St. Petersburg Communal Apartments : My Room Is My Castle

This study focuses on a unique Soviet phenomenon communal apartments known as kommunalki in the Russian language. In such apartments several families or individuals with different backgrounds reside together and each of them occupies one or more rooms and shares places of common use. The origins of kommunalki go back to the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 and still a great number of communal apartments is located in St. Petersburg. In 2012 kommunalki totaled about 11% of the housing stock of the city. Nowadays communal apartments are the most acutely felt housing problem in St. Petersburg, and the city authorities have developed a program aimed at elimination of significant part of kommunalki by 2016. This study on communal apartments pursues several aims. Firstly, I aim to find out how the residents in contemporary communal apartments in St. Petersburg understand privacy and examine the social relations that are formed among neighbours in the course of their joint residence in the apartment. Secondly, I am going to examine how the residents cope with the daily practical aspects of living together, e.g. managing of common facilities and performing the necessary maintenance of the apartment. Thirdly, I look at the housing policy the authorities and experts of St. Petersburg have chosen to follow in order to deal with the remaining communal apartments. What are the attitudes the kommunalki dwellers have had to the current housing program and how are they going to solve their 'housing question'? This thesis draws on qualitative data collected through twenty face-to-face interviews with individuals residing in communal apartments. In the study I mainly draw on the multidimensional developmental theory of privacy by Laufer and Wolfe (1977) which helps explain the empirical data dealing with privacy-related issues in kommunalki in St. Petersburg. Living in a communal apartment is closely associated with lack of privacy or 'public privacy', however, paradoxically for some moving into shared dwelling served a distinct purpose – finding independence from parents and hence privacy. The research shows that kommunalki residents have two opposite attitudes to privacy. For majority of the interviewees it is very important to insure protection of their privacy while others conversely do not draw clear boundaries between private and public within the apartment. Relationships between neighbours also vary greatly from very relaxed to causing conflicts. Communal apartment dwellers adopt various rules, also unspoken ones that help them maintain order and regulate norms of behaviour and living in their apartment. Most interviewees are willing to acquire their own individual dwelling but there is a number of factors that hinder it