During the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks seized the grand private houses in the centre of Moscow and St Petersburg and established each of them as a communal living space for 10 or more families. The kommunalka survived the Soviet years, but after the collapse of communism many were sold off and restored to private ownership. In St Petersburg, in particular, however, a housing crisis meant that a large number of the buildings remained communal. By the time the French photographer Françoise Huguier began to document them in 2001, perhaps 300,000 people still lived in these crumbling houses. Some had been resident since before the war.
Huguier rented a room in one of the buildings and over the following decade lived there on and off for months at a time. She recalled her first night clearly: “Someone was kicking my bedroom door: I woke up with a jolt. It was four in the morning. Two guys holding bottles of vodka insisted we got to know one another. Their room was at the end of the corridor. On the way we bumped into an old woman. With a wave of her hand she seemed to say: don’t worry, I keep watch day and night…”
