Communal Kitchens

In the decades following the Russian Revolution, most people in Moscow lived in communal apartments; seven or more families crammed together where there had been one, sharing one kitchen and one bathroom. The spaces were crowded, stove space and food were limited. Clotheslines were strewn across the kitchen, the laundry of one family dripping into the omelet of another.

As the Soviet Union industrialized and millions poured into Moscow from the countryside, one of the goals of the new government was to provide housing for the workers. They started putting people into apartments that had been occupied by the Russian rich or aristocrats who had been driven out by the new regime.

“The communal apartment was like a microcosm of Soviet society,” says Anya von Bremzen, author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking.  “People from all walks of life, sometimes absolute class enemies, living next to each other. The expression was ‘densed up.’ The allotment was nine square meters per person.”

Gregory (Grisha) Freidin, professor of Russian literature at Stanford University, grew up in a communal apartment of 10 families about five blocks from the Kremlin.   “On one side of my room was the man who washed corpses at the local morgue. There were two rooms where the mother and father served in the KGB. Then there was the woman whose husband was serving a sentence for stealing bread from the bread factory where he worked.”

In Grisha’s kitchen, every family had a small kitchen table that housed a few pots and pans. There were two four-burner stoves. Everyone cooked their own food — cabbage soup, borscht with beets, potatoes, buckwheat groats, boiled chicken.

Communal Kitchen was a War Zone

Kitchens became a source of tension and conflict. “Five different kettles, five different pots that are all marked,” remembers Edward Shenderovich, venture investor and Russian poet. “When relations between the neighbors were especially fierce, you could see locks on the cabinets.”

Families cooked in quick, staggered shifts. “They cooked in the kitchen but practically never ate there,” says Masha Karp, who was born in Moscow and worked for the Russian Service of the BBC. “They would go with their pots along their corridor and eat in their room.”

“Communal kitchen was a war zone, Alexander Genis Russian writer and radio journalist. “During the Stalin era it was the most dangerous place to be in the kitchen.”

“Communal kitchens were not places where you would bring your friends,” says Edward Shenderovich.  “I think that was one of the ideas for creating a communal kitchen. There would be a watchful eye of society over every communal apartment. People would report on each other. You would never know who would be reporting.”

But Anya von Bremzen remembers there was camaraderie as well. “There was always a grandmother to take care of the kids, and share a bit of cutletta or salat Olivier.  And when they began to disband the communal apartments, the communal kitchen was an institution that many people actually began to miss.”

The Soviet authorities considered kitchens and private apartments dangerous to the regime because they were places people could gather to talk about politics.

“The most important part of kitchen politics in early Soviet time, was they would like to have houses without kitchens,” says Alexander Genis. “Because kitchen is something bourgeois. Every family, as long as they have a kitchen, they have some part of their private life and private property.”

Houses Without Kitchens

The Soviet authorities considered kitchens and private apartments dangerous to the regime because they were places people could gather to talk about politics.

“The most important part of kitchen politics in early Soviet time, was they would like to have houses without kitchens,” says Alexander Genis, Russian writer and radio journalist. “Because kitchen is something bourgeois. Every family, as long as they have a kitchen, they have some part of their private life and private property.”

Soviet planners designed and built apartments without kitchens. Residents were expected to eat all of their meals in large cafeterias and public canteens.

Sergei Khrushchev, retired Brown University professor and son of Nikita Khrushchev, the head of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, explains: “In Stalin’s time, the theoretical idea of communism declared that all people have to be equal and the women have to be free from the slavery work in the kitchen. There mustn’t be a kitchen in the apartment. You will go and eat in the cafeteria.”

This was part of the romantic approach of the early post-revolutionary years, says Masha Karp. “People forget what an incredible upheaval the 1917 revolution was,” she says. “There was a huge movement to free the country from the Czarism, bring happiness to poorer classes. People thought maybe it was a good idea to relieve a housewife from her daily chores so that she could develop as a personality. She would go and play the piano, write poetry, and she would not cook and wash up. The idea to have canteens and cafeterias was a continuation of this wonderful intention.”

But the cafeteria idea did not pan out. After the revolution, the civil war began and they did not build any cafeterias. Also, Anya von Bremzen tells us, the food in the canteens was terrible, and women continued to cook.

“Bolsheviks were not into food. Lenin was not a foodie,” says von Bremzen. “They saw it as fuel, they had to feed the workers. The Bolsheviks kind of wanted to eradicate privacy. And private hearth, private stove becomes very politicized.”

The Industrialization of Food

Food shortages and the famine of the 1920s devastated whatever was left of the Russian kitchen. Stalin’s industrialization program included the industrialization of food.  Completely new, mass produced food appeared.

“The whole of the Soviet Union, all 120 different ethnic groups were suddenly being served exactly the same stuff,” says Grisha Freidin. “Choices for this or that food, the tastings, took place at the politburo level. The kinds of candies that were being produced was decided in a special meeting with Stalin and Molitov.”

The Kitchen Debates

With the death of Stalin in 1953 and the ramping up of the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s goal was to catch up and overtake the United States. In 1959 Khrushchev decided to have a cultural exchange of exhibitions with the United States, the first in history.

The Soviet Union’s display in the New York Coliseum featured sputniks, a model of an atomic ice-breaker and enormous statues of Soviet workers.

The US built a huge pavilion in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, a futuristic geodesic dome featuring American jazz, basketball, rows and rows of high heeled shoes, abstract art, long sleek American cars.  The exhibition introduced never-before seen or tasted American products to the Soviet people.

For many Soviet visitors to the exhibit, Pepsi Cola stole the show.  “Every visitor would pass the counter where Pepsi Cola was given out in disposable paper cups,” remembers Grisha Freidin, who was 13 years old at the time. A decade later, an historic deal was negotiated that brought Pepsi to Russia. “Pepsi was the first American company, even before McDonald’s, to get their foot in the door. Part of the deal between Pepsi Cola and the Soviet Union was that Pepsi would be given the distribution rights for Stoli, Stolichnaya Vodka,” says Freidin.

At the center of the U.S. exhibit was a “typical American home” with a “typical American kitchen.”  It had gleaming white refrigerators, washing machines and all the latest electric appliances.

When Vice President Nixon arrived to open the Pavilion, it was in this model Betty Crocker kitchen that he and Nikita Khrushchev made an unscheduled stop and came head to head in what is now known as “The Kitchen Debates. “

“They go to this kitchen,” remembers Sergei Khrushchev, “and Nixon talks about American achievement and my father talks about Soviet achievement. They argue with each other about which system is better.”

Nixon asks Khrushchev if it would not be better to compete in the relative merit of washing machines rather than in the strength of rockets. He counters, saying “And this is one of the greatest nations? I feel sorry for America judging by your exhibition. Does your life really consist only of kitchens?”

The threat of atomic warfare, economic progress and diplomacy were all examined through the lens of the kitchen. “Nixon and Khrushchev talked about food,” says the Russian writer Alexander Genis, “how people live, how people eat.”

Communal Kitchens was produced in collaboration with Charles Maynes.  Charles is an independent radio producer and multimedia journalist currently based in Moscow, Russia. His reporting and features can be heard on various public broadcasters worldwide, including NPR and PRI in the United States, Deutsche-Welle (Germany), CBC (Canada), ORF (Austria), and ABC (Australia) among others. Before that, he worked extensively as a trainer and digital strategy consultant to independent media in Russia’s regions with the Foundation for Independent Radio and Eurasia-Media. His has also been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and the Third Coast International Audio Festival’s Directors’ Choice award. He is originally from Washington DC.

Ilya Kabakov, a Russian conceptual artist based in Moscow, achieves a holistic representation of Soviet life in his “total installations.” In his  recent work, “La Cuisine Communautaire” or the Communal Kitchen, which was shown at the Musee Maillol in Paris,  Kabakov arranges everyday objects in haphazard patterns that mimic the disarray of daily life. These objects are spread through several rooms, each room belonging to another one of Kabakov’s imagined “characters.” Rather than diminishing its focus, the variety of personalities present bring Kabakov’s work to life—there is the sense of being on a street corner in Moscow rather than in a museum. All of these personalities, crafted with posters and shoes and sheets, are represented in the communal kitchen installations. Kabakov’s kitchens complete his theme of individual lives coming together to make a new world, as Russians of varying ages and occupations would have gathered together in the kitchen to make food and ideas.  Kabakov’s communal kitchen is littered with pots and pans and dishtowels, evoking the number and variety of participants in this cramped culinary ritual.

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“There were no warriors, no revolutionaries except for five or six dissidents. Life consisted of two layers, each person was a schizophrenic. Any person—a factory worker, farm worker, intellectual, artist—had a split personality. From childhood, everyone knew what was necessary in order to survive in this country—how you had to lie, how to adapt, what to draw, what to sing, how to dance. By the 1950s, the entire repertoire, the whole menu, was sketched out; by then there were no discussions at all, like there were during Mayakovsky’s time. This was so monstrously false, that underneath this bark emerged an autonomous layer of a different kind of human existence. For stealing from the factory, a worker could be very honored inside his own family. He would teach his child decency, but each day he would bring home a stolen sausage or milk. This was the norm in Soviet life. For the external world there was one structure—mostly verbal, chatter, all those meetings, the battle for peace. And then there was “human” life that transpired in the kitchen, among one’s close family and friends. In the 1950s, it was possible to talk among one’s close friends in kitchens, by that time there was a guarantee that no one would run and tattle about what was discussed there. After the death of the Cannibal1 this dual life became firmly established, it was recognized by absolutely everyone, including the official organs of the secret police. There was a very strict distinction between public and domestic, kitchen life.” – Ilya Kabakov

 

Life in a Communal Apartment

 

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Links

 

Communal Living in Russia: A Virtual Museum of Soviet Everyday Life http://kommunalka.colgate.edu/index.cfm		Kommunalki http://riowang.blogspot.com/2011/07/kommunalki.html

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