Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

by Anya Von Bremzen

  From these horrors Soviet agriculture would never recover.

  By this point Lenin had been dead for almost ten years.

  Dead—but not buried.

  Following his long, mysterious illness (the “syphilis” whispers of many decades have lately reintrigued historians) Lenin expired in effective isolation on January 21, 1924. Stalin, a seminarian in his youth, understood the power of relics and was one of the early proponents of keeping the cadaver “alive.” At a 1923 Politburo session he’d already proposed that “contemporary science” offered a possibility of preserving the body, at least temporarily. Some Bolsheviks howled at the reek of deification. Krupskaya objected too, but nobody asked her.

  From January 27 on, Lenin’s body lay in state at the unheated Hall of Columns in Moscow. The weather was so bitter that the palm trees laid on inside for the funeral froze. An icy fog hung over Red Square; mourners were treated for frostbite. But the cold helped preserve the “mournee” for a while.

  The idea to replace the temporary embalmment with something eternal apparently arose spontaneously among the Funeral Commission—swiftly renamed the Immortalization Commission. Refrigeration was being mulled over, but as the weather warmed the body deteriorated, and the Commission panicked. Enter Boris Zbarsky, a self-promoting biochemist, and Vladimir Vorobyev, a gifted provincial pathologist. The pair proposed a radical embalming method. Miraculously, their wild gambit worked. Even a reluctant Krupskaya later told Zbarsky: “I’m getting older and he looks just the same.”

  So the USSR had a New Soviet Eternal Man. Proof in the flesh that Soviet science could defeat even the grave. Socialist reshaping of humanity, it seemed, had soared beyond wildest imagining—far beyond a new everyday life. The antireligious Bolshevik of Bolsheviks, who had ordered clergy murdered and churches destroyed, was now a living relic, immortal in the manner of Orthodox saints.

  From August 1924 on, the miraculous Object No. 1 (as it would later be code-named) preened for Red Square crowds inside a temporary wooden shrine created by the Constructivist architect Alexei Shchusev. Shchusev would go on to build the permanent mausoleum, the now iconic ziggurat of red, gray, and black stone the inner sanctum of which I was so desperate to penetrate as a child. The mavzoley was unveiled in 1930, but without particular fanfare. By then the USSR had a successor-God, one who was relegating Lenin to hazy Holy Spirit status.

  Lenin, incidentally, transmigrated from this distant, idealized Spirithood into warm and fuzzy dedushka-hood during the Brezhnevian phase of his cult. That’s when the didactic cake stories became popular, along with that silly iconographic cap on his bald head—asserting Ilyich’s modest, friendly, proletarian nature.

  The country would by then be wary of God-like personality cults.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1930s: THANK YOU, COMRADE STALIN, FOR OUR HAPPY CHILDHOOD

  Like most Soviet kids of her time, my mother was raised on stories by Arkady Gaidar. Gaidar’s tales are suffused with a patriotic romanticism that doesn’t ring insincere even today. They fairly brim with positive characters—characters who know that the true meaning of happiness is “to live honestly, toil hard, and deeply love and protect that vast fortunate land called The Soviet Country.” Mom was particularly struck by a story titled “The Blue Cup.” After overcoming a spell of conflict, a young family sits under a tree ripe with cherries on a late-summer night (spring and summer, one ironic critic remarked, being the only two seasons permissible in socialist realism). A golden moon glows overhead. A train rumbles past in the distance. The main character sums things up, closing the story: “And life, comrades, was good … entirely good.”

  This phrase filled my five-year-old mother with alienation and dread.

  To this day she can’t really explain why. Her parents, youthful, striving, and faithful to the State, exemplified Gaidarian virtues and the Stalinist vision of glamour. Liza, her mother, was a champion gymnast, an architect, and a painter of sweet watercolors. Naum, her father, possessed a radiant smile and a high, honest forehead to go along with his spiffy naval caps, which smelled of the foreign cologne he brought back from frequent trips abroad. If Mom and her younger sister, Yulia, were good, Naum would let them pin his shiny badges on their dresses and dance in front of the mirror. On his rare days off he’d take them to the Park of Culture and Relaxation named after Gorky.

  Mother had a second father, of course. Like her kindergarten classmates, she began each school day gazing up at a special poster and thanking him for her joyous, glorious childhood. On the poster the youthfully middle-aged Genius of Humanity and Best Friend of All Children was smiling under the black wings of his mustaches. In his arms a beautiful little girl also smiled. With her dark hair cut in a bowl shape, the girl reminded Mom of herself, only with Asiatic features. She was the legendary Gelya (short for Engelsina, from Friedrich Engels) Markizova. Daughter of a commissar from the Buryat-Mongol region, she came to the Kremlin with a delegation and handed a bouquet of flowers to the Supreme Leader, whereupon he lifted her in his arms, warming her with his amused, benevolent gaze. Cameras flashed. After appearing on the front page of Izvestia, the photograph became one of the decade’s iconic images. It was reproduced on millions of posters, in paintings and sculptures. Gelya was the living embodiment of every Soviet child’s dream.

  Comrade Stalin kept a watchful eye over Mom and her family, she was sure of that. And yet a pall hung over her. Life, she suspected, was not “entirely good.” In place of big bright Soviet happiness, my mother’s heart often filled with toska, a word for which there is no English equivalent. “At its deepest and most painful,” explains Vladimir Nabokov, “toska is a sensation of great spiritual anguish.… At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul.”

  When Mom heard cheerful choruses on the radio, she imagined squalid people singing drunkenly around a putrid-smelling barrel of pickles. Sometimes she’d refuse to go out into the street, frightened of the black public loudspeakers broadcasting the glories of the Five-Year Plan. Many things about Moscow made her feel scared and small. At the Revolution Square station of the new metro, she ran as quickly as she could past bronze statues of athletic figures with rifles and pneumatic drills. No use. Night after night she was haunted by nightmares of these statues coming alive and tossing her mother into a blazing furnace, like the one in the mural at the Komsomolskaya station.

  Perhaps she had such dreams because the parents of other children were disappearing.

  There were many things my mother didn’t know, couldn’t have known, at the time. She didn’t know that Arkady Gaidar, beloved writer for the young, had brutally murdered civilians, including women and children, as a Red commander during the civil war. She didn’t know that one year after that bouquet at the Kremlin, Gelya Markizova’s father was accused of a plot against Stalin and executed—just one of an estimated twelve to twenty million victims of Stalin. Gelya’s mother perished as well. The poster child for a happy Stalinist childhood was deported and raised in an orphanage.

  Darkness. The unyielding blackness of Arctic winter in Murmansk is my mother’s earliest memory. She was born in sunny Odessa, a barely alive five-pound preemie bundled in wads of coarse cotton. Her father was then sent to Russia’s extreme northwest to head the intelligence unit of the newly formed Northern Flotilla. The year was the relatively benign 1934. The harvest was decent. Collectivization’s famines and horrors were slowly subsiding. Ration cards were being phased out, first for bread and sugar, then meat.

  Myska—childspeak for “little mouse”—was Mother’s very first word, because mice scurried along the exposed wires above her bed in the tiny room she shared with her sister and parents. Thinking back on those days, Mother imagines herself as a mouse, burrowing through some dark, sinister tunnel of early consciousness. She remembers the thunderous crunch of Murmansk’s snow under their horse-drawn sled, the salty taste of blood in her mouth after the icicles she liked to lick stuck to her tongue.

  Leningrad, whe
re Naum was transferred in 1937, was a thousand kilometers south but still on the chill sixtieth degree of north latitude. Its darkness was different, though. Russia’s former imperial capital suggested various conjugations of gray: the steely reflection off the Neva River, with its somber granite embankments; the dull aluminum of the grease-filmed kasha bowls at Mother’s nursery school. In place of mice there were rats—the reason Uncle Vasya, their communal apartment neighbor, was missing half his nose. Too bad Mom’s name rhymed with krysa (rat). “Larisa-krysa, Larisa-krysa,” children taunted her in the courtyard. Liza occasionally took the girls to see museums and palaces in the center of town. Their melancholy neoclassical grandeur contrasted starkly with the web of bleak alcoholic alleys near their apartment. Mother was inconsolable when a drunk trampled and ruined her brand-new galoshes, so shiny and black, so red inside.

  Bleak too was the mood in the city. Three years earlier, Leningrad’s charismatic Communist boss Sergei Kirov had been shot down in the corridors of the Smolny Institute, local Party headquarters, by a disgruntled ex-Party functionary. His killing signaled the prologue to the years of paranoia, midnight knocks on the door, denunciations, witch hunts for “enemies of the people,” and mass slaughter that would come to be known as the Great Terror of 1937–38. Stalin’s suspected involvement in Kirov’s murder has never been proved. But the Friend of All Children was quick to seize the moment. After planting a sorrowful kiss on Kirov’s brow at his operatic show funeral, Stalin unleashed an opening paroxysm of violence against his own political enemies. The show trials would follow. The charge of conspiracy to kill Kirov was used until 1938; it offered one of the key justifications of terror among the grab bag of crimes against the Soviet State and betrayals thereof. Thousands were arrested without cause and shipped to the gulags or killed. Moscow staged the most notorious trials (including the trial of Zelensky, my great-great-grandmother Anna Alexeevna’s boss), but Leningrad’s suffering was possibly deeper still. By 1937 the former capital had been ravaged by deportations and executions. It was Stalin’s vendetta against the city he hated, the locals whispered. Indeed, after Kirov’s coffin left Leningrad for Moscow, the Great Leader never set foot by the Neva again.

  I look at a picture of my mother from that time. She has an upturned nose, a bob of black hair, wary, defiant eyes. She’s laughing, but in her laughter there seems to lurk a shadow. In constructing the narrative of her childhood, Mother likes to portray herself as Dissident-Born, a young prodigy of distress, instinctively at odds with the land of happy children of Stalin. A thousand times I’ve heard her tales of constantly running away from summer camps and health sanatoria. Of how she finally escaped to America as an adult and at last stopped running.

  But to when and what, exactly, does she trace the origins of her childhood toska? I’ve always wanted to know. And now I learn about one particular wintry day.

  It’s still pitch-black outside when Liza yanks Larisa from her blanket cocoon. “Hurry hurry, we have to get there by six for the start,” she urges, blowing furiously on Mom’s farina to cool it. On the sled ride wet snow cakes Mother’s face; the tubercular Baltic chill pierces right through her limbs still heavy with slumber. Despite the early hour she hears marching songs in the distance, sees people hurrying somewhere. Why is this? Her stomach tightens with alarm and foreboding. A sick worm of fear comes alive; it keeps gnawing at her intestines as she finally reaches a thronged hall inside a building decked out with life-size posters of Great Comrade Stalin. Her parents push through the crowds toward officials bellowing greetings on loudspeakers behind a long table covered with kumach, the crimson calico of the Soviet flag. The march music turns deafening. Her parents fill out some papers and momentarily she loses them in the commotion. “They’re voting!” a woman in the crowd cries, handing Mom a red baby-size flag—on this day, December 12, 1937. Voting. It’s a new word. It stems from golos, or “voice.” Could her parents be screaming for her? She starts to scream too, but her shrieks are drowned out by song.

  “Shiroka strana moya rodnaya” (“O vast is my country!”), the people are singing. “There’s no other country where a man breathes more freely.” Swept up in the collective elation, Mom inhales as deep as she can, filling her lungs with what she will always describe as “that smell”—the Soviet institutional odor of dusty folders, karbolka cleaner, woolen coats, and feet stewing in rubber galoshes, which will haunt her all her adult life in the USSR, at offices, schools, political meetings, at work. Her parents find her at last. They are beaming with pride, laugh at her anguish.

  By evening Mom is happy again. On the family’s afternoon stroll, Leningrad’s vast squares look dazzling, decked out in red slogans and posters. Tiny lights outline the buildings in the early dusk. And now on their way to Uncle Dima’s house Naum is promising that they will see the salut from his balcony. What’s salut? Why on the balcony? “Just wait, you’ll see!” says Naum.

  Mom’s excited to be visiting Uncle Dima Babkin. He isn’t really her uncle; he’s her dad’s tall, bald naval boss. In his high-ceilinged apartment, he has a rosy-cheeked baby and twin girls a little older than Mom, and, always, a never-ending supply of sugary podushechki candies. When they arrive, the family is celebrating full-throttle. Bottles burst open with a loud popping of corks; toasts are drunk to Russia’s historic election and to the arrival of Uncle Dima’s elderly father from Moscow. “Vast is my country,” sing the children, dancing around the baby’s crib, which Uncle Dima’s wife has filled with sweet raisin rusks. Any minute Aunt Rita, Dima’s sister, will arrive with her famous cake called Napoleon.

  Uncle Dima’s whole building is, in fact, celebrating Election Day; neighbors stream in and out, borrowing chairs, carrying treats.

  “Aunt Rita? Napoleon?” scream the children constantly darting up to the door.

  There is a short, harsh buzz of the doorbell—but instead of cake Mom sees three men in long coats by the entrance. How come they don’t bring tangerines or pirozhki, she wonders? Why haven’t they shaken the snow off their felt valenki boots before entering—as every polite Russian must do?

  “We’re looking for Babkin!” barks one of the men.

  “Which Babkin?” Uncle Dima’s wife asks with an uncertain smile. “Father or son?”

  The men look confused for a moment. “Well … both—sure, why not?” they say, and they shrug. “Both.” They almost giggle.

  The silence that follows, and the smile that’s turned strangely petrified on Uncle Dima’s wife’s face, reawakens the worm in Mom’s stomach. As if in slow motion, she watches Uncle Dima and his old father go off with the men. To her relief, the family’s babushka orders the children onto the balcony to see the salut. Outside, the black night erupts in glitter. Fiery thrills shoot through Mom’s body with each new soaring, thundering explosion of fireworks. Green! Red! Blue!—blooming in the sky like giant, sparkling, jubilant bouquets. But when she goes back inside she is startled to see Uncle Dima’s wife splayed out on the couch, panting. And the house is filled with the sweet-rotten odor of valerian drops. And silence—that dead, scary silence.

  Arrests to the popping of corks, horror in the next room from happiness, fear emblazoned with fireworks and pageantry—this was the split reality, the collective schizophrenia of the 1930s. Venom-spitting news accounts of the show trials of “fascist dogs of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite gang” ran beside editorials gushing over crepe de chine dresses at “model department stores” and the “blizzards of confetti” at park carnivals.

  People sang. Sometimes they sang on their way to the firing squad, chanting “O Vast Is My Country,” a tune used as a station signal for Radio Moscow even during my youth. Featured in Circus, a Hollywood-style musical comedy, “O Vast Is My Country” was composed to celebrate Stalin’s new 1936 constitution, heralded as “the world’s most democratic.” On paper it even restored voting rights to the formerly disenfranchised classes (kulaks, children of priests). Except now arrests were not so much class-based as guide
d by regional quotas affecting every stratum of the society.

  Chronicles of Stalin’s terror have naturally shaped the narrative of the era. They dominate so completely, one can forgive Westerners for imagining the Soviet thirties as one vast gray prison camp, its numbed inhabitants cogs in the machinery of the State that promoted itself solely through murder, torture, and denunciation. This vision, however, doesn’t convey the totalizing scope of the Stalinist civilization. A hypnotic popular culture, the State’s buoyant consumer goods drive, and a never-ending barrage of public celebrations—all stoked a mesmerizing sense of building a Radiant Future en masse.

  Those who didn’t perish or disappear into the gulags were often swallowed up in the spectacle of totalitarian joy. Milan Kundera describes it as “collective lyrical delirium.” Visiting Russia in 1936, André Gide couldn’t stop marveling at the children he saw, “radiant with health and happiness,” and the “joyous ardor” of park-goers.

  When I think of the Stalinist State, which I knew only as a banished ghost, these are the images that come to my mind: Nadezhda Mandelstam’s description of her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, being led away to the sounds of a Hawaiian guitar in a neighbor’s apartment. Anna Akhmatova’s unbearably tragic poem “Requiem” (dedicated to the victims of purges) juxtaposed with the indomitable cheer of Volga-Volga, an infectiously kitsch celluloid musical comedy of the time. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of the voronki (black Mariahs), prison transports disguised as brightly painted comestibles trucks, their sides eventually featuring ads for Sovetskoye brand champagne with a laughing girl.