Sentence examples for communal flats from inspiring English sources

In 1950, as in 1940 and 1930, they had been wearing hand-me-downs and living for the most part in squalid, crowded "communal flats" carved out of antiquated pre-revolutionary buildings.

After getting the population out of overcrowded, subdivided communal flats and into purpose-built apartments with their own front doors, the planned economy could finally move from "quantity" to "quality".

It's difficult to exaggerate just how huge a social advance this was for Muscovites; not only in the sense of amenities, but also in that a private life was now possible, after three decades where the majority had been living in cramped communal flats, one family to a room or worse.

Yet, Khrushchev was a man of the people: his housing policies enabled millions who used to languish in communal flats, huts and basements to get free apartments; he put an end to Stalin's virtual "serfdom" in the countryside; and he tried to reform the economy and the party's vertical structure.

They effectively had none — no families of their own, no money, no worldly possessions to speak of, just the acrid smell of their tiny rooms in decrepit, overcrowded, communal flats — and no realistic expectations of any kind for a better, more dignified future.

In the 1950s, the Soviet Union began mass-producing cheap, prefabricated housing to accommodate millions of people who had been living in overcrowded communal flats and even in cellars and dugouts dating from World War Two.

Our Ukrainian neighbours in the communal flat would have borshch for breakfast.

For most residents life in a communal flat was -- and remains -- one of the lower rings of purgatory.

"To be a true citizen of St Petersburg, you must have shared a communal flat, and you must have visited the roofs".

The family flat where my father had stayed as a schoolboy had been divided and was now a communal flat in the Soviet manner, with families at loggerheads over use of the kitchen.

According to Chirkova of the Shostakovich museum, to create the Mussorgsky museum, Rostropovich arrived one day at the rooms of the communal flat and cajoled the residents into selling with a bottle or two of vodka.