Did you know the top floor of Moscow’s GUM once housed a large communal apartment?

The country’s main department store, located right on the Red Square, wasn’t always exclusively a symbol of the abundance of industry and trade in the Soviet era. Apart from deficit goods and its exquisite interior, one could, at one point, have found… a regular communal apartment inside!

Nikolay Kubeev/TASS

In the 1920s, the top floor of the ‘Glavny Universalny Magazin’, aka ‘GUM’, where its warehouses were located, was refurbished as a communal apartment, due to the lack of housing. It housed 22 families of the most regular Soviet people. And, if you think they were lucky to live with a view of the Kremlin, think again!

Yes, stores, a hairdresser, a printing house and foreign language courses operated right under them, but this place was barely suitable for life. The communal housing had neither a common kitchen nor gas nor toilets. They had to cook right in their rooms on kerosene stoves and use the public toilets of the department store. At the end of the 1930s, a paid sauna opened in the basement of GUM – that seriously lightened the everyday life of the tenants.

GUM

Library of Congress

Not everyone was lucky with their view from the window, either. For the majority of the communal apartment windows led not even outside, but inside the building. Every morning at 8 am, the department store would open its doors and the tenants could check their watches by the sound of the stomping feet of those who were rushing to take their places in lines.

Repair work in GUM

Archive photo

Only in 1953, after the death of Stalin, were the tenants of the department store resettled into apartments that were better suited for life, while the GUM also ceased to be someone’s home.

If using any of Russia Beyond's content, partly or in full, always provide an active hyperlink to the original material.