3HOUSING FATESNegotiating Homespace Barriers in the Material Afterlife of Soviet Socialism

The Ubiquitous Soviet Apartment Building

Each New Year's Eve in Russia, a 1976 romantic comedy titled The Irony of Fate, or, Enjoy your Bath! (S Legkim Parom ili Ironiya Sud’by; Ryazanov 2002) streams into living rooms across the country. The film, a sort of Russian It's a Wonderful Life in the sense of holiday season nostalgic ubiquity, hinges on a peculiarly Soviet plot point: Across the Soviet Union, not only did many city centers have streets with the same names as one another, but block after block of apartment buildings were constructed using the same design.¹ Moreover, the centrally planned economy and limited availability of domestic goods meant consumers had very little choice when it came to furniture design. The film's protagonist, drunk after a particularly adventurous New Year's Eve, fails to notice that his friend has dragged him from Moscow to Leningrad. Finding his way home, he locates his street, his apartment building, and his apartment number; enters the apartment; and falls asleep on the couch. He awakens not much later to find the true owner of the doppelganger apartment (albeit in Leningrad instead of Moscow) in a state of panic about the strange man sleeping on her couch. Hijinks ensue, and whether or not you have seen the film, the ending comes as no surprise—the two falling in love, succumbing to the irony of fate.

The premise of the film hinges on a nuance of the architecture of Soviet life, which has since become the architecture of post-Soviet life: the ubiquitous design of the Soviet apartment building. This premise is evident in the opening credits of the film, an animated illustration of Soviet architecture's collision with the kind of central planning that led to all-Soviet designs for domestic residences. The credit sequence begins with a parade of anthropomorphized rectangular Soviet apartment buildings marching forth on iron legs to plant themselves in various unsuspecting landscapes. The cartoon concrete buildings stride confidently into warm beach towns (representing southwestern Russia), peaceful snowy landscapes (of the north), and desert steppes (Central Asia). The animated scene shifts to a sketch of the globe, a single apartment building taking it over, multiplying, and then becoming ubiquitous and manifold. The opening animation sequence is quickly followed by a wide-angle scan surveying the apartment blocks of 1970s outer Moscow, where building after building melts into a repetitive pattern of concrete cubes. At once a jovial illustration of socialist progress—the buildings are multiplying!—and a tongue-in-cheek critique of that ubiquitous Soviet discourse, the animated opening of the film stands as an example of late Soviet stiob, skirting the line between promoting an official narrative and critiquing it.² This short cartoon illustrates a different kind of universal design from that declared by disability advocates in the West several decades later: The socialist economy of scale and centralized optimization of living needs and standards, combined with a historic housing crisis after World War II, led to the construction of so many apartments based on the same plan in different cities.³

Far from the miserable automatons that inhabited US Cold War depictions of Soviet citizens, the characters (and, indeed, the authors) of The Irony of Fate are colorful, endowed with a sense of humor and fully human. They just happen to live in a social environment that has been engineered in a strikingly unvarying manner. The Irony of Fate revels in the implausible absurdity of the vast geographic expanse of the Soviet Union being populated with nearly identical apartment blocks. Despite this observation, the characters find lightness, life, and complexity in an architecture of uniformity.

It would be easy to imagine the Soviet apartment building as a cultural object that eschewed originality in favor of mass-produced design that valued function but not form, an infrastructure of repression. In US popular culture (or propaganda) in the second half of the twentieth century, Soviet-era uniformity was frequently represented as a repression of individuality. Soviet citizens were imagined as victims, and the uniformity of centralized planning represented a lack of freedom of choice. Binary logics of oppressed versus free led to a totalizing narrative in which Soviet citizens were deprived of choice and thereby of human self-expression (Yurchak 2006). From this vantage point, American consumers were understood to exercise choice in domestic consumer decisions, facilitating a consumer-connoisseurship as mark of cultural sophistication, an experience that it seemed from afar that Soviet citizens lacked and wished for (Fehérváry 2009). Post-Soviet apartment life, however, was neither purely limiting nor enabling. Instead, we can eschew the binary logics of Soviet citizens’ agency (or lack thereof) in favor of a more nuanced view that reimagines the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian citizen as a bricoleur, making do and deploying creative, but culturally rooted, solutions to the problems presented by the postsocialist-built environment.⁴ This argument follows on from this critique of binary perception of passive versus active citizens. It suggests that we might apply a similar skepticism to the widely recited refrain that Russia is so inaccessible, a sentiment frequently expressed by my Russian interlocutors and by foreigners who have visited Russia. As historians have shown, Soviet and post-Soviet Russians are neither captives of an inaccessible regime, nor passive recipients of Western disability advocacy, but rather, they are creative and agentive self-advocates drawing on domestic and global discourses to craft rhetorical approaches and advocacy strategies (e.g., Shaw 2017; Galmarini-Kabala 2024; Bernstein 2024).

FIGURE 7. A Khrushchev-era apartment building in Petrozavodsk. The style of nine-story buildings can be found in many cities; yet, the detailing on the building, from the customization of windows added to insulate the balcony, the addition of curtains, and the choice of interior paint mark the specificity of each family apartment. Melting snow and tufts of grass around the building suggest that it is early spring. Photo by Cassandra Hartblay, 2013.

Life in Four Walls

A common refrain in interviews with and about people with disabilities in Petrozavodsk was the phrase zhizn’ v chetrikh stenakh, life in four walls. In this idiom, “four walls” refers to the walls of one's room or apartment, and the expression denotes the sort of mundane lack of stimuli that someone who spends most of their days at home experiences. The same colloquial expression came up, for example, in conversations about the quarantine during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Life in four walls” was a shorthand to describe the experience of not being able to access the world outside of one's apartment. Svetlana, the sociologist, found that young adults with mobility impairments in Karelia were deeply in need of social experiences outside of the home (Driakhlitsina 2009), and her dissertation led her to advocate for more city programming to support the social needs of unemployed adults with disabilities, resulting in the creation of social rehabilitation groups, like the one where I first met several of my interlocutors. Other scholarly accounts note the centrality of the problem of getting in and out of one's family apartment as essential to and significant in the lived experience of disability in Russia (Kikkas 2001; Phillips 2011; Romanov and Iarskaia-Smirnova 2006). A 2013 Human Rights Watch report, based on interviews with activists and people with disabilities in Russia, suggests that physical confinement to homes is the primary barrier that Russians with disabilities face in their environment, ahead of, if compounded by, inaccessible sidewalks and street crossings, public transportation, and entrances to public spaces, businesses, and government buildings (2013a 20–32). An advocacy campaign started on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic (several years after my fieldwork ended) used the hashtag #ButWeAreAlwaysAtHome to raise awareness of the inaccessibility of going in and out of the Soviet-era apartment buildings where most Russians live to those complaining about life in four walls during quarantine (Mullins 2021). This issue raised the question of whether or not an interlocutor with mobility impairments could leave the family home easily, or only with significant organizational labor and physical effort.

During my fieldwork, I often traveled across town to meet Alina, who was in her early thirties and a wheelchair user with cerebral palsy (or DTsP in Russian). We would meet at Alina's apartment, where I would be buzzed in by her mother, Valya, who then greeted me at the apartment door on the second floor. Valya would usher me into the vestibule to take off my coat and then lead me down a dim interior hallway to the sitting room in their family's section of the shared apartment. Whereas most other families I visited would bring me to the kitchen and serve me tea, because Alina and Valya shared their kitchen with another family, I saw it only briefly passing by. Instead, I would sit on the worn sofa in their sitting room, sometimes moving to the table for tea and sweets, or we would meet in Alina's computer room, with Alina shooing off her mother so that we could talk as age-mates.

My interviews with Alina and Valya took place in their apartment, and I rarely saw them elsewhere. As I got to know them better, I realized that they rarely left their neighborhood, and Alina rarely left the apartment. I started to understand the way this played out in terms of class and architecture one afternoon over tea at the round table in the sitting room, when Valya recalled a time when Alina was still a child. Caring for her daughter, who needed assistance to go to the bathroom, made it difficult for Valya to work.

Valya: A lot of the parents didn’t work, but I worked. […] So I would lock her in the apartment and walk to work [as a janitor] for three hours…. After a year and a half I was going into the city to [work at] the medical clinic. I would leave keys with the neighbors, and they would feed her, change her, and sometimes they brought her over to their place—that was when we were renting an apartment in a house. But when we moved here [to a bigger apartment building], I would lock her in … they didn’t give me medical leave, even when she was in a cast after an operation … I walked to work, and locked her in …

C: [to Alina, with empathy] You must have been lonely in a cast and not able to move …

Alina: You didn’t say it right, I was never alone, I always had a lot of people around … there were always people around me.

Valya: I would leave the keys and the neighbors would come, it was simpler then.

Alina: I would play with the kids and no one picked on me. It was only when they grew up a little that they realized that I couldn’t get around … Even now, everyone in the building can’t believe that I go places, that I do things.⁵

In Valya's account, the moral dilemma that she faced as a mother who both had to work and care for a child with intense physical needs weighed on her. She portrayed her decision to work as one that required her to leave Alina alone in the family's rooms of their communal apartment. Alina, in this exchange, challenged this perspective. She did not want her mother to present a story of her childhood that would induce pity. “I always had lots of people around me,” she countered, asserting her capabilities and an array of experiences outside of the apartment. In Alina's perception, an invalid who stayed alone in an apartment was truly disabled, in that that person had no social value. Alina asserted her own social worth and diversity of experiences. In fact, although she spent many days in her apartment, she often had visitors and had relationships with neighborhood children, neighbors, and peers. During periods when programs with accessible transport like the art therapy group were running, she participated in weekly meetings with disabled peers.

Alina asserted that her social world reached beyond the walls of her family apartment and contrasted that fact with the culturally expected situation for people with severe physical disabilities like hers. “Even now,” she said, “everyone in the building can’t believe that I go places, that I do things.” In her conversation with her mother, Alina contested this dominant perspective that to be an invalid and to stay at home rendered her socially isolated, or “needed by nobody.”⁶ Instead, she suggested that her social relationships were both fulfilling and cast her as a friend and peer to others. In this way, Alina navigated the reality of “life in four walls” asserting that despite perceptions, living in an inaccessible apartment did not diminish her social personhood, even as she wished for a new apartment to become available.

Vera: Trading Up to the First Floor

Most families in the city, whether or not they had a disabled family member, had elaborate stories to share about the locally specific logics of what constituted a good apartment. A good apartment could be an apartment with proximity to the downtown city center, where one could easily walk to museums, premiere businesses, the university, a variety of grocery and consumer stores, and the lakefront. For another friend, a good apartment might be one that was separate from, but in the same neighborhood as, extended family (even if that meant taking a bus or marshrutka to work or the city center). Others valued new construction over older buildings; the solid stone prewar Stalin-era apartments in the city center were considered to be prestigious. The worst housing was widely understood to be the old wooden buildings, which were notorious for poor heat, frozen pipes, and the many design flaws of their slap-dash construction (built when Petrozavodsk was a frontier town funneling lumber from Karelian forests to other regions in the new Soviet Union), and the temporary barracks, which were constructed after the city's occupation during World War II. In all cases, questions of convenience and ease permeated considerations of whether or not a particular apartment might support an imagined good life. This good life was imagined in terms of standards of comfortable modernity.

Many families had complicated stories of negotiating available housing resources to support the best outcome in an illiquid housing market with insufficient housing stock. One family rented out a large three-room apartment near the city center to earn extra income, while living for two generations in a smaller apartment elsewhere in the city. A young couple shared a room in a student dormitory, preparing food in an electric hot pot. A twenty-something moved out of his family apartment shared with parents and a younger sister in a neighborhood twenty minutes outside the city center to share a small apartment with his grandmother that afforded him a five-minute walk to work. A musician friend worked as a real estate agent on the side to earn money to buy his family a better apartment, because he realized the two rooms would be difficult as his two daughters grew up. That is, the “two-room” apartment had an entryway for coats and boots, a small kitchen with a small table, a washroom (shower/tub and sink) and toilet, and two other rooms – one adjoining the kitchen with a foldout sofa bed, and one bedroom where the children slept. This layout was quite typical. Following the logic of Soviet housing planning, apartment size is described in terms of the total number of rooms aside from hallways, kitchen, and bathroom facilities, therefore including living room/sitting room/dining rooms (e.g. unlike in the US and Canada, where bedrooms are counted but living rooms are not (e.g. a two-bedroom apartment typically also has some common room). Soviet designers imagined the room closest to the kitchen as a multifunctional living/dining/sleeping/socializing/tv room, in contrast to what they understood as petit-bourgeois backwardness inherent in monofunctional room design of early twentieth century Europe; they designed modular and multi-purpose furniture to meet this plan (Buchli 1997). But, in my experience, by the 2010s, the Soviet political commitment to multifunctional living had given way for a different imaginary: the evroremont and desire for monofunctional sleeping quarters depicted in film and television. Still, most of the housing stock in Petrozavodsk had been built in the Soviet period. New constructions offered some opportunity for large open-plan kitchen-living room spaces. But constructing a new, stand-alone house (or kottezh, in local parlance) required a good deal of capital, both financial, to purchase the land and supplies, and social, to ensure security and avoid swindle, in the course of the construction. In general, the cost of renting apartments was high compared with local wages; those whose families had managed to take ownership of apartments during privatization of the housing stock in the 1990s were better off and engaged in complex strategizing to negotiate the most livable space for themselves and their families.

For my interlocutors with mobility impairments, the relative accessibility of one's living space was an important part of the equation when it came to what constituted good housing. This was a common topic in interviews with adults with mobility impairments and parents of children with disabilities in Petrozavodsk. One trade-off that people often made was leaving behind a smaller apartment for a larger one. For some interlocutors with disabilities, first-floor apartments were also desirable (although not for Vova and Larissa, as previously described).

The notion of trading up for a first-floor apartment came up in an interview with Vera, a bright, social, outgoing woman who lived at the time of our interview in a three-room apartment with her parents, her husband, and her two young children. Vera told me the story of her family's journey to their current living situation.

V: So where we live…. When I first became disabled (poluchila invalidnostu), we were living in a dormitory. And after that, my parents waited in line for a long time until … I think they even wrote a request. So. They got a two-room apartment. But, a two room apartment in a regular building, a five-story building, on the second floor, that's what we had. As long as I was little, and my parents could still carry me up the stairs well enough, because there wasn’t an elevator … so. But, when I got a little bigger and became a teenager, like up to seventeen years old, I got heavier, and at the same time my parents were getting older. So, we moved to a different apartment on the first floor, but there wasn’t a ramp there either, so it was a long time, um, that we were petitioning our administration with the ministry of health and human services, so that they would build a ramp for us. So, they finally did it all, it took probably seven years to get it together. But—it worked out, I mean, I have my own ramp at home, and inside we remodeled so that, because the passageways were really narrow everywhere, there were really narrow doors.

So, then, we thought everything was really set up. I can get through the doors without a problem, I can get outside on my own. I mean, the problem that most people in wheelchairs have is that they can’t get out of their house, and, thankfully, I don’t have that problem.

C: Yes, a lot of people can’t get out of their homes.

V: Yes, REALLY a lot of people.

Vera was glad that the apartment her parents had, through years of work and organizing, obtained for their family offered her the possibility to come and go using a ramp.⁷

Vera's valuation of her family's first-floor apartment as accessible was part of a broader pattern ensconced in history of the desirable first-floor apartment in Soviet disability advocacy and law. She was not the only interlocutor to consider similar perspectives. Anya, the psychologist, moved to a new apartment during my fieldwork, noting that she jumped at the chance to spend her savings and buy when a first-floor apartment in her neighborhood became available. In spite of the fact that Anya used a power chair, she required assistance to get in and out of the front door, given a short half-flight of stairs between the building entryway and the landing to her first-floor apartment. Still, Anya considered that apartment to be more accessible, in that she did not need to rely on an elevator, and she imagined a possible future opportunity to build a separate ramped entrance to her apartment, as Vera had (see Hartblay 2020).

The idea of the first-floor apartment as a more accessible apartment than an apartment on a higher floor is a curious artifact of post-Soviet housing code, which also circulates in popular logic. On one hand, first-floor apartments are much closer to the street exit, and it is sometimes possible (if expensive) to build a private entrance with a ramp into the apartment, thus creating a fully wheelchair accessible passage to and from the street. On the other hand, first-floor apartments in Russia are not actually built at ground level, but half a story, or a flight of six steps plus a one- or two-step door stoop, from the street. Moreover, as Vova and Larissa pointed out, once you are inside an elevator building, any floor is wheelchair accessible.

Yet, several interlocutors noted the existing provision in legal code that those with mobility impairments should be entitled to a first-floor apartment. This observation was usually conveyed without a clear reference to the actual statue, and a raised eyebrows as if to say, but look how far that provision has gotten us, with our government as it is. In fact, evidence of the first-floor apartment idea can be found in Soviet newspapers dating back to the mid-twentieth century, when war-wounded veterans of the Great Patriotic War held a special status, and thus the moral standing to demand better housing (Tchueva 2008). While the word accessible (dostupnyi) was not used in Russian in reference to disability until the 1980s, a review of the digitized archives of several major all-Soviet newspapers demonstrates repeated claims made by veterans with mobility impairments for better housing, one characteristic of which was apartments that were more convenient to enter and exit (i.e., fewer stairs, not on a hill, and close to transit and shops).⁸ Certainly for five-story walk-up buildings, the first floor was indeed more accessible, and by the 1970s, entitlements were introduced, if rarely successfully enacted.⁹ This policy was documented in one 1972 article in the newspaper Pravda about infrastructural developments to make shopping districts more convenient for consumers.¹⁰ The concept of the first-floor apartment as the “apartment for invalids” gained new life in post-Soviet construction (ironically, including in elevator buildings like the one where Vova and Larissa live). Building codes introduced requirements to include at least one dostupnaia apartment in a new construction (more depending on the number of units), which typically was understood to be accessible in terms of having an accessible toilet and being located on the first floor. In this way, the notion that the first-floor apartment is “for” those with mobility impairments (whether war veterans, elderly, or otherwise) has been codified; at the same time, it is unclear whether adults with mobility impairments actually find these apartments desirable, or if they are even successful in acquiring them. Of all my interlocutors, not one had acquired such an apartment in a newly constructed building.

Stairwell Stories

The concept of the first-floor apartment as more convenient for mobility impaired Soviet and now-Russian citizens is rooted in a recognition, promoted by disabled veterans, that stairs are disabling infrastructure. As Vera pointed out, a central concern for invalidi with mobility impairments was how they would be able to get in and out of their family apartments. The architectural design of the entryway or shared staircase that led to the individual apartment doors in all of the various Soviet-designed apartment complexes were patently inaccessible. Most residents in Petrozavodsk in the early 2010s lived in apartment buildings, and the specific dynamics of getting into and out of those buildings were a major consideration when I asked interlocutors about their experiences of daily life with a mobility impairment. Interviews frequently turned to the subject the proximity of one's home apartment to the exit to the street.

FIGURE 8. An interior apartment building staircase in Petrozavodsk; these stairwells are the location for numerous comings and goings and various scenes of daily life. Seven steps separate each landing, with flights in alternating directions and one landing with a window between each floor. A person who is holding a large bunch of multicolor balloons with ribbons, as if for a party or event, descends the stairs. The stairs are worn concrete, with metal hand railings that are bent in some places and painted with a glossy finish. The walls are painted with the same color up to about five feet from the floor, and then are whitewashed to the ceiling. A large window casts light onto a tiled landing, backlighting the balloons and reflecting off of the glossy walls. No elevator is visible. Photo by Cassandra Hartblay, 2013.

Ethnographers have documented the peculiar nature of the stairways in post-Soviet buildings: They occupy a certain kind of spatial category that is neither public nor private in the US sense (Utekhin et al. 2008). When the buildings were privatized in the 1990s, the staircases remained obschestvenniye, although the apartments became private property. As a result, apartments were renovated internally, and even doors to apartments look different within the same staircase, as apartment owners purchased their own security doors in several different styles. The space of the stairway also became a particular kind of place—some frequented by smokers who ash into coffee cans or empty jars while avoiding smoking in their own apartments; others filled by a neighbor's well-tended houseplants; children's tricycles or sleds might be stored in one stairwell; another stairwell might be clean but empty; and still another might reek of urine and vodka.

This shared nature of parts of the building create hassles when it comes time to make renovations. This could be particularly frustrating for people with disabilities who want to renovate entranceways for accessibility purposes. Alina and Valya described one such occurrence:

V: Did you see how they redid the roof above our entranceway?

C: I didn’t notice.

V: They put the announcements up, but didn’t take them down …

A: The neighbors around here aren’t all happy with the renovation …

V: Well, I say to them, “Say thank you that they did anything at all!” So that the awning wouldn’t be crumbling down on anyone who was going in and out … how many kids does it have to kill before they fix it …?

C: It's good they redid them.

V: People are so dissatisfied around here. [impersonating a dissatisfied neighbor] “They didn’t do it right!” Well, I say: “Then you do it better!” The neighbor's son was asking me [mocking voice]: “Are you satisfied with how they did the new entranceway roofing?” And I told him that I’m satisfied with everything. And he goes to me, “Well what for, you’re not signing any documents.” And I say that I’ll sign whatever, and if he doesn’t like it, he can go and fix it himself.

They’re saying that they spent the money for nothing, but I say, they’re not just doing the awnings, soon they’ll do the driveway as well. And of course this comes out of the general housing fund. Soon they’re going to fix the second driveway.

Generally, some arrangement exists in which a resident acts as the custodian of all the stairwells for a block, collecting money from residents to keep the stairwells swept and washed, to repair the outdoor stoops, keep light bulbs changed, and to clear ice and snow from the doorway. As with anything, however, there are variable levels of functionality, often erring toward mismanagement.

The negotiating of coming and going, and the problem of how to escape life in four walls was particularly felt by my interlocutor Vakas. Although Vakas was ambulatory, his balance was off, and because of his brain injury, he tended to fall a lot. (He liked to regal me with stories of particularly nasty falls, pointing to the front tooth he had knocked out, which his mother had paid to have replaced at a private dental clinic). Although his family apartment was cozy and nicely renovated, his mother worked hard to support a family of four, and he often grew bored during the day. He and his father both spent most days at home, and according to Vakas, they often fell into conflict with one another, or retreated to their respective bedrooms to stay apart. Vakas would have liked to go outdoors, to sit in the courtyard, or walk around the neighborhood, but after repeated falls, and the problems that he sometimes ran into with strangers misunderstanding his slow speech (assuming he was slurring from alcohol) and often unusual ideas (the result of spending his days socializing only online without a peer group to let him know when he had gone down a rabbit hole), his mother forbid him from going out without a chaperone. As a result, Vakas was the most trapped in four walls of all my interlocutors. He frequently plotted escapes, and fantasized about living alone without his parents (even going so far as to make entreaties to a social worker to help him work out what such a move would take while keeping these deliberations secret from his parents, whom he was sure would forbid such a thing). Visiting Vakas, I sometimes made my way across his apartment building courtyard, buzzed in, took an elevator and a flight of stairs (for some reason I always forgot if the family's apartment was on the seventh, eighth, or ninth floor, and then had to walk a few more flights of stairs to find the right landing), and took off my coat and boots in the threshold, only for him to insist that I rebundle so that we could go back downstairs and sit outdoors for a time. Vakas made it clear to me that the barriers keeping him from leaving his apartment were not physical or material but social: The fights and emotional toll of upsetting his parents if he left against their wishes—scared as they were that he would fall or encounter some sort of trouble if he went out alone—were what kept him inside. For Vakas the stairwell, elevator, and courtyard were already “outside,” and to his consternation, were beyond the interior of the family apartment that his parents understood as the only place he might be totally safe.

Desiring Normal Life: Intersectional Strategies for Obtaining Better Housing

As anywhere, in Petrozavodsk, some apartments are more desirable and present fewer barriers than others. But how does one come to inhabit a particular apartment or acquire a different one? Typically, among my interlocutors with mobility impairments, stories about one's home included not only a description of what it took to go in and out of one's apartment but also a history of the family's journey to their current apartment that entailed a variety of trade-offs. The work of obtaining a new domestic residence was entangled with locally specific economies and systems of exchange, and post-Soviet logics of entitlements.

FIGURE 9. A view of a Petrozavodsk neighborhood. Snowy dirt driveways run between apartment buildings, garages, and houses under a winter afternoon sky. Photo by Cassandra Hartblay, 2013.

Some interlocutors without other financial prospects held out hope that their disability status entitled them to a socially distributed apartment. Alina and her mother Valya explained the waiting list for a government apartment to me during one visit to their shared apartment, while eating sweets and drinking tea in their living room. Their building was located in a factory region with only the minimum of local amenities—a small convenience and grocery shop, an elementary school, and a bus stop, and a fifteen-minute walk to a nearby factory.

Alina and Valya's experience of apartment destiny was perhaps the most starkly distressing—or at least, they were the most forthcoming of my interlocutors with their complaints. Unlike other families that I knew, they had no breadwinner. Alina received a monthly disability pension, and her mother received a monthly retirement pension. Alina's brother, in his early twenties, was not in a position to contribute much to the household, and he showed up only occasionally to eat and sleep. They had moved into the current apartment when Alina was a small child. They had opted for this far-from-the-center apartment instead of the previous apartment they had in the center of the city, which was too small for a family of four (her father was alive then) and located in one of the poorly heated old wooden houses that dotted the city in small clusters. The apartment that they were granted after moving up the waitlist of people entitled to housing based on social need was a communal apartment. Their family had three rooms, and they shared a bathroom and kitchen and entrance way with whomever was living in the other room. I had not realized the apartment was so divided; I assumed that the family had chosen to rent out a room for extra income. “Oh, no no no!” Valya told me, with the particular gleam in her eye reserved for moments to reveal injustice. “It might be technically illegal, officially communal apartments no longer exist, but WE live in one!” For the past seventeen years, they asserted, the family had been on a waitlist to receive a new apartment. When Valya scurried off to find the latest letter that they had received stating their place in the queue, Alina waived her hand in an expression of disgust: “It's barely moved in seventeen years!” Without the financial resources to rent an apartment at market rate, and frustrated that the Soviet system of distributing housing seemed to still exist in the form of the waitlist, but without an actual apartment forthcoming, Alina and Valya seemed resigned yet indignant, and expected that they would be living in their communal apartment for some time (they just hoped for “socially adequate” neighbors to be assigned to the other room, as over the years, certain assigned apartment mates had sometimes caused problems or behaved in ways that offended Alina and Valya (e.g., drinking and drugs).

Marina: Living Normally in an Inherited Apartment

During research for this project in 2012–2016, in spite of a period of relative economic stability in Russia (compared with the 1990s and early 2000s) and relative market flexibility compared with the Soviet period, housing scarcity remained a key factor influencing how residents of Petrozavodsk experienced their desire for what they imagined to be a normal living space. Scholars argue that since mid-century onward in the Soviet Union, the desire for svoi (one's own, that is, a single family's) apartment emerged as a primary element of what Soviet citizens imagined as the basic standard of living that ought to be acheivable (zhit’ normal’no) (in contrast to the early Soviet configuration of communal apartments) (Zavisca 2012). Yet, throughout the twentieth century and the following decades, the availability and cost of actual housing has remained illiquid, and most young Russian families in the 2010s did not have enough living space to zhit’ normal’no, live normally, nor the financial resources to acquire more spacious housing in a market with insufficient supply. Furthermore, the scarcity of housing made families hesitant to give up apartments that they do not need. This contributed to illiquidity, in that rather than selling unused apartments, instead, families prefered to maintain ownership, renting the apartment or unofficially offering it to family members who “officially” live elsewhere (Zavisca 2012). This strategy makes sense given that real estate was one of the only assets that remained valuable and in family's control through the upheaval and uncertainty of the post-Soviet economic transition (although many families did lose ownership of homes during this time). Housing market illiquidity makes it harder to move, which reduces the capacity to move to a more accessible apartment if a family member is experiencing disabling barriers in the current space. My interlocutors in Petrozavodsk who were not able to move apartments were more persistently disabled by their environment than their peers who had the financial resources or social capital to move in a competitive housing market. Also, moving was not always a sign of success, but sometimes a retreat to an older or less modern family apartment where one did not have to pay rent.

Marina and her ten-year-old son lived with her boyfriend in her inherited family apartment. For some time, they lived in one apartment, but they moved during the time that I was doing research, so that I visited them in one apartment in October 2012 and in a different apartment the following winter. The apartment, in a rundown building, was a long bus ride from the center of the city and had not been updated for many years.

Marina's son, who has DTsP (Cerebral Palsy), attended the specialized school for children with disabilities. He received a vigorous course of physical therapy at school, supplemented by Marina's implementation of various elements of physical therapy at home gleaned from internet research or talking with other parents. She managed, even living on a meager pension, to acquire a “home gym” for her son, a sort of indoor gymnastics apparatus. On occasions when I visited the family in the evening, I found her enforcing a daily regime of “standing” for her son. Although he was ten years old, he looked quite a bit younger and was small for his age. Propped up between the kitchen table and the wall, he was made to stand for forty minutes at a time, although he much preferred to sit. The family held on to hope that with continued physical therapy, his constricted muscles could be trained into the capacity to walk. In the meantime, family members carried him up and down the four flights of steps, under an arm, like a much younger child of four or five. He was just on the cusp of being too big to be carried. His tricycle and wheelchairs were stored on the staircase landing just outside of the apartment, for safekeeping, which therefore required a second trip, or two adults, to take him outside or to school.

Although the apartment was, on the surface, undesirable given its aging infrastructure and the distance from the city center, Marina explained how meaningful the apartment was to her in her childhood. She told me the story as she prepared tea in the kitchen on my first visit after the family had moved. During her early childhood, she explained, her family had lived in a barracks—emergency housing the Soviet government constructed in the immediate postwar period. With families clustered around bedding areas in undivided warehouses, outdoor toilets, and shared kerosene stoves, these barracks were very much stop-gap measures. Their family, she told me, really could not wait and was ecstatic to get this three-room apartment with a kitchen and indoor plumbing.

The apartment that her family eventually received was a top-floor walk-up in a four-story building in the Kliuchareva region of the city. Far from the center, the area was developed around two factories—a bread factory and a shipbuilding factory. Although the factories no longer operated at the same capacity now that they were privatized and food supply chains in the city had diversified, and although the region was far from the city center, the apparatus of residential life (most important, including public transportation) still served the region, making it a livable option. Today, numerous new housing projects are being built in this area, and the amenities and available apartments have attracted young families. The gas stove lines and indoor plumbing, which once were cutting-edge amenities, now (sixty years later) were markers of outdated modernity. As Marina lit the pilot, she recalled fondly: “This stove was the best thing we had ever seen when we moved into this apartment.” At the same time, the financial possibility that this apartment afforded a family surviving on a low income was an enabling factor that made living there preferable to other options.

These anecdotes illustrate the way in which the local personal histories of housing and inheritance have shaped the life opportunities of young people with disabilities in Petrozavodsk. Indeed, Marina inherited the family apartment, but ironically, with a son who had a mobility impairment, that apartment was on the top floor of an elevator-less building. As a working-class and sometimes single-parent family, Marina was largely priced out of the housing market in much of the city. For Marina and her son, as for many residents, opportunities to choose where one might live were few and far between.

Housing Fates and Normal Life

The logics by which interlocutors in Russia valued and desired particular living spaces have continued to be shaped by personal and political histories. When interlocutors talked about domestic living spaces, their stories were shaped by considerations of what elements of the material housing infrastructure were particularly disabling for them. Disabling barriers in the built environment of the home were material in two ways: (1) the infrastructure that presented barriers, and (2) poverty and access to social capital. Interlocutors occupied different relationships to an imagined normal, middle-class ideal of housing and domestic materiality, glossed as normal life. This imagined normal life for residents of Petrozavodsk in the 2010s—as for other Soviet and post-Soviet families—implicitly indexed ideas about Western European and North American middle-class life (Fehérváry 2013; Zavisca 2012). The concepts of “normal” were often understood in relation to images depicted in films and music videos from the West; at the same time, they were embedded in historically rooted understandings of norms for domestic life.

The stories that interlocutors told about disabling design were inflected with everyday logics of historical materialism inherited from Soviet rhetorical patterns for making claims about justice and about infrastructure, patterns of thinking about justice materially that endured as a legacy of socialist design ideology. Disabling structures in domestic residential buildings presented real challenges to social and political participation for interlocutors. The specific cultural history of the Soviet-built apartment building continued to structure how residents of Petrozavodsk in the early 2010s narrated housing stories: from communal stairwells and elevators, to advocating for or ignoring statutes that promised better access in first-floor apartments, the material conditions of daily life echoed with history.

For my interlocutors, the irony of fate is to wake up each day in a material space that was designed according to an ideology that sought to create a more equitable society through the design and distribution of space. However, the question of stairs as a disabling design element was not considered in Soviet architecture, and minor capitulations to veteran demands were rarely enforced. Examples of inaccessible infrastructure in apartment buildings circulated and continue to appear in popular mythology about the failures of the state to provide what is needed to live a normal life. The material afterlife of Soviet design ideology continues to shape social experience in a time when the rules formulating pathways to social equity have changed: when it comes to renovating, moving, or renegotiating domestic living spaces, the playing field is unequal. Intersectional familial considerations profoundly shape the possible egress futures that my interlocutors imagine and bring into being.

Inaccess Stories and the Material Afterlife of Soviet Dwellings

What is specific about the inaccess stories that these interlocutors in Petrozavodsk tell? What distinguishes them from the inaccess stories about places of residence that disabled people in other regions of Russia or in other parts of the worlds might tell? As we have seen in the case studies in this chapter, each of the interlocutors has continued to negotiate the material afterlives of Soviet design and centralized architectural planning in the ways in which they navigate the variable accessibility and accessibility of their home space.The culturally specific character of Soviet and post-Soviet apartment buildings has shaped the considerations, strategies, concerns, hopes, and desires interlocutors have about their homes. Vera and Anya imagined how first-floor apartments might become accessible, in part thanks to advocacy of disabled people during the Soviet era. Alina and her mother made sense of what it meant to desire a different apartment while living on a limited income in Petrozavodsk. Soviet designers imagined the room closest to the kitchen as a multifunctional living/dining/sleeping/socializing/tv room, in contrast to what they understood as petit-bourgeois backwardness inherent in monofunctional room design of early 20th century Europe; they designed and modular and multi-purpose furniture to meet this plan (Buchli 1997). Some of these inaccess stories shared a familiar congruence with inaccess stories of urban middle-class families in other regions. The inaccess stories about family homes shared by my interlocuters, however, were inflected by the material conditions of post-Soviet life that were deeply specific to this context.

In my broader consideration of inaccess stories that interlocutors with mobility impairments and their family members in Petrozavodsk told, apartment stories became a genre of consideration. The family apartment, Anya argued (in her discussion of accessible public space in chapter 2), played a central role in the capacity of each interlocutor to access the rest of the city. Accessible pathways, from a user's point of view, as she pointed out, started at your front door and went out from there. Getting onto the street from one's front door was a major point of consideration, as the apartment inaccess stories in this chapter demonstrate. Conditions of illiquidity, avoidance of market tactics to obtain housing (usually because markets were prohibitively expensive), an overall scarcity of housing, aging and inaccessible Soviet architecture, and a history of communal systems that made accessibility renovations to common areas difficult all combined to make the typical apartment in Petrozavodsk a disabling structure.

In this way, inaccess has emerged through a particular historical configuration of material objects, and socially coordinated infrastructure design and planning. The post-Soviet Russian patterns of dwellings and the manner in which housing is distributed has created a particular infrastructure of ableism. Interlocutors navigate this infrastructure, working with vastly different resources, managing their living quarters to their minimum disadvantage. These tales of how to navigate the ableist infrastructure of the Petrozavodsk housing stock offer important insight into the kinds of in/access stories that my interlocutors told. In chapter 4, I further examine Petrozavodsk access stories by considering the attributes of accessibility that my interlocutors valued and the specific vocabulary my interlocutors used to describe experiences of access. I contextualize the attributes of this access in relation to the ways in which access has continued to circulate as a metaphor and commodified abstraction in popular Russian culture.