Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (19 page)

By early 1943, Russia’s luck, too, was changing at last. Hitler’s lunge for the Caucasus oil fields had collapsed. It collapsed because it started so
well that the Fuhrer split his forces to grab for another prize simultaneously: the strategic city on the Volga named after Stalin. The fate of the Reich was cast. Operation Blau (for the blue of the Caspian) was sucked into what the Germans now called the “War of the Rats” in the freezing rubblescape of bombed-out Stalingrad. Over the course of more than six months, Hitler’s forces, commanded by Field Marshal Paulus, were annihilated by the combined power of the Russian winter, hunger, and the Red Army under bloody Zhukov and General Vasily Chuikov. It was the first and the worst Nazi defeat since the beginning of Operation Barbarossa. Germans killed and wounded numbered some three-quarters of a million. The Russians suffered more than a million casualties (a figure that exceeds the total World War II losses for both the United States and Britain). But with Paulus’s surrender in February 1943, the momentum had swung. Come May 1945, Zhukov and Chuikov’s Red banner would wave over Berlin’s ruins.

As for Naum, he stayed on in Baku even after Stalingrad and the passing of the Caucasus oil threat. In autumn of 1943 the Azeri capital became the hub of technical and logistical support for the Soviet presence at the Tehran Conference. Yalta and Potsdam might be more famous, but Tehran was the grand rehearsal, the first time the “Big Three”—Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill—came together around a table. Stalin himself arrived in Baku by train in November, from there flying to Tehran. The plane ride was another first: the phobic Wise Helmsman had never been airborne before.

On a notably balmy afternoon on November 29, midconference, the Big Three and their aides sat down to a white-tablecloth late lunch in the Soviet embassy’s snug living room. Stalin was desperate for a second front in Europe, and the menu was part of his charm offensive. The lunch card featured zakuski (appetizers), clear bouillon with pirozhki, then steak followed by
plombir
ice cream. To drink: wines from the Caucasus, and the ever-indispensable Sovetskoye brand champagne, Stalin’s pride. In Leningrad the Siege wouldn’t be lifted for another two
months yet, and close to a million had perished from hunger. In Tehran, as waiters passed around vodka, Armenian brandy, and vermouth, Marshal Stalin rose to offer a welcoming toast. No longer the abject gray-faced figure of June 1941, our Vozhd acted the part of the Nazi vanquisher of epic Stalingrad.

Not all the Soviet attendees showed Stalin’s poise. The Vozhd’s ravenous interpreter, Valentin Berezhkov, was caught with a mouthful of steak just as Churchill began to speak. There was awkward silence, tittering, laughter. Stalin’s eyes flashed. “Some place you found for a dinner,” he hissed at the hapless Berezhkov through clenched teeth. “Look at you stuffing your face. What a disgrace!” (Berezhkov survived to record the incident, and the meal, in his memoirs.)

But mainly Stalin waxed gastronomic to his Allied invitees. He invoked the subtleties of his spicy native Georgian cooking. FDR revved up his own charm, praising the inky Caucasian wines and enthusing about Sovetskoye Shampanskoye—shouldn’t this “marvelous wine” be imported to the United States? A Pol Roger aficionado, Churchill tactfully chose to admire the Armenian brandy. No one mentioned the epidemic looting and black marketeering of American lend-lease food supplies, or that Soviet wine-bottling plants were mostly producing containers for Molotov cocktails. (Sovestkoye Shampanskoye? Among Russian troops this was the nickname for an explosive blond concoction of sulphur and phosphorus.)

To cap off the lunch, Stalin arranged for a pescatorial showstopper. Four stout uniformed men trailed by a pair of Filipino chefs trailed by a U.S. security guy carried in a giant fish, again as big as a man or a small whale. No, it wasn’t one of Naum’s spy-cover belugas, but a salmon freighted in from Russia.

“I want to present this to you, Mr. President,” Stalin announced.

“How wonderful! I’m touched by your attention,” said FDR graciously.

“No trouble at all,” said Stalin, just as graciously.

Reboarding his plane, the lunch host had what he wanted: a commitment to a European second front, Operation Overlord (D-Day), for early 1944; and the eastern slice of Poland as lawful property of the USSR.

Tastier pieces of European cake would follow at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. And a much fancier banquet proper. As the country still reeled from starvation, a grandiose Potemkin village resort was set up for the Big Three in the war-devastated Crimea in just under three weeks. Suddenly there appeared two service airports, lavish fountains, sixty-eight remodeled rooms across three czarist palaces, ten thousand plates, nine thousand pieces of silverware, and three kitchens fueled with masses of firewood magically transported along paralyzed railway networks. At the main feast—white fish in champagne sauce, Central Asian quail pilaf, kebabs from the Caucasus—the host and soon-to-be Generalissimo was reported by attendees to be “full of fun and good humor,” even “smiling like a benign old man.” And why not? He’d gotten himself de facto the rest of Poland and the keys to most of post-war Eastern Europe.

“Govorit Moskva”
—Moscow Speaking. Later that spring of 1945, the radio man Yuri Levitan made one of his most operatic announcements. In a steely, officious baritone, he announced that Soviet forces had concluded the destruction of Germany’s Berlin divisions. “Today, on the Second of May,” he continued, his voice rising, gathering force, “they achieved total control … of the German capital … of the city … of BEAR-LEEEEEEEEEEEN!!!”

Without understanding Russian you might think he was a South American soccer commentator shouting out news of a goal. The iconic image of the Soviet Victory Banner on the roof of the Reichstag, however, is unambiguous.

On May 9, 1945, at 2:10 a.m., Levitan read the German Instrument of Surrender, and everything inside my mother froze. She couldn’t help it. Dread and terror. She felt them, without fail, every time she heard Levitan’s voice and the words “Moscow Speaking.” It no longer mattered that for months now the Voice had been bringing
good
news, that following its announcements of the Soviet retaking of each new Russian city, fireworks and artillery salvos boomed through the center of
Moscow, where the Frumkin family had been reunited for more than a year now. To this day the thought of Levitan’s baritone paralyzes my mother.

Mom remembers as vividly the spontaneous, overwhelming outpouring of orgiastic relief and elation that swept the capital on May 9. More than two million revelers streamed toward Moscow’s old center. An undulating sea of red carnations and white snowdrops. Soldiers tossed into the air. Delirious people—hugging, kissing, dancing, losing their voices from shouting
OORAAAA
(hooray). That night powerful strobes flashed on the Kremlin’s towers, illuminating the visage of Stalin, seemingly floating above Red Square, and the fireworks were extravagant: thirty blasts fired from one thousand mortars.

Among the celebrants was a reed-thin, six-foot-tall beauty with green sirenlike eyes and a hastily applied smear of red lipstick. She was in her late twenties, yanking along a recalcitrant eight-year-old boy. The louder everyone cheered, the harder the woman sobbed. Andrei Bremzen, her husband, my paternal grandfather, was one of the eight million men who didn’t return from the front.

If one adds civilian deaths, the Great Patriotic War (as we officially called it) took 27 million lives, although some estimates are far higher. In Russia it left tragedy and devastation unprecedented in history, unfathomable in its scale. For four uninterrupted years war had camped on Soviet soil. There were 25 million citizens homeless, 1,700 towns and more than 70,000 villages reduced to rubble, an entire generation of men wiped out.

By war’s end my mother was eleven, a bookish daydreamer with two thick black braids who’d graduated from Hans Christian Andersen to Hugo’s
Les Miserables
in its mellifluous Russian translation. Really, any book permeated with romantic tragedy attracted my mother. The first post-war summer found her family at a cozy dacha on the outskirts of Pushkino, a town north of Moscow where Naum was now directing a spy-training academy. “
Counter
intelligence,
counter
intelligence!”
Granddad kept correcting, brows furrowed, when anyone blurted out the “spy” word. Later that year he’d be in Germany to debrief Hermann Goering amid the ruins at the Nurenberg Trials.

Swatting flies and picking at gooseberries, Mom read her sad books and contemplated what was happening to Russia. What to make of the crippled men now thronging stations, begging and playing the accordion? How to grieve for the fathers of her friends who hadn’t come back? Strangely, no one else in her family shared these thoughts. Liza plunged herself into household chores; Naum, who anyway never really
talked
to the kids, was busy with his steely-eyed spy colleagues and their coiffed wives, who boasted of the furniture their husbands scored in Berlin. Yulia quoted Generalissimo Stalin so often now, it made Mother nauseated. And so Larisa started a diary. Carefully she selected a small book with glossy white pages and a gold-embossed cover, a prewar Scandinavian present from Naum. She dipped her pen in the inkpot and paused for so long that ink drops ruined the page and she had to tear it out.

“Death,”
she then wrote, pressing hard on the pen so it squeaked.
“Death inevitably comes at the end of life. Sometimes a very short life.”
She thought a bit and continued. “
But if we are meant to die anyway, what should we do? How must we live that short hour between birth and death?”

To these questions Mom had no answers, but simply writing them down she felt relief. She thought some more about such matters out on the grass by the house, sucking on a sweet clover petal as dragonflies buzzed overhead.

“DEATH!! DEATH???” Liza’s screams broke Mom’s contemplation.

Liza pulled at Mom’s braid, brandishing the notebook she’d just found on the table. “We beat the Germans! Your father fought for your happiness! How
dare
you have such bad, silly thoughts.
Death!
” Liza ripped up the notebook and stormed back into the house. Mom lay on the grass looking at the shreds of paper around her. She felt too hollow even to cry. Her parents and the voices on the black public loudspeakers, she suddenly realized—they were one and the same. Her innermost thoughts were somehow all wrong and unclean, she was being told, and in her entire life she had never felt more alone.

CHAPTER FIVE