My Building Has Every Convenience

Armenia is a country of varied locales, including villages, towns and cities.  Reflecting this variety is the different conditions in which people (including we volunteers) live.  And one of those that is common is Soviet apartment buildings.

This could be anywhere in the former Soviet Union

Most common are the Khrushchev era buildings known as “Khrushchovkas”.  The origin of these building is as follows (thanks to Wikipedia):

To ameliorate a severe housing shortage, during 1947-1951 Soviet architects evaluated various technologies attempting to reduce costs and completion time. During January 1950 an architects' convention, supervised by Khrushchev (then the party director of Moscow), declared low-cost, quick technologies the objective of Soviet architects.

The Khrushchovka design was an early attempt at industrialised and prefabricated building, the elements (or panels) made at concrete plants and trucked to the site as needed. Elevators were considered too costly and time consuming to build, and according to Soviet health/safety standards, five stories was the maximum height of a building without an elevator. Thus, almost all Khrushyovkas have five stories.

Krushchovka in Yerevan

 

Typically these buildings do not have a common lobby so there are many entrances to different areas of the building.  To find someone’s apartment, you must first know which side of the building and which entrance to use.  While they seem to have been clearly marked when built, many of the signs are now gone.  Therefore, getting directions is a challenge and usually involves directing people past multiple grocery stores, laundry lines and trash receptacles. Once you find the entrance, the quality of the door is variable also.

Security is not a priority

At least this one has a number

More often than not, I have to duck through the entrance of these buildings.

 

A lot of times I see resident listings inside the door.  There must have been an expectation of permanence since all of these signs I have seen are painted on wood, therefore not allowing for changes so if you are looking for someone who is a rental tenant, you will not see the name there. Inside the front door, you will also see mailboxes that don’t seem to be used, electric and gas meters and – in some buildings – a list of tenants who are late in paying their utilities. Some have garbage disposal chutes while in others you need to carry trash out to an external dumpster.  From what I have seen, the trash chutes that exist go to an area on the ground floor that may or may not be emptied regularly.

As a rule, the stairs are uneven.  Someone once told me that Soviet building specifications included the number of steps in a flight of stairs but nothing about the stair height.  As a result, you may see a very short step seemingly tacked onto the top of one to meet the quota.  

I have been in some of the buildings that have elevators.  In every one I have been in, pushing the call button won’t do anything if the elevator is already in motion so you need to listen for it to stop and then push.  They tend to be very narrow and any seem to have been designed to prove that three is a crowd.  In some cases, the elevator stops at the floor you are going to, while in others there is a landing between floors and you go either up or down the stairs to get to your destination.

 

Everyone owns their apartments and seem to put in their own doors, so they don’t all match although there are several styles that seem to be popular.

It is unclear to me who (if anyone) is responsible for the common areas, so I usually see worn out paint and exposed wiring but no functioning lights in the stairways so a flashlight is a good idea after dark. Any windows in the stairwells normally no longer have glass.

 

With unmarked entrances, the lack of names on doors, the lack of lighting, losing count when walking up multiple flights of stairs (floor markings are scarce also), taking an elevator that doesn’t stop on the floor you want and the commonality of doors, it is pretty easy to wind up in the wrong place. More than once, I have knocked on a door and been greeted by a confused look from the resident who was not the person I was expecting to see.

Inside the apartments themselves, it is a mixed bag.  If the family could afford to renovate, there may be modern appliances, nice bathroom fixtures and other nice features.  Most often, though, especially with rental units, everything is a wee bit dated. Some buildings have a common layout, so I have been to two apartments in separate buildings in Sevan that have identical floor plans.  Some have seemingly random rooms and oddly placed toilets compared to where the bathroom is.  

Kitchens tend to be functional and some can be roomy (by New York standards, at least).  While there is usually a stove and oven, they don't always work so electric ovens and propane stoves are pretty common.  The sinks tend to be pretty small.

 

When looking to rent an apartment, it is crucial to ask about the water schedule.  Depending on where you live, you may have water all the time, several hours a day or not at all.  In Gyumri, one of my fellow volunteers has water two hours per day while I have it 24/7.  A volunteer in a village an hour away has to carry water from a pipe on the street up four flights to his apartment.  In another village near him, a water truck comes in periodically for the residents to draw from.  All of this adds to the challenge of washing dishes in a miniature sink.  Buckets and barrels of stored water are the norm.

The bathrooms are more of a challenge.  Living on a water schedule not only makes bathing difficult, but also flushing.  Some store up water in buckets, some use the bathtub.  The faucet for the sink is sometimes the same faucet for the tub which makes filling buckets somewhat easier. 

As to the tub itself, Wilikpedia offers the following:

Khrushchyovkas featured combined bathrooms. They had been introduced with Ivan Zholtovsky's prize-winning Bolshaya Kaluzhskaya building, but Lagutenko continued the space-saving idea, replacing regular-sized bathtubs with 120 centimeter (4 foot) long "sitting baths". Сompleted bathrooms cubicles, assembled at a Khoroshevsky plant, were trucked to the site; construction crews would lower them in place and connect the piping. Some theorists even considered combining toilet bowl functions with the shower's sink, but the idea was discarded.

With regard to the last line, all I can say is that I am glad that common sense prevailed. Here is a picture of one of the sitting baths mentioned. 

 

Heating also varies by building and what the family can afford.  Some have gas heaters, some electric and some just put up with the cold.

Also notable about these buildings is that many were designed as "disposable" with 25 year lives.  Given that the Soviet Union has already been gone for 21 years.....

It is also interesting to see how the standards evolved over the course of the Soviet period as many pre- Khrushchovka buildings survive today.  In real estate listings, you see buildings described as “Stalinist” and those are comparatively nice.  The ones I have been in have large rooms, high ceilings and the buildings have some character to them (reminding me of the desirable “pre-war” buildings in New York to an extent). Beyond that, they have many similarities with the later models – multiple entrances now lacking markings, unlighted stairways, unmaintained hallways, etc. They were discontinued during the Khrushchev era due to the unnecessary cost of the decorative elements.

When you rent an apartment here, you (usually) get it fully furnished.  This can include multiple sofa-beds (likely because Armenian families often have many people in one home and also to provide for visiting relatives), odd assortments of dishes and old clothing.  There is usually a locked room where the landlord will put away things that are not part of the rental but it is always an adventure to see what was left for the tenant to use.

In Gyumri, there are many of the Stalinist buildings (such as the two pictured above) and the five story Khrushchovkas.  Virtually all of the higher buildings collapsed during the earthquake, but there is a cluster that somehow survived even though everything around them was devastated.

Anything constructed after the earthquake has been limited to five stories and some are quite modern. There are areas being developed to provide long-overdue permanent housing to the people living in domiks, but they are a fair distance from the center of the city.

Mush II District

In the past few years, there has been a building spree in Yerevan and many of the buildings have real conveniences like central heating.  With prices that rival parts of the US, you can imagine that they are not selling too well.

So, yet again, I find myself happy for what I have.  My Gyumri apartment is comfortable and I still have my place in New York that I look forward to going back to.  And no matter what may happen when I get there, I can guarantee that I won't be complaining about it much.