“From a communal apartment to a penthouse. Russian Cultural Tradition and Ideal Housing”- one of the most interesting discussions at the Mosurbanforum. It was hosted by the writer Tatiana Tolstaya. She began with the fact that the beast has a hole, and the person has an apartment, and talked about how, by her birth, she helped the family move to a large apartment in the house of authorship of Fomin-Levinson on Karpovka. “After the evacuation, my parents returned to Leningrad and received a small apartment in this house, where they lived with their two children, when I appeared. Dad began to bother about a large apartment in the same house, but some general and some party leader were already "fighting" for it. When my father came to the official in charge of housing distribution, he was unexpectedly delighted (“you saved me!”). Because, if he chose one of the mighty of this world, he was in any case threatened with punishment. When a wolf and a tiger fight, they reward a bunny,”said Tatiana Tolstaya. “But even this apartment was cramped: there is always more than one person in a room. Often, in the corner, dad worked with graduate students, and in the other corner, the teacher taught the children English. " "Can a person move from a communal apartment to a penthouse in three generations?" York in the penthouse. " The history of the apartment in the Levinson-Fomin house turned out to be completely mystical, but more on that later.
Artist Dmitry Gutov told about the vicissitudes of the housing problem, captured in Soviet painting. He began his speech with a quote from Lenin's work "Will the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?" about the seal: “The detachment comes to the apartment of a rich man. He finds four tenants in five rooms and tells them - "You make your room, citizens, in two rooms for this winter, until we build good apartments for everyone." Gutov analyzed Sergei Luchishkin's 1926 painting The Ball Flew Off with scenes of everyday life in the windows of houses, with a suicide in one of the windows. “The man hanged himself, the balloon flew away, the number of suicides in the late 1920s is sharply increasing,” commented Dmitry Gutov. The leitmotif of these years is Mandelstam's line "And the damned walls are thin", where it is not about physical subtlety, but about defenselessness. For example, in the famous painting "Vuzovki" there is something hanging on the wall in a frame, in which one can guess a self-portrait of Van Gogh with a cut off ear.
But 1929 - 1933 is a relatively calm period when compared with the next. In 1934, the year of the murder of Kirov and the beginning of mass repressions, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin paints the painting "Anxiety". And although in the plot it refers to 1919, to the time of the Civil War, the situation in the picture is read as an expectation of arrest. Even worse is the 1937 "Housewarming" of the same Petrov-Vodkin, where the arrest has already taken place, the peasants move into an apartment, which, judging by the situation, belonged to some "bourgeois" or professor, apparently repressed. Then a portrait of the sad Meyerhold by Pyotr Konchalovsky was shown, and Tatyana Tolstaya said that the apartment where she moved as a baby in the 1950s was the same apartment in which Meyerhold was arrested in the 1930s. According to the recollections of a relative of Meyerhold, she was waiting for him for dinner, called to say that the soup had cooled down, and Meyerhold went to a friend (in this very apartment) and never returned. And initially the apartment was intended for Kirov, but he was shot before the house was handed over.
In the picturesque history of the housing issue, Dmitry Gutov singled out the periods of the Soviet Biedermeier of the late 1940s - 1950s (Galaktionov "Housewarming", Yablonskaya "Morning"), the thaw romance of the Khrushchevs (Pimenov "Wedding on Tomorrow Street", "Lyrical Housewarming") and Brezhnev melancholy (Viktor Popkov "The Bolotov Family", Erik Bulatov "In Front of the TV") and completed it in the 1980s ("The Man Who Fled into Space from His Room" by Ilya Kabakov). Away from the housing stock.
Grigory Revzin, professor of urban studies at the Higher School of Economics, partner of KB Strelka, spoke about the problem of residential areas. To explain the inability of society to move away from residential areas, it is necessary to understand how they arose and what they replaced. An industrial city, as it follows from the book of the same name by Tony Garnier, is housing for workers. The houses of an industrial city are made in a factory (this was first postulated by Le Corbusier in the Voisin Plan and House, at the CIAM congresses). But how did the workers live before the advent of mass concrete construction? Cities do not preserve workers' quarters, but we know them from literature: the works of Gorky, Dickens, Hugo. And they give us anthropological horror.
Modern slums in Third World countries can provide insight into the working-class neighborhoods of the past. The slums are, in some ways, a pretty correct city. It is pedestrianized, there is no social differentiation (everyone hates everyone, but there is equality). There is no history and no future in slums (all dwellings are about the same), there is no identity.
This product has been processed in a factory. If we look at the Moscow panel district of Tsaritsyno (or any other panel area), we will see the same qualities: equality, lack of history and future, lack of identity. The difference is in the comfort achieved (heating, electricity, sewage). What else is there in the sleeping areas? Garages. They reproduce slums in miniature. They carry out the same economic activity as in the slums: you can fix something, sew, steal, etc. The horror is that sleeping areas, like slums, have no future. They can only be demolished. The Khrushchevs were demolished. The same fate awaits the later panel high-rise buildings.
Is it possible to bring some other life into the sleeping areas? There are doubts here. In Russia, 70% of housing is standard buildings. 50% of the population lives in standard houses. In some countries, national housing is a private cottage. Our national housing is an apartment in a panel building. What does it mean? It is impossible not to demolish, it is impossible to reconstruct.
Professor of the European University of St. Petersburg, anthropologist Ilya Utekhin objected to Grigory Revzin about the slums, that they are sometimes pleasing to the anthropological heart. And he cited as an example a documentary film about a Brazilian slum, in which a men's hairdresser's becomes the center of social life. These guys who do highlights there, grind gossip, and then go wall to wall - this refutes the idea that the slum is monotonous. As a resident of St. Petersburg, Ilya Utekhin noticed that in the center of the northern capital there are still many traditional communal apartments, the way of life of which is a contrast to the front facades. He drew a connection between the type of area, the standard of living, and olfactory sensitivity, that is, sensitivity to odors. If earlier, before the invention of deodorants, when you came to the conservatory for a concert of classical music, you smelled the perfume "Krasnaya Moskva" and the smell of a washed body, now it will not work. Meanwhile, the public in the metro is still stifling, although it depends on the stations.
But the sensitivity of the middle class should not be transferred to all generations, because young people today are more communal than before. So, in St. Petersburg, they tried to resettle communal apartments, not taking into account that the communal apartment allows the student to rent inexpensive housing in the city center and enjoy all the advantages of a central location. Now the communitarian generation has entered life, for which coworking, car sharing, coliving and cohousing have become familiar (here Tatyana Tolstaya made a remark that all these words seem to be the names of intestinal diseases). Cohausing is a fenced-off village with small plots and a community center with a library or fitness room. It is obvious that there are many advantages to living together with socially close people.
Then the host asked the guests to say which apartments they live in. Tatyana Tolstaya began with herself, describing her three-room apartment in Moscow, a former communal apartment. Dmitry Gutov lives in a house 10 km from Moscow and gets behind the wheel when Yandex traffic jams show zero. Ilya Utekhin lives in a five-room apartment on the Petrogradskaya side with adult children, each of whom has a room. Grigory Revzin lives with his wife in a rather large apartment, in a Stalinist five-story building on Chistye Prudy.
In conclusion, Tatyana Tolstaya said that the worst thing is the faceless houses around the perimeter of Moscow. “Why don't they build streets? Everyone loves the streets and goes to watch them while traveling. And, indeed, why? It remains to redirect this question to architects, builders and officials. How many sleeping areas can you build? Panel Russia, where are you rushing? Doesn't give an answer.
