Russian publisher Alpina Non-Fiction has released an excerpt from author Svetlana Voroshilova detailing the realities of housing, public baths, and sanitation in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg.
The excerpt comes from Voroshilova's book, In a Horsecar Without a Smartphone: How to Survive in Pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg, which examines urban life in the former Russian capital without modern conveniences.
Rental advertisements in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg contained no information regarding the floor area of apartments. Both tenants and landlords were unable to state square footage without consulting legal documents.
Instead of total floor area, advertisements listed the number of rooms and windows. Natural lighting was a critical factor for tenants before electricity was introduced into residential homes.
Floor preferences changed over the course of the 19th century. In the first half of the century, second-floor apartments were the most expensive. By the end of the century, third and fourth floors became the most valued because elevators were installed in high-end buildings, sparing residents from climbing stairs.
Increasing street traffic also reduced the appeal of second-floor living due to the noise of carriages and horsecars, as well as street odors. Apartments situated directly under roofs remained non-prestigious.
St. Petersburg remained relatively low-rise at the end of the 19th century, with only one in ten buildings standing four stories or higher, including suburbs built with one and two-story structures. Four-story to seven-story buildings became common in the early 20th century.
Tenement Layouts and Courtyard Design
Apartment values depended heavily on whether a flat was located in the main building or a courtyard wing, whether access was from the street or the courtyard, and whether windows faced the street or an enclosed courtyard well.
Some architects designed buildings to maximize rental revenue. Architect Boris Gershovich designed a tenement house for Yulian Bak at 24 Kirochnaya Street, connecting the main building and courtyard wing with galleries on the second and fifth floors. The galleries allowed courtyard wing residents to use the front entrance, raising rental prices.
Tenement builders also constructed cour-d'honneur yards enclosed on three sides rather than four. Facing all three wings toward the street increased overall apartment value and offset the cost of unbuilt land.
Large apartment layouts relied on enfilades until the mid-19th century. Street-facing wings contained two parallel enfilades, with formal rooms facing the street and living spaces facing the courtyard. Courtyard wings had a single enfilade with formal rooms at the front, living rooms in the middle, and kitchens and utility rooms at the end, offering no personal privacy.
Corridors were added to enfilade apartments in the second half of the 19th century. Initially used by domestic servants, corridors allowed room doors to remain closed, and builders began constructing apartments with isolated rooms in the 1880s. Large rooms were reserved for expensive master apartments, while economy flats remained compact.
Water Supply and Public Bathhouses
By the end of the 19th century, 64 percent of St. Petersburg apartments had running water. City authorities had rejected running water proposals in the 1820s, ruling that the city was adequately supplied with water. Private water systems began operating in the 1860s before being purchased by the city in the 1890s under the City Executive Commission on Water Supply of Saint Petersburg.
Running water was more common in the city center than on the outskirts. Water deliverers transported water in color-coded barrels, using white barrels for Neva River drinking water at five kopecks per bucket, and yellow or green barrels for cleaning water drawn from rivers and canals. Cleaner spring water was available at higher prices.
Only 13 percent of residential spaces possessed bathtubs in the late 19th century, mostly in multi-room master apartments. Water was heated on stoves and poured into tubs manually until wood-fired water heaters were introduced later in the century.
The 87 percent of residents without bathtubs relied on public bathhouses. About 40 public bathhouses operated in St. Petersburg in the mid-19th century, increasing by six by the 1870s, with each establishment serving an average of 14,000 residents across four pricing tiers.
Visitors to lower-tier bathhouses frequently washed their laundry on site. Bathhouse owners petitioned the police chief in 1842 against clients using facilities as laundries, but owners eventually permitted the practice.
Surgeon Boris Rubinstein recalled in his memoirs that his family had no bathtub in early 20th-century St. Petersburg despite being prosperous. Rubinstein noted that his family used a commercial bathhouse opposite their home, where four classes cost 5, 10, 15, and 20 kopecks. The 20-kopeck gentleman's bath provided velvet-covered sofas and mirrors, with attendants available to wash clients, trim nails, and cut calluses for about 50 kopecks total, while common patrons in five-kopeck baths washed shirts and drawers.
Before municipal water networks expanded, 18 bathhouses used Neva River water in 1871, while others drew from the polluted Ekaterininsky Canal. The arrival of piped water allowed all bathhouses to access Neva water regardless of location.
Bathhouse Regulations and Luxury Facilities
Author Alexandre Dumas claimed in his novel The Fencing Master that 300 naked men, women, and children bathed together in St. Petersburg while police ignored the mixed gathering, but Voroshilova's book notes the account is fiction.
Historical records show city authorities enforced strict separation of sexes in bathhouses under a 1743 Senate decree and Catherine II's 1782 Police Ordinance. In 1824, Interior Minister Vasily Lansky complained to St. Petersburg Military Governor-General Mikhail Miloradovich after seeing an advertisement in Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti for Tal's baths at 60 Moika Embankment, which advertised 20 family baths alongside male and female sections.
Tal submitted a written pledge to authorities confirming that family baths were restricted to same-sex relatives, allowing the business to operate until 1917 and later continue under nationalization as the Gorokhovye baths.
Palace bathhouses emerged in the late 19th century. Architect Pavel Suzor designed the Voronin baths at 1 Fonarny Lane, featuring fountains, three marble pools with artesian water, hydromassage showers, Louis XVI-style decor, bronze chandeliers, and Venetian glass.
Sanitation, Laundries, and Water Closets
Apartment buildings without indoor plumbing featured basement laundries equipped with boilers, washing tubs, and rinsing tanks. In the absence of tanks, residents carried laundry to wooden rafts called portomoynya on local rivers, while clothes dried in attics. Household laundresses or day workers were hired to handle the manual labor.
Water closets spread across master apartments and mid-sized units in the late 19th century, but remained rare in cheap one-room flats.
Buildings lacking toilets used open-drop latrines located in stairwell alcoves or outdoor pit latrines in courtyards, with an average of six latrines per yard. By 1900, 22 percent of courtyards contained shared water closets.
St. Petersburg lacked a centralized sewage network, forcing flush toilets to drain into courtyard cesspools. Some landlords illegally diverted cesspool pipes into storm drains, discharging waste into city waterways and causing disease epidemics. Commercial toilet paper was introduced to St. Petersburg in the early 20th century as an exotic novelty.
