“Room? What room?” Octobrina said, staring innocently and lasciviously straight into the upravdom’s eyes. “Please leave, my dear, or I’ll telephone Comrade Stalin this minute.” It was a good thing she didn’t invoke Eisenhower. Or maybe she wasn’t so mad after all.
Stalin had been dead for almost two decades. Still, the upravdom stepped back and instinctively shuddered. Then he sucked in his cheeks with great force and let out a blistering spit. Against the kollektiv he was powerless. Anyway, bribes for rooms—that wasn’t exactly legal either.
That night the whole building threw a feast of celebration in the new kitchen. Herrings were whacked against the table to loosen their skins, then arranged on pristine sheets of fresh Pravda. Vodka flowed like the Don. Moonshine, too. In an act as communal as Auntie Niusha’s room demolition, all four floors contributed to the construction of the salat Olivier. The Georgian family produced bunches of scallions—improbably in the middle of winter—to lend the salad a summery twang. Neighbors carted in boiled potatoes and carrots and pickles; and they dipped generously into their stashes of canned crabmeat and Doctor’s Kolbasa. Special thanks went to our Misha, the food store manager with a proprietary attitude toward socialist property, for the defitsit peas and a whole case of mayonnaise. I can still picture Octobrina in her grime-fringed, formerly frilly housedress, piping mayonnaise flowers onto the salad with such abandon, you’d think both Joe and Ike were arriving for dinner. After a few bites of the Olivier salad I fell into a mayonnaise-lipped stupor.
I don’t recall the exact taste, to be honest, but I assume it was pretty fab.
Now, in Mom’s tiny kitchen in Queens, she doesn’t share my nostalgic glow. “Foo! I’ve never had salat Olivier so laden and clunky as the one at Baballa’s party,” she exclaims, still dicing the veggies into precise half-inch pieces for her more ethereal version. “Who mixes chicken, kolbasa, and crab?” Well, I can’t blame her for having less than tantalizing memories of Baballa’s apartment, where neighbors, straight to her face, called her yevreechka (“little kikette”).
Like every Russian, Mom maintains her own firm ideas of a perfectly composed Olivier. And as with most Soviet dishes, the recipe’s nuances expressed social belonging beyond one’s personal flavor preferences. Soviets felt this acutely in the Stagnation years under Brezhnev. On the surface, the propaganda machine continued to spin out its creaking myths of bountiful harvest and collective identity; beneath, society was splintering into distinct, often opposing milieus, subcultures, and tightly knit networks of friends, each with its own coded vocabulary, cultural references, and political mind-set—and, yes, recipes—that signaled how its members felt about the official discourse.
With salat Olivier, identity issues boiled down mainly to the choice of protein. Take for instance militant dissidents, the sort of folk who typed out samizdat and called Solzhenitsyn “Isayich” (note the extremely coded, Slavic vernacular use of the patronymic instead of first and last names). Such people often expressed their culinary nihilism and their disdain for Brezhnev-era corruption and consumer goods worship by eschewing meat, fish, or fowl altogether in their Olivier. At the other end of the spectrum, fancy boiled tongue signified access to Party shops; while Doctor’s Kolbasa, so idolized during the seventies, denoted a solidly blue-collar worldview. Mom’s version—I’d call it arty bohemian—featured delicate crabmeat, along with a nonconformist crunch of fresh cucumbers and apples to “freshen up” the Soviet taste of boiled vegetables.
But Mom’s suddenly not so sure about my homespun semiotics.
“Eh? Whatever,” she says with a shrug. “In the end didn’t all the versions just taste like mayo?”
So they did! They tasted of the tangy, loose-textured Soviet Provansal brand mayo, manufactured for the first time in 1936 and taste-tested and approved by Stalin himself. Initially scarce, Provansal began to lubricate Soviet consciousness in the late sixties and early seventies, which is when salat Olivier took center stage at the table.
Specifications of a totem: short, 250-gram, potbellied, and made of glass, with a tight-fitting lid. If, as Dostoyevsky supposedly said, all Russian literature comes out of Gogol’s story “The Overcoat,” then what Gogol’s garment was to nineteenth-century Russian culture, the Provansal mayonnaise jar was to the domestic practices of Mature Socialism.
Our Brezhnevian days, so “abundant,” “friendly,” and “happy,” were accompanied by a chronic and calamitous shortage of tara, the term for packaging and receptacles. Hence the deep bonds between people and their avoskas, into which salesladies would dump fish or meat—unwrapped, unless you brought along your own sheets of Pravda. Of this time too was the fetishistic adulation that comrades lavished on foreign-issue plastic bags—washing them tenderly with a fancy East German bath foam called Badoozan, hanging them to dry on the slipshod balcony, parading them at haute soirées the way modern fashionistas show off their Kelly bags.
Still, nothing matched the use—the reuse—value of the mayonnaise jar. I toted mayo jars full of nails, needles and threads, and other paraphernalia of socialist junior toil to my school “Labor” classes. Both my babushkas sprouted scallions from onion bulbs in mayonnaise jars. My drunken Uncle Sashka used them as a) spittoons, b) ashtrays, and c) drinking vessels at certain unlovely canteens from which thoughtless comrades had pilfered the vodka glasses. When spring came and the first flowers perfumed Moscow air with romance, gangly students carried mayonnaise jars filled with lilies of the valley to their sweethearts. (Being short and delicate, lilies of the valley—and violets, too—were unjustly ignored by the Soviet flower vase industry, which favored tall, pompous blooms like gladioli.) And which H. sovieticus, strapped for cash three days before payday, hadn’t stood in line to redeem a sackful of mayo jars for a handful of kopeks? Elaborate rituals sprang up around the act of glass redemption.
Finally, where would Soviet medicine be without this all-important receptacle?
COMRADES WOMEN, BRING YOUR PREGNANCY TEST SAMPLES IN MAYONNAISE JARS PREVIOUSLY SCALDED WITH BOILING WATER, instructed signs at gynecological clinics. And it wasn’t just pregnant women: anyone having a urinalysis—routinely required for most polyclinic visits—had to deliver their specimen in the container from the tangy Provansal mayonnaise.
My poor mom. She was forced to contribute half her meager salary to the Soviet mayonnaise industry. My affliction was the reason.
The trouble began when I was eight. My life had actually turned fairly rosy by then. I excelled in second-grade Spanish at School 110, which my mom had also attended. I devotedly practiced piano for my weekly lessons at the prestigious Moscow Conservatory prep school near our Arbat house. I even acted in Soviet films on the side, not that my celluloid career was anything glamorous. Mainly it involved perspiring for hours in thick makeup and polyester costumes from fashion-forward Poland while waiting for an inebriated cinematographer to be fished out of a drunk tank. On the elaborate period set of Tolstoy’s Childhood, however, the costumes were gauzy and gorgeous, and the cameraman was fairly sober. But there was another problem: the entire juvenile cast became disfigured by boils—caused, they said, by a viral mosquito gorging itself on young flesh within Ostankino TV Film Studios. The casting director herded the children to the Union of Cinematographers dermatologist. As the doc examined our boils, I decided to show him as well an oddly discolored patch on my right ankle that had been alarming Baballa.
The doctor sent me home with a note. On it was a single word, which sent Mom and Baballa rushing in past the bearded statue of Ilyich outside the Lenin Library.
“Scleroderma.”
I’m not sure exactly how the Soviet Medical Encyclopedia described it. But I do remember the conversation between Mom and Dr. Sharapova, Moscow’s most in-demand dermatologist, to whom she immediately hauled me.
Sharapova: “Is Anechka an only child?”
Mom: “Yes.”
Sharapova, in a treacly voice: “Larisa Naumovna! You are young. There will be oth
er children.”
Mom didn’t want other children. Besides, her reproductive system had already been ravaged by socialist gynecology. So began our epic battle with scleroderma, which, it became quickly apparent, baffled and defied Soviet medics. Vitamin A and vitamin E; massage and physiotherapy; a ferociously expensive elite herbal goo called moomiyo used by Olympic athletes and cosmonauts; daily penicillin injections; weekly cortisone shots; mineral-rich mud from the gaudy and piratical Black Sea port of Odessa. All were deployed randomly, in hope of defeating this potentially fatal autoimmune disease—one that would most likely spread, so Mom was informed in whispers, from my leg to my vital internal organs, and shut them all down. We spent the next two years on a grinding merry-go-round of doctors, always clutching test samples in a trusted mayonnaise jar. While Mom endured yet more shrugs and compassionate frowns in their offices, I gaped at the public health posters in grimy hallways of dermatological clinics, which conveniently doubled as venereal wards.
RELIGION IS THE OPIATE OF THE PEOPLE. SHARING A COMMUNION CUP CAUSES SYPHILIS!
Gnawed-away chins, crumbled noses, cauliflower-like growths—the syphilitic faces on those posters are still etched in my memory. Syphilis terrified me far more than my scleroderma, since nobody had informed me about the “fatal” part. About syphilis, however, I’d heard plenty from our homeroom teacher, a squat brunette with a clenched perm and a taste for corporal punishment. “Syphilis is contracted by sharing chewed gum and accepting sweets from foreigners,” she never tired of proclaiming. Guilty of both, every day I’d examine my face in the mirror for cauliflower-like buds. In the meantime, my scleroderma kept creeping up my left leg. When one day the doctor noticed a fresh spot on my other leg, Mom plonked into a chair and covered her face with both hands.
Mom’s other heartache was losing her friends.
Partly in response to Western pressure over human rights, partly to purge “Zionist elements,” the “compassionate” Soviet State began loosening the emigration quota for its Jews at the start of the seventies. By mid-decade about 100,000 had managed to leave. “Reuniting with family in Israel” was the official qualification. Some Soviet Jews genuinely headed for their “historic homeland.” The majority left on Israeli exit visas and then in Vienna, the first refugee transit point, declared their desire to immigrate elsewhere, to the New World mainly. These “dropouts” were carted on to Rome to await American refugee visas.
Citing my illness, and her visceral hatred of Rodina, Mom herself began contemplating the move at the end of 1973.
A vyzov (invitation petition) from a chimerical great-uncle in Israel had been already secured. The paper with its suggestive red seal sat in Mom’s underwear drawer as she pondered our future. Newspapers of the day freshly railed against the “Zionist aggressors” (the Yom Kippur War had just ended). We attended clandestine Hebrew classes and endless farewell open houses for departing friends, their flats stripped down to bare yellow-stained mattresses. People squatted atop packed suitcases. Cried, smoked, guzzled vodka from mismatched borrowed mugs, scooped salat Olivier straight from the bowl. We left these gatherings loaded with practical tips—for example, thoroughly lick the stamps for your exit visa petition—and tantalizing snippets of news of the already departed. Lida’s daughter was loving the kibbutz; Misha in Michigan had bought a used Pontiac, green with only two dents. At home I looked up Tella Veef and Sheekago on my globe as Mom weighed the pros and cons of Israel (honor) versus America (comfort, old friends, a renowned scleroderma expert).
I needed proper medical help. Dad evidently needed us out of his hair. He seemed bored once again with family life. “Da, da,” he’d agree, almost gleeful, whenever Mom brought up zagranitsa. “Go, I might join you later once you are settled.”
And yet Mother kept stalling—torn between the dead-end “here” and a future “there” that she couldn’t even begin to imagine.
Navsegda—forever. Emigrating without the right of return. It would be a kind of dying.
Our country’s tragic shortage of tara was what tipped Mom finally toward the OVIR, the State Office of Visas and Registrations.
A luxurious late-spring day in 1974. The monumentalist capital of our Socialist Rodina was veiled in the yellow-green leafy crochet of its birch trees. But inside our regular grocery store, nuclear winter reigned. Besides the familiar rot, a greenish-white slime adhered to the beets; strange mutant growths sprouted on the potatoes. Normally oblivious to such things, my mother stormed off without her usual makings of soup, holding back tears. At the Three Piglets corner shop, an even grimmer landscape awaited: the counter was bare, save for bloodied hunks of unidentifiable flesh.
“Udder and whalemeat!” barked the button-nosed salesgirl. Her scowl was like frostbite.
With two mouths to feed, Mom swallowed hard and asked for a half kilo of each, trying not to look at the crimson trails left on the scale. “Open your bag,” grunted the girl, shoving the purchase toward Mom. Mom informed her that she’d forgotten her avoska. Humbly, abjectly, she begged for some wrapping paper. “A newspaper, anything—I’ll pay you for it.”
“Citizen!” scolded the girl with her scowl. “You think everything in our country can be bought and sold?”
Whereupon Mom exploded with everything she thought about the udder and whale and the salesgirl’s scowl and our stinking bounteous Rodina. She took the meat anyway, bearing the lumps along home in her naked hands, forensic evidence of the State’s remorseless assault on her dignity.
I was just back from school, practicing “February” from Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, when Mom stormed in. She summoned me to the kitchen.
Her hands were still bloody. The conversation was brief.
She had had it with the USSR, she announced. She was finally ready to apply for an exit visa—but only if that was my earnest desire as well.
“If you want to stay,” she said, “we will stay!”
Called away just like that from my Red October upright piano to pronounce on our entire future, I shrugged. “Okay, Mamulya,” I replied.
Zagranitsa would be an adventure, I added cheerily.
To be honest, I only feigned a chipper nonchalance to appease Mom.
Personally I had no reason to emigrate, and no bitter grievances with our Rodina. Even my sickness wasn’t that much of a drag, since the frightened doctors excused me from going to school whenever I wanted. I was now ten years of age, and my past as a sad-eyed bulimic was behind me. I was, at long last, enjoying a happy Mature Socialist childhood.
A couple of words about Mature Socialism.
My grandparents had idealistically embraced the regime, whereas the urban intelligentsia of my parents’ Thaw generation of the sixties rejected it with equal fervor. We, the kids of zastoi (Stagnation), experienced a different relation with Rodina. As the first Soviet generation to grow up without ruptures and traumas—no purges, no war, no cathartic de-Stalinization, with its idealizing of sincerity—we belonged to an age when even cats on the street recognized the State’s epic utopian project as farce. We, Brezhnev’s grandchildren, played klassiki (Russian hopscotch) on the ruins of idealism.
Happiness? Radiant Future?
In the cynical, consumerist seventies, these were embodied by the holy trinity of kvartira (apartment)-mashina (car)-dacha (country cottage). An imported sheepskin coat figured in too; so did blat, that all-enabling network of connection so scorned by Naum and Larisa. A popular Stagnation-era gag sums up what historians dub the Brezhnevian social contract. Six paradoxes of Mature Socialism: 1) There’s no unemployment, but no one works; 2) no one works, but productivity goes up; 3) productivity goes up, but stores are empty; 4) stores are empty, but fridges are full; 5) fridges are full, but no one is satisfied; 6) no one is satisfied, but everyone votes yes.
In return for the “yes” vote (at pseudoelections), the Kremlin gerontocracy kept commodity prices unchanged and guaranteed nominal social stability—steady employment that “pretended to pay” while co
mrades “pretended to work.” It also turned a semiblind eye to alternative economic and even cultural practices—as long as these didn’t blatantly violate official norms. As one scholar notes, by socialism’s twilight the only classes that took ideology at face value were professional Party activists and dissidents. They were an overwhelming minority. Everyone else eked out a daily life in the holes and crevices of the creaking machinery of power.
My own transformation from an alienated, shadow-eyed mess in my kindergarten days into a scheming, duplicitous junior Homo sovieticus occurred during Lenin’s jubilee year. In 1970 beloved Vladimir Ilyich was turning an immortal one hundred inside his mausoleum, and Rodina was celebrating with such unrelenting kitsch pomp, all the force-fed rejoicing produced the reverse effect on the popular psyche.
Having just moved to the Arbat, smack in the center of Moscow, we were besieged by a never-ending stream of tea-guzzlers. In the airy, multicornered kitchen that once belonged to my grandparents, people came and went, eating us out of the house—and treating us to a feast of jubilee jokes. The “commemorative Lenin products” series sent me into a paroxysm of private rejoicing. Items in the series:
Triple bed: “Lenin Is with Us” (a ubiquitous State slogan)
Bonbon: Chocolate-dipped Lenins
Perfume: Scent of Ilyich
Body lotion: Lenin’s cremains
Guidebook to Siberia: For those telling Lenin jokes!
My glee was so extravagant because my previous relations with Lenin had been so anguished. As Mom fought to exorcise him from my young mind, I furtively adored Ilyich at home, only to gag on him at the kindergarten, where Lenin-mania was crammed down my throat along with black caviar. The situation was tormenting, paralyzing; it had me throwing up almost daily. Until the populist carnival of jubilee humor liberated me from the schizophrenia of Lenin’s conflicting presence. Laughter magically shrank the whole business. Imagining Lenin’s squinty, beardy visage trapped inside a milk chocolate bonbon—instead of a raisin or cashew!—was somehow empowering. And how I delighted in seeing the local drunks slap a Lenin centennial ruble on a filthy liquor store counter, muttering: “My pocket ain’t no mausoleum. You ain’t lying around in there for long.”
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking Page 20