Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (37 page)

“
Chudo, chudo, chudo
—miracle miracle.” Relatives tugged on our sleeves, as though we might be a mirage. Grandpa Naum was the happiest customer of all. His smile was wide, his tense intelligence worker’s frown smoothed—as if thirteen years of shame and fear and moral dilemmas had magically slid away. His dogged loyalty to whatever regime was in power had paid off. All was ending well. The omniwise Gorbachevian State had magnanimously forgiven us prodigal traitors to Rodina. It was now fine even to openly condemn Stalinist crimes, a sentiment Granddad had bottled up for over three decades.

“If only Gorbachev would restore the navy to its former glory” was his one lament.

“Let’s thank the Party,” he thunderingly toasted, “for bringing our girls back to our Rodina!”

“Fuck the Party!” shrieked the young glasnost generation.

“Fuck Rodina!” the entire family chimed in unison.

Our Moscow fortnight passed in a blur. Never in our lives have we felt so desired and loved, been kissed so hard, listened to with such wild curiosity.

A demonic hospitality possessed Mom to invite people she barely knew to visit us in America. Because now they
could
.

“I’ll send you a visa, stay with us a month, we’ll show you
our
New York!”

I kept pinching her under the table.
Our
New York was a small one-bedroom in Queens that Mom and I shared with my antique Steinway grand and my six-foot-three boyfriend, a haughty British poststructuralist.

“That first visit,” Aunt Yulia confided recently, “we found you so adorable, so American in your fancy fur coats. And more than a little demented!” She giggled. “How you loved
everything
about our shabby, shithole Rodina! Perhaps because of the snow?”

True. A fairy-tale white had camouflaged all the sores and socialist decay. To our now-foreign eyes Moscow appeared as a magical Orientalist cityscape, untainted by garish capitalist neon and billboards. Even my mother the Rodina-basher found herself smitten. With
everything
.

The store signs: R
YBA
. M
YASO
. M
OLOKO
. (Fish. Meat. Milk.) These captions formerly signifying nothing but empty Soviet shelves and unbearable lines were now to Mom masterpieces of neo-Constructivist graphic design. The metro stops—those teeming mosaic and marble terrors of her childhood, now stood revealed as shining monuments of twenty-four-karat totalitarian kitsch. Even the scowling pirozhki sales dames berating their customers were enacting a uniquely Soviet linguistic
performance
.

Mom for her part very politely inquired what coins one might use for the pay phones.

Grazhdanka
, she was snarled at. “Citizen, you just fell from
Mars
?” Me in my vintage raccoon coat? I was branded as
chuchelo
, a scarecrow, a raggedy bum.

In retrospect 1987 was an excellent year to visit. Everything had changed. And yet it hadn’t. A phone call still cost two kopeks, and a three-kopek brass coin bought you soda with thick yellow syrup from the clunky
gazirovka
(soda) machine outside the maroon-hued, star-shaped Arbat metro station. Triangular milk cartons still jumbled and jabbed in
avoska
bags; Lenin’s bronze outstretched arm still pointed forward—often to
Dumpsters and hospitals—with the slogan
YOU
’
RE ON THE RIGHT PATH, COMRADE!

At the same time, perestroika announced itself at every turn. I marveled at the new fashion accessory: a chain with
an Orthodox cross!
Mom couldn’t get over the books. Andrei Platonov (Russia’s Joyce, unpublished since the twenties), Mikhail Bulgakov’s previously suppressed works, collections of fiery contemporary essays exposing past Soviet crimes—all now in handsome official hardcovers, openly devoured on the bus, on the metro. People read in lines and at tram stops; they read as they walked, drunk on the new outpouring of truths and reassessments.

Along newly pedestrianized Arbat Street, we stared at disgruntled Afghan war vets handing out leaflets. Then gaped at the new private “entrepreneurs” selling hammer-and-sickle memorabilia as ironic souvenirs. Nestling
matryoshka
dolls held a tiny Gorbachev with a blotch on his head inside bushy-browed Brezhnev inside bald Khrushchev inside (yelp) mustachioed Stalin—all inside a big squinty-eyed, goateed Lenin. We bought lots.

Back at the Davydokovo apartment, we sat mesmerized in front of Granddad’s Avantgard brand TV. It was all porn all the time. Porn in three flavors: 1) Tits and asses; 2) gruesome close-ups of dead bodies from war or crimes; 3) Stalin. Wave upon wave of previously unseen documentary footage of the Generalissimo. Of all the porn, number three was the most lurid. The erotics of power.

And there was another phenomenon, one that reverberated deep in our imagination:
Petlya Gorbacheva
(Gorbachev’s Noose). The popular moniker for the vodka lines.

They were astonishing. Enormous. And they were blamed entirely on the Party’s general (
generalny
) secretary, now dubbed the mineral (
mineralny
) secretary for his crusade to replace booze with mineral water. Even the abstemious leader himself would later amusedly cite a widespread gag from that very dry period.

“I’m gonna go kill that Gorbachev motherfucker!” yells a guy in the
vodka line. Hours later he comes slumping back. “The line at the Kremlin to kill him was even longer.”

The joke barely conveys the popular wrath over Gorbachev’s antialcohol drive.

At a mobbed, shoddy liquor shop near our former Arbat apartment, Mom and I watched a bedraggled old woman with the bluish complexion of a furniture-polish imbiber. Theatrically she flashed open her filthy coat of fake fur. Underneath she was naked.

“Pila, pyu i budu pit’!”
she howled. (I drank, I drink, I will drink!)

On the faces of fellow vodka queuers I noted that existential, sodden Russian compassion.

The trouble in the alcoholic empire had started in May 1985. Just two months in office, Gorbach (the hunchback) issued a decree entitled
On Measures to Overcome Drunkenness and Alcoholism
. It was his first major policy innovation—and so calamitous that his reputation inside the Soviet Union never recovered.

The mineral secretary was of course right about Soviet drinking being a social catastrophe. Pre-perestroika statistics were secret and scant, but it’s been estimated that alcohol abuse caused more than 90 percent of the empire’s petty hooliganism, nearly 70 percent of its murders and rapes, and almost half of its divorces—not to mention the extremely disturbing mortality rates. Perhaps a full-scale prohibition would have had some effect. Instead, Gorbachev promulgated the typical half measures that ultimately made him so reviled by Russians. In a nutshell: after 1985 drinking simply became more expensive, complicated, and time-consuming.

Vodka factories and liquor stores were shut, vineyards bulldozed, excessive boozing harshly punished. The sclerotic state sorely needed cash—among other things, to clean up the Chernobyl disaster—but it gave up roughly nine billion rubles a year from alcohol sales. Such sales, under the mineral secretary, took place only after two p.m. on workdays. Meaning the hungover workforce had to maneuver more skillfully than ever between the workplace and the liquor line.

Not the most efficient way to combat alcohol-related loss of productivity.

We had arrived in Moscow in late December. Getting booze for the holidays ranked at the top of everyone’s concerns. New Year’s festivities were about to commence, but store shelves were barren of that Soviet good-times icon: Sovetskoye champagne. Baking, too, was a wash: yeast and sugar had completely vanished, hoarded for
samogon
(moonshine). Fruit juices, cheapo
pudushechki
candies, and tomato paste had evaporated as well. Resourceful Soviet drinkers could distill hooch from anything.
Kap-kap-kap
. Drip-drip-drip.

Trudging around snowy, parched perestroika Moscow, Mom and I kept dropping into liquor lines to soak up alcoholic political humor. The venom poured out where vodka didn’t.

At the draconian penalties for consuming on the job:
The boss is screwing his secretary. Masha, he whispers, go open the door—wide—so people don’t suspect we’re in here drinking
.

At the price hikes:
Kid to dad: On TV, they’re saying vodka will become more expensive, Papa. Does it mean you’ll drink less? No, son, says Papa, it means you’ll eat less
.

At the effect of the antialcohol drive:
Gorbach visits a factory. See, comrades, could you work like this after a bottle? Sure. After two? Yup. All right, five? Well, you see we’re working!

To properly grasp the social and political disaster of Gorbachev’s Noose, you have to appreciate Russia’s long-soaked, -steeped, and -saturated history with vodka. So allow me to put our blissful family reunion into a state of suspended animation—befitting our fairy-tale visit—while I try to explain why our Rodina can only really be understood
v zabutylie
(through a bottle).

Booze, as every Russian child, man, and dog knows, was the reason pagan Slavs became Christian. With the first millennium approaching, Grand Prince Vladimir of Rus decided to adopt a monotheistic religion. He began receiving envoys promoting their faiths. Geopolitically,
Islam made good sense. But it banned alcohol! Whereupon Vladimir uttered his immortal line, “Drinking is the joy of the Rus, we can’t go without it.” So in 988 A.D. he adopted Byzantine Orthodox Christianity.

The story might be apocryphal, but it puts a launch date on our Rodina’s path to the drunk tank.

Originally Russians tippled mead, beer, and kvass (a lightly alcoholic fermented refreshment). Serious issues with
zeleny zmey
(the green serpent) surfaced sometime in the late-fourteenth century when distilled grain spirits arrived on the scene. Called variously “bread wine” or “green wine” or “burnt wine,” these drinkables later became known as vodka, a diminutive of
voda
(water).

Diminutive in name, a permanent spring flood in impact.

Vodka’s revenue potential caught the czars’ eyes early. By the mid-seventeenth century the state held a virtual monopoly on distilling and selling, and for most of the nineteenth century, one third of public monies derived from liquor sales. Then came the First World War. The hapless czar Nicholas II put his empire on the wagon, fearful of the debacle of the Russo-Japanese War a decade earlier, a humiliation blamed on the sodden state of the military. Bad move. Nikolai’s booze ban starved Russia’s wartime coffers; the resulting epidemic of illicit moonshining destabilized the crucial grain market. Grain shortages led to hunger; hunger led to revolution. (Perhaps the mineral secretary in the twilight of his own crumbling empire might have paid closer attention to history?)

Even so, the Bolsheviks were no fans of vodka, and they initially kept up prohibition. Lenin, who occasionally indulged in white wine or a Munich pilsner while in exile, insisted the Russian proletariat had “no need of intoxication,” and deplored his utopian State trading in “rot-gut.” The proletariat, however, felt differently. Deprived of vodka, it got blasted into oblivion on
samogon
supplied by the peasantry, who preferred to divert their scarce, precious grain and bread reserves to illegal distilling rather than surrender them to the requisitioning Reds. The
samogon
flood overwhelmed the sandbags. By the mid-1920s a full state liquor monopoly was once again in effect.