AGORA: Glorious news of overfulfilled Five-Year Plans blasts from the transistor radio suspended above the stove. Neighbors discuss grave political issues. “Motherfucking Jew-traitor Maya Spiro from room number six conspiring against the Soviet Union again.” MARKETPLACE: “Nataaaasha… Saaasha… Trade me an onion for half a cup of buckwheat?” BATHHOUSE: Over a kitchen sink women furtively rub black bread into their hair. Furtively, because while bread is believed to promote hair growth, it is also a sacred socialist treasure. Its misuse could be interpreted by other neighbors as unpatriotic. LEGAL CHAMBER: Comrades’ Court tries neighbors for offenses, including but not limited to neglecting to turn off the kitchen lights. A more serious crime: stealing soup meat from the pots of your neighbors. In Baballa’s rambling flat, the thief is a tiny, aristocratic-looking old lady whose mournful expression sometimes resolves into a beatific smile that seems glued to her face. To combat her theft, some neighbors hang skull-and-bones signs over their pots; others put padlocks on lids. LAUNDRY ROOM: As you enter the kitchen on a cold dark winter morning, half-frozen stockings swaying from clotheslines flagellate you in the face. Some neighbors get angry. The tall blond Vitalik grabs scissors and goes snip-snip-snip. If stockings were imported, a fistfight ensues. The communal apartment kitchen turns into an EXECUTION SQUARE.

People cooked, too, in communal kitchens; cooked greasy borscht, shchi, kotleti, and kasha. The petite fireball pensioner Valentina Petrovna, who babysat me sometimes, baked the world’s most amazing pirozhki, seemingly out of thin air. Misha’s mom, Baba Mila, fried succulent defitsit chicken tenders that Mother pilfered. Eating, however, was something neighbors did in the ideologically suspect privacy of their own rooms. In the entire memory of Baballa’s apartment, that salat Olivier feast was the only exception.

The occasion was joyous indeed, exceeding the apartment’s very bounds. A kitchen expansion on the floor above Baballa’s!

Inside that kitchen, a door led to a tiny, bare, four-square-meter space that had been for years occupied by an old lady we all called Auntie Niusha. Miniature and birdlike, with sunken eyes, a sweet disposition, and a pervasive odor of formaldehyde, Auntie Niusha loved her job as a morgue attendant, loved sharing inspirational stories about washing cadavers. One day Niusha herself left this world. Not because neighbors added ground glass to her food to acquire her room, as sometimes happened in other communal apartments. Oh no no no—truly and genuinely!—Auntie Niusha died of natural causes.

Her death, everyone hoped, would result in a much-needed kitchen expansion. The upravdom (the building’s manager) had other ideas. Although the apartment above Baballa’s was already dangerously overcrowded even by the nine-meters-per-person standard, the upravdom instantly registered a new tenant in Auntie Niusha’s room in exchange for a bribe. One evening people came home from work to find a notice from the Housing Committee. The next morning, it said, a new tenant would be claiming Auntie Niusha’s dwelling space.

“Fuck the upravdom’s mother!” screamed the Tatar janitor.

“Over my dead body,” howled the Jewish expert in Sino-Soviet relations.

And so, in a feat of passionate and—for once—genuine communality, the communal apartment above Baballa’s sprang into action. They performed their Stakhanovite labor in the night’s slumbering darkness, so as not to attract the attention of informers on other floors.

By morning the door and walls had been brought down and the rubble trucked off. The entire expanded kitchen floor had been repainted, the seams between the kitchen and Auntie Niusha’s former room sanded down and the space filled with kitchen furniture.

The kitchen was now four square meters larger. Not a trace of Niusha’s dwelling space remained.

The upravdom arrived bright and early with a new tenant. The tenant was dangling keys to Auntie Niusha’s room on a key ring shaped like Lenin’s profile.

“Bastards! Motherfucking traitors of Rodina!” roared the upravdom. “Where’s the room?!” He started kicking the wall in front of which Auntie Niusha’s room had stood.

Everyone went speechless with fear. It was after all illegal to alter a dwelling space. Only Octobrina stepped forward.

She was an exotic creature, this Octobrina. Of uncertain age, her fire-engine red hair always in rollers, her eyes wandering, her lips curled in a perpetual amorous smile. A not altogether unpleasant delusion possessed her. She was convinced both Stalin and Eisenhower were madly in love with her. “He sent me a cable to say ‘I miss you, my dove,’ ” she’d announce every morning in the line for a toilet. “Who—Stalin or Eisenhower?” the alkogolik Tsaritsin would mutter grumpily.

“Room? What room?” Octobrina said, staring innocently and lasciviously straight into the upravdom’s eyes. “Please leave, my dear, or I’ll telephone Comrade Stalin this minute.” It was a good thing she didn’t invoke Eisenhower. Or maybe she wasn’t so mad after all.

Stalin had been dead for almost two decades. Still, the upravdom stepped back and instinctively shuddered. Then he sucked in his cheeks with great force and let out a blistering spit. Against the kollektiv he was powerless. Anyway, bribes for rooms—that wasn’t exactly legal either.

That night the whole building threw a feast of celebration in the new kitchen. Herrings were whacked against the table to loosen their skins, then arranged on pristine sheets of fresh Pravda. Vodka flowed like the Don. Moonshine, too. In an act as communal as Auntie Niusha’s room demolition, all four floors contributed to the construction of the salat Olivier. The Georgian family produced bunches of scallions—improbably in the middle of winter—to lend the salad a summery twang. Neighbors carted in boiled potatoes and carrots and pickles; and they dipped generously into their stashes of canned crabmeat and Doctor’s Kolbasa. Special thanks went to our Misha, the food store manager with a proprietary attitude toward socialist property, for the defitsit peas and a whole case of mayonnaise. I can still picture Octobrina in her grime-fringed, formerly frilly housedress, piping mayonnaise flowers onto the salad with such abandon, you’d think both Joe and Ike were arriving for dinner. After a few bites of the Olivier salad I fell into a mayonnaise-lipped stupor.

I don’t recall the exact taste, to be honest, but I assume it was pretty fab.

Now, in Mom’s tiny kitchen in Queens, she doesn’t share my nostalgic glow. “Foo! I’ve never had salat Olivier so laden and clunky as the one at Baballa’s party,” she exclaims, still dicing the veggies into precise half-inch pieces for her more ethereal version. “Who mixes chicken, kolbasa, and crab?” Well, I can’t blame her for having less than tantalizing memories of Baballa’s apartment, where neighbors, straight to her face, called her yevreechka (“little kikette”).

Like every Russian, Mom maintains her own firm ideas of a perfectly composed Olivier. And as with most Soviet dishes, the recipe’s nuances expressed social belonging beyond one’s personal flavor preferences. Soviets felt this acutely in the Stagnation years under Brezhnev. On the surface, the propaganda machine continued to spin out its creaking myths of bountiful harvest and collective identity; beneath, society was splintering into distinct, often opposing milieus, subcultures, and tightly knit networks of friends, each with its own coded vocabulary, cultural references, and political mind-set—and, yes, recipes—that signaled how its members felt about the official discourse.