Then a new policy came out eliminating the need for coupons and the situation got even worse. Suddenly there were no restrictions on how much a person could buy without coupons and some people would buy large amounts of a particular item, leaving none of it for other people. Officials recognized this problem and placed various limits on certain goods, like only one kilogram of flour per person per sale. If they wanted more flour they would have to go back to the end of the long line and wait all over again-two to five hours was typical.
The food shortage in 1947 became severe. The home-raised food of my parents saved them from many problems. However, they were worried about the food supply of their relatives living in Moscow. Mikhail had heard that the lines in Moscow food stores were as long as the lines to Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square, which typically was a kilometer (.621 miles). A dictionary definition of famine is the protracted shortage of food, causing widespread and persistent hunger, emaciation of the affected population, and a substantial increase in death rate. Its causes are numerous, but the effects are the same. The horror of this ancient curse is difficult to portray accurately unless one has experienced it.
It was seven years since Dad had seen any of his relatives, and poor mom had heard nothing from her relatives since 1941 and had not seen them since early in 1939. It was time to do something. In those days there were no e-mails, no instant messaging, and villages usually had no telephone or telegraph systems, so letters were the main communication and mail delivery was not always reliable. Normal delivery was weeks, not days, and sometimes the thick letters and small packages just disappeared.
Father, postwar, 1940s.
There was also the matter of my parent’s marriage. There was no ceremony at their marriage, just an entry in a military booklet. Dad had asked Mom on bended knee to marry him in a civil service ceremony numerous times. At least part of the reason was that Dad was tired of their having different last names. She would respond, “Oh, it’s not a good time to marry. Let’s wait and have the ceremony at your parent’s home. I don’t want to marry you just to get a stamp in your passport.” Finally, one day she agreed.
They were married in a USSR Civil Service ceremony in Pogranichnyi in July of 1947. No one in the family seems able to remember the exact date in July; it just was not important to us. We all remember January 7, 1941, the date of their original marriage and this is the date that we always celebrated.
My parents both asked for and received new internal passports. Dad was not required to do this. He had never had one and he still had his Communist Party booklet and his Soviet Military booklet. Mother’s last name on her new passport was Sariecheva. Their children’s birth certificates were interesting. Slahva’s birth certificate from the embassy in Mongolia recorded his mother as Maria Ivanovna Kondratyeva. Mine indicated that my mother was Maria Ivanovna Sariecheva. A further complication was that Maria Ivanovna was as common in Russia as Jane Smith is in America. Later on, whenever we moved to a new town, the school authorities would raise their eyebrows when we explained that we were brother and sister with the same mother and father.
The Red Army finally cleared Dad to have a two-month leave, the first in eight years. The long round-trip train ride to his parents in Arscent’evo would consume 25 days of the precious 60 days allotted. Their plans commenced. Mareika and Mikhail were taking a large amount of luggage. They wanted to support their relatives with material things such as shoes, including many pairs of high leather military boots, plus various kinds of clothes and stocks of food. Large suitcases were full with clothes for all relatives. Boxes with tins of meat were packed. Mom obtained five large wooden barrels and she filled them with salted pork from her bountiful pig herd. Large wooden boxes were carefully loaded with fruit preserves from her garden.
There were strong reasons for taking all this food and clothing. About six months earlier a few brave local Communist officials had written several diplomatic letters to the Central Committee Communist Party in Moscow requesting that their local celebrations for Revolutionary Day on November 7 not include the normal parade and outdoor meetings. The reason for this request was that the vast majority of people in their area did not have shoes or clothing and it was very cold and miserable outside in November. Moscow approved this unusual request. A recent documentary verified this story and enlarged upon it with numerous testimonies such as women who had no clothing, just one coat, and whenever they had to go outside, be it winter or summer, they wore it with nothing underneath, just bare skin.
Mom found a local woman named Feania who she trusted to care for the house and garden during their absence. As they discussed compensation, it became obvious that the woman did not want money. Mom asked Feania, “I have to pay you. What is it you want?”
She responded, “Some old clothes for my husband and me. Our children are grown up.”
Mom persisted, “That is not enough and I have to pay you. Look, I know what; the chicken flock is very large. Every week or so just eat a chicken.”
Feania said, “Thank you, that is very generous, but my husband and I were thinking of something very different. You have a lot of pig fat from all the slaughtering. Can I have that?”
My mother was astounded. She had been burning the fat in the fireplace in lieu of firewood and because she didn’t know what else to do with it. “Why do you want that?”
The woman was not embarrassed. “The fat has a high caloric value. It can keep us alive. Please, your money is no good; there is no food to buy. My husband and I talked this all out. We just want your pig fat!”
Mother agreed and before the deal closed, Mareika told Feania to use the garden produce and all the eggs to either eat or sell for her own benefit and also to eat some chickens. Feania took excellent care of the house, garden, and animals and upon my family’s return; mother gave her money as a bonus.
Feania responded,” These have been the best months we have had in many, many years. My husband and I thank you.” It was then that Mareika came to understand that Feania was not just helping her, she was helping Feania.
Feania continued to help Mareika with her plant and animal husbandry, and three years later when the Sariechev family moved to an apartment in a new town, Mareika gave all the animals to Feania.
Feania is the same woman who had a son going on a trip that autumn of 1947 to work on a major construction site for new buildings. Feania mentioned to Mom that she was worried about her young son not having warm clothes to wear in the winter cold, so my mom gave him some winter clothing including an American made long leather coat of my dad’s. Several days after he left, the young man noticed a coded list of nonsense in the inside coat pocket of Dad’s leather coat. He was a responsible boy and he went to an official who arranged to have the document sent to my dad’s military unit.
My dad was flabbergasted and visions of prison flashed in his mind when his commanding officer held the list up and asked him about the secret document which no one should have known about. It was a jumbled coded list of secret agents and the addresses where dad would meet them. Dad answered that he always kept it at home in his leather coat, as he always changed out of his military uniform and wore civilian clothes when meeting agents. Dad did not even know that his wife had given away his leather coat. Father was not in trouble but he was upset. However, the secret list was safe and only four people knew of the incident. Dad’s superior officer greatly appreciated Mikhail and his work, so he covered up the episode. Dad’s love for Mom finally overcame his anger, but it took several hours before he could control his emotions and go home to confront his wife. Dad always felt that his love for Mareika was greater than her love for him. That night he told Mom that if she really loved him she would have checked with him before she gave away his clothes. Deep in his heart he absolutely knew that she loved him deeply, but it was a hard day for my dad. Mom was very good at checking pockets after this incident but it did not stop her from giving away family items to less fortunate people.
Augu
st finally arrived and the Sariechev family began their long journey home. Anticipation made the hard trip an enjoyable expedition. The express train system required that they go to Moscow and take another local train back over the same tracks to Ryazan. So the decision was to stay in Moscow for several days with Mikhail’s sister Tania and her husband Vanya.
It was on that stay that my four-year-old brother Slahva discovered the electric tramways with their steel tracks that dominated Moscow streets at that time. Mareika and Tania wanted Slahva to enjoy this time so they took him on endless tramway trips all over Moscow. At one point they tried to calculate how many kilometers they had traveled but they finally gave it up as a hopeless task. Slahva made many new friends during his hours on the tramways and this gave him a new word to use. The Russian word for friend is tovarish and for tramway is tra’mvay, so Slahva made up a new word, tovarovay, a friendly tramway.
After this brief stay in Moscow, the Sariechev family and Tania’s family headed for a welcome feast at Arscent’evo.
34. The Feast
Every nationality has its own food traditions: what to eat, when to eat it, where to get it, how to cook it, why it tastes best. Every nationality, every district, every kitchen has its unique way to cook its own favorite dish and the same basic ingredients can taste very different from place to place. Usually foreigners want to try the local food, the local wine, the local whatever it is that makes that place famous. It might be a chorizo enchilada, pig truffles in fried sour cabbage, bird’s nest soup with egg roll, or Scottish haggis. This exotic food is all right for a few days, then one starts to long for familiar food-anything-even just a piece of bread made in one’s own hometown. Everyone who travels has the same feeling, the Italian’s mouth waters at the thought of his pasta, a German goes cross-eyed at the thought of a fat juicy sausage, an Irishman claims potato soup rules the world, a Thai must have fish, rice, and hot chilies, and the Georgian will give his life for shish kebabs. Russians are no different from anybody else, home cooked food is best.
Mikhail’s return to his family in Arscent’evo for the first time in eight years was cause for a large celebration in his honor. Numerous friends came to welcome and congratulate the young family. The first day back was just the usual meals, but an organized feast was in the works for the second day. Varvara and her three daughters Tania, Manya, and Lizza were all ready to roll up their sleeves in the August heat and prepare the homecoming feast. Everyone from Arscent’evo would attend, as would friends and well-wishers from other nearby villages and even Ryazan, Moscow, and other places.
My father’s youngest sister Lizza had arrived from a distant town with her family. She had developed into an exceedingly beautiful woman but she was spoiled by everyone and she had become lazy. However, she had the good luck to marry a strong and handsome man in 1941 named Vasia who everyone liked. Vasia was smart, hardworking, did not drink or smoke, and was an excellent husband. One leg ravaged by polio had kept him out of the military. They lived in a small town where Vasia worked as the supervisor of a repair shop for farm equipment on a huge kolkhoz farm. However spoiled she was, on the day of the feast she worked like a trooper as she sweated and toiled around the oven like her sisters. Lizza’s naturally beautiful hands and fingers worked very fast. They looked like she was playing the piano as she worked on the food. A Russian proverb says, “She did not want to beat her face into the dirt.” A loose translation would be, “She wanted to do good in front of her friends and family.”
Russia’s widespread famine had many indirect effects on the villagers. Peasants had already culled out the non-breeding animals and sold them for meat in Ryazan’s meat market. Most had even reduced their breeding stock to just a few head. They would slaughter in the late evening and by six o’clock the next morning the meat would be hanging on a hook in a Ryazan meat shop. There were very few cattle, sheep, or pigs in Russian villages that summer. The high price of meat and the lack of fodder from the drought served to improve the livestock genetics through heavy culling of the inferior animals.
Soviet peasants, like their farming counterparts around the world, learned early on to maintain a private food stock of, ideally, two or three years to offset famine, disease, bandits, corruption, and governments. Every peasant family maintained a garden and food storage facilities. Peasants could get locally unavailable commodities such as tea, salt, and spices through trading. A farmer will never survive if he can only plant and harvest. How well he eats and lives requires a multitude of skills in numerous areas. Any farmer is comfortable in a good year but during a bad year good farmers survive while poor ones starve.
The large co-op farms usually paid wages to peasants in the form of food produced on that co-op. Typically this would be the cull portion, the lowest quality produced. Occasionally, during a bad year, this food payment could include almost inedible produce. The co-ops might pay in flour or cereal grains, whatever was to their advantage. The villagers kept cereal grains for grinding into flour, plus a good stock of flour ready for bread-making.
In later years, I could still distinctly recall my grandparents’ cellar. Granny Varvara would take me down the steps and as we descended the air became noticeably cooler and the smells of various foodstuffs vied for my attention. The small room gave an aura of peace and security. Granny’s face was typically soft-featured but being in that cellar gave her countenance an even softer glow. The village stone mill on the riverbank provided a super fine ground flour. I loved to stick a fingertip into its silky mass; it was a new dimension for my senses. I would run my fingers through the whole grain in another container and it felt like millions of tiny fairies dancing as I spelled my name or made elaborate designs on the surface of the grain.
I can also remember the wintertime “chip-carving” when woodcrafters would produce beautifully hand-carved wooden plates and utensils with numerous and hard to clean decorative depressions. One would think that this would be a continuous source of viral and bacterial diseases but such was not the case. Evidently wood is not a prime carrier of contamination.
That year, as the famine progressed, the co-ops tried to buy back some of the peasant’s food for resale to the cities. Few farm workers agreed to that proposal from Moscow. The village had its own agenda right now. One of its prodigal sons had returned.
It was and still is the custom for the hostess to prepare all the food, with possibly a few family members and maybe some volunteers if needed. Typically, the guest neither brings any food nor helps in the cleanup; their only responsibility is to enjoy themselves. Except for the times when she is the hostess, a Russian woman can have many wonderful meals with no work on her part. As a guest herself, she can just eat and enjoy the companionship of good friends. The custom of every family bringing something to eat and everyone sharing all the food was unknown in Russia. Only seldom in Russia was a buffet type dinner planned and then just for special events like a huge reception.
How many countries besides Russia have soup with a big piece of meat in it as the main and sometimes the only course and serve it at breakfast, lunch, and dinner? A typical home meal for a Russian family includes soup, meat and/or a salad, and dessert. Russians do not serve a meal in courses, one at a time; with a salad, then a main course and several secondary dishes. Instead, they put all the food on the table at the same time. At the end some hot tea and a dessert are served. One could be confident at a Russian feast that tables would groan under the weight of the food and that everyone would walk away from the tables very full. Russian cooking is best enjoyed in an atmosphere of celebration with family and friends at a large gathering, happily making toasts, speeches, jokes, and music-laughing and dancing.
My Granny Varvara had been planning this feast for a long time and she had it well organized. Her three daughters were all good cooks and they would do the main dishes according to their individual skills. Much of the routine work of slicing and dicing would be left to young girls in the village who volunteered to help. Varvara spent
many days prior to the feast on the small details.
She had already baked numerous loaves of bread. Peasants usually make bread weekly and it is a serious ritual. Russians have almost a mystical regard for cereal grains used to make bread since bread is the Russian’s most important food. Several Russian proverbs translate roughly as, “Bread is the staple of the meal.” Rye, wheat, and occasionally barley are used to create many types and shapes of bread: large tasty round loaves, little rectangular ones, long narrow ones, braided ones, decorated ones-maybe thirty different styles of bread. Some kinds are eaten with morning tea, some with soup. Some are only for religious holidays, some only for Easter, and the large round loaves served with salt are for visiting dignitaries and newlyweds. The favorite of many people is the black Russian rye which leaves a tangy flavor on the palate. Varvara felt confident that her bread supply was more than adequate. She had also spent a day making fruit and berry pies and even a few meat and curd pies, which were always popular.
Soft drinks enjoyed by Russians are served at room temperature and no one drinks cold things, particularly in the cold winter, as it is thought to invite sickness. If a Russian had found some ice in his drink in those days he would probably have had a heart attack from the shock. Varvara had liters of fruit drinks she had gleaned from the liquids of stewed fruit. There were more liters of her homemade kvass which is a popular liquid fermented from flour. It has an appealing sour taste. Kompote is a similar drink to kvass and Varvara also made it in quantity with dried or sometimes fresh fruit which she boiled in water with sugar.
The alcoholic drinks on hand for the feast included nalivka which is a weak fruit liqueur, fermented to a thick sweet drink and greatly enjoyed by the ladies. Varvara knew that virtually every fruit can produce an alcoholic drink via fermentation but she seldom made them. The village men didn’t like beer like their city brothers did and wine was never popular in the country. Vodka was the choice of the farm community and even a few non-drinkers would occasionally have a shot or two. Arscent’evo was almost a dry village by choice, but occasionally the need for vodka arose and they would buy it from a store. Homemade vodka was cheaper and much stronger but it was illegal, although that fact inhibited no one. Aunt Manya had a talent for making vodka but she didn’t do it often.
My Russian Family Page 24