Close Quarters: Dealing with Difference in the (Post-)Soviet Realm

Abstract

The kommunalka as a living arrangement particular to the Soviet Union appeals to researchers as much as it fascinates people who first come across this space with its complex rules and relationships. Its challenge to Western notions of private and public, the coexistence of fierce territoriality and intimate relationships in cramped quarters, which could elicit the whole range of emotions between inhabitants who often hailed from wildly diverging backgrounds and did not live together by choice, has turned the kommunalka into an allegory for the whole Soviet Union.1 As a metaphor, it has also been popular with scholars working on the multiethnic character of