Living in a Common House

Common houses were a model in Soviet Russia, where people or families coming to a city needed a place to live, but the local authorities couldn’t give them an apartment (yes, apartments were free in USSR and were given out to people in need) so they gave them a room in a such a house. In the photo above, you can see a plan of the floor of the house. The numbered squares are the rooms on the floor. It is just a room, no bathroom, no kitchen, just a plain space to live with usually one window and a door leading to the long hallway. The hallway itself leads to the sides of the building where usually the common kitchens and bathrooms were situated. Yes, one or two bathrooms for the thirty five or more rooms. Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, people as a rule started turning these rooms into their private property. So now, these are in private hands, but still they have one bathroom and one kitchen on each floor.