>10 and having to find a spot to do your homework while your parents' flatmates are having a "marriage crisis psychotherapy session" over vodka.

Raises hand it me! it me!

To be honest, it was fun at that age, many fond memories. We head great relationship with (most of the) flatmates, which included two very sweet old ladies: an X-Ray technician in one room, and a retiree who eventually moved out and rented her room to a couple with a kid in another. There was also an alcoholic with his wife, and his daughter's family living in a different room - we didn't really talk to either.

Showering was a complex process, because not only one needed to figure out the time sharing, but also the water heater was a tricky beast. Known as 'kolonka', it didn't have a tank: the water was being heated in the pipes as they ran over gas being burned (very common back then). It was hard to get the temperature to be consistent; it had to be a two-person operation, with one person in the shower, and another manning the kolonka. The toilet, thankfully, was separate from the shower (as is common in Europe), which allowed for some degree of parallelization of the person hygiene streams.

The kitchen was huge, and had at least four stoves. No (figurative) bottlenecks there - but that's where you'd bring the (literal) one.

There was only one telephone line, with a rotary phone to match. Anyone would pick it up, and call out loudly to see if the callee is at home.

Everyone fed the cat.

I was lucky to have my own room: my parents' room was large enough that it could be divided into two rooms and a small corridor with an honest-to-God wall. The other couple with a kid also had a large room, but theirs was divided with a bookcase. It was a very old building, the ceilings were 4-5 meters tall, and if one went creative, one could easily build a loft - but no one did.

We moved out when I was 11. The apartment, which housed five families, was consolidated into a regular apartment and sold off to someone rich - just as it was before the Revolution. Everyone got enough money for their rooms to buy an apartment further away from the city center.

That was one aspect of living in the early 90-s that is not coming back soon: there were no rich neighborhoods. There were (newly) rich people, but they didn't build out enclaves yet; everyone was mixed together. The historical center was rather dilapidated, and the people who lived there came from all walks of life. I came back 15 years later, and the city felt like a Disney-fied copy of its former self: clean and painted up, but much less alive.

We moved into a newly-built highrise, with a great view from the 9th floor, and a boiler that had a tank. I finally felt comfortable inviting friends over to our place.

We remained friends with most of the flatmates, and visited each other in the years after. The communal get-togethers (i.e. people staying in the kitchen smoking and talking about everything ranging form world politics to personal things) were a missed aspect.

The X-Ray technician worked for as long as I could remember, which, I think, how she maintained a clear mind going into a very old age. The other one didn't fare as well: she got scammed out of her apartment, IIRC by someone who got some sort of guardianship arrangement with her (help with basic necessities and whatever old people need) in exchange for inheriting the apartment. The arrangement, ad well as the scam, were common at the time.

She was found in the streets, not being quite coherent, and somehow, the police reached my father, who had to take care of the situation. We found out she had an estranged daughter in Moscow, who didn't want to have to do anything with all of that. And so we were the closest people she had left. My father arranged for the old woman to be put in a mental health hospital, which was probably for the best. Whatever was left of the Soviet healthcare system at least meant that you didn't have to pay for it.

In retrospect, another downside of getting our own place was that flatmates having a "marriage crisis psychotherapy session" were, most often, my parents. I could always go either of the old ladies' places in the communal apartment to weather out the storm. At the new highrise, I didn't know who our neighbors were.

Ultimately, I don't know if it even made my parents much happier. I think, in the end, it was just not that important. The reason, I feel, is that the Soviet work ethic was, in its idealized state, very Protestant in spirit: one was to find their self-actualization in work. "From each according to their own abilities" and all that. Things like housing conditions and personal relationships were, ideally, secondary. "Why? Because we are the pilots, and the sky is our home. Airplanes come first, girls come second", went the popular song, which, by 90s, was utterly obsolete.

Most of the people weren't quite sold on that, but quite a few were. Some never changed. And, as many articles here on HN discuss, tying one's happiness to work and success leads to a predictable crisis.

But, having grown up, and having lived with and without roommates in the US, I do agree - that's a substantial difference.

The thing that determined the dynamics of the communal flats the most was that people usually owned their part of the flat (post-USSR), and so were much more invested and tied to it. Even more so in the Soviet times: it was very hard to change your housing (not impossible, and there was a black exchange market, but something that required a lot of effort). So people in communal flats were stuck with each other over a span of decades.

My family lived in a communal flat for 12 years, most of it with the same 4 families. So yes, very different from the way people live with roommates.

That whole 'kommunalka' model obviated itself by the end of the 90-s.