That subversive hiccup before the R—this was the seventies. You could be disrespectful to Rodina and still enjoy four fun-filled August weeks at a Young Pioneers’ camp—paid for by the State.

I, of course, experienced no such regime-sponsored enjoyment. My cruel mother wouldn’t send me to camp, and she kept me home sick on that festive spring day in 1973 when our entire class was inducted into Young Pioneers. Never did I stand on Red Square making a five-finger salute to the clattering of drumbeats and the squawks of bugles. Never felt the garlicky breath of Vassa, our school’s Pioneer leader, as she fumbled with the knot of the scarlet tie around my neck. Never solemnly swore to “love Rodina, to live, learn, and struggle, as Lenin bequeathed, and as Communist Party teaches us.” Luckily, School 110 considered me a de facto Pioneer anyway and let me wear the tie, that small, sacred scrap of our Rodina’s banner.

As for where Rodina really began… Well, maybe it began, for all of us, with salat Olivier: with the colorful dice of cooked potatoes, carrots, pickles, hard-boiled eggs, peas, and some protein to taste, the lot smothered in a sharp, creamy dressing. Apparatchiks, impoverished pensioners, dissidents, tractor drivers, nuclear physicists—everyone across our eleven time zones relished salat Olivier, especially in the kitschy, mayonnaise-happy seventies. Borscht was banal; Uzbek pilaf or Georgian walnut chicken a little exotic, perhaps. But Olivier was just right, unfailingly festive and special on account of such defitsit items as canned Hungarian Globus-brand peas and tangy Soviet mayo, which was always in stores but never without a long line. Birthdays, engagements, dissertation-completion bashes, farewell parties for Jews who were emigrating (these sometimes felt like funeral wakes)—there was no special “table” without salat Olivier.

And who doesn’t remember big cut-crystal bowls of salat Olivier at New Year’s celebrations where families gathered in front of their television sets waiting for the Kremlin clock to strike twelve, and for Dear Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev to adjust his reading glasses, rattle his medals, thunderously clear his throat, and then shuffle his papers in a desperate scramble to locate the first line of his New Year’s address?

The first line was always the same: “Dear Compatriots!”

Nowadays Mom and I must have at least a thousand various salad recipes in our collective repertoire. I like Thai and Catalan. Mom has perfected the simple green salad, possibly the hardest one of all to master. Hers has toasted pine nuts and chewy dried cranberries to punctuate a shallot vinaigrette veiling impeccable lettuce leaves. It’s as non-Russian as food ever gets. And salat Olivier? We don’t make it often, and never idly, careful not to disturb its aura of festiveness. A precious heirloom of our non-idyllic socialist pasts, the Olivier recipe gets pulled out from the memory drawer to commemorate a particular moment in life.

One day Mom decides that it’s time once again. Her sister, Yulia, is coming to visit from Moscow. We will throw a party and Olivier will anchor the appetizer spread.

I arrive to help with the cooking. Mother’s apartment, overheated as always, is permeated by the sweet, earthy smell of boiled root vegetables. In the dining nook off the kitchen, the potatoes and carrots sit, cooked in their skins—awaiting their transformation into salad. We peel, chop, chatter. As often happens in Mom’s dining nook, time and space begin to blend and compress. A taste of a Lebanese pickle that uncannily resembles a Russian gherkin leads to a snippet from a Rodina song, which in turn rouses a political morality tale, or reawakens a recollection of a long-ago dream, of a fleeting pang of yearning.

Piling potato, carrot, and pickle fragments into a bowl, I think that Olivier could be a metaphor for a Soviet émigré’s memory: urban legends and totalitarian myths, collective narratives and biographical facts, journeys home both real and imaginary—all loosely cemented with mayo.

We keep chopping, both now lost in our own thoughts.

I am seven when the grandest Olivier feast I can remember occurs. Tables are pushed together in a cavernous kitchen unevenly lit by greasy dangling bulbs. Potbellied men haul in chairs; women in splotched aprons dice and mince. A banquet is being prepared in a shared kitchen inside a long four-storied building on Kuybishev Lane, two minutes by foot from the Kremlin.

We’re in the kommunalka, the communal apartment into which I was born. Where I heard Misha the black marketeer puke out his delicacies; where Dad’s mother, Babushka Alla—Baballa, we call her—still lives; and where Mom spent three agonizing years after my birth until we moved out to Davydkovo.

We don’t live in Davydkovo anymore, by the way. Before my first school year, Dad decided that he did want a family full time—but only if we moved to the center of Moscow. In a bureaucracy-defying maneuver, Mom finagled a dwelling swap between herself and her parents. Naum and Liza moved to our apartment, where bracing walks awaited among Stalinist pines, and we took over their central two-room flat in the Arbat, only one metro stop away from Baballa’s kommunalka kitchen. Which is where we’re crowded this evening.

I visit Baballa here every weekend, often staying overnight in her dank, high-ceilinged room. On our sleepovers Grandma and I play cards and dine on no-fuss frozen dumplings followed by the “Snowhite” meringue torte she has toted home from the elite canteen at Gosstroy, the State Construction Committee where she earns a whopping 260 rubles a month. I’m in awe of Baballa: her swagger with vodka and billiards, her three-tiered slang, her still-sexy looks. She’s my playmate and role model, the one who pressured Mom to allow me to grow my hair long just like hers. Whenever construction workers whistle at her, I wink and whistle back proudly while she slanders the offenders in a voice roughened by a lifetime of Belomor cigarettes. Baballa is the world’s coolest granny. But her kommunalka simultaneously fascinates me and scares me so much, I get butterflies in my stomach each time I visit.

Bolshevism did away with private life, Walter Benjamin noted after his 1927 visit to Moscow. Describing a communal apartment, he wrote: “One steps through the hall door—and into a little town.” It’s a poignant image, Magrittian almost. Except that the “town” in Baballa’s apartment forty years later wasn’t that little: more than fifty people jammed into eighteen rooms situated along a long narrow hallway. Unheated, with water-stained walls and no lights—the bulb was perpetually stolen and bartered by the alkogolik Tsaritsin—the hallway was a canyon of terror and peril for me. There you could catch pneumonia, fracture an ankle stumbling over the passed-out body of the self-same Tsaritsin—or worse. The worst? The ghoulish figure of demented old Mari Vanna, who meandered about in her torn once-white nightgown with a chamber pot in her hands. If she was feeling frisky she’d tilt it toward your feet.

I won’t share details about the communal bathroom other than the fact that its three toilet cabins were separated by plywood, through which the peeper Vitalik liked to drill holes. Next to this peeper’s gallery lay the shared kitchen.

Please note that there is no word for “privacy” in Russian.

Fittingly, the kitchen of Baballa’s apartment constituted a multifunctional public space, abustle with all manner of meaningful collective activities. Here were some of its functions: