Communal flat museum in St Petersburg

In brief, if you are choosing where to go. The communal flat museum in St Petersburg is apartment 34 in building 23 on Rubinstein Street. Sergei Dovlatov lived here from 1944 to 1975. The flat is communal to this day: the museum occupies some of the rooms, neighbours live in the others. That is why visits are by prior booking only — there is no walk-in admission, and there will not be.

The shortest way inside is the museum tour: about an hour, 993 ₽, daily at 11:00, and from 1 September also at 16:30. No prepayment. Choose a date.

A communal flat is not a style of interior but a way of living, one that lasted seven decades in Leningrad. One kitchen for seven families, one lavatory, a queue for the tap, a light bulb on the shared meter, conversations through the wall that cannot go unheard. A communal flat museum tries to show this — and here the genre’s main fork begins.

Most such museums are reconstructions. Premises are chosen, walls are aged, wallpaper is brought in, objects are gathered from private collections. The result is convincing and often touching, but it is an exhibition about communal life staged in non-residential premises.

The second way is a genuine flat: the very one where all this happened, with its layout preserved, the same stove and the same doors. Such places are very few, because the communal flats of the centre were long ago emptied and turned into upmarket housing.

And there is a third, rarest case — a flat that has stayed lived in. Not «used to be a communal flat» but is one. The museum in it exists not in place of the residents but alongside them, by agreement. In Russia there is one such flat.

The building at 23 Rubinstein Street was built in 1912 as an apartment house for the St Petersburg Merchants’ Board, architect Alexander Baryshnikov. Apartment 34 is seven rooms, a shared corridor, a kitchen, a back staircase. After the revolution the flat was consolidated, packed with new tenants, and became communal. It has been one ever since: a hundred-odd years running.

The Dovlatov family moved in here in 1944, on returning from evacuation. Sergei Dovlatov lived in two rooms of this flat until 1975. From here came the novella «Ours», in which the flatmates became characters, and some of the stories of «The Suitcase».

The museum opened in 2022 — without moving anyone out. This is the key difference: the neighbours were not evicted, the communal flat did not turn into an exhibition. People still live behind the wall, cooking still goes on in the kitchen, other people’s bicycles stand in the corridor. Guests enter a home where people live and behave accordingly — quietly, by booking, in small groups.

So there was nothing here to recreate. The tiled stove Dovlatov stoked is the very one, restored by volunteers. The peephole in the door was drilled by the writer himself. The building’s house register has survived, and from it the families of the flat have been reconstructed — the surnames of the future characters of «Ours» written in by the house manager’s hand.

The wording we hold to and answer for: this is the only genuine, lived-in writer’s flat in Russia. Among the museum-apartments of St Petersburg — Pushkin’s on the Moika, Dostoevsky’s in Kuznechny Lane, Akhmatova’s in the Fountain House, Brodsky’s in the Muruzi House, Nabokov’s, Zoshchenko’s, Blok’s — not one has stayed lived in.

So that the claim of being the only one does not hang in the air, here are all the venues devoted to the communal flat that we were able to verify from official sources. The list is useful in itself: if you are planning a route on the subject, it is all here.

St Petersburg

• «Communal Paradise, or Close Against Their Will» — 44 English Embankment, the Rumyantsev Mansion, a branch of the Museum of the History of St Petersburg. Opened in December 2016. The rooms are genuine: the mansion really did hold a communal flat, and the four-room layout, the narrow corridor and the shared kitchen survive. But the furnishings are a museum reconstruction: more than a thousand objects from the collections, and the «residents» are composites — the lady of the house squeezed into one room, a family from the village, nonconformist youth of the sixties, an underground artist. The flat’s residents have been moved out. Ticket 400 ₽, concessions 250 ₽; daily except Wednesday, 11:00–18:00.
• The «Kommunalka» Museum-Apartment — 17 Griboyedov Canal Embankment. Opened just before New Year 2026 and occupies the semi-basement of an apartment house. The interior was recreated by the museum’s team: they painted and aged the walls themselves, the Soviet wallpaper was brought from Krasnodar. The objects, though, are genuine, and the tour ends with tea in the kitchen. Daily 11:00–22:00 by booking; it has no website of its own, bookings go through its VKontakte community.
• «XX Years After the War. Museum of the Everyday Culture of Leningrad, 1945–1965» — 4th Line 19, Vasilievsky Island. A private museum, opened in August 2014 in a former communal flat; one of its two halls is a reconstructed room, the other works as an exhibition space and lecture hall.

The rest of Russia

• «Artkommunalka. Yerofeyev and Others» — Kolomna, 205 Oktyabrskoy Revolyutsii Street. Opened on 1 December 2011 in a real former communal flat in a merchant’s house. People do live here — not neighbours but artists and writers: the museum works as an art residency with constant rotation. Self-guided visit — 600 ₽.
• «A Communal Flat. Soviet Everyday Life of the 1930s–1960s» — Krasnokamsk, 9 Mira Avenue. Of the whole list this is the closest case to ours: a genuine flat on the ground floor of a real residential building — a listed one, the «House of the Two Hundred and Five». People live in the building. The difference is that the exhibition flat itself has been emptied: the neighbours are behind the wall of the stairwell, not the wall of the corridor.
• «The Old Moscow Flat» — Moscow, Izmailovo Island, a department of the Kolomenskoye — Izmailovo museum-reserve. A recreated communal corridor, kitchen, bathroom and rooms; visits by timed sessions.
• The «Kommunalka» Museum of Soviet Everyday Life — Vyatskiye Polyany, Kirov Region, 13 Sovetskaya Street. Opened on 1 December 2018; its creators are the local collectors Oleg Uvarov and Valery Smolyuk. A recreated display by zones: hallway, kitchen, school classroom, library.
• «Hall of Socialist Everyday Life. A Communal Flat» — Sokol, Vologda Region. Three reconstructed rooms from different decades inside the local history museum, with theatrical programmes.

What follows from this. Several have genuine rooms. A genuine flat in a residential building — Krasnokamsk. Living people inside — only Kolomna, and there they are artists in residence, not tenants. And in no case does the flat remain communal in the legal and everyday sense: everywhere the residents were moved out before the museum came, except at 23 Rubinstein Street.

Hence our wording, which we answer for: communal apartment 34 is the only working, lived-in communal flat in Russia with a museum inside it, and the only one where that flat was a writer’s home. If you find a counter-example, write to hello@dovlatovmuseum.ru and we will correct the page.

Not display cases. The «Underwood» typewriter can be touched, the gramophone wound up, books taken down from the shelf, tea drunk from a Soviet tea set. On display: Dovlatov’s first book, published by «Ardis» in Ann Arbor in 1977, a 1987 issue of «Kontinent» with Brodsky on the cover, a samizdat copy of Akhmatova’s «Requiem», the trunk from «The Suitcase», the «Night Shift» note found under layers of paint, and two newspapers — from 4 September 1941 and from 1990, with the obituary.

A separate room belonged to the artist Tatyana Mileant — frozen in time for decades and opened only recently. Plus the shared spaces: the corridor running from the front door to the lavatory, the kitchen where seven families shared one stove, and an interactive plan of the flat showing who lived where.

Address: 23 Rubinstein Street, apartment 34, St Petersburg. Nearest metro stations — Dostoevskaya and Vladimirskaya, five minutes on foot. The building is residential, with an intercom at the door; entry is with a tour only.

Visit formats:

• Museum tour — apartment 34 only, about an hour, 993 ₽. Daily at 11:00, from 1 September also at 16:30.
• Grand tour «Secrets of Leningrad Communal Apartments» — three communal flats on one route, Dovlatov’s as the finale, about 2 hours, 1295 ₽.
• Immersive tour «No goodbyes — call me!» — an evening format with actors, 1695 ₽.
• The play «What have I earned?», based on «The Suitcase» — performed in the flat itself, 2495 ₽.
• Private visit — the flat for your party alone, from 10 000 ₽.

All four theatre evenings are covered separately — an immersive performance in a communal flat: how they differ and which to choose.

No prepayment in any format except the theatre ones: booking is free, payment at the meeting point, cancellation and rescheduling carry no penalty.