Between 1992 and 1999, Yeltsin’s dermokratiya (crapocracy) sent Russia into free-market shock. Rampaging inflation, pitiful salaries unpaid—the previous hungry years of sauerkraut were remembered as plentiful. Overnight, a giant sleazy fire sale of national resources spawned oligarchs out of former apparatchiks and gangsters. Lesser beings lost everything: identity, pride, savings, Crimean beaches, and the comforting rhetoric of imperialist prestige and power. Not to mention the Soviet state’s social benefits. What’s more, Boris “Champion of Sovereignty” Yeltsin started a war to stop Chechnya from seceding, a conflict with horrors that fester to this day.
In 2000 an obscure midget with a boring KGB past was elected post-Union Russia’s second president and started flexing his muscles. Authoritarian symbols and rhetoric were revived. Among them, the Soviet national anthem—the words “Russia–our sacred power” substituted for “unbreakable Union of Soviet Republics.” Under Putin’s petrodollar kleptocracy, narcissistic consumerism began to bloom and boom. Money and glamour—Russified as glamur—swaggered in as the new state ideology (fretfully decried by the intelligentsia). These days Muscovites still order Georgian kharcho soup and Ukrainian vareniki dumplings at cute “ethnic” restaurants. But mostly they enjoy carpaccio and sushi—at oligarch prices.
Recently, cleaning my office in Queens, I unearthed a box of recipe postcards from the seventies. Fifteen sets, each celebrating a Soviet republic’s cuisine. Arranging them slowly on my dining table, I recalled the rain-washed autumn day four decades before when I scored these defitsit treasures at the big Dom Knigi bookstore and triumphantly carried them home. Poring now over the faded Technicolor close-ups of Moscow-designated “national dishes,” I still twinged at their faintly fragrant Orientalist spell, their enticements to wanderlust. There was “Azerbaijani” sturgeon salad, inexplicably smothered in Slavic sour cream, pictured against socialist oil derricks rising from the blue Caspian Sea. Faux “Kyrgyz” cakes, exotically called “Karagat” though featuring black currants in no way native to arid Kyrgyzstan. Umpteen ethnic variations on salat Olivier and kotleti. National in form, socialist in flavor, exactly as the Party prescribed.
Why was it, then? Why, of all the totalitarian myths, had the gilded fairy tale of the friendship of nations stayed so deeply, so intimately lodged in my psyche?
Fearing the answer might expose my inner Soviet imperialist, I quit speculating. Instead I decided to throw a birthday dinner for Mom featuring the real dishes of our erstwhile republics. As celebration, as semi-expiation.
For a solid week I pulverized walnuts for Georgian chicken satsivi, folded grape leaves around scented Armenian lamb, fried pork crackling for my bonafide Ukrainian borscht. Proudly I set these out on Mom’s birthday table along with Moldovan feta strudels and abysta, that bland Abkhazian corn mush of my farewell to the USSR. For dessert, a dense Lithuanian honey cake. And in tribute to the toasts at the dissolution of the Union Treaty, I even steeped a Byelorussian herbal vodka.
Mom was touched almost to tears by my handiwork. But she just couldn’t help being herself.
“Za druzhbu narodov—To the friendship of nations!” She offered the dog-eared toast with a grin so sarcastic, it practically withered my edible panorama of the republics.
“Imagine!” she exclaimed to her guests. “The daughter I raised on Tolstoy and Beethoven—she went gaga over the stupid gilded fountain at VDNKh!”
I was a little hurt by her words, I have to admit.
That Friendship of Nations fountain, by the way, has been freshly regilded in Moscow. Kids with their grandmas still circle around it. “Babushka, Babushka, tell us what it was like to live in the USSR?” the kids want to know.
“Well, once upon a time …” begin the babushkas.
CHAPTER TEN
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: PUTIN ON THE RITZ
We landed in Moscow on Good Friday, 2011—my mom, Barry, and I.
For the very first time ever, relatives weren’t there to embrace us at the airport. They still loved us, they claimed, but life now was different. Busier. Terrible airport traffic.
Earlier that afternoon we’d been devouring an epic garden lunch under late-April cherry trees in Odessa. The city of my mother’s birth, that gaudy, piratical Soviet port of my childhood seaside vacations, had been transformed into a charming, smiley, semiglobalized city in very foreign Ukraine. We’d stopped over in Odessa to do family research—only to discover that second cousin Gleb, our closest local relative, had a broken nose, a prison past, and complete alcoholic amnesia. So we researched Odessa’s garlicky cooking instead, shopping up a storm at the boisterous Privoz market. Our suitcases bulged with wholesome Ukrainian lard, folkloric garlic-studded kolbasa, and buttery smoked kambala flatfish.
None of this was presents for family. A month in the world’s fourth most expensive metropolis loomed ahead of us. We anxious American paupers stocked up on cheap, delicious Odessa edibles as if preparing for combat. Putin’s Moscow: a battleground, not for the fainthearted and shallow-pocketed.
In the new millennium our visits to Moscow had been infrequent and brief. Mother and I stayed away altogether from 1991 to 2001, missing out on the booze-soaked get-rich-or-have-your-brains-blown-out anarchy of the Yeltsin years. Not by design; it just happened. My grandparents and Uncle Sashka were dead; our surviving relatives came to visit in New York. As for rodina, we no longer mentally spelled it with a capital R. From the irony, dread, and tangle of signifiers sprouting from the dead morass of Sovietese, the word had shrunk to a de-ideologized, neutered noun, denoting, simply, where you were born. I felt more at home elsewhere, traveling and eating for a living. I’d bought an apartment in Istanbul with a Bosporus view and had devoted my latest cookbook to frenetically hospitable Spain, after writing about the tastes of Latin America and the Pacific Rim.
Moscow?
“Dubai with Pushkin statues,” Barry, my boyfriend, pronounced it on our previous visit.
It was already late evening on this Good Friday when we settled finally into our rented “highrise” flat.
“Highrise,” pronounced khi-rize in Russian, was the deluxe tag that Moscow4Rent, the rental agency, had concocted for our boxy two-bedroom apartment on Novy Arbat Avenue. The view made our jaws drop. From the twenty-second-floor windows we beheld 1) Hotel Ukraine, a showpiece of Stalinist neo-Gothic gigantomania; 2) Novy Arbat Avenue, Khrushchev’s swashbuckling slap at such feats of Stalinist ornamentalism; 3) the bulky Parliament White House, site of the 1991 attempted putsch that triggered the fall of the empire. Even at night the endless soaring construction cranes of Putin’s gangster-corporate capitalism were still at it. Moscow’s rapacious real estate schemes never sleep.
The khi-rize cost a small fortune. But leaning transfixed on a windowsill I gazed at the wide street below in breathless exhilaration at a long-ago childhood fantasy finally realized.
I had arrived!
In the early sixties bulldozers crushed a swath through crooked, archaic Old Arbat lanes, gouging out this massive, ruler-straight avenue then known as Kalinin Prospect. Strolling the renamed Novy Arbat of today, a foreigner might only see sleek BMWs cutting off sooty rheumatic city buses on a choked six-lane thoroughfare, with late-modernist towers hulking alongside, grubby-gray but with a certain brutalist je ne sais quoi. This foreigner might smirk at the tacky red-lettered globe on the tawdry Arbat center, frown at the ersatz steakhouses and yakitori joints sprawling westward and east.
Me? From the window I saw the boulevard of my young dreams.
I saw that now-tacky globe—year 1972. Magically blue it glowed inside its original wraparound logo: AEROFLOT: SPEED AND COMFORT. Rotating and flashing the locations of different mysterious foreign countries, it was a wonder cabinet of the latest Japanese electronics in Moscow. Below it shoppers in furry hats promenaded along Moscow’s widest sidewalk, past Vesna department store, in the gleaming windows of which checkered Polish coats preened, never actually for sale inside. Black Volgas and Chaikas g
lided by imperiously in the two lanes reserved for officials. Some lucky Muscovites toted defitsit cornflakes boxes from the swishy, American-style self-service Novoarbatsky supermarket. I saw my young self there too, gaping up at the giant Times Square–style screen where cartoons and bright propaganda reels blazed. Kalinin Prospect was my mirage of the West, my vision of technology’s march, my crystal ramp into the future. My Ginza and Broadway and Champs-Elysées packed into one.
As for our own khi-rize, it was one of four twenty-six-story prefab-concrete residential skyscrapers completed in 1968, only two years before I moved to an Old Arbat lane nearby. Strictly allocated to the nomenklatura, these towers fascinated me then with their sheer newness and geometricity. They were my own private, inaccessible residential utopia. I wanted to spend my life here at the very apex of late-sixties Soviet modernity—right here at the very spot where now in 2011 my mom is wrestling with the malfunctioning electric teakettle.
Memory likes its cruel tricks with the objects of our nostalgic yearnings. They usually turn out to be smaller, dishearteningly trite, when finally reencountered in real life. How miraculous then, I thought to myself, that not even thirty-plus years and a passport full of visa stamps could shrink the stature of ugly Kalinin Prospect.
Before collapsing onto our khi-rize Ikea beds, we snacked at our Ikea kitchen table on the sausage and pepper vodka we’d hauled with us from Ukraine. Mom and Barry too tired, I think, to parse the bounty of ironies, with the giant wedding cake of Stalin’s Hotel Ukraine blazing floodlit across the Moscow River.
Next morning we left Mom with her telephone troika—global digital, local land line, Russian cell—and headed off for a nostalgic stroll along Boulevard Ring, the route I used to take with Grandmother Alla. The day was mid-spring-like and stunning. The sky gleamed cerulean blue, and in the suddenly balmy air the tulips flashed and pansies winked from their beds. Anyutini glazki (Anyuta’s eyes—my eyes) is Russian for pansies, and I love them for it. My heart sang. The boulevard flora inspired a Nabokovian nostalgia for that “hospitable remorseful racemosa-blossoming Russia.”
As for the fauna …
“Got a car for my birthday,” a six-year-old in an Abercrombie hoodie was telling his pal. “Not a TOY, kretin. A car. With a chauffeur.”
On Nikitsky Boulevard, ladies young and old, belles and bêtes, hobbled along on sadistic ten-inch heels, like throngs of exotic giraffes. “Look!” whispered Barry, gawking at a blonde in hot pants and vertiginous pink platform-stilettos. Pink satin ribbons fluttered from her absurdly teetering ankles.
But it wasn’t her footwear attracting all the attention.
The Muscovite gaze, which blatantly sizes you up and down, assessing your clothes and accessories, piercing you with disdain or caressing you and yours with haughty approval—that collective gaze now fixed on my toes. They were bare. For our sentimental walk I’d worn sensible Adidas flip-flops, and in doing so had violated some code of Moscow propriety. Here in my old neighborhood, I suddenly felt self-conscious and foreign, as if trapped inside a “naked in public” anxiety dream.
My bare toes were glared at inside some of the world’s most expensive real estate: at the tea shop (ten dollars an ounce of “white needle” Fujian leaves), at the bakery (ten dollars a wedge of tiramisu), at the florist (ten dollars a rosebud). These fine merchants all embodied the most cherished post-Soviet attributes: eleet and ekskluziv.
We fled off the boulevards onto Tverskaya Street, ducking into the more populist Contemporary Russian History Museum.
“Woman!” thundered a custodial babushka. “Your toes will fall off from frostbite!” Outside it was well into the seventies. But instead of defending my flip-flops, I joined a debate between the frostbiter and a mothy spinster in charge of the room with the glamorized diorama of a Soviet communal apartment kitchen (!).
Who was Russia’s best-ever ruler? bickered the babushkas. The alarmist said Brezhnev: “Eighteen whole years of calm and prosperity!” The moth declared that she cried just thinking of what Bolsheviks did to poor, poor czar Nicholas II—and, in the same breath, pronounced Stalin the best-ever leader. “Bless him for leading Russia to victory.”
“What about … er … all the people he killed?” I put in, uninvited.
The Stalinist waved me off philosophically. “Cut a forest and splinters will fly.” It’s a popular expression among Stalin apologists. We left the two of them grunting in agreement with each other (and most other Russians) about the country’s worst-ever leader—Gorbachev!—and once more braved the boulevards.
“Your shlyopki (flip-flops)!” yelled an orange-haired hippo from a bench. “People spit—and worse!—on the streets! Want a leg amputated?”
“But Moscow these days seems so clean,” I cravenly bleated, overwhelmed by how quickly my leisurely, nostalgic stroll had unleashed a present-day nightmare.
“Clean??” came the answer. “When churki are doing the cleaning?”
Churki (logs) is a racial slur for Moscow’s nonwhite migrant workers from our former fraternal republics. Even on this gorgeous pre-Easter Saturday when the heart yearned to sing and Muscovites were buying Dom Perignon for Easter brunch, workers from erstwhile Soviet Central Asia were out in force, sweeping sidewalks, unloading trucks, handing out leaflets promoting sushi bargains. Brushstroke by diligent brushstroke they were painting the historic pastel-hued mansions and the nouveau-riche antihistoric replicas. Suddenly I understood why Moscow center had the eerie fake sheen of a movie set.
Migrant workers in Moscow number anywhere from two to five million, possibly as much as a quarter of the capital’s ballooning population. They’ve been flocking here since the midnineties, fleeing the post-Soviet Disasterstans. To be underpaid, abused by nationalists, harassed by police.
Beyond the hippo on her bench, a young Tajik street cleaner leaned on her broom. She gave a smile at my toes. “Finally a beautiful day,” she sighed. “Last week when it snowed, my shift started at four a.m.” Born in 1991, the year the Imperium ended, she had two babies back in Tajikistan. Her brothers were drug addicts. Her parents, she said, remembered Soviet rule as paradise.
“Moskva—zloy gorod,” she concluded. “Moscow—mean city.”
On Tsvetnoy, the last of the boulevards, finally it rose ahead, my sentimental journey’s destination—the Central Market. The charmed food fairyland of my childhood was now a viciously expensive new mall with edgy international brands, artily designed by a British architectural firm. “Very post-bling,” I’d been told.
Smiling stilettoed giraffes handed out outsize oranges by the entrance. “Visit our Farmer’s Market upstairs,” they cooed. Their gaze lightly brushed my toes and moved on.
Escalators ferried us aloft, past Commes des Garçons, Diesel, and Chloe, past puzzling conceptual art and hip displays of homegrown fashion genius.
The Farmer’s Market held nary a farmer.
The buzzy-bucolic name had been cooked up by a local restaurant group for their organically minded epicurean food hall. We wandered this New Russian arcadia, ogling hundred-dollar boxes of Italian chocolates, farmhouse French cheeses, newfangled sashimi, and Iberico hams, all arranged under the dramatic sweep of the stainless-steel ceiling. Here was Moscow throwing down its Guccied gauntlet at storied food halls like Berlin’s Ka De We and London’s Selfridges.
A dewy-cheeked Kyrgyz Eve called out from a fruit aisle with a shiny red apple.
“This, dear madam, is honey-sweet,” she enticed. “Just arrived from Bordeaux. Or perhaps something tart—a Pippin from Britain? Or here,” she sirened on, “here’s our own little apple!”
A bumpy, mottled-green specimen of the native Semerenko variety now reposed in her delicate hand.
“Looks homely,” I muttered.
“Oh, but the heavenly taste will transport you straight to your dacha childhood,” our Kyrgyz lovely promised, smiling ethereally.
I chewed on a wedge and grimaced. The apple was sour. Around us cute Central Asian boys
in retro flat caps slavishly steered shopping carts for ekskluziv patrons. Somehow the sight didn’t inspire old dacha reveries. And the whole au courant local-seasonal note rang hollow too—just another bit of imported post-bling bling. Not to mention that “our” apple was crazy expensive.
“Anya,” I said, noting the Kyrgyz Eve’s name tag. “We’re namesakes!”
“Nyet.” She suddenly went glum. “Aynazik is my native name,” she murmured. “But think anyone here would bother pronouncing it?
“Moskva—zloy gorod,” she whispered, holding out an apple for the next passing customer. “Moscow—mean city.”
On the way out we received more free oranges, along with a lustrous onion from Holland. Boarding the trolley back to the flat, I felt extremely alienated from this new Moscow. I called Dad’s wife, Lena, on my cell to ask if there were any affordable food shops in this city of Cartier-priced pippins. “Not in the center, my dear!” Lena giggled. Non-elites no longer lived in the center. They sold or rented their flats and lived off the income in faraway suburbs rich in diskaunt outlets like Kopeechka (literally “Little Kopek”). “You can try taking a metro, then a shuttle bus to Kopeechka,” suggested Lena. “But their produce is often rotten.”
We found Mom in the khi-rize, prattling on three phones at once.
“Moscow,” she was saying to someone. “What a mean city.”
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking Page 29