Tag #151094 - Interview #94394 (Maya Pivovar)

We lived with our parents in a huge communal apartment before the Great Patriotic War. There were five other families living there. There was a big kitchen in the end of a long corridor. There were six tables in the kitchen, one table belonged to each family living in the apartment. There must have been a stove, but I don’t remember. Each family had a primus stove [Primus stove - a small portable stove with a container for about 1 liter of kerosene pumped into burners]. There was no gas then. Gas appeared after the war. We had two rooms in the very beginning of the corridor. There used to be steam heating in this house in the past, but when I remember, for example, in 1932, there was no steam heating. There was a small stove and smoke from it was crawling to a neighbor’s apartment across the room: there were no chimney flues that were not necessary for steam heating. Probably, there was a smoke duct in another apartment, there was a tube going there and it dipped, this was such nuisance! I remember somebody brought potatoes to my father and it was dropped on the floor. I and our neighbors’ children used to bake these potatoes in a small oven. We had plain furniture: a desk, a divan with a high back and a cupboard. There was plain crockery. There was a plate-shaped radio hanging almost under the ceiling on the wall. We liked listening to the radio: there was always merry music on it. The desk was right beneath this radio plate and when there was an interesting program, I got onto this desk to be closer to radio to listen to the program.