Kolya's door

It's amazing how to a westerner, it appears that people live on three different standards of living at once. We are used to the amount of money you have determining what kind of stuff you have and what kind of apartment you live in. But here, if you have extra money, you put it into the stuff that's really important to you --- big-screen TVs, cell phones and leather jackets. Many young people made just enough $$ for a few of these. But your other stuff, your furniture, looks like it came out of the 60s and is very small, but still practical. But in the hallways between the apartments, it's all falling apart and looks condemned, because nobody "owns" it and thus feels no responsibility for the upkeep. Often you're walking in the dark, because people steal the light bulbs. The elevators are these old clunky things, and sometimes even they don't have a light inside. However; fortunately, people are practical enough to keep the elevators running and get them fixed right away when they break.

Amazingly, people are renovating their apartments like crazy. Not in the communals; that's not too easy when you share an apartment with strangers. But farther out, around Elektrosila, where people have their own flats, they're big into remodeling. I asked people why they would do this, given the horrid state of the buildings and the fact they might fall down in ten years, but Kolya and Slava said, "No, we're used to it; it's always been like this." "Furtherthermore," they added, "the buildings are made of stone, so they're not going to fall down. Some of them have stood since before the Revolution."

St Petersburg, Russia -- September 1995