Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (16 page)

“But is he lucky?” Napoleon famously asked when promoting a general.

The good fortune of Naum Solomonovich Frumkin, my grandfather, was the stuff of family lore. He was, in that regard, a Bonapartian whiz. “Dedushka,” my older cousin Masha would plead, tugging at the three gold stars on his old uniform shoulder boards, “tell how your car was bombed and you escaped without even a scratch!” Or she’d ask to hear about the time when he had been adrift in freezing waters, hanging on for life—to a mine. Which “forgot” to explode!

Everyone’s favorite was the day they finally came to arrest him. True to his luck, Naum was away, sick in the hospital. Oh, and the date was March 5, 1953. The day Stalin died. The beginning of the end of the repressions.

After joining the RKKA (Workers and Peasants Red Army) in 1921, Granddad went into intelligence in 1931. For the two prewar years he had a perilous job recruiting and coordinating agents abroad. Yet this international cloak-and-dagger—and later even the hazards of combat—seemed to Naum like afternoons in the park compared to the perils from within. Between 1937 and 1941, purges utterly ravaged the leadership of the Soviet military and in particular of GRU, its intelligence branch. GRU’s directorship became a blood-soaked revolving door; five of its chiefs were executed in the four years leading up to Hitler’s attack. A domino effect then took down the heads of departments and branches, liquidating the top GRU cadres almost entirely.

In this harrowing, half-paralyzed environment, Naum in 1939 became a section head himself, supervising spies for the naval commissariat in Moscow. In a sense, my fortunate grandfather was a beneficiary of
the
chistki
(cleansings), swiftly moving up the career ladder from fleet to fleet, filling the empty desks of the purged. But he was also a target, his own arrest lurking outside every window. “I developed eyes in the back of my head,” Naum the retired spy would tell anyone willing to listen. Tailed by the NKVD (secret police) almost continuously, he perfected the art of vanishing into courtyards, of jumping onto fast-moving trolleys. He knew the drill: training spies was part of his job. When the stress got to him, he fantasized about wheeling on his shadowers, demanding to their faces: “Either arrest me or stop following me!”

My grandfather was a vain man. He esteemed his power to charm. To explain his improbable survival, he often mentioned an NKVD comrade called Georgadze, the officer in charge of signing arrest warrants for lieutenant colonels (each rank was assigned its own man, according to Naum). Apparently, this Georgadze fell under Granddad’s spell at a gathering. Naum imagined Georgadze deliberately overlooked or “misplaced” his arrest papers. Mainly, though, Granddad would shrug.
Gospozha udacha
, Lady Luck—she was quite charmed by him too.

Stalin’s intelligence decimations had left the Red Army hierarchy “without eyes and ears,” as one insider put it, on the eve of war. But here was the paradox: by June 22 the Vozhd had been flooded with ongoing, extremely precise details of the looming Nazi attack. A major font of these warnings—all scoffed at by Stalin—was someone whom Naum, the pro charmer, never could stop talking about.

Meet playboy Richard Sorge (code name Ramzai): philanderer, drunkard, and, in the words of John le Carré, “the spy to end spies.” “The most formidable spy in history,” agreed Ian Fleming.
“Unwiderstehliche”
(irresistible), marveled one of his main dupes, the German ambassador to Japan. With his cover as a Nazi journalist in Tokyo starting in 1933, the half-German, half-Russian Sorge and his ring of false-front cohorts steadily passed top-level Japanese and German secrets to GRU headquarters in Moscow. (Larisa particularly recalls Japan specialists as guests at their apartment in 1939 and 1940.) Incredibly, Sorge’s detailed alarms about the exact onset of Operation Barbarossa, up to its very preceding hours, only roused Stalin’s scorn. “A shit,” the Vozhd dismissed him, according to one commentator,
“who has set himself up with some small factories and brothels in Japan.”

Stalin was even less cordial to another accurate warning, from code name Starshina at the Nazi Air Ministry less than a week before Hitler’s onslaught. This “source,” sneered the Great Strategist of the Revolution, signaling contempt with quotation marks, should be
sent to his fucking mother
.

Why the delusional ignorance, the vitriol? Stalin’s rejection of the intelligence continues to foment countless theories among historians, both Western and Russian. But it deserves noting that Hitler orchestrated a disinformation campaign fine-tuned to Stalin’s suspicions of capitalist Britain and Churchill, and to the Vozhd’s faith that Germany would
never
attack during hostilities with England—the supposed German dread of a two-front war. In May 1941 Hitler even wrote a very nice personal letter to Stalin to calm his unease, pledging “his word as a foreign leader.” He went so far as to ask Stalin not to give in to any border provocations by unruly Nazi generals! As Solzhenitsyn later suggested, the ogre of the Kremlin, who trusted no one, somehow trusted the monster of Berchtesgaden.

In his memoirs General Zhukov later sensationally (and rather improbably) asserted that the defense commissariat never saw the crucial bulletins Stalin received from Soviet foreign spies. As for Sorge, who had stayed away from Russia, fearing the purges, he was unmasked and arrested in Tokyo in the fall of 1941. The Japanese wanted to exchange him, but Stalin replied he’d never heard of him. Sorge was hanged in 1944, on the holiday of the October Revolution. He had the ultimate lousy luck: he depended on Stalin.

For his part, Naum always claimed that
he
saw Sorge’s urgent alerts.

Still, this hardly prepared him for what was about to unfold in the north.

On the morning of June 22, when Grandma ran waving after his train, Naum was bound for Tallinn, the Estonian capital. The Baltic Fleet headquarters had moved there the previous summer after the USSR occupied the three Baltic states.

Like stranded ducks, the Baltic ports almost immediately began falling to the German onslaught.

By late August the Nazis were closing on Tallinn. The Baltic Fleet under Naum’s old boss Admiral Tributs was ordered, frantically and at the last minute, to evacuate through the Gulf of Finland to Kronstadt near Leningrad, the fleet’s former traditional base. Red Army units and civilians were packed aboard. Tallinn often gets called the Soviet Dunkirk. Except it was an all-out disaster—one of the gravest naval fiascos in warfare history. Despite being the fleet’s intelligence chief, Naum supervised a ship’s scuttling under shellfire to block Tallinn’s harbor as the residue of Soviet smoke screens drifted murkily overhead. He was one of the last out. Some two hundred Russian vessels tried to run a 150-nautical-mile gauntlet through heavily mined waters, with no air protection against German and Finnish onslaughts. The result was apocalyptic. The waves resounded with explosions and Russian screams, with desperate choruses of “The Internationale” and the gun flashes of suicides as ships sank. More than sixty Soviet vessels were lost, and at least 12,000 people drowned. Naum made it to Kronstadt with only four other survivors from his scuttling mission. His own luck had held, but he was badly shaken.

By fall, the juggernaut of Operation Barbarossa pounded at Leningrad’s gates. On September 8, Shlisselburg, a strategically important town nearby on Lake Ladoga, fell to the Germans. Russia’s second-largest city was now completely cut off by land: no transport, no provisions, no fuel. It was the start of
blokada
, the Siege of Leningrad, which would last a mythic nine hundred days. Stalin was furious. He’d only learned the Shlisselburg news from a German communiqué; Marshal Kliment (Klim) Voroshilov, Leningrad’s bumbling commander, had been too scared to tell him. The Vozhd rushed General Zhukov north with a terse note for Voroshilov: he was fired. Zhukov was taking over. Klim bade stoic farewells to his aides, assuming he would be shot. (Somehow he wasn’t.)

On September 22 Naum stood in Zhukov’s office at the Smolny in Leningrad. The general seemed even more abrupt and severe than
usual, pacing with his arm behind his back. A bold, brutal campaigner, Georgy Konstantinovich was notoriously callous with the lives of his men. He cleared minefields by sending troops attacking across them. The cheapness of Russian blood fueled the future marshal’s combat strategy.

Zhukov ordered Naum to lead an amphibious reconnaissance mission as part of a counterattack on Shlisselburg, to try to break the Nazi encirclement. Immediately.

Naum quickly calculated. Zero time for preparations. Boats for the counterattack in wretched shape. Number of men: grossly inadequate. His troops were to include 125 naval school cadets—mere kids. Granddad had recently delivered an address to them. He remembered one eager boy: dark-haired, small, with pensive eyes and crooked teeth, a pimply face.

Despite his survival instinct, almost despite himself, Naum blurted out his objections.

A bolt of rage familiar to everyone under Zhukov’s command flashed in the general’s eyes. His bullmastiff jaw tightened.

“We’ll execute you for this,” Zhukov snarled quietly. “You have your orders!”

Orders were orders, even if suicidal.

High winds on Lake Ladoga postponed the counterattack the first night. The second night three boats overturned, drowning two men, and the operation was aborted. The main force’s commander was arrested on the spot and sent to the gulag. The third night Naum and his scouting party were able to land, though the main force still couldn’t. Granddad and his men had to wade two kilometers through chest-high, ice-cold water. With their radio soaked, they were unable to relay reconnaissance but managed some sabotage before fighting their way back to Soviet lines the following night, losing four men.

The main assault force was ordered to try yet again the day after. It was obliterated in the shallows by the Germans.

But Russian blood was cheap; that was the ongoing lesson from Zhukov, who would be anointed the great architect of the Soviet victory
to come, then brutally demoted by Stalin (saved from arrest by a heart attack), repromoted by Khrushchev, then demoted again.

Back from his mission, Naum lay semiconscious, wheezing and grunting. The acute pneumonia he’d contracted from his forty-eight drenched hours could finish him, he knew, here in this anonymous hospital bed. Or he could perish in another “meat-grinder” like Shlisselburg—the best death, since his kids would remember him as a hero. Zhukov’s firing squad was the most agonizing scenario. Families of “enemies of the people” were usually exiled, or worse; their children grew up in orphanages, branding their fathers as betrayers of Homeland. This last possibility deprived Naum of sleep. It pierced like a red-hot iron. For several years now he’d been writing to his kids almost daily, letters composed mostly in his head, but some actually written and left in locked drawers.

Only one of those letters was ever opened in front of Larisa, Yulia, and Sashka. Three sentences jabbed out there on that hospital bed:
“Liza, teach the children to throw grenades. Make sure they remember their papa. He loved them so.”

These lines reached Liza at the end of 1941 in a seven-hundred-square-foot room on the second floor of a crumbling warehouse. She, the children, and Dedushka Yankel shared the room with six other families evacuated from Moscow. The September journey, during which Nazi Messerschmitt fighters circled low over their riverboat, had brought them here, to the relative safety of Ulyanovsk, an old Volga town with muddy streets and folkloric carved wooden shutters.

“Look, look, Jews!” pale-blond street kids greeted them upon arrival.

“We are
not
Jews,” Mother corrected them. “We are from Moscow.”

Now, several months into their stay, Liza had barely unpacked Aunt Clara’s blue
sunduk
. Why bother? Peace, she still believed, would surely come any day. She attended to their makeshift existence while Dedushka
Yankel dug trenches—and sometimes potatoes—outside the city, both his fingers and the potatoes harder and blacker as the earth froze. The five of them slept and did most of their living on two striped mattresses pushed together on the room’s cement floor. Beyond the flimsy curtain partition a sound tormented them around the clock: the piercing shriek of a toddler slightly older than Sashka. The boy was barely nursed, barely touched by Katya, his mother, who disappeared all day to return after midnight with nylon negligee and Coty perfume. “
Prostitutka
and black marketeer” everyone in the room said, taking turns holding and rocking the inconsolable child, who wouldn’t eat.

Katya wasn’t home when the boy stopped crying. The next day Larisa watched in solemn exultation as a small sheet-wrapped bundle was carried out the door. She knew exactly what had happened: death had been her constant obsession ever since she’d read about a little frozen match girl in a Hans Christian Andersen tale.

Death. It was in the wail of Dasha their neighbor when she unfolded the triangular letter from the front, the official notification known as a
pokhoronka
, or funeral letter. Death came every day from the radio where the Voice announced it, in numbers so catastrophic, they baffled a child who could barely count over one hundred.