My mother was fortunate to have her marriage collapse in 1964.

In the late fifties, the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, best known for epic symphonies, scored Moskva, Cheryomushki, a rollicking operetta pastiche satirizing the housing shortage. In 1962 it was turned into a film. Sasha and Masha, its young protagonists, have a marital crisis that is the inverse of my parents’ mess: they’re recently wed but forced by the dreaded “housing issue” to live apart, each with his or her family. My favorite bit is the campy Technicolor dream sequence when Sasha and Masha go waltzing through their imaginary new digs—private digs!—singing “Our hallway, our window, our coat hanger… Nashe, nashe, nashe: ours ours ours.” In the film’s socialist Hollywood ending, corrupt housing officials taste defeat and the lovers finally nest in their ugly new prefab flat—nashe nashe!—in the Cheryomushki district.

Cheryomushki in southwestern Moscow was, in fact, quite real, the country’s first mass development of private apartments. Similar housing blocks went shooting up in the sprawl of other outlying mikrorayoni (micro-districts). They were the Bald One’s low-cost revision of the Soviet domestic fairy tale: an escape from the hell of forced communality. At long last the nuclear family had a promise of privacy.

It’s hard to overestimate the shift in consciousness and social relations brought about by this upsurge of new housing. Initiated by Khrushchev in the late fifties, the construction continued well beyond him, into the eighties. It was the country’s biggest lifestyle transformation since the 1917 revolution, and represented probably the Bald One’s greatest social achievement.

By 1964 close to half the population—almost 100 million people—had moved into the new, bare-bones units slapped up quick and shoddy from prefab concrete panels. Soviet stats boasted that the USSR was churning out more apartments per year than the USA, England, France, West Germany, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland combined. Who doesn’t remember those endless housewarming bashes where we sat on the floor and ate herring off a newspaper, garnished with enticing whiffs of wallpaper glue? The prefabs put an end to the era of ornate, lofty-ceilinged, elite Stalinist housing. No longer just for nomenklatura and Stakhanovites, material well-being (such as it was) was now touted as a birthright for all. Khrushchev wanted to offer us a preview of the promise of full communism, shining bright just beyond Mature Socialism. And like Iosif Vissarionovich before him, Nikita Sergeevich bothered with the details. The Mustachioed One sniffed the soap. The Bald One tested and approved the standardized unitaz (toilet).

It was not large, this unitaz. Private dwellings were in no way meant to provoke bourgeois aspirations or rampant individualism. The vernacular name for the new prefabs, after all, was khrushcheba, a contraction of Khrushchev and truscheba (slum). What’s more, the new egalitarian residential spirit expressed itself in crushing architectural uniformity. Boxlike elevatorless blocks, usually five stories high, held multiple tiny dvushki (two-roomers). Ceiling height: two and a half meters. Living room: fourteen square meters. Bedroom: always the same eight square meters. For cooking, eating, talking, guzzling vodka, sipping tea, chain-smoking, doing homework, telling political jokes, playing the seven-string Russian guitar, and generally expressing yourself, the now-legendary “five-metrovki”—shorthand for the minuscule fifty-square-feet kitchens—fondly remembered later as incubators of free speech and dissent. The expression “kitchen dissident” entered the lexicon from here. Dissidence was an unintended but profound consequence of Khrushchev’s housing reforms.

The unrelenting sameness of the khrushchebas weighed heavily on the Soviet soul. “Depressing, identical apartment buildings,” wrote Alexander Galich, a well-known bard and singer of the time, forced into exile. “With identical roofs, windows, and entrances, identical official slogans posted on holidays, and identical obscenities scratched into the walls with nails and pencils. And these identical houses stand on identical streets with identical names: Communist Street, Trade Union Street, Peace Street, the Prospect of Cosmonauts, and the Prospect or Plaza of Lenin.”

Most of the above applied to the long-awaited new home we finally moved into in 1966. With a couple of major exceptions. Our street was called Davydkovskaya, not Lenin, Engels, Marx, or, God forbid, Mom’s dreaded Gagarin. Full address: Davydkovskaya, House 3, Fraction 1, Structure 7. At first, yes, Mom and I wandered forever trying to find it among identical blocks surrounded by pools of mud. But the neighborhood—Davydkovo, part of the Kuntsevo district—wasn’t depressing. It was rather charming, in fact. A former village in the western reaches of Moscow, it was a twenty-minute drive from the Kremlin along a wide, arrow-straight road. In former times Davydkovo was known for its bracing air and for the nightingales that sang from the banks of a fast-moving, shallow river called Setun’. A short walk from our Khrushchev slum rose a beautiful forest of fragrant tall pines. The pines shaded a massive green fence surrounding the closed-up dacha of a certain short, pockmarked Georgian, deceased for over a decade and rarely mentioned.

Mom swears we owed our khrushcheba joy to a ring and a miracle. It all began with a whisper—someone, somewhere, tipping her off to a waiting list for apartments that moved surprisingly swiftly. But there was a catch: the flat was a co-op requiring a major down payment. Which is where the ring and supposed miracle enter the picture. An art nouveau folly of dark-yellow gold in the shape of a graceful diamond-studded bouquet, the band was a post-war present to Liza from Naum, celebrating their survival. Babushka Liza lacked bourgeois instincts; I’ve always admired that about her. Having worn the ring once or twice, she tossed it into her sewing box. She was mending socks when Mom told her about the impossible down payment. The ring—so Mother swears—glinted at Liza with magical force. Miraculously a buyer materialized, offering the very seven hundred rubles (six monthly salaries) needed for the down payment. The entire family took it as an omen, and nobody was upset when they later learned that the ring was worth at least five times that price.

And so, here we were.

Our sauerkraut fermented under a wooden weight in our very own enameled bucket on our mini-balcony. From our windows hung our curtains, sewn by Mom from cheapo plaid beige and brown linen. Our shoe-box-size fridge, which Boris, the drunken plumber, had affixed to a wall because there was no space in the kitchen. The fridge beckoned like a private hanging garden of Babylon. Falling asleep every night in the privacy of her own four walls, my mother felt… Well, she felt she was still living in a Bolshevik communal utopia.

Our walls were cardboard khruscheba walls. Ukrainian Yulia next door wailed at her husband’s philandering. Prim Andrei upstairs rehearsed plaintive double bass passages from Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony to the guttural ostinato of Uzbek arguments on the ground floor. The worst tormentors, Colonel Shvirkin and his chignoned wife, Nina, were quiet as mice, but such unacceptably paradisiacal smells of fried baby hen wafted from their kitchen that the entire building wanted to collectively lynch them.

My mother couldn’t afford baby hens. After several years of maternity leave she still refused to rejoin the workforce. Relatives chided her, but she insisted she had to spend every second with her little Anyutik. And so we lived essentially on Dad’s forty-five-ruble alimony, less than half of the pitiful Soviet monthly wage. Occasionally Mom added a pittance by giving an English lesson to Suren, an Armenian youth with fuzz on his lip and a melon-bosomed mother with fuzz on her lip. “Larisa Naumovna! I understood everything!” Suren would bleat. “Except this one strange word everywhere. T-k-he?” Which is the Russian pronunciation of the.