The following noon I plucked a grape from a ruby-red crystal pedestaled bowl, cranked a heavily lipsticked smile for the cameras, and thought a monstrous thought: one of history’s bloodiest dictators likely touched this bowl I’m eating from.

Him again.

No, I hadn’t slid into obsessional fantasy. I was on my TV shoot, an hour from Moscow at the super-bourgeois dacha of Viktor Belyaev, ex–Kremlin chef and my show partner.

Until a heart attack a few years before, Viktor had spent three high-stress decades cooking for the top Soviet hierarchy. From this lofty gig he’d inherited porcelain manufactured exclusively for Kremlin banquets, and a red crystal bowl set named Rubinovy (ruby, after the Kremlin star). The crystal’s former owner? The mustachioed one himself. More astounding still, the bowls had come from the dacha—that green dacha. Date of issue: 1949, Stalin’s seventieth jubilee year, celebrated so joyously, the entire Pushkin Museum of Art was commandeered as a giant display case for gifts to Dear Leader.

Viktor was disarmingly friendly and compulsively talkative. When Dasha the producer had originally said “Kremlin chef,” I imagined a dour Party hack with a heavy KGB past. Instead, in his baby-blue cashmere sweater and discreet gold neck chain, Viktor suggested a relaxed clone of Louis Prima, the jazz man; he had a very jazzy Chevy Camaro parked in his driveway.

Bonding with him pre-shoot over a quick cigarette out on the porch, I was amazed to learn that Viktor had cooked at the dacha in 1991, right before Gorbachev’s resignation. The mineral secretary had a residence on Blizhnyaya’s grounds, which he never used and wanted to convert into a small hotel—for international biznes VIPs. Viktor was brought in to handle the food operation and do some catering in the main house.

“Gorbach,” huffed Viktor. “Nobody’s favorite boss! Half my staff quit because of Raisa—that harpy-from-hell, our First Lady. Now, Brezhnev’s wife—she was golden.”

“Viktor,” I pressed. “Please—the dacha!”

Viktor shuddered theatrically, fingered his gold chain. “Horrifying musty smell of sinister history… moats and drawbridges everywhere… some of the pine trees even hollowed out with doors and windows—for guards!” Because the Generalissimo detested all food smells, a massive three-hundred-yard corridor separated Blizhnyaya’s dining room from the kitchen. “And his closet…” Viktor grimaced. “I knew Stalin was short, but his clothes… they were for a child—or a midget.”

Viktor initially learned about the forbidding green dacha from his elderly mentor, a certain Vitaly Alexeevich (last name strictly secret), formerly one of Stalin’s personal chefs. On March 6, 1953, Vitaly Alexeevich dutifully reported for his shift. He was met on the dacha porch by Valechka, the Generalissimo’s loyal housekeeper and, possibly, mistress. She had a car waiting for him.

“Flee,” Valechka told him. “Now! Drive as far as you can. Disappear!!” Stalin’s death had just been announced.

The chef ran, while other dacha staffers perished at Beria’s orders. He returned to Moscow the day of Beria’s execution, and for the rest of his life laid flowers on the housekeeper’s grave.

“Vitaly Alexeevich was a cook ot boga (God’s talent),” sighed Viktor. “He’d sing to his dough to help it to rise.” I thought of Mom’s and my struggles to crack the mysteries of Slavic yeast dough for our kulebiaka. Crooning to it, as Stalin’s chef had done—was that the secret?

“So was it really haunted, the dacha?” I wanted to know, thinking of all the times I slinked past the green fence during kindergarten, my heart hammering.

Viktor shuddered again.

At the end of his first night catering at Blizhnyaya, he was sitting alone in Stalin’s old dining room. He leaned on the massively long wooden table, the one at which murderous Politburo men gathered for their nocturnal banquets four decades before. An eerie silence…. Suddenly Viktor heard footsteps… footsteps so ghostly, he bolted into the woods drenched in cold sweat. The same thing happened to the actor who played Stalin during a 1991 film shoot there. And when Stalin’s old dacha guard was invited back for a documentary, he suffered a heart attack. “His boot leather—” stammered the guard at the hospital. “I smelled it—his boot leather and the Karelian birch of his furniture!”

At this point we were summoned back inside. The TV cameras were ready for us.

The sight of Viktor’s table almost gave me a heart attack myself.

For our shoot—on Soviet cuisine—my partner had conjured up a Technicolor fantasia out of The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food—Politburo dreambook edition. Dainty, open-faced rasstegai fish pies nestled inside Stalinist crystal; an elaborate beef roulade layered with a delicate omelet reposed on a Kremlin-issue porcelain platter. There was even a torte outfitted with caramel rockets, contributed by a generous ex-nomenklatura confectioner. Polyot (“flight”), the torte was called: a meringue relic from the sixties kosmos-mania era.

I stared transfixed at this culinary time capsule. At the jellied ham rolls under mayonnaise curlicues, in particular. Early September, 1974: Praga restaurant take-out shop. Me standing—for the very last time, I thought—in the gigantic line for our Sunday kulebiaka as Mom at home irons out final immigration formalities. I’m eyeing the jellied curlicued ham rolls my parents couldn’t ever afford, thinking desperately: Never in my life will I see them again.

And now I learn that pre-Kremlin, Viktor cooked at Praga!

My Praga.

Was there some profound meaning in all this coincidence? Had some god of Soviet Civilization sent Viktor my way to help me properly savor my childhood’s treasures and reveal its mysteries?

Arriving in Moscow this trip I’d been crestfallen to learn that my Praga was closed. One of the city’s last pre-Soviet great restaurants had been bought by the Italian designer Roberto Cavalli, to be converted, no doubt, into a post-bling elite playground. Seeing its iconic yellow facade disfigured by scaffolding at the head of Novy Arbat, I felt as if some dear old grandparent had died.

Viktor and I mourned the closure of Praga as the cameras rolled. “A-plus,” hooted our young director. “I’m loving you guys’ chemistry!” Feeling relaxed at last, I prattled on about stalking diplomats by Praga’s entrance and hawking Juicy Fruit gum at school. The mostly youthful, post-Soviet crew lapped up my socialist misadventures.

“More! More stories like this!” they cried.

When Dasha had originally suggested a show on Soviet cuisine—“The topic is hot”—I’d been bewildered.

“But isn’t Moscow full of people who remember the USSR a lot better than I do? I mean, I’m from New York!”

“You don’t understand,” said Dasha. “Here we have mishmash for our memory. But an émigré like you—you remember things clearly!”

After the lunch, and before the shashlik (kebab) grill shoot by his dacha backyard swimming pool, Viktor clued me in on his time at the Kremlin kitchens.

Supplies were from their very own teeming farms. So damn rich was Politburo milk, truckers would loosely set deep metal lids on the milk buckets, and by arrival the clattering lids had churned up gorgeous thick, sticky cream. For instant pilfering.

I was astonished. “You mean despite all the perks—elite housing, Crimean resorts, special tailors—Kremlin employees still stole?”

“And how!” chuckled Viktor. Soon after taking over he raided his employees’ lockers and turned up sixty kilos of loot. “And that was before noon.”

There beneath the twenty-five-foot ceiling of the main old Kremlin kitchen he made other discoveries too: