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In Freidin'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.

Kitchens became a source of tension and conflict. 'Five different kettles, five different pots that are all marked," says Edward Shenderovich, venture capital 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 as a Russian features editor for the BBC World Service from 1991-2009. "They would go with their pots along their corridor and eat in their room."

Crowded Kitchens By Design

"Communal kitchen was a war zone," says Alexander Genis, Russian writer and radio journalist. "During the Stalin era [1928-1953] it was the most dangerous place to be — in the kitchen."

Shenderovich agrees: "Communal kitchens were not places where you would bring your friends. 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 reason Soviet authorities considered kitchens and private apartments dangerous to the regime was 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 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."

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."

The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, are Peabody Award-winning independent producers who create radio and multimedia stories for NPR and public broadcast. Their Hidden Kitchens series travels the world, chronicling little-known kitchen rituals and traditions that explore how communities come together through food — from modern-day Sicily to medieval England, the Australian Outback to the desert oasis of California.