The Twilight Watch

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THE GENUINE OLD communal courtyards in Moscow’s apartment blocks disappeared sometime between the eras of the two popular bards Vysotsky and Okudzhava.

It’s a strange business. Even after the revolution, when for purposes of the struggle against ‘the slavery of the kitchen’, they actually did away with kitchens in housing blocks, nobody tried to get rid of the courtyards. Every proud Stalinist block that displayed its Potemkin façade to the broad avenue beside it had to have a courtyard – large and green, with tables and benches, with a yard-keeper scraping the asphalt clean every morning. Then the age of five-storey sectional housing arrived – and the courtyards shrivelled and became bare, the yard-keepers who had been so grave and staid were replaced by yard women, who regarded it as their duty to give little boys who got up to mischief a clip round the ear and upbraid residents who came home drunk. But even so, the courtyards still hung on.

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