Dining with Stalin

“In the socialist commonwealth every economic change becomes an undertaking whose success can be neither appraised in advance nor later retrospectively determined. There is only groping in the dark. Socialism is the abolition of rational economy.” —Ludwig von Mises

When I was driving to work earlier this week, I heard a fascinating story on NPR that discussed communal life under the Soviet Union. As part of the grand effort to completely reorganize Russian society under communal lines, the Soviet regime sought to abolish private kitchens!

Why? The NPR story reported that “Soviet authorities considered kitchens and private apartments dangerous to the regime was because they were places people could gather to talk about politics.”

According to Russian writer and radio journalist Alexander Genis, “[t]he most important part of kitchen politics in early Soviet time was they would like to have houses without kitchens. 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.” Another Russian writer adds, “[c]ommunal 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.”

The full article on NPR is worth reading and contains a number of revealing gems on the reality of communal kitchens in Soviet apartments and regimented life under communism. Here’s one striking episode:

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