Ilia Utekhin

The Danger of Purity

A special arrangement intended to maintain the clean state of CA is the tidying up performed by turn (“kommunal’naia uborka”). During the turn, a definite family or person has certain obligations and responsibilities, within which is the regular performance of the following procedures of collective hygiene:

a) regular sweeping (the corridor and antechamber, the kitchen);

b) washing the floors (same territory plus toilets and the bathroom; in case of parquet floors in the corridor, they are not often washed, but instead are covered with floor-polish substance and polished);

c) washing the sinks in the kitchen, the bath and the w.c. pans;

d) bringing garbage buckets to the dump;

And some facultative obligations, such as:

e) emptying ash-trays, polishing the (copper) taps with a cloth up to lustre, etc.

In the last decades, “d” and especially “e” have almost disappeared. “D” became rarely met because the whole system of garbage removal has changed, and the scraps are not kept in the special buckets on the staircase any more (the removal of scraps once was the obligation of the dvornik, that is, of the garbage-collector taking care of the yard and the pavement at one or several buildings). Today, each family has its own plastic bag or bucket for garbage and brings it to dump separately. The bags are placed in the kitchen or in the corridor by the room’s door. If the scraps in a bag start to produce an intense smell, the neighbours notice the bag’s owner of the necessity to throw it out as soon as possible.

With the density of the CA population falling, the rhythm of the performance of duties has changed. Daily washing or polishing the floors is practically gone, nor sweeping is performed daily. The more typical is to perform all the work on cleaning up the apartment twice a week, except for cleaning the bath (it is made once in the end of the turn). A special attention is paid to the final cleaning of a turn, when the next person should formally accept the clean state of the apartment and to assume responsibility for this state. These days, the acceptance is not often strict and involves almost no checking: “when all is ready, we say to the neighbours: ‘We have passed it to you’. They don’t go to check it. Because it’s clear, I think.” Indeed, it is obvious in the state of the floors and in the smells (of cleaning substances; or just in the absence of unpleasant smells). Nevertheless, sometimes the take over of a turn can become a tool in interpersonal fighting, and more or less just accusations in having left dirt here or there are exposed by those who take up the turn. Even if the person on duty is really trying to achieve the best result - which is not always so - , the communal cleaning (“kommunal’naia uborka”) cannot be very thorough, as the property of other tenants placed everywhere in the apartment hinders in getting to all the corners. The state of the bath, sinks and the w.c. pan is sometimes so neglected that the cleanness cannot be but relative (e.g., the drainage is not sufficient because of obstructed sewers; the taps have continuous leakage that tint and damage the sink’s surface, etc.).

Many of everyday CA habits are directed to minimise the sweeping and cleaning work: slippers are used by most tenants, smoking areas are limited and provided with improvised ash-trays (e.g., used cans). Spitting and throwing waste papers, matches etc. on the floor, typical for the same people on the staircase or in the street, is not characteristic for their behaviour in the public space of CA. In case if any minor alternation of the normal state of environment is produced by someone, it is usual to amend it immediately: thus, the water drops on the kitchen floor after washing dishes are to be wiped by the author with a common use floor-cloth.

Right after the cleaning - made by oneself or by a safe neighbour, as not all the neighbours clean the bath good enough, using chlorine or modern cleaners - the bath is regarded clean. It can be then filled with water so that to take the bath inside. Usually it is made for little children, and the first in enjoying the virgin purity of a recently washed bath is the person who has performed the cleaning. Other days, the neighbours limit themselves with shower, standing in a small basin or a tub put inside the bath, or on a special wooden grate, or even right in the bath. The last variant is not frequent, because people washing themselves in tubs and basins regard the bath dirty and try to not touch it while washing or showering (similarly, while washing dishes and tableware, people do this in their own basins put in the sink; when a recently washed fork or spoon occasionally falls to the sink, it is immediately washed up again). Children acquire this habit because since infancy they are washed in special children’s tubs, usually plastic, which are almost necessary element of a CA bathroom landscape (see Fig__). The tubs are put inside the bath under the tap, and parents prevent children from touching the bath. Their own tub is clean, the common bath is dirty.

This combination of the clean and the common can also be traced in the toilet, where the common w.c. pan is dirty, but individual lavatory seats (kept on hooks or nails on the toilet walls) are clean. It is interesting that the sense of purity is felt strong enough to ensure the correct use of the seats: it is impossible to control which seat is used by the visitor of a closed toilet. Socialisation practices involve an important moment of initiation of the young to the common toilet use. One day children stop using chamber-pot and begin to go to a common toilet. The parents say: “Now when you are big enough you’ll go the toilet”. Children are being authorised to use their family seat, and the usage of pot is reduced to night time. During a more or less long period that precedes this day, children wash themselves their chamber-pot, so they gradually become aware of the adult toilet practices. Today, family or personal seats are less spread than formerly; more often the seat is common for all the tenants and is permanently fixed on the pan, while the private hygiene is provided by means of old newspapers, strips of which are kept is a special bag inside the toilet, on a wall or on the door. The users take this paper strips and put them on the seat, in order to not enter into immediate bodily contact with the impure common seat. Then the paper is removed and discarded, sometimes in a special bucket, as throwing it into w.c. pan may produce obstruction (and so a quarrel).

Turning back to personal hygiene, let us remark that bathing in the common bath filled with water (not in a basin or tub put inside) is a luxury that the tenants cannot usually afford, not only because of not very clean bath, but also because it would hold the bathroom occupied for a long time. The said refers only to those neighbours who do actually take bath and shower, themselves and their children. These habits are by no means spread universally.

The more so, as not in all big CAs there is hot water supply in the bathroom. Some people go to public baths, while the others prefer to warm the water up in pans on the cookers, for washing themselves and for laundry. In one of the two dozens of CAs we have observed, a geyser fuelled with wood still was in a working condition, but practically in disuse; at the same time, there was no gas geyser in the kitchen. To install a gas geyser in all the CAs with no hot water in the bathroom would be, of course, possible and not too expensive even for not wealthy people. See the chapter on conflicts for the answer to the question why is this relatively simple modification not always put in practice; another explanation fits better into the account of hygienic ideas in CA mentality: hot water from the tap, in the kitchen and in the bathroom, is not bad. Useful, but not indispensable.

To take shower weekly, on weekends, is the most common hygienic rhythm in CAs. On this background, a more intense bathing may be suspicious: “This Natasha, she must be a dirty woman; she has a shower daily”. A “clean” woman can manage without daily washing; in part, because the make-up could last longer than when it is each time definitively spoilt when the face is washed daily.

Among those tenants who use bathroom, everybody have their own basins and tubs. However, the bathroom being a closed room with a door-bolt, the neighbours enjoy a relative privacy and it is not possible to control the proper use of basins for washing and laundry. A secret use of another tenant’s tubs, soap, tooth-paste or detergent is quite common and may often be a source of conflicts. At the same time, a tub can be shared openly, but not by the whole collective of neighbours: as with some other facilities, two (rarely more) families having friendly relations come to an agreement and use the same tub, basin, or garbage bucket.

Some people make no use of bathroom at all, except, perhaps, for laundry (if it is allowed to make laundry in the bathroom) or taking water into pans or buckets. The neighbours try to limit the access to bathroom for CA drunkards and, especially, for their visitors. It is understandable, as their guests mainly belong to the category of “bomzh” (= tramps, or homeless beggars), or simply are drunkards, all of which can eventually disturb other tenants. As we will see later (see the chapter on deviant behaviour), even heavy drinking is not deviant in itself; only being a way of life (leading to degradation) it makes a person marginal in the CA community. Many people are taken for normal neighbours regardless of their everyday drinking. They are clean. But those who here are referred to as “p’ianitsa” (= drunkard) have acquired a special marginal status due to their behaviour and way of living: they have no constant work, are always begging money, etc. They are dirty and untouchable, and that is why we mention them while discussing hygiene. The impure status of the drunkards is emphasised by many details: they never wash themselves, their dress is almost always dirty and rarely changed, their body smells more that it is accepted for clean members of community, their meals are fetid and the kitchen needs an urgent ventilation when they are cooking half-rotten fish on a rancid oil. They use mainly the “black entrance” - because they are so closely related to the beggars’ life taking place in the yard and in the black staircase, and because they often have lost the key of the main entrance door. At least a part of the neighbours avoid communication with them and confess that feel hatred. After a drunkard has used the telephone, it is wiped with a rag. His room is regarded, first, as a breeding place of cockroaches that are always present in the kitchen, but can be absent from some individual rooms, and, second, as the head-quarter of bed-bugs (“oni k nam ot p’ianits polzut” = “they creep to our rooms from the drunkards’ ”; see the white lines around the sinks on Fig. __ , these are traces of so called “chalk against cockroaches” containing insecticide). Drunkards’ intents to use the bathroom for any purpose can meet other neighbours’ disgust or a direct prohibition.

Personal hygiene practices greatly depend on social and age group of a tenant, and here any generalisation would be erroneous. Nevertheless, some typical features can be observed, especially in the public character of many practices. Tooth-brushing is not uncommon; it is performed both in the kitchen and in the bathroom, as well as washing the face and hands. To wash hands after using the toilet and before meals is a spread, but not universal habit. A small piece of soap intended for common use (lavishly left by some generous neigbour) can often be found in the soap-tray attached to the sink in the kitchen. The towels are usually brought from the rooms and not left in the bathroom, at least in big CAs.

Clothes before laundry are usually kept in the bathroom or in the corridor, in baskets, basins, or inside the washing machines. Many elderly tenants, however, remember the times when people did not have dirty clothes in the bathroom (it was even formally prohibited) and express their discontent with the current state, when soaked washing in basins fills much room and perfumes the air. In the past times the bathroom often “was only for washing, no laundry...”. The ropes stretched across the bathroom are used to dry clothes (and wisps of bast used for washing, Fig. ___). The radiator in the bathroom can be used for drying footwear or the floor-cloth.

As we have remarked, not always personal hygiene has something to do with the bathroom. People who do not often wash the body sometimes resort to alternative ways of body care like wiping the body with eau-de-Cologne. Deodorants and perfume are used mainly by the young and middle age generation. Anyway, the local standards of body smell make only the absolutely exceptional - and the drunkards’ - cases be noted and commented by neighbours; the smell - of sweat or perfume - felt at the common distance of conversation (80-100 cm) is rather normal. This makes a contribution to the specific smell of private rooms, distinctly pronounced in lower class families, drunkards’ and old people’s rooms.

Another important ingredient of rooms’ smell is produced by domestic animals. These are cats and dogs, and, less often, birds kept in cages. At the same time, more that once we met the situation when peasant fever of some tenants provoked them to arrange, during the spring months, a CA division of their village cottage farm (where they move to in summer). Along with rows of little boxes with seedlings in their rooms and in the kitchen, rabbits in cages appear, or even chickens or young quails; there were several dozens of them in an observed case. These animals fill their owner’s rooms (and adjacent corridor space) with a farm smell; another inconvenience for the neighbours are the birds’ peeps and cries. This example is not typical, it rather shows the limits of the possible; the limits include today what was definitely impossible some fifty years ago. But the tolerance of the neighbours in that case is revealing. It is only partly, however, that the tolerance originates from hygienic notions: it has been repeatedly discussed by neighbours that the birds brought dirt to the apartment which was met with evident disgust. The majority of neighbours would willingly denounce the birds’ owners to a sanitary authority, but they do not. As we will demonstrate, the violations of norms (hygienic norms among them) form a delicate balance, to which establishment and maintenance many factors contribute.

It is typical that domestic animals cause problems when their existence affects CA public space. Cf. a passage from interview: “...I was so angry that almost ready to kill him <a neighbour> because he was against my having a doggy. I got a little doggy, a miniature Pinscher. And so he used to say: “What do you have animals in the apartment for?“ And look, when I come from a walk and wash these little paws, he says: “Susanna, do you think it is possible to wash dog’s paws in a common sink?” So I say that this is not the sink where we wash dishes, but that one where the buckets, floor-clothes etc. are washed. And you, Nikolai Alexeich, don’t you wash your galoshes here, do you?”

One of important details is the dissimilation of the sinks according to what is washed where. The floor-clothes, footwear, buckets or chamber-pots are not to be washed in the same sink where people wash the tableware and take water for cooking. This rules is followed by most tenants, and its violation is met with intense emotional reaction. Of course, all this refers to CAs where two or more sinks are available. In the Figs. ___ you can see the kitchen where only one of two sinks is adequately used, but the evident inconvenience of this situation in the eyes of the dwellers goes not far enough. Cats’ basins are also washed here, as would be washed dog’s legs if there would be dog.

Although some neighbours protest against domestic animals being in the apartment, the general attitude is mostly tolerant. In big CAs, the cats’ and dogs’ owners often prefer not to let their pets move freely by the apartment, and even do not let them leave the room. The reason is fear that something can happen with the animal - and, in lesser degree, fear that the animal can disturb the neighbours; this last feeling may be absolutely absent, as some people regard as quite natural their pet’s right to walk through apartment. Even more tolerant is the people’s attitude towards homeless cats living on the service staircase - and in some buildings, on the main staircase.

When on the same staircase there are both CAs and private apartments, we can see a clear-cut distinction of mentalities. The typical communal dwellers’ feeling towards the cats who live in the service staircase (where the black entrance gives access to) is compassion. They always put the rests of meals, scraps, bones and entrails on the floor of the staircase landing, sometimes on a piece of paper. They say poor cats suffer much, and so people are trying to help them with food, sometimes even leaving old clothes on the window-sills or radiators, so that the animals could lie upon them. The children know the cats and greet them. CA mentality regards the dirt, smell, and the excrements on the staircase as an inevitable by-product. The lack of light is, of course, very unpleasant: one can slip and fall. But anyway, we live together in this building, people and cats, and we should tolerate each other and even make something for mutual help. “If there had been no cats, can you imagine how many rats would we have here?“ This coexistence is considered as natural, no contradiction is found to the local ideas about hygiene. The dirt from animals is bad and unpleasant, but is not regarded as dangerous. On the contrary, human excrements are seen with indignation, though not leading to removal of the cause of indignation.

At the same time, strangers are usually shocked with the black staircase. Even the “uchastkovyi” - a district responsible police officer whose duty is to visit big CAs where drunkards and hooligans live that are registered in the local police department - may avoid using this staircase because of the smell of urine, human and animal. An opposite to CA mentality (in what the cats are concerned) is that of private apartment dwellers. They express hatred and indignation when see how people share food with the cats on the staircase: “You are yourselves creating the problem. With your own hands you are putting the shit on the staircase where you then slip and fall. These are your children who have allergic reaction to the cats. It would be more human to sterilise, or even to exterminate them. Anyway, they would be suffer hunger and diseases. You cannot take them home.” Within this view, the coexistence with cats is not mutually profitable, or at least, neutral and natural, but is rather leading to a common suffering and thus is openly dangerous. The experience of private apartment living, with all the personal responsibility for the comfort and hygiene in the individual living space, make the people think correspondingly: CA apartments’ dwellers are lazy and dirty fellows, indifferent to the anti-hygienic conditions of their lives.

This is, obviously, not so. They simply trace another limits of property and responsibility, and have slightly different ideas of the normative. We have already discussed the reactions on the appearance of human excrements in different places (see above the chapter on space): a CA building staircase is practically equivalent to the street in what the hygienic attitude is concerned. You cannot do anything, so you would better adopt an ironical position, cf. the following passage from an interview: “Right after Zoia Levonovna [armenian elderly women who calls herself “refugee”; moved to St.Petersburg from Baku in 1990] had moved here with her family, she slipped on a piece of shit in the main staircase and got into a hospital. She was there for some time, as she had broken her leg. Since then she tells this story to everybody, with evident pleasure, because she believes it well expresses her attitude towards this building and this disgusting city.”

Another interview illustrates the attitude towards the same problem, but inside the apartment, in the public space:

Note that the informer woman is squeamish enough to have a used foil bag put on the hand, like a glove, while going up by the staircase, because she finds the banister dirty. However, it does not prevent her from assuming the disgusting obligation to clean up her neighbours’ excrements from the floor in the corridor. And this is not the duty on turn, not a public obligation, but rather a personal reaction to an extraordinary situation; in cases of less serious accidents the cleaning is usually undertaken by the person on duty, according to the turn.

Not only drunkards are sources of similar disgusting problems, but also old people who form a considerable part of the CAs’ population. When they have relatives in the apartment, the care in whole and in public hygiene questions is performed by the relatives (similarly, when someone’s drunk guests vomit or urinate on the floor of a toilet, the host of the party is responsible). A neighbour can approach an old woman’s relative to say: “Look there what has your grandmother done. Poor creature!” It is natural to humans to be old and helpless, and so to disturb other people. In CAs, this understanding and tolerance are typically spread not only on one’s own family members, but on the old neighbours too.

To conclude this brief account of some aspects of hygienic ideas and practices in CAs, let us formulate a general observation: the collective maintenance of public space in an acceptable state of purity is performed through collectively distributed effort and distributed responsibility. The distribution is temporal, and the main responsibility is temporarily delegated to a member of the collective. The community accepts the principle of the least sufficient effort.

This last conclusion is not so trivial as it may seem. It means that no one in the community tries to make his best while performing communal tidying up; the community does not demand it. To wash those things which are not usually washed, or to clean better than usually, may be regarded as a mere show, cf.: “In the first years [of my living here] I tried to wash the arch [in the corridor, made of beautiful carved wood]. Once I heard behind me: “She’s showing on”. Or that “if she really wanted to wash, she would do it while other people are at work, and it is six o’clock now...” - and [they didn’t notice] that I have a little child, and that I live according to his schedule... No, “she just wants to bother other people, so that to show...” They blamed me once, and twice, and three times. At the fourth time I thought: “Let this arch be in peace, God with it”.

The “acceptable clean state” of public places is, however, a well definite order of cleanness. People recognise that this level is not the highest possible. It varies across CAs, but is enforced in each of them.

Private space and practices are up to a private person, who can try to accomplish his eventual maximalist ideals of cleanness within a separate room. But he usually has no authority to seriously modify the common places’ hygienic balance.

An extremely clean state is dangerous because it is to be lost inevitably. And you cannot control this inevitable loss because of the common way of use. Extreme purity is also irritating because it provokes fear to soil. And, thus, it is but an abstract idea. It would be senseless to try to achieve it: such private achievement would have no public meaning. A newly installed bath is fit for bathing inside it during the first day only; then it will need a previous cleaning with detergent. And such a cleaning is made mainly for oneself, even being a part of “kommunal’naia uborka”. Purity is a part of privacy; the public will always remain slightly soiled, even in the most clean places.

The windows in the common kitchen are generally washed before Easter (in the Soviet period, they were before May Day), but they are never washed so thoroughly as in the private apartments or - sometimes - in the individual rooms of CAs’ dwellers. The italicised word “sometimes” means that private space hygiene in CA is also influenced by Living Together.