Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

by Anya Von Bremzen

  The wrenching discrepancy between the abundance on the pages and its absence in shops made Kniga’s myth of plenty especially poignant. Long-suffering Homo sovieticus gobbled down the deception; long-suffering H. sovieticus had after all been weaned on socialist realism, an artistic doctrine that insisted on depicting reality “in its revolutionary development”—past and present swallowed up by a triumphant projection of a Radiant Future. In socialist realist visions, kolkhoz maidens danced around cornucopic sheaves of wheat, mindless of famines; laboring weavers morphed into Party princesses through happy Stakhanovite toil. Socialist realism encircled like an enchanted mirror: the exhausted and hunger-gnawed in real life peered in and saw only their rosy future-transformed reflections.

  Recently, I shared these musings with Mom. “Huh?” she replied. Then she proceeded to tell me her own Kniga story.

  December 1953, she said, was as frigid as any in Russia. The political climate, however, was warming. Gulag prisoners had already begun their return; Beria had just been executed. And Moscow’s culturati were in an uproar over a piece in the literary magazine Novy mir. “On Sincerity in Literature” the essay was called, by one Vladimir Pomerantsev, a legal investigator. It dared to bash socialist realism.

  Larisa recalls that she was cooking her way through The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food when Yulia handed her the Novy mir conspiratorially wrapped in an issue of Pravda. In those days Mom cooked like a maniac. Her childhood suspicions of life not being “entirely good” and the future not radiant had strengthened by now into a dull, aching conviction. Cooking relieved the ache somewhat. Into the meals she whipped up from scant edibles, she channeled all her disappointed theatrical yearnings. Her parent’s multicornered, balconied kitchen offered a stage for a consoling illusion, that somehow she might cook her way out of the bleak Soviet grind.

  The Novy mir sat on the white kitchen table as Mom assembled her favorite dish. It was a defrosted cod with potatoes in a fried mushroom sauce, all baked with a cap of mayo and cheapo processed cheese. The cod was Mom’s realist-realist riff on a Kniga recipe. The scents of cheese, fish, and mushrooms had just started mingling when Mom, scanning the “sincerity” article, came to the part about food. Overall, Pomerantsev was condemning socialist realist literature for its hypocritical “varnishing of reality”—a phrase that would be much deployed in liberal attacks on cultural Stalinism. Pomerantsev singled out among the clichés the (fake) smell of delicious pelmeni (meat dumplings). He complained that even those writers who didn’t set the table with phony roast goose and suckling pigs still removed “the black bread” from the scene, airbrushing out foul factory canteens and dorms.

  Mom leafed through her Kniga and suddenly laughed. Oysters? Champagne buckets? Fruit cornucopias spilling out of cut-crystal bowls? They positively glared with their hypocrisy now. “Lies, lies, lies,” Mom said, stabbing her finger into the photo of the suckling pig. She slammed shut The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food and pulled her cod out of the oven. It was her dish, her creation stripped of the communal abundance myth—liberated from the Stalinist happiness project.

  She never opened the Kniga again until I pushed it on her in New York.

  Prepping for our Stalin’s Deathday dinner, Mom phoned constantly for my menu approval.

  Her overarching concept, as usual, was maddeningly archival: to nail the cultural pastiche of late Stalinism. One dish had to capture the era’s officious festive pomposity. We settled finally on a crab salad with its Stalinist-baroque decoration of chimerical anchovy strips (never seen in Moscow), coral crab legs, and parsley bouquets. Pompous and pastiche-y both.

  As a nod to the pauperist intelligentsia youth of the emerging Thaw generation, Mom also planned on ultra-frugal pirozhki. The eggless pastry of flour, water, and one stick of margarin enjoyed a kind of viral popularity at the time.

  This left us needing only an “ethnic” dish.

  Stalin’s imperialist post-war policies treated Soviet minorities as inferior brothers of the great ethnic Russians (or downright enemies of the people, at times). So while the 1952 Kniga deigns to include a handful of token dishes from the republics, it folds them into an all-Soviet canon. Recipes for Ukrainian borscht, Georgian kharcho (a soup), and Armenian dolmas are offered with nary a mention of their national roots.

  Mom rang a day later. “To represent the ethnic republics,” she announced, unnaturally formal, “I have selected … chanakhi!”

  “No!” I protested. “You can’t—it was Stalin’s favorite dish!”

  “Oy,” Mom said, and hung up.

  She called back. “But I already bought lamb chops,” she bleated. She had also bought baby eggplants, ripe tomatoes and peppers, and lots of cilantro—in short, all the ingredients for the deliciously soupy clay-baked Georgian stew called chanakhi.

  “But, Ma,” I reasoned, “wouldn’t it be weird to celebrate liberation from Stalin with his personal favorite dish?”

  “Are you totally sure,” she wheedled, “that it was his favorite dish?”

  With a sigh I agreed to double check. I hung up and poured myself a stiff Spanish brandy. Grudgingly, I reexamined my researches.

  “Stalin,” wrote the Yugoslav communist literatteur Milovan Djilas on encountering the Vozhd in the thirties, “ate food in quantities that would have been enormous even for a much larger man. He usually chose meat … a sign of his mountain origins.” Describing meeting him again in 1945, Djilas gasped, “Now he was positively gluttonous, as if afraid someone might snatch the food from under his nose.”

  Stalin did most of his gluttonizing at his Kuntsevo dacha, not far from where I grew up, accompanied by his usual gang of invitees: Beria, Khrushchev, Molotov, and Mikoyan. The (non-refusable) invitations to dacha meals were spontaneous, the hours late.

  “They were called obedi (lunches),” grumbled Molotov, “but what kind of lunch is it at ten or eleven p.m.?”

  There was a hominess to these nocturnal meals that suggested Stalin himself didn’t much enjoy officious Stalinist pomp. A long table with massive carved legs was set in the dacha’s wood-paneled dining room, which was unadorned save for a fireplace and a huge Persian carpet. Waiters presided over by round-faced Valechka—Stalin’s loyal housekeeper and possible mistress—left food at one end of the table on heavy silver platters with lids, then vanished from sight. Soups sat on the side table. The murderous crew got up and helped themselves. Stalin’s favorite Danube herring, always unsalted, and stroganina (shaved frozen raw fish) could be among the zakuski. Soups were traditional and Russian, such as ukha (fish broth) and meaty cabbage shchi cooked over several days. Grilled lamb riblets, poached quail, and, invariably, plenty of fish for the main courses. It was Soviet-Eurasian fusion, the dacha cuisine: Slavic and Georgian.

  I took a swallow of my Carlos I brandy.

  At the dacha Stalin drank light Georgian wine—and, always, water from his favorite frosty, elongated carafe—and watched others get blotto on vodka. “How many degrees below zero is it outside?” he enjoyed quizzing guests. For every degree they were off by, they’d have to drink a shot. Such dinnertime pranks enjoyed a long regal tradition in Russia. Peter the Great jolted diners with dwarfs springing from giant pies. At his extravagant banquets, Ivan the Terrible, Stalin’s role model, sent chalices of poisoned booze to out-of-favor boyars and watched them keel over. Stalin liked to make Humpty Dumpty–like Khrushchev squat and kick his heels in a Ukrainian gopak dance, or he’d roar as his henchmen pinned paper scribbled with the word khui (dick) to Nikita’s rotund back. Mikoyan, ever practical, confessed to bringing extra pants to the dacha: tomatoes on chairs was a cherished dinner table hijink. (The tomatoes, incidentally, were grown on the dacha grounds.) Throughout this Animal House tomfoolery, Stalin sipped, “perhaps waiting for us to untie our tongues,” wrote Mikoyan. These were men who, in their bloody hands, held the summary fate of one sixth of the world.

  Ever the meticulous foodie, Mikoyan left us the best recollections of the Vozhd’s
dining mores. Apparently Stalin had a fondness for inventing new dishes for his chefs to perfect. One particular favorite was a certain “part soup, part entree …”

  Aha, I said to myself.

  “In a big pot,” Mikoyan wrote, “they’d mix eggplants, tomatoes, potatoes, black pepper, bay leaf, and pieces of unfatty lamb. It was served hot. They added cilantro … Stalin named it Aragvi.”

  No, there could be no doubt: Mikoyan was describing a classic Georgian stew called chankakhi. Stalin must have dubbed it Aragvi after a Georgian river or a favored Moscow Georgian restaurant, or both.

  I thought some more about Mikoyan. Seemingly bulletproof for most of his career, by 1953 Stalin’s old cohort, former food commissar, and now deputy chair of the Council of Ministers, had finally fallen into disfavor. The Vozhd trashed him and Molotov at Central Committee plenum; then the pair were left out of the Kuntsevo “lunches.” Mikoyan must have counted his days. His son recalled that he kept a gun in his desk, a quick bullet being preferable to arrest, which would drag his big Armenian family with him. Anastas Ivanovich was a brutally calculating careerist. Yet, sitting at my desk with my brandy, I felt a pang of compassion.

  The phone interrupted my ruminations.

  “I’ve resolved the chanakhi dilemma!” my mother proudly announced. “Before his death wasn’t Stalin plotting a genocidal purge against Georgia?”

  “Well, yes. I believe so,” I conceded, bewildered. This intended purge was less famous than the one against Jews. But indeed, Stalin seemed to have had ethnic cleansing in mind for his own Caucasian kin. More specifically, he was targeting Mingrelians, a subminority of which Beria was a proud son. This could well have been a convoluted move against Beria.

  “Well then!” cried Mom. “We can serve chanakhi as a tribute to the oppressed Georgians!”

  “To Stalin’s death!” hoots Katya after I’ve poured out the vodka. “Let’s clink!”

  Inna is shocked.

  “But, Katiush, it’s a bad omen to clink for the dead!”

  “Exactly! We must clink so the shit may rot in his grave!”

  March 5 has arrived. Outside my mother’s windows in Queens, rain hisses down as we celebrate the snuffing of Stalin’s candle. Katya, Musya, Inna—the octogenarian ladies at Mom’s table pick at the showy crab-salad platter amid fruit cornucopias and bottles of Sovetskoye bubbly. Sveta arrives last—slight, wan of face. Many moons ago, when she was a Moscow belle, the great poet Joseph Brodsky would stay with her on his visits from Leningrad. The thought touches me now.

  “I went,” Sveta boasts, grinning, “to Stalin’s funeral!”

  “Mishugina,” clucks Katya, making a “crazy” sign with her finger. “People were killed!”

  As the monstrous funeral procession swelled and mourners got trampled, Sveta hung on to her school’s flower wreath—all the way to the Hall of Columns.

  “The lamb, a little tough, maybe?” says Musya, assessing Mother’s chanakhi tribute to the oppressed Georgians. I pile insult on injury by slyly noting the connection to Stalin’s dacha feasts. Mom flashes me a look. She leaves for the kitchen, shaking her head.

  “Here we are, girls,” Inna muses. “Arrests, repressions, denunciations … Been through all that … and still managed to keep our decency.”

  Mom reappears with her intelligentsia-frugal pirozhki. “So enough with Stalin already,” she implores. “Can we move on to ottepel?”

  Less than a year after Stalin’s death, Ilya Ehrenburg, a suave literary éminence grise, published a mediocre novella critiquing a socialist realist hack artist and a philistine Soviet factory boss. Or something like that; nobody now remembers the plot. But the title stuck, going on to define the era of liberalization and hope under Khrushchev.

  Ottepel. Thaw.

  By 1955, after an intense power struggle—Stalin hadn’t designated any heir—Khrushchev was assuming full leadership of our Socialist Rodina. Except that nobody called the potbellied gap-toothed former metal worker Mountain Eagle or Genius of Humanity. Father of All Nations? You must be kidding. Politely, they called him Nikita Sergeevich, or simply Nikita, a folkloric Slavic name that contrasted starkly with Stalin’s aloof exotic Georgian otherness. But mostly comrades on the street called the new leader Khrushch (beetle), or Lisiy (the bald); later, Kukuruznik (Corn Man) for his ultimately self-destructive penchant for corn.

  Referring to our leader with such familiar terms—that in itself was a tectonic shift.

  “My elation was unforgettable, the early Thaw times—as intense as the fear during Stalin!” Inna leads off. She was working in those heady days at Moscow’s Institute of Philosophy. “Nobody worked or ate, we just talked and talked, smoked and smoked, to the point of passing out. What had happened to our country? How had we allowed it to happen? Would the new cult of sincerity change us?”

  “The Festival!” Katya and Sveta squeal in unison. The memory has them leaping out of their seats.

  If there was a main cultural jolt that launched the Thaw, it was “the Festival.” In February 1956 Khrushchev made his epochal “secret speech” denouncing Stalin. Seventeen months later, to show the world the miraculous transformation of Soviet society, Komsomol bosses with the Bald One’s encouragement staged the Sixth International Youth Festival in the freshly de-Stalinized Russian capital.

  For Muscovites that sweltering fortnight in July and August of 1957 was a consciousness-bending event.

  “Festival? Nyet … skazka (a fairy tale)!” Sveta croons, her pallid face suddenly flushed.

  Skazka indeed. A culture where a few years earlier the word inostranets (foreigner) meant “spy” or “enemy” had suddenly yanked open the Iron Curtain for a brief moment, letting in a flood tide of jeans, boogie-woogie, abstract art, and electric guitars. Never—never!—had Moscow seen such a spectacle. Two million giddy locals cheered the thirty thousand delegates from more than one hundred countries in the opening parade stretching along twelve miles. Buildings were painted, drunks disciplined, city squares and parks transformed into dance halls. Concerts, theater, art shows, the street as an orgy of spontaneous contact. That internationalist summer is credited with everything from spawning the dissident movement to fostering Jewish identity. (Jews flocked from all over the USSR to meet the Israeli delegation.) More than anything else perhaps was this: the first real spark of the all-powerful myth of zagranitsa—a loaded word meaning “beyond the border” that would inflame, taunt, and titillate Soviet minds until the fall of the USSR.

  And love, that picnic of love, the Khrushchevian Woodstock.

  Sveta fell for a seven-foot-tall red-haired American. La bella Katya, translating for a delegation of Italian soccer players, had one of her inamoratos threaten suicide as they parted. In farewell, the distraught Romeo tossed her a package out of his hotel window.

  “So I unwrap it at home,” cries Katya. “Panties! Transparent blue panties!”

  Mom’s guests rock with laughter. “Remember our Soviet underpants? Two colors only: purple or blue, knee length. Sadistic elastic!”

  Larisa, too, fell in love with an International Youth Festival foreigner. And he with her.

  Lucien was petite and deeply tanned, with chiseled features and dark, lively eyes. He wore a dapper short leather jacket and suede loafers so pristine and comfortable-looking, they instantly betrayed him as ne nash—“not ours.” Born in Paris, raised on Corsica, Lucien ran a French lycée in the Moroccan town of Meknes, a cultural cocktail Mom found intoxicating. In my mother’s cracked vinyl photo album, the fortnight’s worth of pictures of him outnumber the ones of my dad three to one.

  It was their mutual interest in Esperanto that brought the lovers together. Lucien sat next to Mom at the Festival’s first Esperanto plenary session, and when two days later, under one of the behemoth Stalinist facades on Gorky Street, he put his arm around her, it seemed the most natural thing in the world. Lucien radiated charm and goodwill. In all her life Mom, then twenty-three, had never had a suitor who expressed
his attraction with such disarming directness, such sweetness. Somehow her three words of Esperanto allowed her to communicate her innermost feelings to Lucien where Russian had failed her before.

  Which makes sense. For all the Thaw talk of sincerity, Soviet Russian wasn’t suited for goodwill or intimacy or, God knows, unselfconscious lyrical prattle. As our friend Sasha Genis the cultural critic wrote, the State had hijacked all the fine, meaningful words. Friendship, homeland, happiness, love, future, consciousness, work—these could only be bracketed with ironic quotation marks.

  “Young lady, how about we go build Communism together” went a popular pickup line in the metro. Girls found it hysterical.

  Here’s how the coyly convoluted Soviet mating ritual went: Igor meets Lida at a student dorm or party. They smoke on a windowsill. Igor needles Lida admiringly, she needles back coquettishly. Walking Lida home, Igor flaunts his knowledge of Hemingway, maybe mentions that he just happens to have sought-after tickets to the Italian film festival at the Udarnik Cinema. He lingers on her apartment landing. With studied nonchalance he mutters something about her telefonchik (ironic diminutive for phone number). After several weeks/months of mingy carnation offerings, aimless ambling along windswept boulevards, and heated groping in cat-piss-infested apartment lobbies, a consummation takes place. In some bushes crawling with ants if breezes are warm. Lida gets knocked up. If Igor is decent, they go to the ZAGS, the office that registers deaths and marriages. Their happily-ever-after involves moving into her or his family “dwelling space,” which is overcrowded with a father who drinks, a mother who yells, a domineering war widow grandmother, and a pesky Young Pioneer brother. The Young Pioneer likes to spy on newlyweds having sex. From there, married life only gets jollier.

  By the time I was nine, I already suspected that such nuptial bliss wasn’t for me. I had a different plan, involving zagranitsa. A foreign husband would be my ticket out of this “dismally-ever-after” to a glorious life filled with prestigious foreign commodities. More romantic by nature, Mom belonged as well to a generation more idealistic than mine. Her zagranitsa dreams did not feature hard-currency goods. Instead, into this single loaded term she distilled her desperate longing for world culture. Or, I should probably say, World Culture. After the collapse of the Stalin cosmology and her drift away from her ur-Soviet parents, culture replaced everything else in her life. It became a private devotion.