11.   If a card game explodes in a brawl, or neighbors in a communal apartment square off with frying pans or knives, Kanunnikov answers the alarm.

12.   Kolya is allotted a room in a communal apartment -- one of the group homes that proliferated in the biggest cities in the housing-starved Soviet Union.

13.   There are still many communal apartments in St. Petersburg and other Russian cities.

14.   She has two rooms in a communal apartment in the Kuntsevo suburb.