Thoughts on the (De)Feats of Soviet Architecture

May 8, 2008

To give credit where credit is due, the Soviets were good at something: building things quickly. Well, maybe not so much quickly as cheaply. Actually, I don’t really know about their time or cost efficiency, but at least they were good at building things uniformly. True, it is possible to distinguish the imposing, gargantuan neo-classical buildings built by Stalin from the 5-storey apartments built by Khrushchev and the 8+-storey ones built by Brezhnev (who sprung for elevators). But, for the most part, apartment buildings, much like street names—from Petersburg to Vladivostok—left to us by the Soviets look the same.

This sometimes quirky aspect of life in the USSR was perhaps best parodied by the 1970s film Ironiya Sudbi (The Irony of Fate), where an unfortunate intoxicated young man ends up in an apartment that is identical to his own in all features but one: the city in which it’s located. Well he lives at dom 23, ulitsa Stroitelyey in Moscow, the fates have it that he awake in a drunken stupor in dom 23, ulitsa Stroitelyey. As everything about the apartment, from layout to furniture to wallpaper looks like his, he does not realize he is not at home until the pretty blonde resident of the apartment returns, a prolonged and comical argument ensues, she finally realizes what’s going on and convinces him that he is, in fact, in Leningrad.

While much could be written about the feats of Soviet architecture in general, I wish to focus on one particular type of dwelling, the one with which I am the most familiar: the obschezhitiye. While this word is most often translated as a “student residence/dormitory,” it does not really resemble in the least the residences of most North American campuses. Most basically, they are most often even located anywhere near the universities where their students study. Secondly, not only students live in these buildings; they are also home to grad students, teachers, and their families (I shared a kitchen in Yekaterinburg with 3 international students, a young couple and their baby, a middle-aged woman and son, and always-the-lady’s-man Artyom). Indeed, a recent Russki Reporter map reported that 1% of the total Russian population currently lives in an obschezhitiye. That works out to something like 1.5 million people. By the end of this reflection, perhaps you will understand why I find this a worrisome figure.

Obshchezhitiye (from the words obshche, meaning “general/common/mutual” and zhitiye “life/existence”) look pretty much like most other Russian apartment buildings. That is, they generally come in 5-story/no elevator (as here in Irktusk) or 8+ storey with elevator form (as the building I lived in in Yekaterinburg). The corridors and common rooms are most often painted white on top and green/blue on the bottom. Anyone who’s lived in one knows that leaning against such walls leaves a coat of white powder on whatever you may be wearing. (Mark and I figured out the cause for this while trying to do some painting on Olkhon Island—the basic white wash used in this country is a limestone based chalk-water substance that sticks to clothes better than walls.)

What’s wrong with a little white paint on your clothes, you may ask? If this were the worst of the structural problems of most obshags (as they are colloquially known), an entry such as this would not be warranted. You see, these buildings were never meant to be permanent. Built after the Great Patriotic War, these buildings were supposed to last twenty years until the Soviets could come up with a better solution to their housing crisis. Half a century later, these buildings are still kicking, though often crumbling, literally, beneath the feet of their occupants. In the first week after we moved to Irkutsk, we saw two segments on the news about this particular problem. The first showed the wall of an obschezhitiye that, based on outward appearance, could have been our own. There were large gaping holes in the side of the building where bricks had fallen or crumbled away. The second report showed the tragic story of an elderly woman who had fallen to her death after her balcony fell out beneath her. The next shot was off the landlord’s solution to the problem—he was shown nailing closed the balcony doors of another apartment, reprimanding the tenants for even harbouring ideas of stepping outside (why try and fix the problem when a bolt through a door will stave off certain death?).

Structural challenges aside, in Russia modern plumbing seems to have been put on the backburner in favour of launching satellites into space. While I eventually got used to the machine-gun like sound of water going through the hot water pipes in Yekaterinburg, having any water at all, let alone hot water, in our 5^th floor kitchen and bathroom in Irkutsk is no more than a weekly occurrence. We were told that this is due to the face that the water gets used up by the people on the floors below us before it can reach us way up on the 5^th floor, though I have my doubts. Our neighbour Anastasia has told us that the repair man has come on numerous occasions to assess our situation, always noting “trudno, ochen trudno” (difficult, very difficult). In other words, we’re not going to put in the time to fix this problem, it can’t be solved by nailing a bolt through a door. A Belgian student once got fed up with this answer, exclaiming “it’s not difficult in Belgium, it’s not difficult in France, in not difficult anywhere else in Europe, why is it difficult here?” The answer to this seems to lie not in a lack of technical knowledge, but in a lack of will to fix things for other people, especially in buildings whose life expectancy has long passed.

Some time has passed since I began this entry, I have survived an alternating hot-and-cold (but never at the right time) year of central heating, I am not longer phased by the mold in the stairwell, and the pieces of ceiling that fall from our recently renovated ceiling. You probably get the idea anyway. All I have left to say is this. Putin (or Medvedev), the state of housing in your country is appalling. It’s time to use some of your oil revenue, get out the wrecking ball, and build your country some new homes. If uniformity is efficient, be my guest, but quality should not be sacrificed for quantity: this time build some houses that are meant to be lived in. While you may not have created this problem, this is the country you’ve inherited, and it is your job to make it a better place for the citizens who live in it, despite your new market economy. Food, water, shelter. This is where you need to begin.