Like in a CA, in a separate apartment, especially when it is not big and the number of rooms is less than the number of dwellers, family members living together perform all their daily activities in each other’s sight. In this sense, although members of one’s own family are not strangers to each other, their privacy is also relative. The privacy is then transcended in cases when the intra-familiar etiquette norms are violated and one’s personality is affected: say, the mother makes order in the drawers of her daughter’s bureau without the daughter’s consent. Let call it provisionally Privacy 1. A different kind of privacy (Privacy 2) is related to the forms of activity that are believed to require the absence of spectators (e.g., sexual intimacy, or defecation), or at least the absence of disturbing circumstances that would not allow to concentrate one’s attention (e.g., reading or studying). At the same time, there is another kind of privacy (Privacy 3), undetectable in the absence of strangers. Say, to stay in underwear or to quarrel may be acceptable among family members, but some people consider it impossible in presence of visitors.

Overcrowded conditions of living (see Scheme 3 of a room where a family of five lived) inevitably reduce the limits of the first and the second kinds of privacy: here a daughter may share the bureau with her mother, and her bed may be separated from the parents’ bed with a curtain. When several - more than two - generations of a family (or several kin families) live together, the members of the big family become grouped in some way and so feel different degrees of familiarity (or strangeness) towards each other. Such a room, or a separate apartment, thus becomes a reduced model of CA, where the third kind of privacy is also relevant inside of a closed living space. The difference is that not all CA neighbours are relatives.

The neighbours in CA are, in some respects, both strangers and familiars. The transparency of space makes them aware of each one’s live to a degree in other conditions available only to family members. They are always silently present. They recognise each other’s tread. Daily interaction in the places of common use inevitably makes some activities and states - in other conditions confusing if seen by others - acceptable in public. Otherwise these activities would not be possible to perform at all.

CA dwellers appear before each other without make-up. Dressing-gown or an old sporting wear is the everyday CA uniform, never used before strangers in the street or in office (a similar attitude to dress can be observed in hospitals). Undergarment vests are widely used without shirts over them; men often appear with naked torso in the public places, e.g., washing themselves at the kitchen. From time to time, one can meet people going from the bathroom to their rooms wearing but a towel around the hips.

The difference between strangers and neighbours is thus like that between a girl-friend or a bride whom her friend always sees beautifully dressed, and the wife whom in the morning her husband finds sleepy and with her hair in disorder. In CA, it is normal to see neighbours in such a morning state. If someone is uncommonly well-dressed, is brushing his shoes or is observing himself in the big antechamber mirror, neighbours can ask him where is he going.

Personal care procedures often are made in the public places, and sometimes with a neighbour’s assistance (see Fig. ___ for dyeing hair). Of course, most personal hygiene activities suppose privacy in a closed space, but a big amount of data illustrate the ways in which the relative individual privacy can be neglected for the sake of a common benefit, or a benefit of the victim of intrusion (correspondingly, here we have matter to observe so that to establish what is regarded as benefit). Violation of privacy even is normative in some cases. First of all, the fairness of sharing facilities is a more important value than a neighbour’s privacy: when someone occupies the bathroom or a toilet for too long enjoying a relative privacy, it is the violation of the fair order of temporal distribution of goods. Other people start to communicate with him through the closed door to inform about their rights. Queue situation, generally, can lead to a violation of privacy, as, for instance, when a neighbour stands by the side listening another tenant’s telephone conversation and showing his impatience.

Toilet is a good example to illustrate how privacy is taken into account in the communicative strategies in transparent conditions. The recognition of one’s privacy is expressed through the absence of verbal (or other) contact. However, the channel of contact remains active. The person inside the toilet is invisibly present outside. The neighbours outside the toilet know that someone is inside, and often do know who is. In their behaviour, they pay attention to this fact according to etiquette norms. Thus, for instance, they do not gossip about this men (though do gossip about others), except for cases when it is made intentionally so that to make him hear.

In a definite range of situations, this normally silent channel of communication is put into action. For instance, in cases of emergency favours: if somebody who is in the toilet is called by telephone, or if guests have come to visit him, or if meals are burning in his pans. The favour is a compensation for the intrusion. Note that those who make such favour receive certain benefits themselves which compensate the eventual confusion related to the role of intruder. They contribute to common order: the telephone will sooner be free; strangers will no more be present in the antechamber or on the landing, and burned dinner will not perfume the apartment. Moreover, since favours are thought to should be mutual, the receiver of the favour will feel himself obliged and grateful.

Daily interaction leads to an acquaintance with neighbours’ way of life, that is, with their occupations, possessions, schedule of activities, habits, family situation, tastes, attitudes and opinions. A good formulation of it has been proposed in one interview, cf.: “you are growing up in sight of other people. You know you’re evaluated every moment, from head to foot. What you are wearing, where your mother works, who comes to visit you. What you eat. Whether you have a spare time. What clothes you wash and what is your underwear hanging on the rope like.” One’s daily life seems to be glassy.

Among our informers, the overwhelming majority have at least once been in all the rooms of their apartment. When someone is absent from the apartment for more time than usual, as a rule, the neighbours are prevented and thus know where he is and how to contact him. Family relations, quarrels and child-rearing practices do not escape neighbours’ attention and often become the object of joint discussions or help.

Mutual help is a natural part of neighbours’ relations regarded as “normal”. This typically includes, e.g., control over and care for children when their parents are not at home, and care for neighbours who have fallen ill, or for disabled and old people. Meals are shared with them, some shopping (food, medicines) is done, not to say about calling for the doctor. Even if there is nobody ill or disabled, it is common to propose to those neighbours with whom the relations are “normal”: “Do you need something to buy? I am going to the market” or “Where is your garbage bag? I will take it out together with my one”. Normal relationship makes the private space of one’s room available, cf.: “I remember from my childhood that sometimes, when, say, we forgot the key of the room and having returned with my grand-mother after a walk, we had to wait until my mother returned from the work. We did it in a neighbour’s room. There were two such neighbours who used to let us stay for a while.”

Sometimes friendly services are systematic and fixed in form of an oral contract about baby-sitting, or (less frequently) washing dishes or/and clothes. These services are moderately paid with money, the sum of the contract being kept in secret from other neighbours. Another kind of services inside CAs, giving lessons and consultations to school-children or college students, is rarely paid with money, but remunerated with meals and gifts. The most wide-spread hired labour contract in CAs is paid communal tiding up (“uborka”), which gives some additional money to the low income tenants. To lend and to borrow small sums of money, without interest, is a common practice in CAs.

Not only everyday cares are shared by neighbours, but also leisure and holidays. Those neighbours who have “normal” relations and common interests may exchange visits, watch television, smoke or take coffee together, etc. Their children play together in the yard or at home. When the children thus grow up together, it is natural to know each other’s birthday date. Birthday and holiday (New Year) presents are usual between such neighbours. Note that all the described can transcend social, educational etc. differences between people, and even does not always imply a special personal sympathy. It means simply to be in a normal relationship, to be “a good neighbour”. At a funeral repast, where it is a custom to invite at least some of the neighbours who tell a couple of words with a small glass of vodka in hand, a woman said of the deceased: “She was so good a neighbour!” The deceased also was a daughter, a mother, a grandmother, a wife, a colleague, a friend, and a former student-fellow to other members of the audience. At the time, she was a neighbour for those people with whom she had lived together, and this opinion of being “a good neighbour” was no less meaningful than other people’s words about good daughter, mother, etc.

The “normal” relations among neighbours were (and still are) more characteristic to socially homogeneous CAs. However, today’s relative depopulation of CAs makes everyday life tensions less explicit and theoretically opens way to a more peaceful cohabitation despite of class differences. It is also worth noting that such communal friendship practically never includes all the neighbours of an apartment and traces limits between allied groups who oppose themselves to “dirty”, “boors”, “pretentious”, “drunkards” etc. That is to say, it would be erroneous to think that all the children play together. But their long story of living together contributes to the fact that love stories among neighbours are infrequent; the more so are marriages. For approximately same age people this may be somewhat like the diminished mutual sexual attractiveness of siblings, though social and other differences of families make this effect less pronounced.

Sexual life in CAs has its specialities due to transparency of the private, and to some extent has public character. Here is a typical situation for overcrowded apartment: “He gave up drinking and married a woman as big and fat as himself. She moved to our apartment. With his mother they lived in a small room with a plywood partition, in two tiny compartments. In order to give them possibility to make love a little, his poor mother, head of vegetable section of “Gastronom” shop near Finlandsky railway station, simply would go to the kitchen and drink vodka quietly from little glasses with Nikolai Mikhailovich, our Azeri, who also worked in commerce. She looked at her watch from time to time, as both she and Nikolai Mikhailivich were working people and got up early. Until ten o’clock she gave them time to love, and returned to the room by half past ten.” It was a common situation when newly married had a bit of privacy only because their relatives living in the same room temporarily moved to sleep to a neighbours’ room. It also was common for neighbours to take other tenants’ children for a night when their father returned from a long stay outside the home (the same for cases of festivities, when it was impossible to the children to sleep in the same room where adults got a celebration).

All in all, “privacy 3” as we have called the state violated by shame and confusion for incorrect appearence before strangers, has special configuration in CA. A newcomer feels himself highly uncomfortable. Thus, e.g., a newcomer young woman while placing wet clean clothes on the ropes at the common use balcony, put underwear beneath other clothes. The neighbours, understanding the cause of her confusion (the shame about exposing underwear to other people’s sight), tactfully remarked that in that way it would take much time to dry anything.

Until here we have spoken about the neighbours’ awareness of other tenants’ lives which is a natural result of personal interaction. This normal awareness and CA space transparency dictate the way in which one’s sense of privacy is constructed and then implemented in everyday practices. This sense of privacy in CA is sometimes also violated by intentional intrusions, secret or open. What it is known about other people’ lives seems insufficient to some neighbours who are more than others inclined to gossip and intrigue. This inclination is quite typical to CA mentality, being useful in a continuous fighting with neighbours for one’s rights to space, time, goods, privileges, personality and self-expression. To overhear intentionally neighbours’ conversations and to spy becomes a habit of such people. As one informer has said while characterising a neighbour, “She overhears openly at the neighbours’ doors, or listening for what one in saying by telephone, and then with a great pleasure communicates it to other neighbours in the kitchen. She says something like ‘I have just heard through the X’s door that they discussed you. I even stopped to hear it to the end.’ She has a special body posture when she stops at the threshold of her room on the way back from the kitchen. Turning her face to the door, she slightly bows forward and rests motionless for several minutes, listening attentively.”

This is not a sort of mutual surveillance regarded as a virtue in communist ideology and actively inculcated into the Soviet mentality. Today, this is made rather of pure love for art. Of course, in other epoch, the same character traits would lead such people to denounce “the enemy elements” to the authorities, either because of a honest ideological engagement, or - which is more plausible - as a tool in the fighting inside the apartment.

To discuss privacy in the Soviet culture is highly revealing in order to get an idea of the depth of the Soviet man soul. Thus, Oleg Kharkhordin in his topical paper concentrates his attention on the evolution of mechanisms of collective control of morality, ranging from “comradely admonition” to public exposure and blaming. He demonstrates that in official discourse everyday activities and personal life were not regarded as private. It was a public affair, and the collective should interfere in it in cases of moral transgressions.

In CA practice, moral transgressions often disturbe the neighbours not only morally, but also quite tangibly. In our days, one’s personal life is substantially privatised and hardly can be a ground for community interference. A community control of morals, though always present to some degree, in absence of ideologically and administratively supported authority is possible only to the extent to which the community can enforce its will. Thus, e.g., when CA collective becomes smaller in summer, the apartment is almost empty. The behaviour of men whose wives are on holidays with children at the village involves more drinking and more night life than in other seasons. The presence and the authority of the neighbour women who rest at home in summer is not enough to prevent the violations of order. An example is an openly negative attitude of a CA community to a man who, accompanied by a more wealthy friend, made use of “night service”, that is, prostitutes on call. Informants tell ironically about the men’s telephone negotiations late at night - and thus disturbing those neighbours who could hear - concerning the parameters of girls they needed. Some neighbours had to react to the door-bell ring and to open the entrance door to the girls. Verbal quarrels in the morning, the only thing the neighbours could do, were useful but to let out the irritation. Actually, the community voice was enough only to ban the girls from using the common bathroom.

In the last decades, with the social control of everyday life substantially decreased and the communal life more relaxed, an important characteristic trait of CA mentality became emphasised in the relations inside the apartment. This aspect always existed as a compensation of denied privacy, as a way of self-assertion in the transparent environment of envy. It is the drive for theatrical presentation of oneself and one’s possessions, that is, boasting intended to provoke envy. Today, it is a relatively safe play with the dangerous consequences of envy. The envy is caught within the etiquette norms of everyday interaction. For some people, boasting is the way to show that they live “as the other people do”, that they are not worse than others (see about imitation in the chapter on envy). For some other people it is a device of self-identification, opposing themselves to others. Cf. an eloquent passage from a perspicacious speech of an informer: “I was already a big girl, Ignat <the informant’s elder son> had already been born. And on my kitchen table I could have a big pile of dirty dishes. And I could sit on this very table and swing my legs, smoking. To confess it frankly, the motive was not very nice one. It was a show. Before these poor neighbours, who are not worth to make show at. Nevertheless, here am I, making a show: ‘I am free, I can swing my legs and smoke, and you, you do, please, wash your dishes that are so dear to your heart. As for me, I am different.’“ Consciously or not, this aspect of behaviour is a result of the constant state of being watched, as if being constantly on stage.

Anything able to be informative can be used intentionally to inform. In the glassy circumstances, these possibilities increase significantly. All which is known about someone works for his image, which also may be designed intentionally. One can boast, openly or covertly, of all which constitutes his life and distinguishes him from other people - or, at least, shows that he is “not worse”. The guests who visit him, or the dress he wears. A custom involving, perhaps, an unconscious drive for a show can be observed in CAs, as it is well outlined by an informant:

“If someone is about to go somewhere - this is equally valid for all neighbours - to the theatre, to a visit, somewhere else, it is sure that he will pass by the kitchen, apparently to take something or for any other purpose. This is in order to show that, ‘look, I am not always wearing a dressing-gown’. With ear-ring, in full camouflage, high-heeled.”

Cf. another significative passage: “Another thing are these constant communal telephone conversations, as one can say something special, loudly. “Today Larisa and me go to BDT <Bolshoi Drama Theatre>“ - , says she <neighbour woman Zoia> so that all can hear, all our wretched and miserable people: Tamara, Verikundov, Anna Matveevna. It’s clear that it’s meaningless <because they do not go to BDT>, but she, nevertheless will say... Or Larisa who was telling by telephone how a white “Mercedes” met her in the airport after her wedding. That is, telephone is a sort of instrument to communicate with neighbours, not only with those whom you call to. Of course, they only published their successes.”

To sum up our brief consideration of presentation of oneself and one’s possessions in everyday CA life, all of which are associated with envy and privacy, let us formulate a somewhat general model. We find four categories of behaviour related to possession and to envy (plus jealousy) as a psychological correlation of possession. These categories (BOASTING, MODESTY, SHARING, PILFERAGE) form a semiotic square of categories which we think has something to do with covert level of conceptualisation of this domain in CA mentality (Table 4). See below our Essay on theft for some additional information about the fourth category of our square.

Table 4.