Nobody uses парадная, that would be like a big special entrance. And notice how it's an adjective? That's because the noun it modifies is probably дверь, which is feminine. парадная дверь.

подъезд can mean the driveway, but most of the time it means the area inside the apartment building, when you just come in. In Dnepropetrovsk, we lived in a 9-storey apartment building, which had a подъезд, and which we often, on a daily basis referred to as the подъезд. Never called it the парадная.

I know that Dnepropetrovsk is Ukraine, and not Russia, but this is just to show you that not only people in St. Petersburg call it подъезд, but in other places too, all over the former CCCP.

Oh yeah, about the actual question. I've never lived in russia, but in Dnepropetrovsk we had a serious pest problem, at least by american standards (not pakistani standards). In the подвал, we had mice, rats, and cats (seriously, stray cats), and that is just out of the mammals. There were also numerous insects, and things of that nature. There were small rectangular windows at ground level, and one time I saw a rat, (huge, probably about 25 inches long, with the tail.) and it jumped out of one window, ran across the подъезд (outside), and then jumped into another window. There were also numerous cat-fights (not girls fighting, actual cats), and they would battle around the подъезд and it often got quite bloody.