Presnia is a Moscow district in which political upheaval takes material form in streets and homes: barricades rise near the Guishars’ flat, a neighboring yard becomes a workers’ militia post, and later household rooms and entire buildings are reassigned to public uses. Across these scenes, the district registers revolution as a transformation of ordinary space, not merely a change of government.

The uprising in the streets

During the Presnia Uprising, the Guishars’ flat stood within the rebel area. A barricade was being built in Tver Street only a few yards from their house. People carried buckets of water from their yards to cement stones and scrap iron with ice, making nearby domestic resources part of the street’s defenses.

The neighboring yard served the workers’ militia as an assembly point, combining the functions of a Red Cross post and a soup kitchen. Its practical work joined care and organization in a single improvised space. The yard was neither simply private property nor a formal institution: the uprising had made it a place where workers gathered and received help.

A neighborhood of personal ties

The militia post also linked Presnia’s political activity to the young people who lived around it. Larisa Feodorovna Guishar knew two boys who went there. Nika Dudorov, a friend of her school friend Nadia, struck her as proud, straightforward, and taciturn; she felt a likeness between them and was not interested in him.

The other boy was Pavel Pavlovich Antipov, a gymnasium student living with his grandmother, Marfa Gavrilovna Tiverzina. At the Tiverzins’ home, Larisa noticed how delighted he was to see her. His unguarded enthusiasm distinguished him from Nika, and brought the neighborhood’s political setting into contact with a private, formative relationship.

Homes reassigned

In a later period, the conversion of domestic space into institutional space appears in the Gromeko home. Antonina Alexandrovna Gromeko explains that she and her father have given part of the ground floor to the Agricultural Academy. The institution has already moved in libraries, herbariums, and seed specimens, although it has not yet formally taken over the rooms. The change is described in practical terms—there is too much space to heat in winter—but even the household’s vocabulary has shifted: rooms are now called “living space.”

The Tiverzin house undergoes a more sweeping reassignment. At a meeting, a speaker proposes taking the large building for a district soviet hostel for visiting conference delegates and naming it the Tiverzin Hostel in honor of Kuprian Savelievich Tiverzin, who had lived there before being deported. Working people, the speaker says, will be rehoused; other residents are given a year to find accommodation. The declaration that everyone present is a worker, and the accusation of Great-Russian chauvinism, expose the conflict between administrative classification and residents’ competing claims to belonging.

Displacement and altered interiors

The reorganization of housing also reaches Larisa and her daughter. After the school building where Larisa had her flat is taken over by the Town Housing Department, she and Katenka receive part of another house. The owners have left behind so much furniture that Larisa confines it to two rooms and whitewashes their windows to block the sun. To reach her own door, she leads Yurii Andreievich through the dark, crowded rooms by the hand, warning him not to let go or he will get lost.

In another Presnia scene, Yurii and Larisa force their way into the padlocked Mikulitsyn house, tearing off the lock with its screws and splintering the wood. They find the house partly untidy but the study carefully kept, evidence that someone had lived there recently. Unsure who the occupant was, they suppose it might have been a White officer on the run and leave the mystery unresolved. The room’s large table by the window nevertheless draws Yurii’s attention as a place suited to quiet, fruitful work.

The district as lived history

Presnia’s changing interiors and improvised public spaces make political transformation visible at household scale. A yard becomes a support point for the militia; a home lends rooms to an academy; a family house is designated a hostel; displaced residents navigate furniture left by absent owners. These changes do not produce a single, orderly new arrangement. They leave overlapping claims, altered language, and uncertain traces of those who have departed.

The district’s significance lies in this persistent tension between lived space and its reassignment. Barricade-building depends on what nearby households can supply, while later authorities rename, redistribute, or repurpose rooms and buildings. Through such concrete changes, Presnia presents revolution as an upheaval that enters the home and reorganizes the conditions of everyday life.