Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

by Anya Von Bremzen

  Mom remembers as vividly the spontaneous, overwhelming outpouring of orgiastic relief and elation that swept the capital on May 9. More than two million revelers streamed toward Moscow’s old center. An undulating sea of red carnations and white snowdrops. Soldiers tossed into the air. Delirious people—hugging, kissing, dancing, losing their voices from shouting OORAAAA (hooray). That night powerful strobes flashed on the Kremlin’s towers, illuminating the visage of Stalin, seemingly floating above Red Square, and the fireworks were extravagant: thirty blasts fired from one thousand mortars.

  Among the celebrants was a reed-thin, six-foot-tall beauty with green sirenlike eyes and a hastily applied smear of red lipstick. She was in her late twenties, yanking along a recalcitrant eight-year-old boy. The louder everyone cheered, the harder the woman sobbed. Andrei Bremzen, her husband, my paternal grandfather, was one of the eight million men who didn’t return from the front.

  If one adds civilian deaths, the Great Patriotic War (as we officially called it) took 27 million lives, although some estimates are far higher. In Russia it left tragedy and devastation unprecedented in history, unfathomable in its scale. For four uninterrupted years war had camped on Soviet soil. There were 25 million citizens homeless, 1,700 towns and more than 70,000 villages reduced to rubble, an entire generation of men wiped out.

  By war’s end my mother was eleven, a bookish daydreamer with two thick black braids who’d graduated from Hans Christian Andersen to Hugo’s Les Miserables in its mellifluous Russian translation. Really, any book permeated with romantic tragedy attracted my mother. The first post-war summer found her family at a cozy dacha on the outskirts of Pushkino, a town north of Moscow where Naum was now directing a spy-training academy. “Counterintelligence, counterintelligence!” Granddad kept correcting, brows furrowed, when anyone blurted out the “spy” word. Later that year he’d be in Germany to debrief Hermann Goering amid the ruins at the Nurenberg Trials.

  Swatting flies and picking at gooseberries, Mom read her sad books and contemplated what was happening to Russia. What to make of the crippled men now thronging stations, begging and playing the accordion? How to grieve for the fathers of her friends who hadn’t come back? Strangely, no one else in her family shared these thoughts. Liza plunged herself into household chores; Naum, who anyway never really talked to the kids, was busy with his steely-eyed spy colleagues and their coiffed wives, who boasted of the furniture their husbands scored in Berlin. Yulia quoted Generalissimo Stalin so often now, it made Mother nauseated. And so Larisa started a diary. Carefully she selected a small book with glossy white pages and a gold-embossed cover, a prewar Scandinavian present from Naum. She dipped her pen in the inkpot and paused for so long that ink drops ruined the page and she had to tear it out.

  “Death,” she then wrote, pressing hard on the pen so it squeaked. “Death inevitably comes at the end of life. Sometimes a very short life.” She thought a bit and continued. “But if we are meant to die anyway, what should we do? How must we live that short hour between birth and death?”

  To these questions Mom had no answers, but simply writing them down she felt relief. She thought some more about such matters out on the grass by the house, sucking on a sweet clover petal as dragonflies buzzed overhead.

  “DEATH!! DEATH???” Liza’s screams broke Mom’s contemplation.

  Liza pulled at Mom’s braid, brandishing the notebook she’d just found on the table. “We beat the Germans! Your father fought for your happiness! How dare you have such bad, silly thoughts. Death!” Liza ripped up the notebook and stormed back into the house. Mom lay on the grass looking at the shreds of paper around her. She felt too hollow even to cry. Her parents and the voices on the black public loudspeakers, she suddenly realized—they were one and the same. Her innermost thoughts were somehow all wrong and unclean, she was being told, and in her entire life she had never felt more alone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1950s: TASTY AND HEALTHY

  In the prework hours of March 4, 1953, a time of year when mornings are still disagreeably dim and the icicles on roofs begin their thawing and refreezing act, classical music aficionados in Moscow woke up to a pleasant surprise. From early morning that day, instead of the usual Sovietica cheer, the radio was serving up a veritable banquet of symphonic and chamber delights in sad minor keys. Grieg, Borodin, Alexander Glazunov’s most elegiac string quartet. It was when the radio’s “physical culture” lesson was replaced with yet another somber classical piece that people began to have thoughts.

  “Someone in the Politburo kicked the bucket?”

  The shocking announcement came around nine a.m.

  “Comrade Stalin has suffered a brain hemorrhage … loss of consciousness. Paralysis of right arm and leg … loss of speech.”

  Throughout that day a familiar baritone boomed on the airways. Declaiming medical bulletins of the beloved leader’s declining condition, Yuri Levitan was back in combat mode. Pulse. Breathing rate. Urinalyses. The Voice infused such clinical details with the same melodrama with which it announced the retaking of Orel and Kursk from the Nazis, or the drops in prices immediately after the war.

  “Over last night Comrade Stalin’s condition has seriously de-te-rio-ra-ted!” announced Levitan next day, March 5. “Despite medical and oxygen treatments, the Leader began Cheyne-Stokes res-pi-ra-ti-on!”

  “Chain what?” citizens wondered.

  Only doctors understood the fatal significance of this clinical term. And if said doctors had “Jewish” as Entry 5 (their ethnicity) on their passports? Well, they must have felt their own death sentences lifting with Stalin’s last, comatose breath. In his paranoid, sclerotic final years, the Generalissimo was outdoing himself with an utterly fantastical anti-Semitic purge known as the Doctors’ Plot. Being a Jewish medic—Jewish anything, really—in those days signified all but certain doom. But now Pravda abruptly suspended its venomous news reports of the Doctors’ Plot trial. And in the Lubyanka cellars where “murderers in white coats” were being worked over, some torturers changed their line of questioning.

  “What’s Cheyne-Stokes?” they now demanded of their physician-victims.

  By the time the media announced Stalin’s condition on March 4, the Supreme Leader had been unconscious for several days. It had all begun late on the morning of March 1 when he didn’t ask for his tea. Alarmed at the silence of motion detectors in his quarters, the staff at his Kuntsevo dacha proceeded to do exactly … nothing. Hours went by. Finally someone dared enter. The seventy-three-year-old Vozhd was found on the floor, his pajama pants soaked in urine. Comrade Lavrenty Beria’s black ZIS sedan rolled up long after midnight. The secret police chief exhibited touching devotion to his beloved boss. “Leave him alone, he’s sleeping,” the pince-nezed executioner and rapist instructed, and left without calling an ambulance.

  Medical types were finally allowed in the following morning. Shaking from fear, they diagnosed massive stroke. Suspecting he might have been Stalin’s next victim, Comrade Beria had reasons for keeping assistance away. Ditto other Politburo intimates, including a sly, piglike secretary of the Moscow Party organization named Nikita Khrushchev. Whatever the Kremlin machinations, the pockmarked shoemaker’s son né Iosif Dzhugashvili died around 9:50 p.m. on March 5, 1953.

  He was gone.

  The country was fatherless. Father of Nations–less.

  Also Generalissimo–, Mountain Eagle–, Transformer of Nature–, Genius of Humanity–, Coryphaeus of Science–, Great Strategist of the Revolution–, Standard-bearer of Communism–, Grand Master of Bold Revolutionary Solutions and Decisive Turns–less.

  The Best Friend of All Children, Pensioners, Nursing Mothers, Kolkhoz Workers, Hunters, Chess Players, Milkmaids, and Long-Distance Runners was no more.

  He was gone.

  The nation was Stalin-less.

  In the sleety early March days right before Stalin’s death, Larisa, dressed in perpetually leaking boots and a scratchy orange turtleneck under a gray pi
nafore dress, was navigating the cavernous bowels of INYAZ. This was the Moscow state institute of foreign languages, home to Kafka-esque corridors and an underheated canteen with that eternal reek of stewed cabbage. Home to elderly multilingual professors: prime targets of Stalin’s vicious campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans.”

  Closed vowels, open vowels. In her phonetics class my mother was sighing. Land—Lend. Man—Men. A Russian ear is deaf to such subtleties. Anyway, how to concentrate on vowels and the like when Comrade Stalin lay dying?

  Irrespective of the Vozhd’s condition, an English major at INYAZ didn’t figure into Mom’s idea of any Radiant Future. It was a dull, respectable career compromise, as her fervent dreams of the stage kept crashing. “I probably lacked the talent,” Mom admits nowadays. “And the looks.” Back then it seemed more, well, dramatic to blame her crushed hopes on a “history of drama” exam at the fashionable GITIS theater academy. At her entrance orals, having memorized the official texts, Mom delivered the requisite critique of rootless cosmopolitanism to a pair of stately professors. Did they really grimace at her declaiming how art belongs to narod, the people? Why did they give her a troika, a C, for her faultless textbook recitation? Only much later Mom realized, with great shame, that those two erudite connoisseurs of Renaissance drama were themselves being hounded and harassed for their “unbridled, evil-minded cosmopolitanism.”

  On March 6, as word of Stalin’s passing spread, the INYAZ corridors echoed with sobs. Classes were canceled. Janitorial babushkas leaned on their mops, wailing over their buckets like pagan Slavs at a funeral. Mom’s own eyes were dry but her teeth rattled and her limbs felt leaden under the historic weight of the news. On the tram home, commuters hunched on wooden seats in tense silence. Through the windows Mother watched funerary banners slowly rise across buildings. Workmen were plastering over the cheerful billboards advertising her favorite plays. She closed her eyes and saw blackness, a gaping void instead of a future.

  Three days later, my mother, Liza, and Yulia set off for the funeral, but seeing the mobs on the streets, they turned back. My teenage dad persevered. Sergei, then sixteen and a bit of a street urchin, managed to hop forward on rooftops, thread through the epic bottleneck in Moscow’s center, crawl under a barrier of official black Studebakers, squeeze past policemen atop panicked horses, and sneak into the neo-classic pomp of the Hall of Columns where Iosif Vissarionovich lay in state, gold buttons aglint on his gray Generalissimo uniform. Sergei’s best friend, Platosha, wasn’t so lucky, however: his skull was cracked in the infamous funeral stampede into Trubnaya Square. Nobody’s sure of the exact number of fatalities, but at least several hundred mourners were trampled to death on March 9 in the monstrous surge to see Stalin’s body. Even in his coffin, Stalin claimed victims.

  Weeks after the funeral, Mom was still shaken. There were two things she just couldn’t get over. The first was galoshes. Images of black galoshes strewn all over Moscow in the wake of the funeral, along with hats, mittens, scarves, fragments of coats. The second was unreality—the utter unreality of Levitan’s health bulletins during Stalin’s final days.

  Urine. The Great Leader had urine? Pulse? Respiration? Blood? Weren’t those words she heard at the shabby neighborhood polyclinic?

  Mom tried to imagine Stalin squatting on a toilet or having his blood drawn by someone with sweat stains under his arms from fear. But it didn’t seem possible! And in the end how could Stalin do something as mundane, as mundanely human, as die?

  When Stalin’s passing finally began to sink in, Mom’s bewilderment gave way to a different feeling: bitter and angry disappointment. He had left them—left her. He would never come to see her triumph in a play. Whether rehearsing for auditions, Mom realized, or picturing herself on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater in some socially meaningful Gorky production—she yearned for his approbation, his presence, his all-wise, discriminating blessing.

  After Mom confided all this to me recently, I couldn’t sleep. Larisa Naumovna Frumkina. The dissident heart who had always shielded me from Soviet contamination …

  She wanted to be an actress for Stalin?

  So here it was, then: the raw emotional grip of a totalitarian personality cult; that deep bond, hypnotic and intimate, between Stalin and his citizenry. Until now, I’d found this notion abstract. The State of my childhood had been a creaking geriatric machine run by a cartoonish Politburo that inspired nothing but vicious political humor. With the fossilized lump of Brezhnev as Leader, it was, at times, rather fun. But Mom’s response to Stalin’s death suddenly illuminated for me the power of his cult. Its insidious duality. On the one hand the Great Leader was a divinity unflawed by the banalities of human life. A historical force, transcendental, mysterious, and somehow existing outside and above the wretched regime he’d created. At the same time, he was father figure to all—a kind, even cozily homely paterfamilias to the whole Soviet nation, a man who hugged kids on posters and attracted propaganda epithets like prostoy (simple), blizky (intimate), and rodnoy, an endearment reserved for the closest of kin, with the same etymology as the equally resonant rodina (homeland).

  By the time Stalin died, Mother was no longer an alienated child; but neither was she a bumpkin or a brainwashed Komsomol (Communist Youth) hack. She was a hyperliterary nineteen-year-old, a worshipper of dissident cultural heroes like Shostakovich and Pasternak, appalled by their harassment—and all the while spouting anti-cosmopolitan vitriol. In short, she suffered from a full-blown case of that peculiar Stalinist split-consciousness.

  “Look,” Mom explained, “I was anti-Soviet from the time I was born—in my gut, in my heart. But in my head psychologically somehow … I guess I was a young Stalinist. But then after he died,” she concluded, “my head became clear.”

  In certain dissident-leaning USSR circles there arose a tradition of celebrating March 5. Although de-Stalinization didn’t take place overnight, for many, Stalin’s deathday came to mark a watershed both historic and private; a symbolic moment when the blindfolds came off and one attained a new consciousness.

  It so happened that March rolled along just as I was writing this chapter. In the spirit of these old dissident get-togethers, Mom decided that we should host our own deathday gathering. Again we turned to the cookbook my mother had fallen in love with at the age of five.

  One sixth of the measured world, eleven time zones, fifteen ethnic republics. A population of nearly 300 million by the empire’s end. This was the USSR. And in the best spirit of socialist communality, our polyglot behemoth Rodina shared one constitution, one social bureaucracy, one second-grade math curriculum—and one kitchen bible for all: The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. Begotten in 1939, Kniga (The Book) was an encyclopedic cooking manual, sure. But with its didactic commentaries, ideological sermonizing, neo-Enlightenment scientific excursions, and lustrous photo spreads of Soviet production plants and domestic feasts, it offered more—a compete blueprint of joyous, abundant, cultured socialist living. I couldn’t wait to revisit this socialist (un)realist landmark.

  As a young woman, my mother learned to cook from the 1952 version. This was the iconic edition: bigger, better, happier, more politically virulent, with the monumental heft of those Stalinist neo-Gothic skyscrapers of the late forties and the somber-brown hard cover of a social science treatise. The appearance was meaningful. Cooking, it suggested, was no frivolous matter. No! Cooking, dear comrades, represented a collective utopian project: Self-Improvement and Acculturation Through Kitchen Labor.

  You could also neatly follow post-war policy shifts by comparing the 1939 and 1952 editions of The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food.

  In the late thirties, a Bolshevik internationalist rhetoric still held sway. This was the internationalism celebrated, for example, by the hit 1936 musical comedy film Circus of “O Vast Is My Country” song fame. Circus trumpets the tale of Marion, a white American trapeze artist chased out of Kansas with her illegitimate mulatto baby. Marion winds up in Moscow. In
the Land of the Soviets, she’s not in Kansas anymore! Here she finds an entire nation eager to cuddle her kid, plus a hunky acrobat boyfriend. In a famous scene of the internationalist idyll, the renowned Yiddish actor Shloyme Mikhoels sings a lullaby to the African-American child.

  That scene was later deleted. So was Mikhoels—assassinated in 1948 on Stalin’s orders amid general anti-Semitic hysteria. America? Our former semifriendly (albeit racist) competitor was now fully demonized as an imperialist cold war foe. Consequently, xenophobia reigns in the 1952 Kniga. Gone is the 1939’s Jewish teiglach recipe; vanished Kalmyk tea (Kalmyks being a Mongolic minority deported en masse for supposed Nazi collaboration). Canapés, croutons, consommés—the 1952 volume is purged of such “rootless cosmopolitan” froufrou. Ditto sendvichi, kornfleks, and ketchup, those American delicacies snatched up by Mikoyan during his thirties trip to America.

  In the next reprint, released in August 1953 … surprise! All quotations from Stalin have disappeared. In 1954, no Lavrenty Beria (he was executed in December 1953)—and so no more my favorite 1952 photo, of a pork factory in Azerbaijan named after him. A pork factory in a Muslim republic, named after “Stalin’s butcher.”

  Kremlin winds shifted, commissars vanished, but the official Soviet myth of plenty persisted, and people clung to the magic tablecloth fairy tale. Who could resist the utopia of the socialist good life promoted so graphically in Kniga? Just look at the opening photo spread! Here are craggy oysters—oysters!—piled on a silver platter between bottles of Crimean and Georgian wines. Long-stemmed cut-crystal goblets tower over a glistening platter of fish in aspic. Sovetskoye brand bubbly chills in a bucket, its neck angling toward a majestic suckling pig. Meanwhile, the intro informs us, “Capitalist states condemn working citizens to constant under-eating … and often to hungry death.”