Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (12 page)

Chronicles of Stalin’s terror have naturally shaped the narrative of the era. They dominate so completely, one can forgive Westerners for imagining the Soviet thirties as one vast gray prison camp, its numbed inhabitants cogs in the machinery of the State that promoted itself solely through murder, torture, and denunciation. This vision, however, doesn’t convey the totalizing scope of the Stalinist civilization. A
hypnotic popular culture, the State’s buoyant consumer goods drive, and a never-ending barrage of public celebrations—all stoked a mesmerizing sense of building a Radiant Future en masse.

Those who didn’t perish or disappear into the gulags were often swallowed up in the spectacle of totalitarian joy. Milan Kundera describes it as “collective lyrical delirium.” Visiting Russia in 1936, André Gide couldn’t stop marveling at the children he saw, “radiant with health and happiness,” and the “joyous ardor” of park-goers.

When I think of the Stalinist State, which I knew only as a banished ghost, these are the images that come to my mind: Nadezhda Mandelstam’s description of her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, being led away to the sounds of a Hawaiian guitar in a neighbor’s apartment. Anna Akhmatova’s unbearably tragic poem “Requiem” (dedicated to the victims of purges) juxtaposed with the indomitable cheer of
Volga-Volga
, an infectiously kitsch celluloid musical comedy of the time. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of the
voronki
(black Mariahs), prison transports disguised as brightly painted comestibles trucks, their sides eventually featuring ads for Sovetskoye brand champagne with a laughing girl.

The frenzy of industrialization of the first Five-Year Plan (1928–32) had bulldozed and gang-marched a rural society into something resembling modernity—even as officials suppressed details of the millions of deaths from famines brought on by collectivization. In 1931, more than four million peasant refugees flooded the overwhelmed cities. The state needed something to show for all the upheavals. And so in 1935 Stalin uttered one of his most famous pronouncements.

“Life has gotten better, comrades, life has gotten more cheerful,” he declared at the first conference of Stakhanovites, those celebrated over-fulfillers of socialist labor quotas, whose new movement emulated the uberminer Alexei Stakhanov, famed for hewing 102 tons of coal in
one
workshift. “And when life is happier, work is more effective,” Stalin added.

After the speech, reported one participant, the Leader of Progressive Mankind joined all in a song from the wildly popular screen farce
Jolly Fellows
, released weeks after Kirov’s murder. The Genius of Humanity liked music, and occasionally even edited song lyrics himself. He
had personally instigated Soviet movie musical comedy by expounding to director Grigory Alexandrov—former assistant to Sergei Eisenstein in Hollywood—on the need for fun and cheer in the arts. The melodies and mirth that exploded onto Soviet screens in the late thirties were the socialist realist answer to Hollywood’s dream factory. Instead of Astaire and Rogers, dashing shepherds burst into song and gutsy girl weavers achieved fairy-tale Stakhanovite apotheoses. “Better than a month’s vacation,” pronounced Stalin after seeing
Jolly Fellows
, which was Alexandrov’s jazzy, madcap debut. The Leader saw the director’s 1938 musical
Volga-Volga
more than a hundred times. Never mind that the main cameraman had been arrested during filming and executed, and the screenwriter had written the lines in exile.

Quoted on posters and in the press and, of course, set to music, Stalin’s “life is happier” mantra established the tonality for the second half of the decade. It was more than just talk. In a fairly drastic redrawing of Bolshevik values, the State ditched the utopian asceticism of the twenties and encouraged a communist version of bourgeois life. The Radiant Future was arriving, citizens were told. Material rewards—offered for outstanding productivity and political loyalty—were the palpable proof. Promises of prosperity and abundance invaded public discourse so thoroughly, they shimmered like magical incantations in the collective psyche. Stakhanovite superworkers boasted in the pages of
Pravda
and
Izvestia
about how many rubles they earned. They stood beaming beside their new furniture sets and gramophones—rewards for “joyous socialist labor.” Anything capitalism could do for hardworking folk, went the message, socialism could do better—and happier.

The masses even got to pop a cork on occasion. Scant years after the paroxysms of the first Five-Year Plan, Stalin turned his thoughts to reviving Russia’s fledgling, pre-revolutionary champagne industry, centered by the Black Sea near the Crimea. Sovetskoye Shampanskoye became a frothy emblem of Stalin’s directive, in his words “an important sign … of the good life.” Garbo’s Ninotchka may have cooed about only knowing bubbly from newsreels. But by the thirties’ end Soviet fizzy, mass-produced in pressurized reservoir vats, would be embraced by the Soviet common man. It could even be found on tap in stores.

Alongside abundance and prosperity, the third pillar of Stalin’s new cultural edifice was
kulturnost’
(culturedness). Hence, Soviet citizens—many of them formerly illiterate—were exhorted to civilize themselves. From table manners to tangos, from perfume to Pushkin, from tasseled lampshades to
Swan Lake
, the activities and mores reviled by the earlier Bolsheviks as bourgeois contamination were embraced as part of the new
Homo sovieticus
. If a member of the
nomenklatura
(Communist political elite) showed up at a meeting in his trophy silk pajamas and carrying a chocolate bar, it just went to show that socialism was doing swell. The teetotaler Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet premier, took tango lessons. His imperious wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, delivered perfume to the masses in her role as chairman of the cosmetics trust. The food supply commissariat established and codified a Soviet cuisine canon.

Russia’s annus horribilus of 1937, which closed with the carnival-esque December election festivities, was launched with a lavish New Year’s Day
yolka
(fir tree) party for kids at the Kremlin. The tubby comedian Mikhail Garkavi played Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost), the Russian answer to Santa. Banned by the Bolsheviks for ten years as religious obscurantism, New Year’s fetes—and fir trees—had just returned from the political cold with the Great Leader’s approval, at the initiative of one Pavel Postyshev. This man whom Soviet children could thank for their new winter gaiety was also one of the chief engineers of the Ukrainian famine; he himself would be shot a year later. Still wearing his long, flowing Ded Moroz robe and white beard, Garkavi appeared later that New Year’s Day at a Stakhanovite ball attended by Stalin. “All are strictly cautioned to leave their sadness outside,” joshed a placard inside the ballroom. Garkavi popped a cork of Sovetskoye Shampanskoye. The tradition is still going strong to this day, even if the brand is being eclipsed by Dom Perignon.

When Mom was five and Yulia was four they moved to Moscow. It was 1939. The country was celebrating Stalin’s sixtieth birthday, and Naum his promotion—to the “Capital of the New World,” to Headquarters.

Mom still had her bouts of
toska
, but life did get a bit better in Moscow. A little jollier, you could say.

For one thing, Moscow wasn’t dark. Their ninth-floor apartment boasted an airy panorama of shingled old city roofs from the window. It was still a communal apartment, to be shared with shrill, dumpling-like Dora and her henpecked husband. But it had new plywood furniture, and it had gas—gas!—in place of their Leningrad
burzhuika
(bourgeois) coal-burning stove, which always ran out of fuel by morning, leaving a veil of frost on the walls.

Best of all was the building itself. Constructed the year before in the fashionable Stalinist Empire style—a bulky mash-up of deco and neoclassical—it resembled an organ, or perhaps musical staves, its vertical lines zooming up from an imposing ground-floor loggia. The musical reference was not accidental. Neither were the extra-thick walls (such a boon in this era of eavesdropping). The house was created as a co-op for the Union of Soviet Composers, with a small quota of apartments for the military. Songs poured out of the open windows the summer Mother moved in.

I always get goose bumps thinking of my five-year-old mom living among the George Gershwins and Irving Berlins of the socialist order. They were the people whose buoyant, jubilant marches I still sing in the shower. Along with generations of Russians, I’ve got them under my skin—which of course was the plan. “Mass song” was a vital tool in molding the new Soviet consciousness. Song set the romantic-heroic tone of the era. Song fused individual with
kollektiv
, comrade with State. It carried the spirit of sunny, victorious optimism into every choking communal apartment, glorifying labor, entrenching ideology—all in catchy tunes you couldn’t stop humming.

Mom didn’t actually share the collective zest for mass song. But there was no escaping the iron grip of Ninka, her new best chum in the building. Daughter of a Jewish symphonist and an Armenian pianist, brash and imperious Ninka had raven-black eyebrows and fingertips callused from violin lessons. She appointed herself Mom’s musical instructor.

“We’re eternally warmed … by the sun-ny Stalinist glor-y!
C’mon, haven’t you memorized the words yet?” she’d demand.

“Reason gave us steel wings for arms,”
she’d continue, trying another popular tune, wincing at Mom’s off-key attempts to keep up.
“And a fiery motor instead of a heart.”

“People had mechanical parts in their bodies?” asked Mom.

“The song celebrates Stalin’s Falcons!”

“What are Stalin’s Falcons?”

“Our Soviet Aviators—clueless dimwit!”

In good weather Ninka conducted her tutorials on the building fire escape. “Ooh … the brothers Pokrass!” she’d swoon, pointing at two men passing below, one lanky, the other plump and short, both with big frizzy hair that sat like hats on their heads. Didn’t Mom know their song “The Three Tankmen”? From the film
Tractor Drivers
? Mom couldn’t admit to Ninka she hadn’t yet seen real
kino
. With perfect pitch (she did truly have a golden ear), Ninka chanted another
“very
important” Pokrass work.
“Bustling! Mighty! Invincible! My
country.
My
Moscow. You
are my true beloved!”
In my own childhood this was the song Mom always turned off when it played on the radio. The radio played it a lot.

Ninka’s musical bullying was tiresome. But at least now Mom could sing along at the parades Naum zealously attended whenever he returned to Moscow from his mysterious, vaguely explained absences. The parades … well, they were deafening, overwhelming. And what of all those small kids perched on their dads’ shoulders, shouting, “Look,
papochka
, what a scary mustache!” when they saw Comrade Stalin? Eyes stark with fear, papa would clap a big, unclean hand over his kid’s mouth. Naum never had to muzzle Larisa or Yulia. He was dashing and funny, his squarish nails were immaculate, and he had a privileged view of the Leadership’s podium from his special Red Square parade bench. “Comrade—are you Stalin’s Falcon?” Mom would ask in a small, polite voice whenever an aviator she’d recognize from newspaper photos shook Naum’s hand.

And so it went. May Day. Constitution Day. Revolution Day. Thunderous welcomes for aviators and polar explorers. Citizens marched; their children sucked sticky ruby-red Kremlin Star lollipops. Meanwhile, just outside the city, on one busy day alone in 1938, 562 “enemies of the people” were shot and dumped in trenches by the NKVD, the
secret police, at its Butovo firing range. There were many thousands more. The German historian Karl Schlögel sums up the atmosphere of the times in his description of Red Square. “Everything converges: a ticker-tape parade and a plebiscite on killing, the atmosphere of a folk festival and the thirst for revenge, a rollicking carnival and orgies of hate. Red Square … at once fairground and gallows.”

I was born in Moscow. The seventies capital of my childhood seemed as familiar and comforting to me as a pair of old slippers. Mother’s anti-Soviet zeal assured I never trooped in a single parade in my life, never once peered at Lenin’s cosmeticized corpse at his Red Square mausoleum.

But often I lie awake nights imagining Mom, a tiny, reluctantly choral protagonist in the mythology of high Stalinist Moscow. The city of her childhood was engulfed in newcomers—from the upwardly mobile
nomenklatura
like Naum to dispossessed victims of collectivization fleeing the countryside. Pharaonic construction works boomed nonstop. Avenues became behemoths ten lanes wide, historic churches were turned to rubble, from vast pits rose socialist public magnificences.
“Bustling. Mighty. Invincible.”
How overwhelming the “Heart of the Socialist Homeland” must have seemed to an alienated, sad child.

Sometimes I picture Mom clutching Liza’s hand on the escalator sinking 130 feet below ground into the electrified blaze of the palatial, newly built Moscow Metro. What did Larisa make of the lofty stained glass and acres of steel and colored granite—of more marble than had been used by all the czars? Did her neck hurt from gazing up at the Mayakovskaya station’s soaring subterranean cupolas, with their mosaics of parachutists and gymnasts and Red Army planes pirouetting against baroque blue skies? Were they really so nightmarish, those eighty-two life-size bronze statues half crouching under the rhythmic arches of the Revolution Square station? Didn’t they produce in Mom the stunned awe of a medieval child at Chartres?