“Man,” enthused Trotsky (who’d read What Is to Be Done? with “ecstatic love”), “will make it his purpose to… raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness… to create a higher social biologic tongue type, or, if you please, a superman.”

A prime crucible for the new Soviet identity was byt (everyday life and its mores)—to be remade as novy byt (the new lifestyle). A deeply Russian concept, this byt business, difficult to translate. Not merely everyday life in the Western sense, it traditionally signified the metaphysical weight of the daily grind, the existentially depleting cares of material living. The Bolsheviks meant to eliminate the problem. In Marxian terms, material life determined consciousness. Consequently, novy byt—everyday life modernized, socialized, collectivized, ideologized—would serve as a critical arena and engine of man’s transformation. Indeed, the turbulent twenties marked the beginning of our state’s relentless intrusion into every aspect of the Soviet daily experience—from hygiene to housekeeping, from education to eating, from sleeping to sex. Exact ideologies and aesthetics would vary through the decades, but not the state’s meddling.

“Bolshevism has abolished private life,” wrote the cultural critic Walter Benjamin after his melancholy 1927 visit to Moscow.

The abolition started with housing. Right after October 1917, Lenin drafted a decree expropriating and partitioning single-family dwellings. And so were born our unbeloved Soviet kommunalki—communal apartments with shared kitchens and bathrooms. Under the Bolsheviks, comforting words such as house and apartment were quickly replaced by zhilploshchad’, chilling bureaucratese for “dwelling space.” The official allowance—nine square meters per person, or rather, per statistical unit—was assigned by the Housing Committee, an all-powerful institution that threw together strangers—often class enemies—into conditions far more intimate than those of nuclear families in the West. An environment engineered for totalitarian social control.

Such was the domicile near Red Square where I spent the first three years of my life. It was, I’m sad to report, not the blissful communal utopia envisaged in the hallowed pages of What Is to Be Done? Sadder still, by the seventies, the would-be socialist ubermensch had shrunk to Homo sovieticus: cynical, disillusioned, wholly fixated on kolbasa, and yes, Herzen’s petit bourgeois chicken.

Naturally, the Bolshevik reframing of byt ensnared the family stove. Despite the mammoth challenge of feeding the civil-war-ravaged country, the traditional domestic kitchen was branded as ideologically reactionary, and downright ineffectual. “When each family eats by itself,” warned a publication titled Down with the Private Kitchen, “scientifically sound nutrition is out of the question.”

State dining facilities were to be the new hearth—the public cauldron replacing the household pot, in the phrase of one Central Committee economist. Such communal catering not only allowed the state to manage scarce resources, but also turned eating into a politically engaged process. “The stolovaya [public canteen] is the forge,” declared the head of the union in charge of public dining, “where Soviet byt and society will be… created.” Communal cafeterias, agreed Lenin, were invaluable “shoots” of communism, living examples of its practice.

By 1921 thousands of Soviet citizens were dining in public. By all accounts these stolovayas were ghastly affairs—scarier even than those of my Mature Socialist childhood with their piercing reek of stewed cabbage and some Aunt Klava flailing a filthy cleaning rag under my nose as I gagged on the three-course set lunch, with its inevitable ending of desolate-brown dried fruit compote or a starchy liquid jelly called kissel.

Kissel would have appeared ambrosial back in the twenties. Workers were fed soup with rotten sauerkraut, unidentifiable meat (horse?), gluey millet, and endless vobla, the petrified dried Caspian roach fish. And yet… thanks to the didactic ambitions of novy byt, many canteens offered reading rooms, chess, and lectures on the merits of hand-washing, thorough chewing, and proletarian hygiene. A few model stolovayas even had musical accompaniment and fresh flowers on white tablecloths.

Mostly though, the New Soviet slogans and schemes brought rats, scurvy, and filth.

There were rats and scurvy inside the Kremlin as well.

Following Lenin’s self-abnegating example, the Bolshevik elite overworked and under-ate. At meetings of the Council of People’s Commissars, comrades fainted from illness and hunger. As the flames of civil war guttered, the victorious socialist state came staggering into the century’s third decade “never so exhausted, so worn out,” to quote Lenin. An overwhelming roster of crises demanded solution. War Communism and its “food dictatorship” had proved catastrophic. Grain production was down; in February of 1921, a drastic cut in food rations in Petrograd set off major strikes. At the end of that month, the sailors at Kronstadt Fortress—whose guns had helped to launch the October Revolution—rose against Bolshevik authoritarianism. The mutiny was savagely suppressed, but it reverberated all over the country. In a countryside still seething from the violent forced grain requisition, peasants revolted in every corner.

What was to be done?

Lenin’s pragmatic shock remedy was NEP—the New Economic Policy. Beginning in mid-1921, grain requisition was replaced by tax in kind. And then the bombshell: small-scale private trade was permitted alongside the state’s control of the economy’s “looming heights.” It was a radical leap backward from the Party ideal, a desperate tack to nourish frail socialism through petty capitalism. And it was done even as the utopian New Soviet Man program pushed ahead in contradictory, competitive parallel.

Such were the Soviet twenties.

Despite the policy turnabout, famine struck southeastern Russia in late 1921. Five million people were dead before the horrors subsided the next year. But between this famine and the one that would follow under Stalin, the NEP’s seven years lit up a frenzied, carnal entr’acte, a Russian version of Germany’s sulfurous Weimar. Conveniently, the nepachi (NEPmen) made a perfect ideological enemy for the ascetic Bolsheviks. Instantly—and enduringly—they were demonized as fat, homegrown bourgeois bandits, feasting on weakened, virtuous socialist flesh.

And yet for all its bad rap, NEP helped tremendously. A reviving peasant economy began feeding the cities; in 1923 practically all Russia’s bread was supplied by private sources. Petrograd papers were gleefully reporting oranges—oranges!—to be had around town.

For a few years the country more or less ate.

Images of gluttonous conmen aside, most NEP businesses were no more than market stands or carts. This was the era of pop-up soup counters, blini stalls, and lemonade hawkers. Also of canteens run out of citizens’ homes—especially Jewish homes, according to Russia’s top culinary historian, William Pokhlebkin.

Checking in on Mom and her twenties research, I find her immersed in reconstructing the menu of one such canteen. It’s in NEP-era Odessa as she imagines it, half a decade before she was born.

The focus of my mother’s imagining is one sprawling room in Odessa’s smokestack factory neighborhood of Peresyp. Owner? Her maternal grandmother, Maria Brokhvis, the best cook in all of Peresyp. To make ends meet, Maria offers a public table. And there’s a regular customer, dining right now. Barely in his twenties, with dark hair already starting to recede but with lively, ironic eyes and dazzling white teeth that make him a natural with the ladies. Often he comes here straight from work in his suave blue naval uniform. He’s new to Odessa, to his posting in the Black Sea naval intelligence. Naum Solomonovich Frumkin is his name, and he will be my mother’s father.