22:10 - Part I - The Crooked Chain of Ghosts

Chapter 2

The iron-framed and worn concrete stairs bellowed loudly off the crumbling plaster hallway as Nikolai barreled down them. At the bottom floor, he passed under the checkered shadow of a cobweb hanging between a naked bulb and the wall as he reached for the door handle and stepped outside. The apartment building was considered too old to be outfitted with a numerical keypad and magnetic lock. There was no button to push, just the handle with a loose latch below. So it was with the old Khrushchyovki estates.

Nikolai felt the crunch of icy sludge under his boot. The temperature had been shifting back and forth throughout the afternoon and into the evening as the cloud cover came and went. Some scattered patches of grass were layered in fine, slightly impure snow. But the sidewalks had not so easily surrendered their little remaining warmth in the concrete. The flurries had fallen, melted, frozen, and, after being trampled and crushed, they froze again. Somewhat miraculously, the icy mix was mostly still white and only beginning to show the inevitable browning from the mud below.

Nikolai crossed the common yard with its pieces of jungle gyms that had fallen into disrepair. Once they had been colorful, vibrant, and filled with neighborhood children at dusk. Nothing had been replaced since, at least, the early 1990s, and all of those children, who had memories of playing in this courtyard, had long since grown up. The rubber seats of the swings had rotted and disappeared; the paint had cracked and fallen off; and any remaining sturdy bits of metal had long been whisked away in the middle of nights gone by whenever someone had needed scrap.

He glanced back up at his kitchen window as he walked. The light was still on, but Tatyana had disappeared. Then he looked around at the pale-amber, glowing patchwork of windows in all four apartment blocks. A few had elegant chandeliers that seemed to outsize the rooms they were in. Even though the apartment complex was not low-income housing, the ostentatious displays were sour to him as awkward overreaches of upper-middle-class status in order to offset the aged and shabby building exteriors. Nevertheless, vacated apartments were occupied again within days due to their prime location between central Moscow and the suburbs, despite only month-to-month leases because all four buildings would be gone without a trace by the end of the following year.

Not many outsiders realized that the city of Moscow experienced a profound population boom during the 20th century: from 1 million to nearly 11 million in eighty years. Shortly after the 1917 Revolution, the number of new Muscovites began to spike. After World War II, the line on a population chart of the city was completely vertical. The growth had become particularly acute in the 1950s as a result of Stalin's industrialization. This exponential influx of urban population set off a housing crisis.

In the early 1960s, Khrushchev ordered another massive wave of housing construction so that each Soviet family would reap a seemingly inconsistent benefit of victorious Communism: their own exclusive, personal space. Khrushchev actively distanced himself from Stalin's "excesses," and the criticism extended into architecture. The new apartment estates were lauded in the press as a stroke of genius for their simple practicality. Two rooms and a kitchen. "Proletarian housing for a robust proletariat," they editorialized.

The speed at which the apartments were to be erected and the resulting cost were monumental undertakings. Cheap construction methods, cheaper materials. The Khrushchyovki were built from prefabricated concrete panels made in city factories, assembled on site, and covered by bland, brown brick with signature red stripes at the top and bottom. One five-story solid rectangle after another appeared because Soviet standards only required elevators in buildings six floors and higher.

The Khrushchyovki were designed for thirty-five years of use, at most, by which time they would have been replaced by much better housing indicative of the rapidly nearing realization of the Communist ideal. Party officials had stood at podiums, pounding their fists in the air and stirring the crowds: "The exploitation of the working class might put a car in every garage of some Americans, but in the USSR there will be a roof over every head!" Housing was tangible propaganda.