Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

by Anya Von Bremzen

  Three years before Mom got hooked on sosiski made by the Mikoyan Meat Processing Plant and opened the green cookbook he’d sponsored, the narkom had his suitcases packed for a Crimean vacation. It was a holiday he’d long promised his wife, Ashkhen, and their five sons. He dropped by the Kremlin to say goodbye to his boss and old comrade, whom he addressed with ty, the familiar intimate form of “you.”

  “Why don’t you go instead to America,” Stalin proposed unexpectedly. “It, too, will be a pleasant vacation; besides, we need to research the American food industry. The best of what you discover,” he declared, “we’ll transplant here.”

  Mikoyan gauged the Supreme Leader’s mood: the proposal was impromptu but serious. Even so, he demurred: “I’ve promised Ashkhen a holiday.” Mikoyan was famously family-minded.

  Stalin must have been in good spirits.

  “Take Ashkhen with you,” he suggested.

  Who knows how Soviet food would have tasted had Stalin not allowed the narkom’s wife to join her husband. Had the Mikoyans sunned themselves on the Black Sea instead.

  One wonders too how the Armenian managed for so long to retain Stalin’s favor while other Politburo members were “liquidated” or saw their wives off to the gulags. “Anastas seems more interested in cheese varieties than in Marxism and Leninism,” Stalin would quip without reproach. Perhaps this escape into the world of sosiski, kolbasa, and condensed milk was Mikoyan’s secret of survival. Formerly ascetic in the old Bolshevik manner, Stalin by now was developing quite a palate himself.

  Mikoyan and his foodie squad landed in New York on the SS Normandie on a sweltering August morning in 1936. In their stopover in Germany they had drawn giggles with their identical new “European-style” outfits. For two months the Soviet expedition covered 12,000 miles of America by car and train, coast to coast. They toured fish, ice cream, and frozen fruit plants. They inspected production of mayonnaise, beer, and “inflated seeds” (Mikoyan-speak for popcorn). They studied corrugated cardboard and metal jar lids. Wisconsin dairies, Chicago slaughterhouses, California fruit farms—not exactly the holiday Ashkhen had been promised. They ate intently at self-service cafeterias. (“Here,” noted Mikoyan, “was a format born out of the bowels of capitalism but most suited to communism.”) They studied Macy’s display strategies—models for the trendsetting department stores that would emerge in Moscow by the end of the decade.

  In Detroit, Henry Ford told Mikoyan not to waste time on meat production. “Meat’s bad for you,” he insisted. Soviet workers should eat vegetables, soy products, and fruit. The Armenian narkom found Ford most peculiar.

  Urbane but unsmiling, Mikoyan could barely restrain himself in his rather dull late-life memoirs from gushing about the wonders of his American trip. Here was the efficient industrialized society for Stalinist Russia to emulate. Was it flash freezing or mechanized cow milking (take that, Stakhanovite milkmaids) that impressed him more? Maybe the fruit juices? True, Russia didn’t have enough oranges, but Mikoyan dreamed of turning tomato juice into a Soviet national drink. (Mission accomplished: in my school days I gagged on the red stuff.) The ever-practical narkom showed no ideological qualms about adopting techniques and mass standardization from the capitalist West. These were the internationalist Soviet thirties, before World War II unleashed Stalinist xenophobia. Unlike evil, devious Britain, the United States was considered a semifriendly competitor—though having American relatives could still land you in the gulag.

  Perhaps what struck Mikoyan most was the American guy at a stainless-steel griddle who swiftly cooked a curious-looking kotleta, which he inserted into a split white bun, then flourished with pickles and dabs of red sauce. “For a busy man it is very convenient,” marveled Mikoyan. Didn’t Soviet workers deserve this efficient, cheap, filling snack on their parades, their outings to Parks of Culture and Relaxation?

  Mikoyan plunked down Stalin-approved scarce hard currency for twenty-two American hamburger grills, with the capacity to turn out two million orders a day. Burger production launched in select major cities, to some acclaim. But World War II intervened; the bun got lost in the shuffle. Soviet food planning settled instead for a take-out kotleta, unsandwiched.

  “So that’s it?” I gasped, reading Mikoyan’s memoirs.

  “So that’s it?” gasped Mother when I passed her the book.

  Our mythic all-Soviet store-bought kotleta—the lump-in-the-throat nostalgic treat from five generations of childhoods. That’s what it was? An ersatz burger that mislaid its bun? Mikoyan’s account of the origins of Soviet ice cream further wounded what was left of my food patriotism. Morozhennoye—our national pride? The hard-as-rock plombir with its seductive cream rosette I licked at thirty below zero? The Eskimos on a stick from Mom’s childhood outings? Yup, all the result of Yankee technology, imported by Mikoyan. The savvy Armenian even coveted Coca-Cola but couldn’t wangle the syrup recipe. As for sosiski and kolbasa, those other ur-Soviet food icons … they were German sausages that, in Mikoyan’s words, “changed their citizenship.” So much for our ideologically charged native madeleines.

  Mikoyan returned from America loaded with samples, information, and brand-new wardrobes for himself and his wife. The Mickey Mouse pens he carried home for his sons were promptly stolen at the boys’ school for Politburo offspring.

  Given Russia’s still rudimentary consumer conditions, the narkom was able to introduce a surprising number of American novelties—from mass-produced ice cream (hitherto made by hand) to kornfleks to the concept of prepackaged foods. A 1937 newspaper ad even urged Soviets to embrace a “spicy aromatic condiment” that “every American housewife keeps in her cupboard.” Ketchup! Occasionally Stalin objected. Russian winters were long, he said, and there was no need to produce the GE-style home fridges that Mikoyan wanted. What’s more, heavy-industry factories were preoccupied with defense orders. So until the end of the war Soviets made do with a box outside the window.

  Stalin took great personal interest in Mikoyan’s business. The Leader took great personal interest in many things. When he wasn’t busy signing execution orders or censoring books or screening Volga-Volga, the Standardbearer of Communism opined on fish (“Why don’t we sell live fish like they did in the old days?”) or Soviet champagne. A fan of sweet bubbles, he wanted to ban brut production wholesale, but here Mikoyan held firm. Suds? Indeed. Mikoyan recalls how with his bloodthirsty henchmen Molotov and Kaganovich, Stalin fingered, sniffed, and critiqued trial soap bars, deciding which should go into production. “Our comrade Stalin has a boundless resource of wisdom,” gushed Mikoyan of the soap venture. Clearly, the bathing habits of Homo sovieticus were a matter of great national concern.

  An obsessive micromanager himself, Mikoyan taste-tested each new food product, approved all recipes and label designs, okayed punishments for wreckers and saboteurs. Stalin’s directive for happiness, abundance, and cheer loomed large. “Since life has gotten better,” wrote Mikoyan in a report, “we need to produce more aromatic high-quality cigarettes.” In a speech: “What kind of cheerful life can we have if there’s a shortage of beer and liqueurs?” Period food industry trade magazines portray their workers practically agog with joy and enthusiasm. Inspired by Stalin’s credo, they’d even staged an amateur theater production called Abundance, featuring singing sausages. One of the comrades playing a sausage recalled using the Stanislavsky method to interpret her role.

  Or picture this. May Day. The Mikoyan Meat Plant procession parades toward Red Square under the portrait of the mustachioed Armenian and a festive panel of children with flowers beneath the slogan THANK YOU COMRADE STALIN FOR OUR HAPPY CHILDHOODS. Banners emblazoned with sosiski, kolbasa, and bacon wave alongside—emblems of Soviet-issue smoked goodness.

  One pauses at the grotesquery of such scenes in this most murderous decade of a political regime in which abundance would remain a myth for another half-century. For those not attached to privileged stores—in the thirties and later—shortages of basic essentials we
re the grinding reality. And yet—Mom’s elderly friends remember equally vividly the prewar chocolates and champagne, the caviar and smoked fish magically materializing in stores before holidays.

  In 1937 Mikoyan’s favorite Red October Chocolate Factory produced more than five hundred kinds of confections, his meat plant close to 150 kinds of sausages. True, these were mainly available at flagship stores in larger cities. (Moscow, with 2 percent of the population, got 40 percent of the country’s meat allocation.) True, basics were often neglected in favor of luxury items; the champagne, chocolates, and smoked sturgeon all served as shining political symbols, furthering the illusion that czarist indulgences were now accessible to the masses. And yet in his push to create a socialist consumer culture—based on Western models, ironically—and to democratize certain foodstuffs, Mikoyan delivered moments of happiness to the common folk. A pink slice of kolbasa on a slab of dark bread, Eskimo on a stick at a fair—in the era of terror these small tokens had an existential savor.

  On Stalin’s death in 1953, the secret police chief Beria was executed and Molotov was effectively exiled to outer Mongolia. But Mikoyan prospered. His ability to side with winners matched his uncanny managerial skills. He backed Stalin against Trotsky, then denounced Stalin’s legacy and rose to the lofty post of Supreme Soviet chairman under Khrushchev. He voted for Khrushchev’s ouster and retained Brezhnev’s favor, tactfully retiring in 1965. Thirteen years later, he died of old age.

  A jingle summed up his career: “From Ilyich to Ilyich [Lenin’s and Brezhnev’s shared patronymic] without infarkt [heart attack] and paralich [stroke].”

  More resilient still were his kolbasa and sosiski. Just like my mother, when I was growing up I thought Mikoyan was the brand name of a kotleta. To our minds he was the Red Aunt Jemima or Chef Boyardee. The Mikoyan meat plant remains operational. These days it produces actual hamburgers.

  In the seventies, when Soviet Jews began emigrating, many packed Mikoyan’s hefty cookbook in their paltry forty-pound baggage. The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food had become a totalitarian Joy of Cooking—a kitchen bible so cherished, people lugged it with them even as they fled the State that published it. But the book didn’t keep its original parsley-green cover for long. Its color—physical and political—kept changing with each new regime and edition: a dozen editions in all, more than eight million copies in print, and still selling. Most iconic and politicized is the 1952 version, which I will revisit later.

  Mom, though, left her copy behind. The tattered volume that had taught her and her mother good socialist housekeeping was by then ideologically radioactive to her. She even despised the gaudy photos with the Soviet food industry logos meant to drive home the idea that the State was our sole provider.

  In the fall of 2010, I presented my mother with an original 1939 edition of Mikoyan’s masterwork. She flinched. Then she fell for it—hard. “Drab, dreary recipes,” she’d grumble while cooking up a storm from the book and matching her table settings in Queens to the ones in the photos as her mother had done in Moscow seventy years before. She piped mayonnaise borders onto “Stalinist-Baroque” crab salads. She carved tomato rosettes, trapped fish in aspic, and fashioned kotleti from meat, carrots, cabbage, and beets. Every night she telephoned friends, roaring at the book’s introduction, its vaunting invocations of “mankind’s centuries-old dream of building a communist society … of an abundant, happy, and joyous life.”

  “I’m not nostalgic!” she would correct me. “I just like old cookbooks, and this one, wow, a real antique!”

  Then: “Anyuta, what do they call that syndrome … when victims fall for their tormentors?”

  Followed by: “You dragged me into this!”

  Finally: “So what, I like all foods.”

  But never an admission of sentiment.

  One blustery Saturday night Mom’s elderly friends gather for a thirties-style dinner around her table set with ornamental cut-crystal bowls and bottles of sickly sweet Sovetskoye Shampanskoye.

  At first, the ladies recall their Stalinist childhoods with the guarded detachment of people who’ve long entombed their pasts. But with each new toast, fragments of horror and happiness tumble out, intermingled. They talk of the period’s dread silence, the morbid paralysis of families of the newly arrested, and in the same breath they remember the noise.

  “Living in the thirties was like being inside a giant metal forge,” says Inna. “Incessant drumbeats and songs, street loudspeakers, radios blasting behind every door.”

  “It was feast in a time of plague,” declares another friend, Lena, quoting the title of Pushkin’s play. “You were happy each new day you weren’t arrested. Happy to simply smell tangerines in your house!”

  “My father had murdered Kirov,” announces Musya, an octogenarian former Leningrader, in a clear, spirited voice. “I was convinced of this as a child. Why else would he and my uncle silently pass notes to each other at dinner?”

  Did she think of denouncing him? asks Inna.

  Musya vehemently shakes her head. “We Leningraders hated Stalin!” she retorts. “Before anyone else in the country, we knew.” When Musya’s uncle was arrested, men in long coats showed up and confiscated her family’s furniture. Sometime afterward Musya recognized their chairs and sideboard at a secondhand shop. She jumped with joy, hugging and stroking the plush blue upholstery. Her mother just yanked her away. “I lost my innocence at that moment,” says Musya.

  “I remained innocent—I knew nothing until Stalin died,” Katya confesses. A vivacious former translator near ninety who still smokes and swears like a sailor, Katya grew up—“a true Soviet child”—in provincial Ukraine. Happiness to her meant the clean, toasty smell in the house when her mom ironed the pleats on her parade skirts. And singing along with the crowds.

  “I too knew nothing about Stalin’s crimes,” Inna puts in ever so quietly, nervously stroking her immaculate chignon. “But I hated him for taking my mother away.” What she means is that her fanatical mother devoted her every breath to the Party. “On the day she noticed me, hugged me, and promised to mend my socks, I went to bed the most euphoric child on the planet,” Inna tells us. Her mother never did mend the socks. When she was forced to relinquish her Party ID card because Inna was emigrating, “she howled like an animal.”

  The ladies finish their champagne and Mom’s Soviet-style truffles and prepare to depart. “Living under Stalin,” Inna reflects at the door, “we censored our thoughts, terrified when anything bad crossed our minds. Then when he died, we kept on censoring, purging any traces of happiness from our childhoods.” Everyone nods.

  The autumn cold of 1939 ended Mom’s fire escape music lessons. She and her pal Ninka found a different occupation: helping older kids in the building chase spies. All children in paranoid Russia played at chasing spies. Anyone could be a suspect. The lift lady, for instance, with her single odd metal coat button. Comrades wearing glasses, or fedora hats instead of proletarian caps.

  Along twisting lanes, through dim podvorotni (deep archways), into silent, half-hidden courtyards—Mom and the gang pursued would-be evil betrayers of Rodina (Homeland). Mom liked the podvorotni. They smelled, not unpleasantly, of piss and decaying fall leaves. Under one of them a babushka in a tatty beret stood hawking an old doll. Forty whole rubles she was asking. Unlike the usual bald, grinning Soviet toy babies, this doll had flaxen hair, a frayed velvet dress, and melancholy eyes out of a tragic Hans Christian Andersen tale. In late November Naum relented; at home Mom inhaled the doll’s musty mystery. The next morning Naum went away on a trip.

  December brought soft, flaky snowfalls, the resinous aroma of fir trees, and invasions of gruff out-of-towners in stores. New Year’s festivities were still new to Soviets. Some simply hung their trees with walnuts in tinfoil; Liza propped a bright Kremlin star on top of their tree and bought presents for Larisa and Yulia. Mom only wanted things for her doll. There was no news from Naum, and Liza’s face had assumed a grim, absent expression.
Silently she stood in lines for toy washboards and miniature versions of the dinner sets depicted in Mikoyan’s parsley-green cookbook.

  Every day Mom consulted the cookbook for dollhouse decoration. Every day Liza perused its pages, churning out panfuls of kotleti and trays of cottage cheese korzhiki (biscuits). Uncharacteristically, she baked elaborate dried apricot pies—listening intently to the rattle of the approaching elevator. But it was usually Dora or the composers next door. Ninka and the Pokrass children ate most of the pies—their cheerful chewing filling Mom’s heart with toska.

  For New Year’s Eve Liza draped a brand-new tablecloth over the table. It was deep red like a theater curtain, as plush as a teddy bear’s cheek. Naum didn’t come home to admire it. The Sovetskoye champagne stood unopened as fireworks exploded above the Kremlin clock.

  “Nichevo, mozhet nichevo.” (Nothing, maybe it’s nothing.) Their neighbor Dora had been whispering this lately to Liza while Mom hid under the table chewing on the tablecloth tassels.

  “Nichevo, nichevo,” Mom whispered to her doll, licking tears off her face. The doll’s eyes said that she understood everything: the worm of despair in Mom’s stomach, the mystery of her father’s absence, her gnawing suspicion that the Radiant Future was passing them by. Stroking and braiding the doll’s flaxen hair, Mom desperately wanted at least to make her silent friend’s life happy, abundant, and cheerful. She had an inspiration. With Liza out of sight, she reached for her scissors. The first piece of tablecloth she cut off didn’t fit, so she kept cutting more: for the doll’s tablecloth, for her toy bedspread. When Mom was done the doll’s house was draped in red velvet, golden tassels lining its floor.

  Seeing Mom’s handiwork, Liza flailed a dishrag at her, but without her usual vigor. That day, and for days after, she kept looking for the key to Naum’s desk. She was trying to decide if now was the time to read Larisa and Yulia the letter he had written and locked in a drawer. The letter that urged his children to love him, love their mother, and love their Rodina—no matter what might suddenly have happened to him.