Communal Living in Russia: A Soviet Experiment

FAIN: EE-50345-06

Colgate University (Hamilton, NY 13346-1338)
Alice S. Nakhimovsky (Project Director: October 2005 to May 2009)

The development of a bilingual, multimedia website on the everyday life and implications of Soviet experimentation in communal apartment living or kommunalka, implemented as a tool of social policy from 1917 to the 1970s.

This project will create a multidisciplinary Web site devoted to a singular cultural phenomenon: the Russian communal apartment, or kommunalka, which from 1917 on squeezed people of vastly different ethnicities, education, attitudes, and life habits into largely involuntary collective living. This way of life was a core experience for several generations and is the background to all of Soviet high culture and everyday life. We bring an internationally renowned team together to film, write, and design a multimedia, bilingual “virtual museum.” Students of anthropology, cultural studies, Russian literature, language, society, politics, and culture will find on our site an array of materials to understand and analyze a particular way of life.