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This chapter draws on the memories of Soviet citizens themselves, presenting the results of a series of in-depth interviews with people who, between them, lived through the full range of Soviet housing possibilities. Interviews were carried out in Moscow and St. Petersburg between March 2002 and May 2006, with a total of sixteen people. All but one of the respondents had experience of communal living. The neighbours were the most important and, usually, the most difficult aspect of life in the communal apartment. Violence was sometimes a problem in communal apartments. It is suggested that women who were unable to find husbands in the post-war decades might live their entire adult lives in hostel accommodation. The move to the single-family apartment made child care a more pressing issue. The importance of housing, and the ways in which the housing shortage distorted people's intimate lives are shown.

This chapter investigates the early Stalin era and the launching of the first Five Year Plan. It also describes the renewed enthusiasm for communal living which accompanied the Plan. The first Five Year Plan generated considerable fear. Housing management played a major role in identifying likely candidates for disenfranchisement during the first Five Year Plan. Communal housing and plans for the reconstruction of byt enjoyed a much greater level of official support. The development of gigantic new factory enterprises across the country was one of the key features of the first Five Year Plan. Rabotnitsa stressed the particular benefits of communal living to women. It also reported with enthusiasm that workers were coming round to the idea of communal living. The inadequacies of domestic facilities meant that most of the women living in Magnitogorsk continued to act as domestic servants.

This chapter examines the retreat from ‘new byt’, charting the ideological transition from the promotion of communal living to the revival of the individual family and, in theory, the individual family home. The commitment to communal living and communal housing came to an end, and the individual family apartment was now proclaimed the ideal form of housing. Rabotnitsa was less willing than Ogonek both to abandon the principle of communal living and to go along with the fantasy that ordinary families could really acquire single-family apartments. Rabotnitsa also provided a number of examples of successful ‘socialist initiatives’. Anti-egalitarianism justified huge differentials in housing provision. Many of the short stories in Rabotnitsa and Ogonek present family life as subordinate to the demands of industry and making it clear that good citizens should be willing to neglect or even discard it if it interfered with work.

Housing policy in reality amounted to simply trying to deal with the housing crisis in the cheapest way possible. It was claimed that women had the most to gain from communal living. The ‘Great Patriotic War’ resulted in enormous damage to the housing stock. It also led to the drastic depletion of the population. Both led in a need for more and better housing. Communal housing continued to exist alongside the single-family apartment. The Soviet Union may not have succeeded in bringing about genuine communal living, but it did bring together people from very different professions and educational backgrounds, placing them in the same districts, streets and apartments. Housing remains a problematic issue in post-Soviet Russia, but in a different way; instead of the ‘equality in poverty’ of the Soviet period, there is now a sharp differentiation between the housing of different socioeconomic groups.

This chapter covers the Great Patriotic War and its aftermath, up to the end of the Stalin era. It also addresses Ogonek and Rabotnitsa and the wartime journal Leningrad. Moscow and Leningrad had become rivals even before the war. Ogonek and Rabotnitsa paid less attention to the agonies of Leningrad and its citizens than might be expected. Rabotnitsa did take up the theme of female heroism in Leningrad, reproducing the transcript of a Leningrad radio broadcast in which the female narrator talked of housewives manning barricades and running factories and sacrificing themselves and their families, sometimes quite literally, to the war effort. Ogonek also printed a few articles on the Leningrad siege, one of which described the devastation wreaked by a Nazi shell on ‘a densely populated communal apartment’. For Soviet Jews, communal living was particularly unpleasant in the post-war years.

This chapter considers how the study of Roman baths and bathing customs is related to public latrines and their use. First, public latrines have become more common in baths and within urban settings. The increasing frequency of toilet services in cities was becoming a part of Roman cultural identity, much like baths. Second, the existence of baths and public latrines in Roman cities is very to be related to the social custom of communal living for an expanding urban population. Third, simultaneous improvements in Roman building technology also have contributed to the building of baths and latrines in cities. Developments particularly related to the production of more durable concrete allowed for increasingly larger, more elaborately designed, and more lasting structures. The final and perhaps most important reason for explaining the spread of baths and latrines relates to the influences of trade and travel, since these two are most often the mechanisms for technology transfers.

After a brief historical overview of how the communal life and ministry of Catholic sisters have changed over the centuries, the chapter charts generational differences in the kinds of communal lifestyles and ministries that sisters prefer today. While few respondents of any age in the 2009 survey preferred to live alone, younger respondents tended to prefer living in larger groups than older respondents did. In comparison, respondents in the earlier survey who had entered their institutes between 1965 and 1980 were less likely to mention the attraction of a communal lifestyle. Similar differences were found for ministry preferences: Younger age cohorts in the 2009 survey were more attracted by opportunities to minister in common; the type of ministry their institute performed was less important to them.

This chapter discusses the social dynamics of sectarianism, and introduces the main religious groups mentioned throughout the book. It describes special teachings these groups have developed about their second and subsequent generations, and the ways they choose to integrate the new generation. The communal lifestyle provides advantages, but there are still different styles of accommodating children.

This chapter examines the temporal encounters of the Vilnans. Members of the five Christian confessions and three religions organized their communal and more private lives according to a wide range of daily, weekly, and annual rhythms and calendars. The chapter considers how this fact structured their coexistence within the walls of a city that also functioned by a clock and a calendar that were obligatory for all in certain aspects of their lives. Hence, matters of time and space often coincided for the Vilnans, making it necessary for them to address problems arising from systems and habits of marking time that both brought them together and set them apart.

This chapter turns to food cooperatives established during the 1960s and 1970s. It discusses food co-ops as one of the many social movements of the time, and the challenges the co-ops faced during the 1980s and 1990s. In some ways, these new wave co-ops' initial goals resembled those of the 1800s: to demolish capitalism, to create communal living, and to eliminate profit. Most co-op founders and members in the 1960s and 1970s were college students, and although they had insufficient business know-how, they made up for it with their hard work and idealism. The 1960s also ushered in the ecology movement. Consumers were concerned about the prevalence of false advertising and labeling of foods. When large food companies lobbied the Congress and the Food and Drug Administration to prevent accurate labeling of food products, the food co-ops responded by selling organic produce from local farmers and boycotting certain products.

This chapter focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson's mentorship of poet Charles King Newcomb. Before analyzing Newcomb's poetry and his immersion into transcendentalism, it considers Emerson's attraction to Newcomb's Coleridgean aesthetics and mysticism, including his sense of hell and sin. It then examines Newcomb's “The Two Dolons” and concludes by describing the poet's stay at Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts as an experiment in communal living.

This chapter introduces the theories of Karl Mannheim on generational change and outlines the characteristics of different generational cohorts of Catholics in the United States. The implications of different generational cultures for Catholic religious institutes are explored: how generational cultures influence the reasons for entering a religious institute; the types of prayer, ministry, and communal living desired; and the aspects of their religious vocation that each generation of sisters finds to be the most challenging.

Chapter 1 covers Latrobe’s early life from his birth in 1764 in a Moravian community, his rebellion against the church, and his expulsion from a seminary in Barby, Germany. It describes his thirteen years in London where he studied architecture and engineering and set up his own practice. Latrobe achieved success as an architect in London, but amid the successes there were disturbing signs of his inability to manage his financial affairs, especially when the city experienced an economic downturn. He continually complained that his Moravian background had sheltered him from negotiating the realities of finance. The chapter also describes his marriage and the devastating death of his wife and third child. Suffering from this loss and forced into bankruptcy, Latrobe made the decision to emigrate to the United States.