RUSSIA: KOMMUNALKA LIVING

You know, I was so surprised by the density of population in St. Petersburg.  Apartments apartments apartments everywhere.  They were like bikes in Amsterdam.  Okay - I guess people have to live somewhere.  The population of the city is over 4.6 million, and if you include the vicinity it goes up to 6 million.  I somehow pictured in my mind a whole lot of houses - but not so.   


This is a video one of the kids took.  They understood their tour guide to say that there pretty much aren't any houses in the city.  Everyone lives in a suite.

 

Kommunalka is a communal living arrangement still practiced by a large percentage of residents in St. Petersburg. 

Communal flats appeared in Russia in the years following the 1917 Revolution, when the authorities hurriedly shifted the urban proletariat into the flats of the former middle classes and aristocracy.  But these places weren't designed for multiple families, so they had to make common rooms.  That may mean that a kitchen and bathroom might be shard by eight apartments, for example.  The city still has more than 100,000 communal flats, most of them in the historic centre of the city.