselves in their own basin put inside of the common bathtub and try to avoid touching the bathtub walls. The ideas about the clean and the dirty are closely related to categories of private and public, one's own and the alien. Correspondingly, invasions into a private sphere are often regarded as the loss of a clean state. Unfriendly neighbours are taken for "dirty", while the friendly ones are "clean" and, therefore, are allowed to use one's matches or, say, to share basins for laundry.
The relations inside the neighbours' collective vary from endless conflicts to quasi-family relationship involving a whole system of mutual help. Prototypical public scandals are performed in the kitchen that is the main place for both disputes and peaceful communication. In a more general perspective, closed environment of CA tends to inhibit overt aggression, and violent fighting is more often observed inside families or between CA inhabitants and stranger visitors to the apartment who have committed transgressions against public order. Special strategies are elaborated to control deviant behaviours of local drunkards and drug addicts. In the recent years, a pronounced tendency is manifest for women to acquire main authority in public affairs inside CA.
Cases of so called "dwelling place paranoids" have been observed in CAs. The term "dwelling place paranoids" has recently been proposed to denote a special sort of (non-schizophrenic) psychotic disorders, when the content of delirious verbal and non-verbal behaviour is related to dwelling place. People are accusing neighbours of systematically stealing and damaging their things, and believe that their neighbours are persecuting them in order to inflict material and moral damage. At the same time, these people remain in their good memory and continue to perform normally all the routine activities. Their intellectual abilities are not affected. The delirious talk of those who are affected with paranoid disorders is often so systematic and rational that it is impossible to distinguish false accusations from narrations of real events unless one gets access to an alternative source of information, be it observation or the opinions expressed by other neighbours. All which is told about the malignant neighbours' behaviour - be it theft, spying, persecution, overhearing, inspection of one's things in the absence of the owner, intentional damage, and even substitution of food or things - all of it is quite possible in CAs and does not contradict the normal way of things. Systematic baiting is, perhaps, more typical to delirious narratives than to the real life, though it also can be met in reality.
The main motives in behaviour, hallucinations and delirious narratives of the pathologic subjects have been analysed. Some of pathologic behaviours involve an inversion of roles in a "hunted hunter" way: the subjects start to steal and damage the things that belong to their supposed offenders. Some behaviours have been observed when the subject publicly destroyed his own possessions "so that to avoid theft". We have found that the parallels to such behaviours, as well as of the content of delirious ideas and perceptions are evident enough in the normal behaviour. The specific logic of delusion turns out to be a systematic transformation of the rationality implied in the practices of everyday life in CAs, as result of heavy communication disorder. A good illustration is provided by the facts of "virtual thefts", when behaviour of normal subjects is quite similar to pathological paranoid behaviours - and thus quite revealing in what tacit presuppositions and attitudes are concerned..
In the public areas of CA it is often enough that an incident occures and no witness can be found. Each neighbour has to reconstruct the situation according to his own presuppositions. The question is that the situation to be reconstructed does not exist apart from interpretation in this or that way. So, it turns out to be impossible to find a rational objective ground for deductions in "objective reality", because several alternative rationalities can eventually be applied.
Our inquiry inclines us to believe that the long experience of living in CA and, more generally, taking part in practices of collective everyday life of Soviet type not only is able to create favourable ground for development of certain personality traits, but also can be regarded as one of important pathogenetic factors contributing to the fomation of "dwelling place paranoids".
CA folklore in form of gossip, etiological statements and oral history narratives is the base of a particular CA dwellers' competence, the most important factor in their identity as community members. The mastery of the local history competence is prestigious and typical to the "old dwellers" status. The old dwellers' claims to special rights in Soviet times were supported not only by customary law, but also reflected in the active legislation: they had privileged rights to get additional living space. Even today some people are sure that one day the State will provide them with separate apartments just because they are old dwellers, living here since the blockade times. This status and the references to historical motivation of this or that claim are tools in conflicts and controversies inside apartment. The reference can be made to ones personal involvement not only into the history of a particular community, but rather into the history of the place (building, district, or city). The Russian term for the old dweller of Leningrad, korennoy leningradets, means literally "leningrader according to his roots", which is particularly interesting for a city whose population continuously underwent active migrations: it fell drastically and then increased back at least two times during the Soviet period.
Recent social change has increased the number of "temporary" dwellers, who are not fully incorporated into CA community and who consider their CA as a provisional residence, which is clearly opposed to the attitude of people with traditional communal mentality who regard the CA as their home and often refuse to move elsewhere when real estate agencies offer them a separate flat on the outskirts of the city, in exchange for their room in downtown area CA.
The communal stereotypes have deeply influenced even those behaviours and forms of social interaction of contemporary Russians that are not directly related to CA as a type of housing. The collective control over individual behaviour is often combined in such forms with "human", non-formal Gemeinschaft-type attitude to the individual. The observed inclination to what can be regarded as neglect to one's own comfort in the everyday life is, probably, rooted in the communist ideals of self-renunciation in collective work for the sake of a common good, in which framework any attention to personal comfort was despised as petty-bourgeois.
In the final chapter of the book, some methodological problems of the fieldwork and analysis are discussed, with particular attention paid to specific nature of everyday life as an object of anthropological inquiry. Semiotic anthropology, ethnomethodology, and batesonian bias towards communication patterns analysis may be listed among the sources of methodological inspiration for the author's rather eclectic mothodological stand.
In Annex, there is a Glossary of local terms, the Questionnaire for the study of CAs, and the official Regulations concerning the everyday life in CAs.