Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

by Anya Von Bremzen

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1940s: OF BULLETS AND BREAD

  On the weekend of June 21, 1941, in honor of the official arrival of summer, Liza finally switched from listless hot winter borscht to the chilled summer version. Tangy and sweet, the soup was alive with the crunch and vitality of the season’s first cucumbers and radishes. Following a short cold spell, Saturday’s weather was heartbreakingly lovely. Sun beamed on the lipstick-red tulips and dressy white lilies at the Pushkin Square flower beds; petunias scented the Boulevard Ring. Girls in their light graduation dresses floated past couples embracing on the Moskva River embankment. Summer plans, stolen kisses, blue and white cans of Mikoyan’s condensed milk packed for the dacha. Even the babushkas who hawked fizzy water with cherry syrup at parks somehow looked decades younger. The happiness in the air was palpable, stirring. Or so it seemed to my mother on her Saturday stroll with Yulia and their father.

  Naum was back with them—for a brief while at least. Ever since his alarming disappearance in 1939, when Liza thought him arrested or dead, his absences had gotten more prolonged and frequent. One morning Liza sat on the narrow cot that Mom shared with Yulia and explained Papa’s job.

  “Soviet spy?” Mom squealed with glee.

  “Nyet, nyet! Razvedchik (intelligence worker).”

  That too sounded thrilling. To protect their dad’s secrets from enemies of the people, Mom and Yulia took to stealthily eating his papers. They’d tear them into confetti, soak them in milk, and dutifully chew, handful by handful. This felt heroic—until Naum threw a fit after they swallowed his sberkassa (savings bank) documents.

  The girls now learned to put the names of foreign countries to his absences; they learned where their presents were coming from. The Russo-Finnish war of that winter in 1940—a hapless bloodbath that sent Russians home badly mauled but with a strategic chunk of the chilly Ladoga Lake—yielded Larisa and Yulia a festive tin box of Finnish butter cookies. Bright yellow neck scarves of fine flimsy cotton were the girls’ trophies from the ugly Soviet occupation of Estonia in July of 1940. From Naum’s intelligence missions in Stockholm came sky-blue princess coats with fur trim. Scandinavia and the Baltic were Naum’s specialties. He never mentioned the ugliness.

  There were six of them now sharing two communal rooms in the house of composers. Liza’s widowed dad from Odessa was living with them, snoring in the living room where the girls slept. Dedushka Yankel was obliging and doleful. A retired old Jewish communist shock-worker (pre-Stakhanovite uberlaborer), he hated the Talmud and detested the Bible. Mom liked to tug at the wispy clumps of hair on his temples as he sat in the kitchen copying The Short Course of the History of the All-Union Communist Party into his notebook over and over and over. He knew it by heart, Stalin’s Party catechism.

  Sashka, their new baby brother, was noisier. Liza had him in May while Naum was in Sweden, and her heart nearly broke in the maternity ward when she saw the nurse carry a huge bouquet of pink roses to some other lucky new mamochka. “For you,” said the nurse, smiling. “Look out the window.” Below, Naum waved and grinned. Since the baby was born he hadn’t left Moscow.

  Sashka wasn’t crying and Dedushka wasn’t snoring late on Saturday, June 21. Still, Mom couldn’t sleep. Perhaps she was overexcited at the prospect of seeing the famous chimp Mickey at the Moscow Circus the next day. Or maybe it was the thunderstorm that broke the still, airless sky after ten. Waking up often from her uneasy slumber, Mom noticed Naum in the room, crouched by his Latvian VEF shortwave radio. The radio’s flashing green light and the non-Russian voices—Hello … Bee Bee See—finally lulled my mother to sleep.

  Naum had his ear to the radio, fists clenched. Damn VEF! Were it not for the sleeping girls he’d have smashed it to pieces. It was shortly after dawn on Sunday. A static-crackly foreign voice had announced what he and his superiors had been warning about for months with desperate near certainty. His small suitcase had been packed for a week. Why wasn’t headquarters calling? Why did he have to crouch by the whining, buzzing radio for information when intelligence had been so overwhelming, when he himself had reported menacing activity at the new Soviet-Baltic border for more than a year? Top-level defense professionals had been aghast at the TASS news agency statement of June 14, which dismissed as base rumor the possibility of attack by Russia’s Non-Aggression Treaty cosigner—Nazi Germany. But the directive for the TASS pronouncement had come from the Vozhd (Leader) himself. Certain top commanders left for vacations; others went to the opera.

  Meanwhile, early the previous evening, a small, somber group had gathered nervously in Stalin’s Kremlin office. Among those present was Naum’s uberboss, naval commissar Admiral Kuznetsov. He’d brought along Captain Mikhail Vorontsov, a longtime acquaintance of Granddad’s (and his direct boss some months later). Vorontsov had just landed from Berlin, where he was Soviet naval attaché. Hitler would invade at any hour, he warned. Stalin had been hearing these kinds of detailed alarms for months. He rejected them with contempt, even fury. Tellingly, the meeting started without his new chief of military staff, General Georgy Zhukov.

  The signs, however, were too ominous to dismiss. The Dictator was noticeably agitated. General Zhukov rang at around eight p.m. from the defense commissariat: a German defector had crossed the border to warn that the attack would start at dawn. After midnight he rang again: another defector said likewise. Stalin grudgingly allowed a High Alert to be issued—with the bewildering caution not to respond to German “provocations.” He also ordered the latest defector shot as a disinformer.

  At his dacha the Leader, an insomniac usually, must have slept deeply that night. Because Zhukov was kept waiting on the line for a full three minutes when he telephoned just after dawn.

  “The Germans are bombing our cities!” Zhukov announced.

  Heavy breathing on the other end of the line.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” asked Zhukov.

  Upon returning to the Kremlin, Stalin appeared subdued, even depressed, his pockmarked face haggard. Refusing to address the nation himself, he delegated it to Molotov, who was then foreign commissar and stuttered badly. Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in the history of warfare, comprising more than three million German troops augmented by Axis forces, and ranging from the Baltic to the Black Sea, had been allowed to commence in effective surprise.

  In the early light of June 22, lying in bed with her eyes half closed, Larisa saw her father pull her mother to his chest with a force she’d never witnessed before. The embrace—desperate, carnal—told her that the circus was off even before Naum’s one-word announcement: war.

  At midday they all stood among panicked crowds under the black, saucer-shaped public loudspeakers.

  “Citizens of the Soviet Union!… Today, at four a.m.… German troops … have attacked our, um um, country … despite … a treaty of non-aggression …”

  Mercifully, Comrade Molotov didn’t stutter as much as usual. But his halting speech was that of a clerk struggling through an arcane document. “Our cause is just. The enemy will be beaten,” concluded the world’s worst public speaker.

  “What does perfidious mean?” asked children all over Moscow. What happened to Stalin? wondered their parents, joining the stampedes for salt and matches at stores.

  At two p.m. that afternoon, amid the wrenching chaos of departures at the Leningradsky railway station, Mother couldn’t help but admire Naum’s spiffy gray civilian suit.

  “Please, please, take off that hat!” Liza yelled, running after his train. “It makes you look Jewish—the Germans will kill you.”

  The Father of all Nations finally spoke on July 3.

  “Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters! I am addressing you, my friends!”

  It was a moving speech. The brothers and sisters line went down in history as possibly the only time Stalin called out to Russians in such an un-godlike familial fashion. Stalin had been even less godlike in private, though that was not known until
years after his death.

  “Lenin left us a great legacy and we shitted it away,” the Vozhd had blurted dismally a few days before his speech, after a frantic session at the defense commissariat where the ruthless General Zhukov had fled the room sobbing.

  Indeed. By the time Stalin spoke to the nation, the Germans had swept some four hundred miles into Soviet territory along three fronts. By late October they counted three million Russian POWs. The tidal roar of the Wehrmacht with its onrushing Panzer tanks, Luftwaffe overhead, and SS rear guard would not begin to be turned until Stalingrad, a year and a half away.

  After Naum’s departure, though, life in Moscow seemed to Mom almost normal. Except that it wasn’t. People carried home masks resembling sinister elephant trunks. Women with red swollen eyes clutched the hands of their husbands and sons all the way to conscription points. Dedushka Yankel glued X-shaped strips of tape on the windows and covered them with dark curtains, as officially required. The wails of the air raid sirens awoke in Mom the familiar sensations of alarm and toska, but now with an edge of adrenaline. Strakh (fear) was more tolerable somehow than toska. Falling asleep fully clothed, a rucksack packed with water and food by her bed for the frantic run to the bomb shelter—it was terrifying and just a little bit thrilling.

  In the dark, freshly plastered shelter beneath the house of composers, familiar faces were fewer with each air raid. Loudspeakers urged remaining Muscovites to evacuate. “Nonsense,” Liza kept murmuring. “Haven’t they said the war’s almost over? Why go?” Following one particularly long mid-August night on the concrete shelter floor, they came back to the house. Liza opened the curtains. Her hollow scream still rings in Mother’s ears after seventy years.

  The entire panorama of shingled Moscow roofs Mom so loved stood in flames in the gray morning light.

  The telephone call came at seven a.m. The evacuation riverboat was leaving that day. Someone from Naum’s headquarters could collect them in a couple of hours.

  Liza stood in the living room, lost. Scattered around her were the cotton parcels and pillowcases she’d been distractedly stuffing. She was five feet tall, as thin as a teenager at thirty-one years of age, still exhausted from childbirth, fragile and indecisive by nature.

  Sergei’s baritone jolted her out of her stupor. He was their driver. Everything ready? One glance at Liza’s flimsy parcels sent him into a tornado of packing.

  “Your winter coats. Where are they?”

  “Winter? Please, the war will be over by then!”

  “Whose clothes are these?”

  “My husband’s—but don’t touch them. He doesn’t need them—he’s fighting.”

  Sergei now swung open the sunduk in the hallway. It was a lightweight blue trunk that had once belonged to an aunt who’d fled long ago to America, where she ran a chicken farm. It still held her stuff. The smell of mothballs wafted into the air as Sergei wrenched out Aunt Clara’s old petticoats and filled the blue sunduk with Naum’s dandyish suits, his dazzling white shirts, and the ties he wore on his intelligence missions. Dedushka’s old sheepskin coat. Liza’s fuzzy Orenburg shawl. The girls’ valenki boots. Done packing, Sergei picked up both girls at once and tickled them with his breath. He had a wide smile and honest Slavic blue eyes. He also had a raging case of TB he’d pass on to the children.

  The building manager came to seal off the apartment per regulations. Approaching the riverboat station, Liza screamed: they’d forgotten little Sashka. Sergei raced back to the house while the family waited on board, sick with anxiety. Smiling broadly, Sergei made it back with the baby.

  “But is he lucky?” Napoleon famously asked when promoting a general.

  The good fortune of Naum Solomonovich Frumkin, my grandfather, was the stuff of family lore. He was, in that regard, a Bonapartian whiz. “Dedushka,” my older cousin Masha would plead, tugging at the three gold stars on his old uniform shoulder boards, “tell how your car was bombed and you escaped without even a scratch!” Or she’d ask to hear about the time when he had been adrift in freezing waters, hanging on for life—to a mine. Which “forgot” to explode!

  Everyone’s favorite was the day they finally came to arrest him. True to his luck, Naum was away, sick in the hospital. Oh, and the date was March 5, 1953. The day Stalin died. The beginning of the end of the repressions.

  After joining the RKKA (Workers and Peasants Red Army) in 1921, Granddad went into intelligence in 1931. For the two prewar years he had a perilous job recruiting and coordinating agents abroad. Yet this international cloak-and-dagger—and later even the hazards of combat—seemed to Naum like afternoons in the park compared to the perils from within. Between 1937 and 1941, purges utterly ravaged the leadership of the Soviet military and in particular of GRU, its intelligence branch. GRU’s directorship became a blood-soaked revolving door; five of its chiefs were executed in the four years leading up to Hitler’s attack. A domino effect then took down the heads of departments and branches, liquidating the top GRU cadres almost entirely.

  In this harrowing, half-paralyzed environment, Naum in 1939 became a section head himself, supervising spies for the naval commissariat in Moscow. In a sense, my fortunate grandfather was a beneficiary of the chistki (cleansings), swiftly moving up the career ladder from fleet to fleet, filling the empty desks of the purged. But he was also a target, his own arrest lurking outside every window. “I developed eyes in the back of my head,” Naum the retired spy would tell anyone willing to listen. Tailed by the NKVD (secret police) almost continuously, he perfected the art of vanishing into courtyards, of jumping onto fast-moving trolleys. He knew the drill: training spies was part of his job. When the stress got to him, he fantasized about wheeling on his shadowers, demanding to their faces: “Either arrest me or stop following me!”

  My grandfather was a vain man. He esteemed his power to charm. To explain his improbable survival, he often mentioned an NKVD comrade called Georgadze, the officer in charge of signing arrest warrants for lieutenant colonels (each rank was assigned its own man, according to Naum). Apparently, this Georgadze fell under Granddad’s spell at a gathering. Naum imagined Georgadze deliberately overlooked or “misplaced” his arrest papers. Mainly, though, Granddad would shrug. Gospozha udacha, Lady Luck—she was quite charmed by him too.

  Stalin’s intelligence decimations had left the Red Army hierarchy “without eyes and ears,” as one insider put it, on the eve of war. But here was the paradox: by June 22 the Vozhd had been flooded with ongoing, extremely precise details of the looming Nazi attack. A major font of these warnings—all scoffed at by Stalin—was someone whom Naum, the pro charmer, never could stop talking about.

  Meet playboy Richard Sorge (code name Ramzai): philanderer, drunkard, and, in the words of John le Carré, “the spy to end spies.” “The most formidable spy in history,” agreed Ian Fleming. “Unwiderstehliche” (irresistible), marveled one of his main dupes, the German ambassador to Japan. With his cover as a Nazi journalist in Tokyo starting in 1933, the half-German, half-Russian Sorge and his ring of false-front cohorts steadily passed top-level Japanese and German secrets to GRU headquarters in Moscow. (Larisa particularly recalls Japan specialists as guests at their apartment in 1939 and 1940.) Incredibly, Sorge’s detailed alarms about the exact onset of Operation Barbarossa, up to its very preceding hours, only roused Stalin’s scorn. “A shit,” the Vozhd dismissed him, according to one commentator, “who has set himself up with some small factories and brothels in Japan.”

  Stalin was even less cordial to another accurate warning, from code name Starshina at the Nazi Air Ministry less than a week before Hitler’s onslaught. This “source,” sneered the Great Strategist of the Revolution, signaling contempt with quotation marks, should be sent to his fucking mother.

  Why the delusional ignorance, the vitriol? Stalin’s rejection of the intelligence continues to foment countless theories among historians, both Western and Russian. But it deserves noting that Hitler orchestrated a disinformation campaign fine-
tuned to Stalin’s suspicions of capitalist Britain and Churchill, and to the Vozhd’s faith that Germany would never attack during hostilities with England—the supposed German dread of a two-front war. In May 1941 Hitler even wrote a very nice personal letter to Stalin to calm his unease, pledging “his word as a foreign leader.” He went so far as to ask Stalin not to give in to any border provocations by unruly Nazi generals! As Solzhenitsyn later suggested, the ogre of the Kremlin, who trusted no one, somehow trusted the monster of Berchtesgaden.

  In his memoirs General Zhukov later sensationally (and rather improbably) asserted that the defense commissariat never saw the crucial bulletins Stalin received from Soviet foreign spies. As for Sorge, who had stayed away from Russia, fearing the purges, he was unmasked and arrested in Tokyo in the fall of 1941. The Japanese wanted to exchange him, but Stalin replied he’d never heard of him. Sorge was hanged in 1944, on the holiday of the October Revolution. He had the ultimate lousy luck: he depended on Stalin.

  For his part, Naum always claimed that he saw Sorge’s urgent alerts.

  Still, this hardly prepared him for what was about to unfold in the north.

  On the morning of June 22, when Grandma ran waving after his train, Naum was bound for Tallinn, the Estonian capital. The Baltic Fleet headquarters had moved there the previous summer after the USSR occupied the three Baltic states.

  Like stranded ducks, the Baltic ports almost immediately began falling to the German onslaught.

  By late August the Nazis were closing on Tallinn. The Baltic Fleet under Naum’s old boss Admiral Tributs was ordered, frantically and at the last minute, to evacuate through the Gulf of Finland to Kronstadt near Leningrad, the fleet’s former traditional base. Red Army units and civilians were packed aboard. Tallinn often gets called the Soviet Dunkirk. Except it was an all-out disaster—one of the gravest naval fiascos in warfare history. Despite being the fleet’s intelligence chief, Naum supervised a ship’s scuttling under shellfire to block Tallinn’s harbor as the residue of Soviet smoke screens drifted murkily overhead. He was one of the last out. Some two hundred Russian vessels tried to run a 150-nautical-mile gauntlet through heavily mined waters, with no air protection against German and Finnish onslaughts. The result was apocalyptic. The waves resounded with explosions and Russian screams, with desperate choruses of “The Internationale” and the gun flashes of suicides as ships sank. More than sixty Soviet vessels were lost, and at least 12,000 people drowned. Naum made it to Kronstadt with only four other survivors from his scuttling mission. His own luck had held, but he was badly shaken.