Kommounalki, 2007
“As a provisional measure after the Revolution of 19717, the Kommounalkas (community flats), went through the whole 20th century and still concern 17 million of Russians. The Bolsheviks had to requisition the private homes and mansions of the bourgeoisie and others in order to alleviate the housing crisis due to the urban demographic explosion resulting from the upheavals in Russia.
In St. Petersburg and Moscow, the catch was substantial: two hundred and sixty, three hundred square meters where up to one hundred tenants of all ages lived. To make people forget the hell of this promiscuity, they ventured for a while to advocate this communal lifestyle as an antidote to the petty-bourgeois spirit. Survival, would the kommunalkas be the best key to understanding present-day Russia? “Michel Parfenov
“It is by entering their rooms that François Huguier completes a quest which, carried out throughout the world, always tells – with this taste for happiness and this way of standing on rubble without falling into misery – the same story of women, blood, flesh, the sacred, the secret”. Magali Jauffret
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