Why the kitchen is small and everything happens in it

A lot of Russian kitchens are small because of when the buildings went up. The mass housing of the late 1950s and 1960s — the flats everyone calls khrushchevki — was designed to move millions of people out of shared rooms and barracks into a flat of their own, fast and cheaply. The compromise was floor area: low ceilings, a narrow hallway and a kitchen sized for one person cooking.

What happened next is the interesting part. The kitchen became the social room. The living room held the sofa bed, the wall unit and often a sleeping grandparent, so the kitchen was the one place you could sit late with a friend, talk, smoke out of the window and not wake the flat. The Soviet-era 'kitchen conversation' — long, unguarded, political — has a physical address, and it is six square metres wide.

The habit outlived the architecture. New buildings have bigger kitchens, some open-plan, and people still end up at the kitchen table rather than on the sofa. Offer a guest tea and you are pointing at a chair in the kitchen, not at the living room.

For a visitor the practical effect is simple: if you are being taken to the kitchen, you are not being kept at the door. That is the room where things are actually said.