Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (18 page)

“The Lenin House Museum closes at five,” said the attendant.

Back at her own house Larisa sat with her arms closed around Liza, stroking the sharp shoulder blade under her mother’s coarse woolen dress. They sat like this a long while. About the lost
kartochki
Liza said nothing. She remembered too well her own childhood loss of a ration in the twenties: a loaf of bread yanked out of her hand by a bearded giant who gorged on the entire half pound in front of her eyes.

Salvation came from Katya, of all people, the
prostitutka
and black marketeer.

“Liza, you fool—you have the
sunduk
!”

So every few days Liza and Katya went to the black market on the outskirts of Ulyanovsk to trade Naum’s spiffy shirts, suits, and ties from inside the blue trunk. His best suit went for a sack of millet that they ate for the rest of the month. Millet for thin, watery breakfast gruel. Millet soup for lunch, flavored with herring heads. Best was millet baked for
supper in a cast-iron pot inside the clay Russian stove in their warehouse. Russian war survivors fall into two categories: those who idolize millet and those who can’t stand it. But they all agree: millet was life.

The Nazi invasion caught Stalin’s Soviet Union with yet another food supply crisis looming. Two years of below-average harvests had combined with the drain of the 1940 war with Finland and mammoth defense spending. But if the Soviets had scant grain reserves, they had even scantier strategies for handling wartime supply problems.

The Reich, however,
had
a strategy: Hungerplan, the “Hunger Plan.” Brainchild of corpulent, gourmandizing Hermann Göring and the Reich’s Food Ministry, the Hunger Plan was possibly history’s most sinister and cynical blueprint. The “agricultural surplus” of the Ukraine—which the Nazis intended to capture immediately—would be diverted to feed only Wehrmacht soldiers and Germany’s civilians. Thirty million Russians (a sixth of the population), mainly in cities, would be left without food. In other words: genocide by programmatic starvation.

By late fall of 1941, Hitler controlled half of the Soviet grain acreage. Crucially, however, he had not yet achieved the lightning victory he was so sure of. Despite staggering initial losses and blunders, the Soviet forces resisted. Moscow shuddered, bled, but didn’t yield. Russian generals regrouped. Instead of swollen Ukrainian granaries and willing slave labor, the advancing Wehrmacht usually found only burnt crops and demolished farm equipment, as per Stalin’s scorched earth policy. (“All valuable property, including non-ferrous metals, grain, and fuel which cannot be withdrawn, must without fail be destroyed,” instructed the Leader in early July.)

Then winter descended and it was the Germans whose poor planning was brutally exposed. Counting on three months of blitzkrieg at most, the Reich hadn’t provided warm clothes to the men at its front. The war lasted four long years, much of the duration bitterly cold.

Soviet citizens got their first rationing cards in July of 1941. Average
kartochki
allotments, though symbolic and crucial, were nowhere near adequate for survival. Daily, it was only a bit more than a pound of bread; monthly, about four pounds of meat and under three pounds of flour or grain. Substitutions became the norm: honey for meat, rotten herring instead of sugar or butter. Under the slogan “All for the Front, All for the Victory,” supplies and rail transport were prioritized for the Red Army, which often fought in a state of near-starvation. How did Stalin’s state manage the food supply for civilians? By temporarily encouraging near-NEP conditions. Economic ideology was suspended and centralization loosened, meaning local authorities and citizens were left to fend for themselves. Schools and orphanages, trade unions and factories, all set up ad hoc green plots. Even in cities, people foraged, learning to digest birch buds, clover, pine needles, and tree bark. At the front, chronically hungry soldiers ate not just fallen horses but saddles and straps—anything made of leather that could be boiled for hours with some aromatic twigs to stun the tar smell.

“Naum’s clothes and Aunt Clara’s
sunduk
saved our lives!” Grandma Liza used to say, gravely nodding at the blue trunk still in her hallway during my childhood. Indeed. Markets of every shade from white (legal) to black (illegal) were central to daily survival. With rubles almost useless, food itself, bread especially, became currency.

Diaries from the Leningrad Siege leave bone-chilling details of the economics of starvation.
Ushanka
(flap hat) = four ounces of bread; men’s galoshes = five ounces of bread; used samovar = two pounds of bread. Families hid the deaths of relatives so they could continue using the deceased’s monthly bread
kartochki
. The cost of an individual grave = four and a half pounds of bread plus five hundred rubles.

Starvation was nowhere as horrifying, as extreme, as it was in Leningrad, during those nine hundred days. But for any Russian who suffered hunger contractions at all, a wartime food glossary was etched in his or her memory:

Shokolad
.

Of all the gifts that made their way from Naum during those days, one struck Mother right in the heart. It made her delirious. Not just because it was
shokolad
in war-torn Russia. Not even because it tasted far better than the chalky American lend-lease stuff. No. It was because of the dark-eyed young man on the wrapper: prodigious of nose, young and steely of glare, with a gloriously embossed collar. The crush Mom developed on this chocolate hero was instant and hopeless. His swoony Orientalist name matched his fiery looks.
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi
—crowned shah of Iran in 1941 after his father was forced into exile by occupiers Soviet Union and Britain.

Oil
. Petroleum was the reason the Frumkin children were getting Pahlavi Jr. chocolates.

The second summer of war marked the Soviet low ebb of the conflict: six million soldiers killed or captured, most of Ukraine occupied, Leningrad faltering under
blokada
, Moscow unfallen but vulnerable. As the Germans headed southeast, Naum had yet again been transferred,
this time to Baku, the hot, windy, uneasily quiet capital of Soviet Azerbaijan. This vital Caucasian republic, bordering Iran on the Caspian Sea, pumped the majority of Russia’s oil. It was oil Hitler coveted for himself. Launching Operation Blau at the Caucasus in June 1942, the Fuhrer aimed to take Baku by September. His overconfident generals presented him with an extravagantly frosted cake with a sign that said K
ASPISCHES
M
EER
(Caspian Sea). Film footage shows Hitler smiling suavely as he takes the slice labeled B
AKU
. But the Luftwaffe left Baku alone: its vast petroleum infrastructure had to be delivered intact. The Fuhrer wanted to eat his cake but have it too.

Iran, meanwhile, occupied but still nominally neutral, simmered with international intrigue. Tehran was thick with German agents and operatives. Shuttling between Baku and the Iranian capital, Naum was back in the familiar world of cloak-and-dagger. So highly classified was his work that he never confided its details to any of us—aside from bragging about having met the dashing young shah on the chocolates.

From Baku, Naum dispatched Ivan Ivanych, his intelligence aide, to Ulyanovsk to bring the family south. Gray-eyed and sinewy, Ivan looked the part of an elite GRU spy guy—lend-lease black leather coat, tall boots, a pistol, plus a mysterious attaché case he watched like a hawk. The journey to Baku lasted three nightmarish weeks, or maybe six, Mother can’t remember. Mostly they bivouacked for days at train stations on layovers between hopelessly delayed, crawling
teplushki
, the wartime cattle freights overcrowded with orphaned children and wounded combatants whose bandages undulated with black swarms of lice. At one point Ivan dozed off on a station bench and someone snatched his attaché case. Mom watched the GRU hero chase down the culprit and whack him on the head with the butt of his gun. The police intervened, the attaché case sprang open, and to her utter astonishment, Mom saw watches—big clunky watches!—tumble out onto the pavement. Larisa was little, but not too little to smell a black marketeer, even though Granddad later insisted that the watches were “crucial intelligence tools.” (Who knew?) For the final leg of the journey there was a boat at a filthy port in Turkmenistan where women in headscarves hawked quince and men with Turkic features rode atop
camels. For several days everyone vomited crossing the Caspian during a storm.

Naum met the family on a pier in Baku with an armful of tangerines. An oily Caspian darkness smothered the city. Mom could barely make out Naum’s features, but the overwhelming aroma of citrus made her weep. The family was together again. Their luck had held.

Compared to hungry Ulyanovsk, Baku was a different planet, a lush Orientalist dreamscape similar to the magical pavilions Larisa had encountered at Moscow’s agricultural exhibition back in prewar 1939. At the bazaars men with splendiferous mustaches not unlike Comrade Stalin’s whistled at Liza as she bartered her bread rations for fuzzy porcelain-looking peaches, sun-dried figs threaded on strings, and tubs of Azeri yogurt, piercingly tart. There were swims in the polluted Caspian Sea; mouths and fingers stained from climbing mulberry trees. Local Caspian Flotilla dignitaries hosted rice pilaf feasts aboard destroyers and cruisers. Only the foul smell from the oil rigs marred Mother’s happiness.

Once in a while Naum’s family even got a taste—literally—of his intelligence work. A few of his “boys” would haul a big table into the courtyard of the house where they shared one narrow closetlike room, but with a balcony and a view. On the table lay a sturgeon the size of a man, or a small whale.
Fishing
was the cover for Naum’s spies in the Caspian. The sturgeon was split open, glistening caviar scooped from its belly. For weeks after, the family ate sturgeon pickled, brined, dried, and minced into kotleti. To this day Mother can’t look at sturgeon or caviar, still riven, she says, by the guilt of eating those delicacies while the rest of the country was starving. During the entire eighteen months they spent by the Caspian, Mom couldn’t shake the sense that she was hallucinating. She was dazed and overwhelmed by her family’s luck—their improbable luck.