Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

by Anya Von Bremzen

  And then on a dank September day, crossing a pedestrian underpass near the Bolshoi, she ran into him. Sergei looked pale, defenseless, and shivery. Larisa handed him three rubles; he seemed badly in need of a drink. He took it and walked off, gaze averted.

  A few weeks later the doorbell rang at her parents’ house in the Arbat. It was Sergei—returning the money, he said. Oh, and something else. “I’ve been running into all these ballerinas,” he mumbled, “so seductive and pretty in their bell skirts. But I have this short Jewish girl on my mind … you are the one.”

  This is how my father proposed.

  Mom should have slammed the door right then and locked it and dived back deep under the scratchy beige blanket and stayed there. Instead, she and Sergei formalized their love on a gray December afternoon in 1959, after three months of living together.

  My parents’ generation, the generation of the Thaw, scoffed at white dresses and bourgeois parties. Mom and Dad’s uncivil non-ceremony took place at a drab ZAGS registry office near the Tretyakov Art Gallery. Outside, a wet snow was falling.

  Under her shapeless coat with squirrel trim, Mom wore her usual blue hand-sewn poplin blouse. Sergei yet again looked pale and disheveled; he’d knocked back a hundred grams—rubbing alcohol, was it?—with buddies at work. But my parents’ spirits were good. Everything amused them in the dingy reception area. Pimply sixteen-year-olds waiting for their very first Soviet internal passports. Non-sober families, and a war invalid with his accordion serenading nervous couples reemerging from their assembly-line knot-tying. On this occasion Mom didn’t even mind the institutional smell of galoshes and acrid disinfectant that had nauseated her ever since her first elections in 1937.

  A tiny head peeped out of the marriage hall area.

  “Next couple!”

  My parents passed through a vast hollow room beautified by a pair of forlorn chandeliers into a smaller room, this one bare save for a giant portrait of Lenin thrusting an arm out and squinting. The arm pointed conspicuously in the direction of the toilet. Behind a crimson-draped table sat a judge fringed by two dour clerks. The wide red ribbons draped across their gray-clad chests gave them the appearance of moving banners.

  The judge cast a suspicious glance at Mom’s homemade blouse. Her small face resembled a vydra’s (an otter’s), squished below a towering hairdo.

  “ON BEHALF OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION”—the vydra’s petite mouth suddenly boomed like a megaphone at a parade—“WE CONGRATULATE THE …”

  Mom clenched her jaw tight. She looked up at the ceiling, then over at squinting Lenin, then at Sergei, then exploded with hysterical laughter.

  “STOP THIS DISGRACE, COMRADE BRIDE,” thundered the vydra, “OR YOU WILL BE ESCORTED FROM HERE IMMEDIATELY!”

  “DO YOU PROMISE TO RAISE YOUR CHILDREN,” she resumed, “IN THE BEST TRADITIONS OF MARXISM AND LENINISM?” Mom nodded, fighting the next eruption of laughter.

  “RINGS!!!” shouted the vydra.

  Mom and Dad had none.

  “WITNESSES—WHERE ARE YOUR WITNESSES?”

  Ditto the witnesses.

  The vydra didn’t bother with further felicitations. My parents didn’t seem worthy of the customary wishes of good luck in creating a new socialist family.

  “SIGN HERE, NOW!”

  The vydra shoved a stack of documents across the red table.

  Mom picked up the heavy blue fountain pen with a sharp, menacing metal tip. The vydra snatched it away and whacked it across my mother’s knuckles.

  “GROOM SIGNS FIRST!”

  Three months after being assaulted with a fountain pen, Larisa moved into her mother-in-law’s communal apartment, where eighteen families shared one kitchen.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1960s: CORN, COMMUNISM, CAVIAR

  The year I was born, 1963, is remembered by Russians for one of the worst crop failures in post-Stalinist history. War rationing still fresh in their memory, comrades found themselves back in breadlines with queue numbers scribbled on their hands in violet ink so indelible and so poisonous, the joke was that it infected your blood. All over Moscow adults enlisted schoolchildren to take their place in the line. For handing over as well the extra ration of bread they were allowed, some enterprising Young Pioneers made small fortunes charging ten kopeks per breadline.

  Coarse and damp was the bread waiting at the end of the line. Not just damp, but often oozing weird greenish gunk: the flour had been stretched out with dried peas. Still, Moscow was hardly near starvation. In one of those savory ironies of socialist food distribution, some stores carried shrimp and crab from Vladivostok. But regular citizens didn’t touch these exotic pink Far Eastern crustaceans out of the pompous pages of Kniga. Regular citizens hadn’t a clue what shrimp were. People spat hardest at the fourteen-kopek cans of corn stacked up on store counters in Giza-scaled pyramids. All corn—no bread. That was everyone’s curse for Kukuruznik (Corn Man), the blabbering clown in the Kremlin who’d crowned this stupid, alien corn “the new czarina of Russian fields.”

  “What does the 1963 harvest look like?” went a popular joke. “Like Khrushchev’s hairdo (bald).”

  Things were going badly for Nikita Sergeevich. After a stretch of prodigious economic boom and scientific achievement, his career was belly flopping. There was the bungled Karibsky krizis (Russian for the Cuban missiles affair). His Virgin Lands scheme of planting grain en masse on the Central Asian steppes, promising initially, was ending in a cartoonish fiasco with millions of tons of topsoil simply blowing away. And his dairy and meat price hikes in 1962 had erupted in riots in the southern city of Novocherkassk. “Khrushchev’s flesh—for goulash!” railed a protest banner. The State responded with tanks, killing twenty-three rioters.

  The massacre was concealed; but the Leader’s kukuruza (corn) disaster could not be. Enthralled by a visiting Iowa farmer in 1955, the Bald One had introduced corn as the magic crop that would feed Russia’s cattle. Corn was forced down human throats too. Khrushchev-look-alike chefs sang songs to the new corn in short propaganda films; animated rye and barley welcomed this new corn off the train in cartoons. “The road to abundance is paved with kukuruza!” went a popular slogan. Maize was planted everywhere—while American instructions for proper seeding and care were everywhere ignored. After a couple of encouraging harvests, yields plunged. Wheat, neglected, grew in even shorter supply. Bread lines sprouted furiously.

  In 1961 at the Twenty-Second Party Congress Khrushchev had promised true communism. Instead there was kukuruza. Russians could forgive many things, but the absence of wheat bread made them feel humiliated and angry. Wheat bread was symbolic, sacred. On induction into Komsomol, students were asked to name the price of bread. Woe to the politically retarded delinquent who blurted out “thirteen kopeks.” The correct answer: “Our Soviet bread is priceless.”

  Capitalizing in part on this popular wrath, in October of 1964 a Kremlin clique forced Khrushchev from power. For a while papers talked about his “subjectivism” and “hare-brained scheming,” about the “lost decade.” Then they stopped mentioning him. A previously obscure apparatchik named Leonid Brezhnev, now general secretary, ushered the USSR into a new era. Stagnation, the era was later dubbed. The age of cynicism and “acquisitive socialism.” The age of bargains, contracts, and deals, of Brezhnev’s-eyebrows jokes and Lenin Centennial anecdotes—of empty store shelves and connivingly stuffed fridges.

  The dissolution of my parents’ marriage mirrored Khrushchev’s fall.

  A product of the Thaw Era, Mom still retains tender feelings toward Kukuruznik. But she can’t help blaming him and his corn and the breadlines for what happened with her and my father.

  About a year before my mother’s troubles began, she sat at a pedsovet, the pedagogical council of School No. 112, District 5. Another meaningless “agitational” propaganda meeting was about to begin. Mother felt queasy. The odor of sulfuric acid, potassium hydroxide, and teenage stress hormones hung in the air. The classroom they gathered i
n belonged to Comrade Belkin, the puffy-faced science teacher and font of communist consciousness.

  For these endless, poisonous meetings Mom was partially to blame. She had spoken up at her very first “agitational” session. Recently hired as the school’s progressive young English teacher, she’d been eager to flaunt her dissident stripes. It was still the Thaw. Sincerity was the buzzword. Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Stalinist One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had just been published!

  “Comrades!” my mother had begun in her best imitation Moscow Art Theater voice. “What have we actually learned from this meeting? Why have we sat here listening to Comrade Belkin read aloud the entire political section of Pravda? Aren’t piles of homework waiting? Don’t some of us have hungry kids to go home to?”

  At the last sentence Mom’s oration trailed off. Nearing the Soviet grandmotherly age of thirty, she herself had no kid waiting hungrily. An ectopic pregnancy followed by barbaric Soviet gynecological care had left her in no shape to conceive, and “home” was a dumpy single room she shared with her husband and mother-in-law in a bleak communal apartment.

  Tak tak tak. “So, so so,” said the troika: the Labor Union rep, the school’s Party functionary, and Citizen Edelkin, the principal. Tak tak tak; they tapped their pencils in unison. “Thanks for sharing your views, Comrade Frumkina.”

  But the other teachers had been mesmerized by her words. Mom caught their grateful, admiring glances. Shortly afterward a sign had appeared in the principal’s office: FROM NOW ON: PROPAGANDA MEETINGS—COMPULSORY. The other teachers started avoiding my mother.

  This new March session droned on and on. So much to discuss. Two Young Pioneers had been caught tying their scarlet scarves on a neighborhood cat. And what to do about Valya Maximova, the third-grader spied at gym class wearing a cross under her uniform? Confronted by responsible classmates, Valya had confessed: her babushka sometimes took her to church.

  Valya’s teacher waved Exhibit A, the confiscated cross, on its neck string as if dangling a dead mouse by the tail.

  “That pesky babushka,” said the science teacher Belkin in a loud whisper. “Under Stalin such types got twenty-five years.”

  Stalin’s corpse had recently been evicted from Lenin’s mausoleum by Khrushchev, so as not to “corrupt” that noblest of cadavers. Invoking the pockmarked Georgian was uncool. But instead of protesting, everyone turned and peered at Larisa. Some weeks before, sacrificing her own Sunday, she’d taken her pupils to a cemetery, where innocent Pioneers had been exposed to crosses galore. She regarded it as a cultural lesson, a way of lifting the Soviet taboo around death for the kids.

  “Some Young Pioneers report that during the trip you mentioned Jesus Christ.”

  Edelkin pronounced this as if Valya’s religious babushka and Larisa were fellow opium pushers.

  “Christianity is part of world culture,” Larisa protested.

  Tak tak tak, went the troika.

  Edelkin ended the meeting on an upbeat note. In the case of pupil Shurik Bogdanov there’d been serious progress. Poor Shurik Bogdanov—an A student, conscience of his class, and champion collector of scrap metal. Then he started getting Cs for “behavior.” His distraught mother stormed into Edelkin’s office and revealed the whole awful story: her husband had been cohabiting with a female colleague from his workplace. He intended to leave them. Poor young Shurik was traumatized.

  “Could the Soviet school save a socialist family?” asked Edelkin with a dramatic flourish. Indeed, it could! The Party organization at Bogdanov père’s workplace had been contacted, a public meeting called. Shurik’s father and the female interloper had been instructed to cease their immoral cohabitation immediately.

  “The father is now back in the family fold,” reported Edelkin, almost smirking with pride. Socialist values had triumphed. Would comrade teachers chip in for a bottle of Sovetskoye champagne for the couple?

  Mom gasped for air as he finished. The chemical stench of the classroom, the intrusion of the kollektiv into some hapless comrade’s love life, the bleakness of her own situation … Next thing she knew, the entire pedagogical council was fanning her with pages of Pravda and splashing her with cologne. She had fainted.

  That week the doctor confirmed the impossible: she had fainted because she was with child. The troika at school suggested that she needn’t bother to return after maternity leave.

  My mother was pregnant, unemployed, and euphoric.

  Mom remembers pregnancy as the happiest time of her life. She didn’t understand why most Soviet mamas-to-be hid their bellies in shame under layers of baggy rags. Even at eight months she waddled down the street as if floating on air—belly forward. Inside her was a girl, she was sure of this. It was the girl she’d been dreaming about ever since she herself was a schoolgirl. The girl she imagined playing the piano, painting watercolors, learning languages in foreign countries, and—who knows?—maybe even riding a shiny brown Arabian horse on some verdant British estate. It was the girl she intended to guard like a tigress from the counterfeit Soviet happiness, from that rotten, demoralizing split-consciousness, from toska, the anguished, alienated anxiety of her own Stalinist childhood.

  Apparently Mom also wanted to shield me from Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin and Belka and Strelka, the adorable black and white mutts who flew into space. My mother hated the kosmos; that preposterous futuristic final frontier of Soviet imperialism. At age five I was forced to hide my profound crush on Yuri Gagarin from her and weep in secret when the smiley kosmonavt died in a plane crash at the age of thirty-four. But I’m grateful Mom didn’t name me Valentina, after Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. I look nothing like Valentina. Mom named me instead after one of her favorite poems by Anna Akhmatova.

  “At baptism I was given a name—Anna, Sweetest of names for human lips or hearing.”

  Anna, Annushka, Anya, Anechka, the irreverent An’ka. The peasant-vernacular Anyuta and Anyutochka, Nyura and Nyurochka. Or Anetta, in a self-consciously ironic Russified French. Or the lovely and formal Anna Sergeevna (my name and patronymic)—straight out of Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog.” The inexhaustible stream of diminutive permutations of Anna, each with its own subtle semiotics, rolled sweetly off my mother’s lips during pregnancy.

  Her baby daydreams usually reached fever pitch in the food lines. Surrounded by disgruntled citizens muttering Khrushchev jokes, Mother drew up imaginary lists of the foods she would feed to her little Anyutik. Unattainable foods she knew only from her reading. Omar. Lobster. So noble-sounding, so foreign. Definitely pizza and pot-au-feu. And when the child was just old enough: Fleurie. Everyone swigged it in the novels of Hemingway, that most Russian of American writers. Yes, yes, definitely carafes of Fleurie, with snails dripping garlicky butter and parsley sauce. Followed by cakes from her beloved Proust. Madlenki, Mom called them in Russian, with the clumsy proprietary familiarity of someone who lived and breathed Proust but still thought madeleines were a species of jam-filled pirozhki.

  Occasionally Mom would get lucky in the lines. She still talks of the day she victoriously lugged home five kilos—ten pounds—of vobla to last her the entire final trimester. Have I mentioned vobla before? It’s the rock-hard, salt-encrusted dried Caspian roach fish. Rock-hard vobla sustained Russians through the revolutionary teens and twenties, the terrible thirties, the war-torn forties, the liberating fifties, and the rollicking sixties—until the Caspian was so depleted that in the stagnant seventies of my childhood vobla became a sought-after delicacy. Vobla brings out that particular Russian masochism; we love it because it’s such a torment to eat. There’s the violent whacking against a table to loosen the skin, followed by the furious yanking of the petrified leathery flesh off the skeleton. There’s self-inflicted violence, too—a broken tooth here, a punctured gum there—all to savor that pungently salty, leathery strip of Soviet umami. Vobla was the last thing my mother ate before being rushed to Birthing House No. 4. This might explain why I’d happily trade all Hemi
ngway’s snails and Proust’s cakes for a strip of petrified fish flesh.

  From Birthing House No. 4 Mom brought home a jaundice-yellowed infant swaddled tight as a mummy into totalitarian submission. Awaiting her were the glories of Soviet socialist motherhood. Cribs as elegant as a beet harvester. Pacifiers made of industrial rubber you sterilized in a water bath for two hours while you hand-copied the entire volume of samizdat Dr. Spock. And pelyonki (diapers), twenty per day per Soviet child—not including nine flannel over-diapers, and a mountain of under-diapers fashioned from surgical gauze.

  These scores of diapers couldn’t simply be bought at a store. In an economy where every shred and scrap was recycled, all twenty pelyonki were made at home, by cutting up and hand-hemming old sheets. During the day Mom soaked them in cold water with suds from a brown smelly soap bar she grated until her knuckles bled. At night she scalded them in a four-gallon bucket on the stove of a communal apartment kitchen lacking hot water, then rinsed all twenty under an icy stream from the rusted communal tap until her arms were falling-off frozen. The weight of maternal love came down on me with full force when I learned that each morning she then ironed the twenty pelyonki. Mom claims that she loved me so much, she didn’t mind the diaper routine, which I guess makes her a Soviet martyr to Motherhood. After she told me about it, I went to bed lamenting what a burden I’d been, being born.