Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (25 page)

“What does the 1963 harvest look like?” went a popular joke. “Like Khrushchev’s hairdo (bald).”

Things were going badly for Nikita Sergeevich. After a stretch of prodigious economic boom and scientific achievement, his career was belly flopping. There was the bungled
Karibsky krizis
(Russian for the Cuban missiles affair). His Virgin Lands scheme of planting grain en masse on the Central Asian steppes, promising initially, was ending in a cartoonish fiasco with millions of tons of topsoil simply blowing away. And his dairy and meat price hikes in 1962 had erupted in riots in the southern city of Novocherkassk. “Khrushchev’s flesh—for goulash!” railed a protest banner. The State responded with tanks, killing twenty-three rioters.

The massacre was concealed; but the Leader’s
kukuruza
(corn) disaster could not be. Enthralled by a visiting Iowa farmer in 1955, the Bald One had introduced corn as the magic crop that would feed Russia’s cattle. Corn was forced down human throats too. Khrushchev-look-alike chefs sang songs to the new corn in short propaganda films; animated rye and barley welcomed this new corn off the train in cartoons. “The road to abundance is paved with
kukuruza
!” went a popular slogan. Maize was planted everywhere—while American instructions for proper seeding and care were everywhere ignored. After a couple of encouraging harvests, yields plunged. Wheat, neglected, grew in even shorter supply. Bread lines sprouted furiously.

In 1961 at the Twenty-Second Party Congress Khrushchev had promised true communism. Instead there was
kukuruza
. Russians could forgive many things, but the absence of wheat bread made them feel humiliated and angry. Wheat bread was symbolic, sacred. On induction into Komsomol, students were asked to name the price of bread. Woe to the politically retarded delinquent who blurted out “thirteen kopeks.” The correct answer: “Our Soviet bread is priceless.”

Capitalizing in part on this popular wrath, in October of 1964 a Kremlin clique forced Khrushchev from power. For a while papers talked about his “subjectivism” and “hare-brained scheming,” about the “lost decade.” Then they stopped mentioning him. A previously obscure apparatchik named Leonid Brezhnev, now general secretary, ushered
the USSR into a new era. Stagnation, the era was later dubbed. The age of cynicism and “acquisitive socialism.” The age of bargains, contracts, and deals, of Brezhnev’s-eyebrows jokes and Lenin Centennial anecdotes—of empty store shelves and connivingly stuffed fridges.

The dissolution of my parents’ marriage mirrored Khrushchev’s fall.

A product of the Thaw Era, Mom still retains tender feelings toward Kukuruznik. But she can’t help blaming him and his corn and the breadlines for what happened with her and my father.

About a year before my mother’s troubles began, she sat at a
pedsovet
, the pedagogical council of School No. 112, District 5. Another meaningless “agitational” propaganda meeting was about to begin. Mother felt queasy. The odor of sulfuric acid, potassium hydroxide, and teenage stress hormones hung in the air. The classroom they gathered in belonged to Comrade Belkin, the puffy-faced science teacher and font of communist consciousness.

For these endless, poisonous meetings Mom was partially to blame. She had spoken up at her very first “agitational” session. Recently hired as the school’s progressive young English teacher, she’d been eager to flaunt her dissident stripes. It was still the Thaw.
Sincerity
was the buzzword. Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Stalinist
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
had just been published!

“Comrades!” my mother had begun in her best imitation Moscow Art Theater voice. “What have we actually
learned
from this meeting?
Why
have we sat here listening to Comrade Belkin read aloud the entire political section of
Pravda
? Aren’t piles of homework waiting? Don’t some of us have hungry kids to go home to?”

At the last sentence Mom’s oration trailed off. Nearing the Soviet grandmotherly age of thirty, she herself had no kid waiting hungrily. An ectopic pregnancy followed by barbaric Soviet gynecological care had left her in no shape to conceive, and “home” was a dumpy single room she shared with her husband and mother-in-law in a bleak communal apartment.

Tak tak tak
. “So, so so,” said the troika: the Labor Union rep, the school’s Party functionary, and Citizen Edelkin, the principal.
Tak tak tak
; they tapped their pencils in unison. “Thanks for sharing your views, Comrade Frumkina.”

But the other teachers had been mesmerized by her words. Mom caught their grateful, admiring glances. Shortly afterward a sign had appeared in the principal’s office:
FROM NOW ON: PROPAGANDA MEETINGS—COMPULSORY
. The other teachers started avoiding my mother.

This new March session droned on and on. So much to discuss. Two Young Pioneers had been caught tying their scarlet scarves on a neighborhood cat. And what to do about Valya Maximova, the third-grader spied at gym class wearing a cross under her uniform? Confronted by responsible classmates, Valya had confessed: her babushka sometimes took her to church.

Valya’s teacher waved Exhibit A, the confiscated cross, on its neck string as if dangling a dead mouse by the tail.

“That pesky babushka,” said the science teacher Belkin in a loud whisper. “Under Stalin such types got twenty-five years.”

Stalin’s corpse had recently been evicted from Lenin’s mausoleum by Khrushchev, so as not to “corrupt” that noblest of cadavers. Invoking the pockmarked Georgian was uncool. But instead of protesting, everyone turned and peered at Larisa. Some weeks before, sacrificing her own Sunday, she’d taken her pupils to a cemetery, where innocent Pioneers had been exposed to crosses galore. She regarded it as a cultural lesson, a way of lifting the Soviet taboo around death for the kids.

“Some Young Pioneers report that during the trip you mentioned
Jesus Christ.”

Edelkin pronounced this as if Valya’s religious babushka and Larisa were fellow opium pushers.

“Christianity is part of world culture,” Larisa protested.

Tak tak tak
, went the troika.

Edelkin ended the meeting on an upbeat note. In the case of pupil Shurik Bogdanov there’d been serious progress. Poor Shurik Bogdanov—an A student, conscience of his class, and champion
collector of scrap metal. Then he started getting Cs for “behavior.” His distraught mother stormed into Edelkin’s office and revealed the whole awful story: her husband had been cohabiting with a female colleague from his workplace. He intended to leave them. Poor young Shurik was traumatized.

“Could the Soviet school save a socialist family?” asked Edelkin with a dramatic flourish. Indeed, it could! The Party organization at Bogdanov père’s workplace had been contacted, a public meeting called. Shurik’s father and the female interloper had been instructed to cease their immoral cohabitation immediately.

“The father is now back in the family fold,” reported Edelkin, almost smirking with pride. Socialist values had triumphed. Would comrade teachers chip in for a bottle of Sovetskoye champagne for the couple?

Mom gasped for air as he finished. The chemical stench of the classroom, the intrusion of the
kollektiv
into some hapless comrade’s love life, the bleakness of her own situation … Next thing she knew, the entire pedagogical council was fanning her with pages of
Pravda
and splashing her with cologne. She had fainted.

That week the doctor confirmed the impossible: she had fainted because she was with child. The troika at school suggested that she needn’t bother to return after maternity leave.

My mother was pregnant, unemployed, and euphoric.

Mom remembers pregnancy as the happiest time of her life. She didn’t understand why most Soviet mamas-to-be hid their bellies in shame under layers of baggy rags. Even at eight months she waddled down the street as if floating on air—belly forward. Inside her was a girl, she was sure of this. It was the girl she’d been dreaming about ever since she herself was a schoolgirl. The girl she imagined playing the piano, painting watercolors, learning languages in foreign countries, and—who knows?—maybe even riding a shiny brown Arabian horse on some verdant British estate. It was the girl she intended to guard like a tigress from the counterfeit Soviet happiness, from that rotten, demoralizing
split-consciousness, from
toska
, the anguished, alienated anxiety of her own Stalinist childhood.

Apparently Mom also wanted to shield me from Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin and Belka and Strelka, the adorable black and white mutts who flew into space. My mother hated the
kosmos
; that preposterous futuristic final frontier of Soviet imperialism. At age five I was forced to hide my profound crush on Yuri Gagarin from her and weep in secret when the smiley
kosmonavt
died in a plane crash at the age of thirty-four. But I’m grateful Mom didn’t name me Valentina, after Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. I look nothing like Valentina. Mom named me instead after one of her favorite poems by Anna Akhmatova.

“At baptism I was given a name—Anna, Sweetest of names for human lips or hearing.”

Anna, Annushka, Anya, Anechka, the irreverent An’ka. The peasant-vernacular Anyuta and Anyutochka, Nyura and Nyurochka. Or Anetta, in a self-consciously ironic Russified French. Or the lovely and formal Anna Sergeevna (my name and patronymic)—straight out of Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog.” The inexhaustible stream of diminutive permutations of Anna, each with its own subtle semiotics, rolled sweetly off my mother’s lips during pregnancy.

Her baby daydreams usually reached fever pitch in the food lines. Surrounded by disgruntled citizens muttering Khrushchev jokes, Mother drew up imaginary lists of the foods she would feed to her little Anyutik. Unattainable foods she knew only from her reading.
Omar
. Lobster. So noble-sounding, so foreign. Definitely pizza and pot-au-feu. And when the child was just old enough: Fleurie. Everyone swigged it in the novels of Hemingway, that most Russian of American writers. Yes, yes, definitely carafes of Fleurie, with snails dripping garlicky butter and parsley sauce. Followed by cakes from her beloved Proust.
Madlenki
, Mom called them in Russian, with the clumsy proprietary familiarity of someone who lived and breathed Proust but still thought madeleines were a species of jam-filled pirozhki.

Occasionally Mom would get lucky in the lines. She still talks of the day she victoriously lugged home five kilos—ten pounds—of
vobla
to last her the entire final trimester. Have I mentioned
vobla
before? It’s
the rock-hard, salt-encrusted dried Caspian roach fish. Rock-hard
vobla
sustained Russians through the revolutionary teens and twenties, the terrible thirties, the war-torn forties, the liberating fifties, and the rollicking sixties—until the Caspian was so depleted that in the stagnant seventies of my childhood
vobla
became a sought-after delicacy.
Vobla
brings out that particular Russian masochism; we love it because it’s such a torment to eat. There’s the violent whacking against a table to loosen the skin, followed by the furious yanking of the petrified leathery flesh off the skeleton. There’s self-inflicted violence, too—a broken tooth here, a punctured gum there—all to savor that pungently salty, leathery strip of Soviet umami.
Vobla
was the last thing my mother ate before being rushed to Birthing House No. 4. This might explain why I’d happily trade all Hemingway’s snails and Proust’s cakes for a strip of petrified fish flesh.

From Birthing House No. 4 Mom brought home a jaundice-yellowed infant swaddled tight as a mummy into totalitarian submission. Awaiting her were the glories of Soviet socialist motherhood. Cribs as elegant as a beet harvester. Pacifiers made of industrial rubber you sterilized in a water bath for two hours while you hand-copied the entire volume of samizdat Dr. Spock. And
pelyonki
(diapers), twenty per day per Soviet child—not including nine flannel over-diapers, and a mountain of under-diapers fashioned from surgical gauze.