A Bit of Squeeze

The centers of old Russian cities are usually a joy to the eye – a delightful assortment of epochs, styles and designs. Visitors and photographers love them but the citizens who live in the old dilapidated houses and those who are responsible for their upkeep hate them.

The newer areas of Russian cities look quite different. Most urban Russians live in big blocks of flats many storeys high. Those built after the Second world War look like gigantic dominoes, either vertical or horizontal. Almost each flat has a balcony, often glazed by the owner, which turns the original ugly structure into something repulsively original. Whole cities are built in this way, dismal and monotonous, though as modern conveniences, they serve their purpose.

Quite another matter is that people are squeezed into these buildings like herrings in a barrel. They in microscopic flats; if 2 people meet in the passage, one of them has to back up. The lavatories are so narrow that a person of more than medium weight has one more reason to think of dieting. Lumber-rooms are rare so for many families buying a washing machine is a double problem : expense and the place where to put it when you get it.

Sometimes 2 families share a bathroom and a kitchen. Two people living in a 3-room apartment is an unthinkable luxury. It’s foolish to ask a Russian how many bedrooms he has, as there aren’t any. Each room serves all purposes, so instead of beds people tend to sleep on sofas or divans easily transformed into whatever-you-like-at-the- moment. Yet due to their feeling of togetherness, Russians do not suffer in this situation as much as an outsider might think. One of the most popular Russian proverbs runs: “Better for everyone to be crammed in than for anyone to be left out.”

The kitchen is minute. In new flats it is so small that a table and fridge hardly leave elbow room for the busy housewife. Yet somehow the whole family manages to have their regular meals there and often when the children are in bed and must not disturbed, the rest of the family and even visiting friends meet round the kitchen table with a bottle of vodka. The kitchen was even more popular in Soviet times, when the intelligentsia gathered there in heated political discussions lasting far into the small hours of the night. Sometimes those discussions ended in concentration camps.

Communal services in Russia are usually so poor that everyone needs to be able to do plumbing and wallpapering, to build bookshelves, replace electrical wiring, whitewash the ceiling, paint the floor and so on. In fact, all Russia is a huge Do-It-Yourself arena. If you feel that a repair is beyond your capabilities, you can always ask the plumber or electrician who lives next door. He will come immediately if he is sober. Applying to the building’s manager will take much more time and effort and the result may not be worth the trouble.

Country Life

A Russian peasant hut looks very much like a log cabin on a Christmas greeting card, only better. The wooden window decorations remind you of exquisite lace and the sills are crowded with flowering plants. Each cabin is surrounded by a kitchen garden or an orchard which adds to the idyll.

Inside it is not so picturesque. The rooms can be quite dim since much of the light is stolen by the flowers sitting on the window-sills. But then why should you want a lot of light if most of your time you spend in the open? It’s a chance to give your eyes a rest.

The greater part of the biggest room is occupied by a huge Russian stove, a very useful and cleverly-designed multi-purpose brick structure, fed with wood. You cook on the stove, you bake in the stove, the house is heated by it and you sleep on its flat top.

Running water in a peasant hut is rare. To use the ‘outhouse’, as the name suggests, necessities having to go out into the yard – a fairly unpleasant experience in winter when it’s minus 30 degrees.

Russian peasants are a peculiar lot. Active in warm seasons, they are all but hibernate in the long winter. There is not much you can do when the ground is waist-deep in snow. Their 2 best companions, which help them wile away the monotony, are the television and a bottle of ‘samogon’, home-made spirit mostly distilled from sugar. When there is no sugar, you can use corn or sugar beet – in fact, there’s hardly anything you cannot use.

It’s all different in summer when there is land to be ploughed, vegetable plots to be weeded, fodder to be produced (with luck, the source of the fodder might well be the nearby collective farm where the guard is your close relative). Under the Communists, you could only keep one cow; now you may have as many as your cowshed can hold. On a collective farm, a cow that can yield 3,000 litres of milk a year is a record holder, the pride of the herd; on a private peasant holding it is much more, though never as much as in Holland or Denmark where no-one is surprised by 10,000 litres.

Collective farms are dying out, as is the Russian village as such. The young flock to the cities, while older folk look forward to their retirement years. But in summer, village life is quite lively when sons and daughters come from the cities to enjoy the fresh air, to pick mushrooms and to swim in the river. They often bring the children, much to the joy of the village ‘babushkas’ who can indulge themselves to their heart’s content scolding and spoiling.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 914