An American in Moscow's Story

Russia: a riddle stuck in an apartment surrounded by a dacha
am presently at wits end, trying to wrap my heavily taxed intellect around this great bear called Russia. But mind you, my brain is not so big, and it has not been an easy evening.
Presently, there is a comely young girl, let's call her Zina, since that is her name (it really is), who is blowing her nose copiously into an embroidered handkerchief between lustful gulps of cold firewater while cursing some poor brute named ‘Serozha.'
But before we consider poor Zina's plight, we should remember that there are things the academicians will never be able to teach us about Russia despite, or because of, the vantage point of their ivory towers. If you really want to understand the sprawling Eurasian landmass of 12 time zones, you must first understand the perplexing intricacies of the general living situation, otherwise known as the flat. Yes, the flat. That is really the essence of the entire thing.
"The simplest thing of all," declared Koroviev, a character in Mikhail Bulgakov's novel, The Master and Margarita.
"I'll tell you more, dear madame, they can stretch space the devil knows how far!... I heard of one man, for example, who received a three-room apartment and immediately turned the three into four without any fifth dimension or any other things that make your mind reel, simply by dividing one room with a partition.
"After that, he exchanged the apartment for two in different districts of Moscow - one with three rooms, and the other with two. You will agree that now he had five rooms. Then he exchanged the three-room one for two two-room apartments, and thus became the possessor, as you see, of six rooms - though scattered, it's true, in total disorder all over Moscow."
Zina's situation was not quite so perplexing, yet far more heart wrenching, since it was a mere flat (and a tiny one at that) that brought the poor girl's world tumbling down upon her fair head. You see, her beloved Serozha, who was living at home with his parents in a one-room flat while attending technical school, proposed to Zina one summer evening during a television commercial break. Zina was so flabbergasted by Serozha's sudden display of love and devotion that she had no choice but to dial up all of her friends on the mobile phone to immediately prepare the wedding arrangements.
Early the next morning, Serozha and Zina zig-zagged in their Zigoli to the nearest ZAGS, the government agency where love birds enlist for marital duty. Upon entering the office, Serozha duly enquired, "who's last?" After standing in line for one hour, kissing and cooing, the couple made an appointment for their wedding and departed hand-in-hand.
Anyways, so as not to turn this into a Tolstoy novel, Serozha's parents naturally found out about the wildly spontaneous wedding that was scheduled to tale place the very next month. Although the details are still sketchy, witnesses say that the next morning Serozh's mother, Olga Nikolayevna, got down on the kitchen's cold linoleum floor on old knobby knees and begged her son between tears, "Serozh, please, I beg you, my only son, don't marry that wretched girl until we've privatized the flat."
At this point, even the Sovietologist's may be scratching their thinking domes, wondering: Why on earth does Olga Nikolayevna want to privatize the flat before her son's momentous wedding day? Because if Serozha and Zina get hitched before the apartment is privatized, coldly calculating Zina would be legally entitled to her percentage of the swank estate, as stated in Russian legislation - even if she and Serozh decide to terminate their state-sanctioned vows! Furthermore, any offspring that may come as a result of this blissful union would also have a future fair share of the one-room pie, thus leaving the family, you see, with rather paltry pickings.
So young Serozha, who was always a bit of a momma's boy, told Zina that they would have to postpone their nuptials until their parent's property was properly secured. Naturally, Zina, feeling betrayed by her man, not to mention very insulted that anybody would suspect her of such selfish shenanigans, told Serozh in so many unprintable four-letter words that he could go pound salt for all she cared.
So there you have at least one riddle concerning Russia, the flat, still as opaque and impenetrable as ever.