Communal apartment

Communal apartments (Russian singular: коммунальная квартира, romanized: kommunal'naya kvartira, colloquial: kommunalka) are apartments in which several unrelated persons or families live in isolated living rooms and share common areas such a kitchen, shower, and toilet. When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 after the October Revolution, to cope with the housing shortage, they nationalised luxurious apartment blocks from rich people to make them available to the proletariat.

The term communal apartments emerged specifically in the Soviet Union, kommunalkas became the predominant form of housing for generations. Communal apartments were supposed to be a temporary solution and were in fact phased out in many cities of the country. Due to the Second World War, large population influxes from the countryside and a lack of investment in new housing, kommunalkas still exist in some former Soviet cities, such as Saint Petersburg.