How Thirty People Can Share an Apartment

Abstract

There were 30 of us, in 10 rooms. My family lived in a 10-square-meter room in which was enthroned a very high couch. My mother’s first husband had a shop in Odessa, couldn’t stand that it was expropriated during the Revolution, started drinking, and finally died under the wheels of a tram. Then my mother, paradoxically, married a staunch communist, who was a party member, which did not stop him from living in communal lodging. Only the Nomenklatura’s top echelon escaped this fate.