Poor living conditions in the Soviet Union

See ‘Without the Banya We Would Perish’ Review: Sweat Like a Russian “Either socialism will defeat the louse,” Lenin famously declared, “or the louse will defeat socialism.” The louse won. Book review of Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse by Ethan Pollock
by Gary Saul Morson. 

"In the first years of the Soviet Union, typhus and other epidemic diseases took millions of lives, and communist officials placed their hopes in new bathhouses. “Either socialism will defeat the louse,” Lenin famously declared, “or the louse will defeat socialism.” The louse won. As late as 1965, when typhus was spreading in Moldova, there were still so few banyas that residents of the capital, Kishinev, could bathe, on average, once every 150 days.

Right through the 1970s, most Soviet citizens lived without indoor plumbing. Even in 1991, when the Soviet Union ended, many who did have indoor plumbing had to share it with several other families in a communal apartment. As long as the U.S.S.R. lasted, banyas were a necessity, but shoddy construction and Soviet inefficiency guaranteed that there were never enough. Every five-year plan promised ambitious banya construction, but we can infer how few were built when Mr. Pollock reminds us that “hardly a month went by in the 1930s without an article in either Pravda or Izvestiia announcing the completion of a banya in some part of the USSR.” As the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov observed, “red tape triumphs” while “the people become encrusted in filth.”

As anyone familiar with Soviet institutions would guess, most banyas were “under repair” at any given time. “In 1946, if all the banyas were running smoothly, people could bathe in a banya only once every 60 days on average,” Mr. Pollock explains. But all the banyas did not run smoothly: “In the city of Kaluga plans called for its only two banyas to provide 500,000 cleanings in the first half of 1946. Instead they provided only 172.” Workers, waiting hours in line only to find there was no more hot water when their turn came, complained of a “banya famine.”

Throughout the Soviet period it remained common to use unfiltered water, polluted with human and industrial waste, and Mr. Pollock mentions a banya that got its water from a swamp. Sometimes Soviet officials built banyas with no source of water at all. In city after city, the boilers exploded."