The Soviet Kommunalka

Kira Varvanina

A Room in Between
   The fact that the English word “private” is not easily translated into Russian can be explained by the word's ambiguity. On one hand, it implies any entity that is not run by the government, which explains its derogative meaning during the Soviet regime. On the other, the term carries individual and confidential connotations and is simply substituted in Russian with “personal”.  As a result, in Soviet terms, private space is not owned by an individual but is considered national. In many ways this explains the bizarre fusion of private and public worlds in the everyday Soviet lives. In this essay I attempt to look at the influences of communal living arrangements on the tightly intertwined realms of national and individual identities during the USSR era.
Throughout the first years of the Soviet Regime, much of the working class was relocated to urban centers and colonized in cramped kingdoms of "kommunalkas"— large flats that once belonged to the Tsarist ninetieth century bourgeoisie. They were later redistributed among the working class, often leaving as many as fifty people co-existing in ten living rooms, one large kitchen, two water closets and a bathroom. Even though these apartments were similar to dormitories, where sharing of public space was part of everyday life, kommunalkas were permanent places where inhabitants could have lived their entire lives.
    While the name “kommunalka” is a vernacular short form for a communal apartment, the long mazes had little in common with the Western flat. Firstly, the residents were placed there by the state, which resulted in a diverse and forced social structure of these quarters. Secondly, there was a clear division between what “belonged”  to an individual and what “belonged” to nobody (in other words, public). Living and sharing the “national territory” of kommunalka resulted in constant clashes between neighbours and often developed into comical settings. For example, because there were only two water closets shared by numerous inhabitants, it was common to own and carry around one’s personal toilet seat. This seat would have its own hanging place in the safety of a family room.
The original grand rooms of nineteenth century bourgeoisie apartments and smaller cramped family “corners” in kommunalka had very little, if anything, in common. Divided numerously into smaller spaces, what was often inhabited by entire families, many rooms were narrow. High ceilings, chandelier cords hanging unpretentiously in the corner and disproportionately large windows were the only traces of the building’s former use and grandeur. The lack of space made every corner of the room valuable for potential functionality. A window often served as storage for food and the ceiling would house a clothes line. Consequently, the quality of Soviet life was often measured in cubic meters — the fact that generally defined individual desires and needs.  Curiously enough, even within one’s personal space, one could not necessarily count on privacy. Proximity of neighbors and lack of personal space made kommunalka’s environment transparent to the views of cohabitants and altered the sense of personal confidentiality. 
The communal spaces, however, were true manifestations of the individual within the realm of national and social. Accompanied by rules, public settings carried a sense of the impersonal and ownerless.   Here the theatre of life, so often despised for its lack of humanity, was played out by common Soviet people. Although each family owned part of a stove , a table and a cabinet, the kitchen was often in a state of war for territory. This was not a space for a peaceful dinner or other functions associated with a home, but a place where one would line up to wash the dishes, argue about the electricity bills or discuss communal matters. Bathroom had its own schedule as well. Imagine numerous washing machines and drying clothes illuminated by a steamy, stifling incandescent lamp. Inhabiting shared environments tested the extent of human compassion and defined one's consciousness within the society. 
Living with strangers was not an easy task, considering that it could potentially last a lifetime. Especially in the first years of USSR, individual idiosyncrasies, those that distinguished persons from each other, were not only judged and discouraged within the public atmosphere, but most significantly, scrutinized within one’s home. During this time the meaning of the word “private” gained a negative connotation. Being exposed to the eyes of the state and neighbours resulted in the lost sense of personal identity within the greater Soviet population. The living conditions during these years depicted a simple truth – what was humane and personal was replaced in favour of the national.
Perhaps the picture described above will seem gloomy to most, but that is not my intention.  The sketch was an attempt to show the distinction and, most importantly, coexistence of a national consciousness and conditions of individual identity within the structure of communal living. Of course, the aspects of collective life were not limited to negative insights, where war and argument constantly preoccupied tenants. On the contrary, the kommunalka was, and still remains, a diverse and fascinating environment, where endless personal stories are intertwined with the stories of old and new generations and both the past and present histories of Russia. 

Kira Varvanina has Master of Architecture degree from Carleton University and is currently an independent installation artist based in Toronto. In her work Kira explores spatial transformations by means of technology and interactivity.  Kira Varvanina and Edward Lin work together as Studio 1:1.  www.studio1to1.ca

Kira Varvanina  'The Soviet Kommunalka.'  On Site review, no. 25 Spring 2010
©Kira Varvanina and On Site review

Inscription

marking our place on architectureSarah Zollinger
When we become lost in the cities we live in, we rediscover our place by responding to the stories that architects tell with our own marks — words and images that tell stories in the cities we inhabit. Writing one's name on a building claims space and makes place: it makes that building surface ours. Design cannot be spontaneous, but graffiti needs to be. Architecture may be hard and solid and slow, but writers move quickly. Writing names and identities onto the city is how we engage the slowness of architecture and put ourselves into the stories of the places we live.
Aldo Rossi's city is a collection of the architecture that makes it up: a human-built object, an assembly of artefacts; often a collection of the ‘nameless architecture of large cities, streets and residential blocks’1 — LA, Houston or Toronto—but when we look more closely a counter-definition starts to emerge. Lives lived within these architectures add layers to the palimpsest of a city. With architectures as repositories, cities are ‘the production and distribution of discourse, writing, including the bodily traces of a building's occupants, and its divisions of space, time and movement'.2 This ‘visual litter’ both private and commercial, is part of our dialogue with the city. Competing images and texts might seem entirely chaotic but ‘neither cities nor places in them are unordered, unplanned; the question is only whose order, whose planning, for what purpose, in whose interest’.3
When the modern city disregards the individual in an attempt to plan for the universal, graffiti, stickers and stencils are some of the ways that urban dwellers physically and visually make their individual presence known. This urban art is part of a long tradition of marking the places we live. It is the trace of people we know and things we can identify. Because of the marks made by others like us the city becomes ‘a place that we can identify ourselves within’. 4 Each mark is the trace of another person ‘…every graffito can … be seen and/or read as a miniature autobiography of a member of a society in the sense that the graffitist reveals a part of himself and his society in all that s/he writes’.5 This idea of autobiography is at the heart of graffiti and what makes it unique.
Graffiti is about naming: writing ones name in the city allows ‘an announcement of one’s identity [as] a kind of testimonial to one’s existence in a world of anonymity’.6 Whether it be to sign a contract, or write yourself a name tag, or tag a wall, ‘when one makes a mark, one leaves something of one's self behind’, claiming both identity and belonging.7 For urban youth in a culture of nameless-ness and identity-less-ness, graffiti is a route to belonging, not only in a group but also in a large and anonymous city.8 Naming and re-naming implies the creation, or re-creation, of self and serves as a means of empowerment.9 The subsequent marking of one's name on a public surface adds to this the physical claiming of space and the delineation of boundaries within the city. There is a sense of pride in seeing your name or the names of friends impacting the city. One belongs by marking one's presence.
In this, buildings, the collection of stories told by architects, become the backdrop. The anonymous walls of anonymous buildings become canvases where the average person comes in contact with the city and meets the moment when our lives can inscribe the rigid world that we live in. This is where the people that walk the streets make architecture human: flexible, changeable and where we urban dwellers, who live our lives in the shadows of buildings, push back at an unyielding architecture.

Zollinger, Sarah. 'Inscriptions: marking our place on architecture' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Sara Zolllinger and On Site review

Where we go, what we eat

Where we go, what we eat
Tonkao Panin
French, Italian, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Thai.
Hearing these words, some may think of people with different ethnic and cultural identities. Some may think of different countries with picturesque landscapes. Some may even picture cities with distinct architectural qualities. A lot of us simply think of food.
Black truffles, sun-dried tomato, jalapeno, sesame oil, soy sauce, lemon grass, these ingredients once spoke languages particular to places and cultures. Not only did they remind us of the distinct flavors and aromas of the food we have tasted, they also connected us to various sights, sounds and touches of the places they came from. There were times when food was defined by small geographic zones, prescribed by the products and traditions in those areas. But as places and people became connected, either by profitable trades, sympathetic diplomacy or hostile wars, our food has been modified. When we migrated, we always left remarkable culinary traces in places we passed and settled. Today the food we consider local may contain ingredients our grandparents never dreamt of. Changes in our environment also alter our food, particularly climate changes that have affected both our soil and water. Franchised restaurants and cafes, globe-trotting chefs, fusion fares and exotic ingredients that cross continents, all affirm that today food has become more of a global commodity than ever before. So have architecture and place.
In this age of rapid communication network and advanced information technology, we are living in a here-and-now mode. No places seem to be too far away, no information impossible, no goods unattainable. Today a trip to a Cuban or a Greek restaurant means more than actually eating the food. It offers a quick escape or a short break and satisfies us in a manner not so different from surfing the internet searching for exotic places we wish we could go to. But as exotic consumer goods and faraway places became much easier to reach, we begin to turn our interest to something more obscure and something previously unobtainable. Today Chinese, Japanese and Thai have become such household cuisines that we begin to look for something else.
Within the past few years, an odd type of specialist was born. It is the food hunter, who glimpses and tastes the new frontier of global food.1 The food hunter acts like a culinary detective, tracking down exotic and obscure ingredients from Asia, tasting them and putting them in hands of daring chefs. The focus of his job is to concoct the methods and combinations to get odd ingredients into the world’s menus, restaurants and markets. This is how bael fruit syrup and fish-paste from Thailand or wild guava liquor from Vietnam entered the menus of restaurants in the US and Europe. Perhaps these ingredients count not so much for their flavour but more for their rarity and obscurity. Once out of their native contexts, these ingredients became a symbol for exclusivity much like visiting a faraway land so pure in its natural state that only a few are allowed to enter.
As the new class of food connoisseur seeks for the more authentic (perhaps meaning the more obscure), the traveller of the twenty-first century aims for something similar. During the twentieth century, a type of tourism became popular in many countries with the rise of packaged tours to cities for vacations that would entertain and edify. It was the beginnings of urban tourism — a set of tourist resources or activities in towns and cities offered to visitors from ‘elsewhere’. The urban tourist leaves his own locale in search of excitement in other cities. Urban tourism focuses on urban culture and local environments presenting experiences that are absorbed by the visitor to a place that is far beyond their own living environment. But as the twentieth century closed, urban tourism has also been transformed. While some of us take great pleasure in consuming exotic ingredients, others are satisfied by being able to reach places equally uncommon. As Thai and Vietnamese food have lost their novelty, so have their well-known cities and towns. Bangkok, Phuket, Hanoi and Shanghai seem so familiar that they can no longer generate the sense of surprise that twenty-first century tourists want.
Certainly, tourists who seek well-known destinations still exist, but there are some travellers who intentionally neglect those iconic places. They see themselves as cultural travellers, travelling to less known destinations, looking for something seemingly ‘authentic’. They want to see the real, daily lives of local people. Paradoxically this search for authenticity that drives cultural travellers to the so-called non-tourist destinations has caused changes more dramatic than urban tourism did to major cities during the twentieth century. Tokyo, Beijing or Bangkok have been major tourist destinations for decades, slowly becoming accustomed to visitors. But today the once unheard-of Hoi-an in Vietnam, Lijiang in China, Mae-Hong-Son in Thailand have abruptly been outfitted for curious cultural tourists. Every place, as a tourist destination, can be considered as an image integrated by cultural attributes that travellers shape from their perceptions and their symbolic interpretation of this global image. However, tourist destinations can convey images that are artificially created by marketting strategies. As the towns turn their attention towards travellers, ways of life long vanished have been resurrected, scenes that no longer exist have been recreated. Thus emerges a contrast between the created image and the perceived reality. Today many cities have accepted that the fabrication of cultures is a part of urban reality in the twenty-first century.
As our food culture has dramatically been transformed, our travelling culture as well as its relationship with everyday life has also changed. Certainly there is nothing wrong with using Thai bael fruit syrup or Vietnamese guava liquor in any dish, as long as they complement the cuisine. However, exotic ingredients from faraway also fulfil our anxiety and curiosity for global information. They demonstrate our imaginary ability to go everywhere, to know and to be able to obtain everything. But when this quest for the exotics extends its boundary from culinary and consumer goods to real places, how shall we prevent lives and cultures from becoming merely a product or ingredient shaped and reshaped according to the needs of the visitors. Perhaps time will tell us how we, in the twenty-first century, will be able offer cultural solutions for the riddle we have created from our cultural demands.

1 John Krich, ‘The Food Hunter’. Time, vol 169, no. 24-25, 2007.

Panin, Tonkao. 'Where We Go, What We Eat' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Tonkao Panin and On Site review