The communal apartment is unusual because it brought together families of vastly different educational backgrounds, attitudes, ethnicities, and life habits. These people had nothing in common except for the intimate spaces that they shared. Usually, each family lived in one room, with the kitchen, hallway, lavatory, and—in later years—bathroom, as highly contested public spaces. Communal living was the combined result of rapid urbanization and explicit social policy. New housing construction in Russian cities could never keep up with the massive population influx from rural areas, which increased dramatically with Soviet industrialization campaigns. Revolutionary goals of suppressing the bourgeoisie and nurturing the Soviet "new man," who was supposed to be trained to participate joyously in collective existence, led to this quintessential form of Soviet private life.

Beginning in the late 1950s, the government began building housing projects at the outskirts of major cities. People could get apartments there, generally through their places of work. But waiting lists for those "private" apartments (the adjective meant "not communal") were very long, and for decades many residents of "kommunalki" found themselves stuck in their small rooms in these overcrowded urban flats.

Forced to cope, residents devised a variety of strategies for maintaining order, for defending their own personal spaces, and for negotiating control over spaces that were shared. The resulting way of life was a core experience for generations of Russians, and is background, and sometimes foreground, to all of Soviet high culture.