This book brings together fascinating testimonies from thirty inhabitants of the 'Kommunalka,' the communal apartments that were the norm in housing in the cities of Russia during the whole history of the Soviet Union.

Autorentext
PAOLA MESSANA New York Bureau Chief of Agence France-Presse, and the agency's former Moscow Bureau Chief. She holds degrees in Russian from the Sorbonne and Political Science from the Paris Institute of Political Studies, France.

Inhalt
Uplotnienie' : Filling up White Army, Red Army The Visit to Lenin Like Life In Naples I, Princess Galitzine, a Tenant in a Communal Apartment In Times of Hardship You Have To Make the Best of Things The Black Crow Even the Baltics The Leningrad Blockade The Denunciation SUMMER 1948 The Ambulance, the Dead, the Blind, the Nun and the Others The American legacy Jewish Poison in the Pots The Letter New Year's Eve Celebration Tiotia Grusha, Or How Thirty People Can Share An Apartment The Gulag and the Roslovian smell The Soldier's Ballad Lenins, nothing but Lenins Dissidence The Passageway Room The Prostitute The French Lover Masha L. and the Spirit of the Kommunalka The Englishwoman and the Dealer An Officer in the Strategic Nuclear Forces From Putsch to Putsch Seventeen years after the fall of the USSR, a Happy Ukrainian Two Sisters Through History