Despite his commitment to the Futurist group of left-wing artists, Punin's apartment in the Fountain House retained the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary Petersburg. There were always visitors, late night talks around the kitchen table, people sleeping on the floor. Apart from Punin's former wife, her mother and daughter and a houseworker called Annushka, there were always people staying in the tiny four-roomed flat. By Soviet standards this was far more cubic space than the Punins were entitled to, and in 1931 Annushka's son and his new wife, an illiterate peasant girl who had come to Petrograd as a factory worker, were moved in by the Housing Committee, and the flat was reassigned as a communal one.20 Cramped conditions and the crippling poverty of living on Punin's meagre wages (for Akhmatova herself was earning nothing in the 1930s) imposed a strain on their relationship. There were frequent arguments over food and money which would often spill into the corridor so that neighbours overheard.21 Lydia Chukovskaya describes visiting Akhmatova at the Fountain House in 1938, just before she broke up with Punin:
I climbed the tricky back staircase that belonged to another century, each step as deep as three. There was still some connection between the staircase and her, but then! When I rang the bell a woman opened the door, wiping soap suds from her hands. Those suds and the shabby entrance hall, with its scraps
* Trotsky's two articles were published just a fortnight after the expulsion from the country of several hundred leading intellectuals (accused of being 'counterrevolutionaries') in September 1921.
of peeling wallpaper, were somehow quite unexpected. The woman walked ahead of me. The kitchen; washing on lines, its wetness slapping one's face. The wet washing was just like the ending of a nasty story, like something out of Dostoevsky, perhaps. Beyond the kitchen, a little corridor, and to the left, a door leading to her room.22
The Fountain House was only one of many former palaces to be converted into communal apartments after 1917. The Volkonsky mansion in Moscow, where Princess Zinaida Volkonsky had held her famous salon in the 1820s, was similarly turned into workers' flats. The Soviet writer Nikolai Ostrovsky lived in one of them in the last years of his life, from 1935 to 1936, after the success of his Socialist Realist novel,
Nothing better illustrates the everyday reality of the Revolution than this transformation of domestic space. The provincial gentry were deprived of their estates, their manor houses burned or confiscated by the peasant communes or the local Soviet, and the rich were forced to share their large apartments with the urban poor or to give up rooms to their old domestic servants and their families. This Soviet 'war against the palaces' was a war on privilege and the cultural symbols of the Tsarist past. But it was also part of a crusade to engineer a more collective way of life which lay at the heart of the cultural revolution in the Soviet Union. By forcing people to share communal flats, the Bolsheviks believed that they could make them communistic in their basic thinking and behaviour. Private space and property would disappear, the patriarchal ('bourgeois') family would be replaced by communist fraternity and organization, and the life of the individual would become immersed in the community.
In the first years of the Revolution the plan entailed the socialization
of the existing housing stock: families were assigned to a single room, and sometimes even less, in the old apartment blocks, sharing kitchens and bathrooms with other families. But from the 1920s, new types of housing were designed to bring about this transformation in mentality. The most radical Soviet architects, like the Constructivists in the Union of Contemporary Architects, proposed the complete obliteration of the private sphere by building commune houses
