Dissident Kitchens

On February 16, 2024 Russian dissident Alexei Navalny died under unexplained circumstances in a penal colony in the Russian Arctic just weeks before the election that enthroned Vladimir Putin for another six years of near-absolute power. Within days of Navalny’s death his wife Yulia Navalnaya rose up, spoke out and vowed to continue her husband’s struggle. 

A decade ago The Kitchen Sisters were in Moscow reporting for our NPR series Hidden Kitchens: War and Peace and Food. We were at lunch with writer, television journalist and government critic, Victor Erofeyev and asked what his hidden kitchen was. 

“Dissident Kitchens,” he said. “The Soviet Union fell apart because of the kitchen.” 

We started digging. 

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, millions of people poured into Moscow from the countryside, many living crammed together in the appropriated grand apartments of the wealthy — a single, communal kitchen shared by the ten or so families squeezed together under one roof. Spaces were crowded, food scarce, privacy nonexistent. 

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev came to power. His new Soviet government built hundreds of huge standardized apartment buildings with single family units, each with their own kitchen. These new, private kitchens became hotbeds of politics, forbidden music, literature – "dissident kitchens" where the seeds of ending the Soviet Union were sewn. Just as Victor Erofeyev told us over lunch. 

Today, in honor of Alexei Navalny and in honor of Victor Erofeyev, who fled Russia with his family after the invasion of Ukraine, The Kitchen Sisters Present: Dissident Kitchens.