But the sweets served with our afternoon tea—those I couldn’t bring myself to dispose of. In our happy classless society, candies were the most brutally clear signifiers of status. Sticky proletarian toffees called Iris-Kis-Kis and rock-hard rust-hued delights known as Crayfish Tails tormented the fillings of the masses. Of higher status and available only sporadically were chocolates like Little Bears in the North, with a picture of white bears on ice-blue wrappers. Ah, what a romantic candy the northern bear was! It spoke of the Arctic expanses our Soviet explorers were yet to conquer. And then there were Chocolate Rabbits, those big green-foil-wrapped white elephants of the socialist defitsit economy. Priced at nine rubles a kilo (a tenth of the average monthly salary), rabbits were always available, and utterly scorned for being so. Only traffic cops, flush from bribes, famously moronic and devoid of all taste, were enthusiastic consumers of them. “Traffic cops buy their kids Chocolate Rabbits as payoff for forgetting to fetch them at kindergarten,” the saleslady in our local candy store used to say with a sneer.
Our kindergarten sweets were off this scale altogether. Like most Moscow candies, they were manufactured by the Red October Chocolate Factory, Mikoyan’s pet confectionary. Only recently have I learned that Red October produced two versions of the sweets: one for the People, the other for the Party. Nomenklatura chocolates had the same names—Squirrel, Red Poppy, Hail to October—and wrappers that looked the same as those on their proletarian doubles. But they possessed a vastly superior flavor thanks to exalted ingredients. As a kindergartner I had no idea about any of this. I did know that our candies, hefty in weight and wrapped smartly in classy matte paper, exuded power and privilege. Unable to eat—or toss—something so status-laden, let alone imagine sharing it with my friends outside the fence, I stashed the sweets inside my underwear bag.
My food dumping went well until a smell began to rise from behind the radiator. First it was a disagreeable whiff, then a noxious stench that caused everyone to scream foooo and bolt away from the wall. It was Zoya Petrovna who discovered my decomposed pile. Mother was immediately summoned, with me, to the director’s office. A small, sniffling woman, the kindergarten director had mothy hair pulled into a tight bun and the colorless Slavic features of a career apparatchik: in Mother’s mind doubtless a high-ranking KGB informant. She was formidable despite her size. Once she’d attacked a flasher who loitered by our fenced-off playground, pounding him with her sharp-edged handbag. The flasher fled with a genuinely terrified expression.
“Your child, Comrade Frum-kina,” commenced the director, enunciating mother’s Jewish surname with a meaningful curl of her lip, “your child doesn’t really belong to our kollektiv …” Was I being expelled from the Central Committee kindergarten? Was Mother going to lose her job—or worse? In a panic I rushed out to the dormitory and grabbed my precious underwear bag.
Mother brought me home on a sled, yanking it over the snow slopes with uncharacteristic aggression. I felt for her, a woman alone with no childcare. But then again, she had only herself to blame—raising me as a non-friendly kid, alienating me from the kollektiv—traumatizing my appetite with her dissident nonsense! Moodily, I pulled a candy out of my bag. It was called ananas. First I sucked on the crunchy chocolate shell, then slowly licked my way toward the center. The filling was so excruciatingly luscious with the synthetic-exotic flavor of pineapple, I shuddered. To mollify Mother, I decided to offer her the last remaining spectacular centimeter. I expected her to groan and topple into the snow, paralyzed with ecstasy and guilt by the taste. But she just absent-mindedly chewed and kept pulling the sled.
The following Monday I was back among the Georgian’s pines, gagging on caviar behind the tall wire kindergarten fence.
And Khrushchev? In his lonely, depressing retirement, he occupied himself with growing corn at his dacha.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1970s: MAYONNAISE OF MY HOMELAND
“Where does Homeland begin?”
So wondered a popular croonful tune of the seventies performed in that saccharine Mature Socialist tone that instantly infantilized the listener.
“With a picture in your alphabet book?… That birch tree out in the fields?”
Russians of my mother’s age, who spent most of their living hours standing in line, might insist that Rodina (Homeland) began with avoska. From the word avos’—“with any luck”—this expandable mesh bag lay in wait in the pocket of every Russian, a stubborn handful of hope that defitsit Moroccan oranges or Baltic sprats might suddenly appear at some drab corner store. Our luck sack was a triumph of Soviet optimism and industrial strength. Inside the avoska you could practically fit a small tractor, and the sturdy cotton thread resisted even the sharp corners of the triangular milk cartons—yes, the blue and white leaky ones that dripped their accompaniment as you walked.
My generation, children of the Stagnation Era who now tend to dote on their Mature Socialist childhoods, might joke that Rodina began with their first black market jeans, or bootlegged Beatles LP. Or perhaps it began with the Young Pioneer parades where we sang Rodina songs, adding a nearly silent U in front of the R, which transformed the word into urodina: ugly hag.
That subversive hiccup before the R—this was the seventies. You could be disrespectful to Rodina and still enjoy four fun-filled August weeks at a Young Pioneers’ camp—paid for by the State.
I, of course, experienced no such regime-sponsored enjoyment. My cruel mother wouldn’t send me to camp, and she kept me home sick on that festive spring day in 1973 when our entire class was inducted into Young Pioneers. Never did I stand on Red Square making a five-finger salute to the clattering of drumbeats and the squawks of bugles. Never felt the garlicky breath of Vassa, our school’s Pioneer leader, as she fumbled with the knot of the scarlet tie around my neck. Never solemnly swore to “love Rodina, to live, learn, and struggle, as Lenin bequeathed, and as Communist Party teaches us.” Luckily, School 110 considered me a de facto Pioneer anyway and let me wear the tie, that small, sacred scrap of our Rodina’s banner.
As for where Rodina really began … Well, maybe it began, for all of us, with salat Olivier: with the colorful dice of cooked potatoes, carrots, pickles, hard-boiled eggs, peas, and some protein to taste, the lot smothered in a sharp, creamy dressing. Apparatchiks, impoverished pensioners, dissidents, tractor drivers, nuclear physicists—everyone across our eleven time zones relished salat Olivier, especially in the kitschy, mayonnaise-happy seventies. Borscht was banal; Uzbek pilaf or Georgian walnut chicken a little exotic, perhaps. But Olivier was just right, unfailingly festive and special on account of such defitsit items as canned Hungarian Globus-brand peas and tangy Soviet mayo, which was always in stores but never without a long line. Birthdays, engagements, dissertation-completion bashes, farewell parties for Jews who were emigrating (these sometimes felt like funeral wakes)—there was no special “table” without salat Olivier.
And who doesn’t remember big cut-crystal bowls of salat Olivier at New Year’s celebrations where families gathered in front of their television sets waiting for the Kremlin clock to strike twelve, and for Dear Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev to adjust his reading glasses, rattle his medals, thunderously clear his throat, and then shuffle his papers in a desperate scramble to locate the first line of his New Year’s address?
The first line was always the same: “Dear Compatriots!”
Nowadays Mom and I must have at least a thousand various salad recipes in our collective repertoire. I like Thai and Catalan. Mom has perfected the simple green salad, possibly the hardest one of all to master. Hers has toasted pine nuts and chewy dried cranberries to punctuate a shallot vinaigrette veiling impeccable lettuce leaves. It’s as non-Russian as food ever gets. And salat Olivier? We don’t make it often, and never idly, careful not to disturb its aura of festiveness. A precious heirloom of our non-idyllic socialist pasts, the Olivier recipe gets pulled out from the memory drawer to commemorate a particular moment in life.
One day Mom deci
des that it’s time once again. Her sister, Yulia, is coming to visit from Moscow. We will throw a party and Olivier will anchor the appetizer spread.
I arrive to help with the cooking. Mother’s apartment, overheated as always, is permeated by the sweet, earthy smell of boiled root vegetables. In the dining nook off the kitchen, the potatoes and carrots sit, cooked in their skins—awaiting their transformation into salad. We peel, chop, chatter. As often happens in Mom’s dining nook, time and space begin to blend and compress. A taste of a Lebanese pickle that uncannily resembles a Russian gherkin leads to a snippet from a Rodina song, which in turn rouses a political morality tale, or reawakens a recollection of a long-ago dream, of a fleeting pang of yearning.
Piling potato, carrot, and pickle fragments into a bowl, I think that Olivier could be a metaphor for a Soviet émigré’s memory: urban legends and totalitarian myths, collective narratives and biographical facts, journeys home both real and imaginary—all loosely cemented with mayo.
We keep chopping, both now lost in our own thoughts.
I am seven when the grandest Olivier feast I can remember occurs. Tables are pushed together in a cavernous kitchen unevenly lit by greasy dangling bulbs. Potbellied men haul in chairs; women in splotched aprons dice and mince. A banquet is being prepared in a shared kitchen inside a long four-storied building on Kuybishev Lane, two minutes by foot from the Kremlin.
We’re in the kommunalka, the communal apartment into which I was born. Where I heard Misha the black marketeer puke out his delicacies; where Dad’s mother, Babushka Alla—Baballa, we call her—still lives; and where Mom spent three agonizing years after my birth until we moved out to Davydkovo.
We don’t live in Davydkovo anymore, by the way. Before my first school year, Dad decided that he did want a family full time—but only if we moved to the center of Moscow. In a bureaucracy-defying maneuver, Mom finagled a dwelling swap between herself and her parents. Naum and Liza moved to our apartment, where bracing walks awaited among Stalinist pines, and we took over their central two-room flat in the Arbat, only one metro stop away from Baballa’s kommunalka kitchen. Which is where we’re crowded this evening.
I visit Baballa here every weekend, often staying overnight in her dank, high-ceilinged room. On our sleepovers Grandma and I play cards and dine on no-fuss frozen dumplings followed by the “Snowhite” meringue torte she has toted home from the elite canteen at Gosstroy, the State Construction Committee where she earns a whopping 260 rubles a month. I’m in awe of Baballa: her swagger with vodka and billiards, her three-tiered slang, her still-sexy looks. She’s my playmate and role model, the one who pressured Mom to allow me to grow my hair long just like hers. Whenever construction workers whistle at her, I wink and whistle back proudly while she slanders the offenders in a voice roughened by a lifetime of Belomor cigarettes. Baballa is the world’s coolest granny. But her kommunalka simultaneously fascinates me and scares me so much, I get butterflies in my stomach each time I visit.
Bolshevism did away with private life, Walter Benjamin noted after his 1927 visit to Moscow. Describing a communal apartment, he wrote: “One steps through the hall door—and into a little town.” It’s a poignant image, Magrittian almost. Except that the “town” in Baballa’s apartment forty years later wasn’t that little: more than fifty people jammed into eighteen rooms situated along a long narrow hallway. Unheated, with water-stained walls and no lights—the bulb was perpetually stolen and bartered by the alkogolik Tsaritsin—the hallway was a canyon of terror and peril for me. There you could catch pneumonia, fracture an ankle stumbling over the passed-out body of the self-same Tsaritsin—or worse. The worst? The ghoulish figure of demented old Mari Vanna, who meandered about in her torn once-white nightgown with a chamber pot in her hands. If she was feeling frisky she’d tilt it toward your feet.
I won’t share details about the communal bathroom other than the fact that its three toilet cabins were separated by plywood, through which the peeper Vitalik liked to drill holes. Next to this peeper’s gallery lay the shared kitchen.
Please note that there is no word for “privacy” in Russian.
Fittingly, the kitchen of Baballa’s apartment constituted a multifunctional public space, abustle with all manner of meaningful collective activities. Here were some of its functions:
AGORA: Glorious news of overfulfilled Five-Year Plans blasts from the transistor radio suspended above the stove. Neighbors discuss grave political issues. “Motherfucking Jew-traitor Maya Spiro from room number six conspiring against the Soviet Union again.” MARKETPLACE: “Nataaaasha … Saaasha … Trade me an onion for half a cup of buckwheat?” BATHHOUSE: Over a kitchen sink women furtively rub black bread into their hair. Furtively, because while bread is believed to promote hair growth, it is also a sacred socialist treasure. Its misuse could be interpreted by other neighbors as unpatriotic. LEGAL CHAMBER: Comrades’ Court tries neighbors for offenses, including but not limited to neglecting to turn off the kitchen lights. A more serious crime: stealing soup meat from the pots of your neighbors. In Baballa’s rambling flat, the thief is a tiny, aristocratic-looking old lady whose mournful expression sometimes resolves into a beatific smile that seems glued to her face. To combat her theft, some neighbors hang skull-and-bones signs over their pots; others put padlocks on lids. LAUNDRY ROOM: As you enter the kitchen on a cold dark winter morning, half-frozen stockings swaying from clotheslines flagellate you in the face. Some neighbors get angry. The tall blond Vitalik grabs scissors and goes snip-snip-snip. If stockings were imported, a fistfight ensues. The communal apartment kitchen turns into an EXECUTION SQUARE.
People cooked, too, in communal kitchens; cooked greasy borscht, shchi, kotleti, and kasha. The petite fireball pensioner Valentina Petrovna, who babysat me sometimes, baked the world’s most amazing pirozhki, seemingly out of thin air. Misha’s mom, Baba Mila, fried succulent defitsit chicken tenders that Mother pilfered. Eating, however, was something neighbors did in the ideologically suspect privacy of their own rooms. In the entire memory of Baballa’s apartment, that salat Olivier feast was the only exception.
The occasion was joyous indeed, exceeding the apartment’s very bounds. A kitchen expansion on the floor above Baballa’s!
Inside that kitchen, a door led to a tiny, bare, four-square-meter space that had been for years occupied by an old lady we all called Auntie Niusha. Miniature and birdlike, with sunken eyes, a sweet disposition, and a pervasive odor of formaldehyde, Auntie Niusha loved her job as a morgue attendant, loved sharing inspirational stories about washing cadavers. One day Niusha herself left this world. Not because neighbors added ground glass to her food to acquire her room, as sometimes happened in other communal apartments. Oh no no no—truly and genuinely!—Auntie Niusha died of natural causes.
Her death, everyone hoped, would result in a much-needed kitchen expansion. The upravdom (the building’s manager) had other ideas. Although the apartment above Baballa’s was already dangerously overcrowded even by the nine-meters-per-person standard, the upravdom instantly registered a new tenant in Auntie Niusha’s room in exchange for a bribe. One evening people came home from work to find a notice from the Housing Committee. The next morning, it said, a new tenant would be claiming Auntie Niusha’s dwelling space.
“Fuck the upravdom’s mother!” screamed the Tatar janitor.
“Over my dead body,” howled the Jewish expert in Sino-Soviet relations.
And so, in a feat of passionate and—for once—genuine communality, the communal apartment above Baballa’s sprang into action. They performed their Stakhanovite labor in the night’s slumbering darkness, so as not to attract the attention of informers on other floors.
By morning the door and walls had been brought down and the rubble trucked off. The entire expanded kitchen floor had been repainted, the seams between the kitchen and Auntie Niusha’s former room sanded down and the space filled with kitchen furniture.
The kitchen was now four square meters larger. Not a
trace of Niusha’s dwelling space remained.
The upravdom arrived bright and early with a new tenant. The tenant was dangling keys to Auntie Niusha’s room on a key ring shaped like Lenin’s profile.
“Bastards! Motherfucking traitors of Rodina!” roared the upravdom. “Where’s the room?!” He started kicking the wall in front of which Auntie Niusha’s room had stood.
Everyone went speechless with fear. It was after all illegal to alter a dwelling space. Only Octobrina stepped forward.
She was an exotic creature, this Octobrina. Of uncertain age, her fire-engine red hair always in rollers, her eyes wandering, her lips curled in a perpetual amorous smile. A not altogether unpleasant delusion possessed her. She was convinced both Stalin and Eisenhower were madly in love with her. “He sent me a cable to say ‘I miss you, my dove,’ ” she’d announce every morning in the line for a toilet. “Who—Stalin or Eisenhower?” the alkogolik Tsaritsin would mutter grumpily.
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking Page 19