First of all a pechka is the coal stove that heats your apartment or house. The pechka in my apartment was remodeled this summer because it didn't get all the rooms warm. My host mom (landlady) went to Russia with her daughter right after it was remodeled, and before it got cold. She told me that I shouldn't have to topete (light/stoke) it until she got back because it wouldn't get that cold in the month she would be gone. She did ask me to go ahead and buy coal though since it is better to get it earlier. All I can say is that boy she was wrong about it getting cold. It has been on average 50-53 degrees in my apartment for the last month. There is snow on the ground outside. I, having been raised in the family that goes to a cabin every year for vacation with a wood burning stove and loving camping, didn't think it was a big deal to get a fire started. A pechka is a bit different than I am used to because of the fact that it uses coal, but the basic lighting a fire with wood and paper is the same, you just add coal after the fire is started. I was right, I had no problem at all getting a good fire going. The pechka apparently had a problem with me though. All of the smoke came into the apartment instead of going up the pipe (not really a chimney and there is no flue). the smoke came pouring out of the stove and even the wall (there are cracks in the wall where the pipes to heat the rest of the apartment lead). My good fire starting skills turned out to be a bad thing because now I had a great fire going and no real way to stop it. I opened all my windows and the door to get the smoke out but coal burns for a long time. My smoke and carbon monoxide detector went off...I ended up with a major headache and I am sure that I lost a few brain cells. I decided not to topete again and just brave the cold until my landlady came back and fixed the problem.
I shouldn't have told anyone about my pechka issues because they all tried to convince me that it wasn't broken and it just smoked because it was the first time it had been lit in awhile. Eventually I got so cold that I decided to give it another try. I had my neighbor, Gulia, help me. We did everything right again but ended up with the same results...an apartment full of smoke and not any warmer. We checked the pipe and no smoke was getting to the outside. The smoke this time was even more than the first and my upstairs neighbors came to see what was going on. I got yelled at for being an american that doesn't know what she's doing and one old babushka asked if I was trying to kill myself! Thankfully Gulia defended me and said I lit the fire perfectly and that it was my pechka that was broken. She also called my landlady's son to see if he could come over and look at it. Marina, my landlady's daughter-in-law came over the next day and cleaned out the pipe and covered the cracks in the walls where the smoke had been leaking out. We then lit the pechka again and this time my apartment was smoke free! I was so grateful because I don't think I can handle another one of those headaches...they last longer than the migraines I get. Plus there was the added bonus of my apartment getting warm, it actually got up to 65 degrees! In the end it all worked out fine, I just froze for a month and was exposed to carbon monoxide. Seriously though I am fine and excited that I can now heat my apartment whenever I get cold.