Soviet Communal Living: An Oral History of the Kommunalka (review)

In Soviet Communal Living, journalist Paola Messana aims to give the Western reader an insider's view of life in communal apartments both under communism and today. A foreword from Studies in Oral History series editors Bruce Stave and Linda Shopes provides the basic history of Soviet communal apartments in which families from different classes were forced to share housing, with one room to each family and the kitchen and bathroom shared by all. At times up to 80% of urban Soviets lived in kommunalka, which simultaneously addressed the housing crisis, mixed social classes, and created opportunities for State surveillance and informing at the most intimate scales. The book, Stave and Shopes write, is designed to demonstrate "the interview process's ability to capture human interest and dramatize . . . everyday life" (xi). A second foreword, by the classicist, Russian exile, and former kommunalka dweller Vasily Rudich, celebrates oral history's potential, like literature, to "stimulate the reader's imagination" and move beyond the "sweeping generalizations and clichés" that form the bulk of Western knowledge about life under communism (xiii). This volume, Rudich asserts, provides valuable raw material for scholars and a diverse collection of compelling stories that anyone will enjoy.

In her introduction, Messana describes her initial shock and "horror" at encountering the "peculiar" living conditions of the kommunalka, immediately followed by a growing fascination (1). The interviews that form the basis for this book are clearly the product of a passionate interest, sustained over almost two decades (the first interviews took place in the early 1990s and the last in 2008). Messana is the former Moscow Bureau Chief of Agence France-Presse, and her extensive experience reporting in the former Soviet Union is evident. Unfortunately, a nonspecialist reader without detailed knowledge of the recent history of Russia and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics may be left wishing for a bit more context to frame the narratives presented in this book. Messana provides informational footnotes, but they tend to be narrowly focused, explaining that a person mentioned by a narrator was a popular performer at a certain theater, for example, where broader information about the performing arts under communism would also be useful. Four appendices reproducing the texts of the original decrees creating and enforcing the kommunalka do serve to give a more detailed framework for understanding the interviews and reinforce the impression, introduced by Rudich, that this book is intended in part as a published collection of primary sources.

The bulk of the volume consists of a series of thirty edited oral history interviews from two to eight pages long and varying a great deal in content. Messana writes that "the stories are left as is," but it is not clear if these are excerpts or full, if short, interviews (3). There are no questions included. Some chapters are organized around particular anecdotes about communal life, ranging from a shared New Year's celebration in a cozy kitchen to the denunciation and disappearance of a beloved father. Others invoke the theme, familiar to all who have lived with unrelated others, of the "worst roommate I ever had" story. Some offenders chop cabbage loudly at odd hours; others drink and beat their wives. Still other chapters present a life story narrative framed by the exigencies of housing. The reader hears the stories of aristocrats forced to share their luxurious homes with a dozen strangers and of working people thrilled to be suddenly living in one room of a glamorous flat. Messana has chosen her narrators to include both a cross-section of kommunalka dwellers and a selection of individuals who can speak to some of the major events of Soviet history, so while most of the interviews focus on everyday life, some recount more overtly "historic events," such as the Siege of Leningrad during World War II, or a close brush with Stalin's feared, and notoriously sexually predatory, chief of secret police.

While there are narrators who enjoyed, or at...