What if Barbie and Ken had lived the Soviet Union? Russian photographer Lara Vychuzhanina has depicted the world's most famous doll couple first made by a US toy company back in 1959 in the environment of a communal apartment (Kommunalka in Russian), where many families in the USSR resided from the time of the October Revolution all the way up to the 1980s.
In communal apartments, the inhabitants shared the kitchen, bathroom and toilet.
Photo: Barbie hangs laundry in a kitchen.
Photo: Barbie hangs laundry in a kitchen.
The communal apartments came into being when, due to the housing shortage after 1917, several families were accommodated in large apartments of the rich. In a shared apartment, where there could be up to twelve rooms, there were usually three to seven families, but sometimes more.
When several families lived in one apartment, they had to have a timetable for using the bathroom or the kitchen. They also used to share household duties.
Photo: Ken reads a tiny copy of the newspaper "Pravda", the "voice" of the Communist Party.
Despite the fact that electricity was cheap in the USSR, residents of communal apartments carefully calculated the price and, for example, installed their own separate candlesticks in the bathroom or in the kitchen in order to pay only for the electricity they themselves consumed.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev’s regime "embarked upon a mass housing campaign," to eliminate the persistent housing shortages, and create private apartments for urban residents.
The photographer made tiny copies of real food from that time: a fish bowl, a pyramid-shaped milk carton, a pack of "Prima" cigarettes, a can of beef and a bottle of "Russkaya" vodka.
Some Russians still live in communal apartments, with most of them (around 100,000) being located in the historic city and the so-called cultural capital of Russia, Saint Petersburg.
