Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (42 page)

The histrionics of discontent possessed a carnival edge. A perverse glee, almost. Force-fed cheerful Rodina songs, Soviet society was now whooping up an anti–fairy tale of collapse.

It was during such a time—when deliveries were called off for lack of gasoline and newspapers shrank to four pages because of lack of ink; when the words
razval
(collapse),
raspad
(disintegration), and
razrukh
a (devastation) echoed everywhere like a sick song stuck in the collective brain—that the Derridarian and I journeyed around the USSR for his book of Soviet-twilight picaresques.

Picture sardine cans on ice: rickety Zhiguli cars were our means of transport, usually on frozen roads. Lacking official Intourist permits, we couldn’t legally stay at hotels, so we depended on the kindness of strangers—friends of friends of friends who passed us along like relay batons in a Soviet hospitality race. Between summer 1989 (the Caucasus) and December 1991 (the Caucasus again) we must have clocked 10,000 miles, give or take another endless detour. We roamed Central Asia, jounced through obscure Volga regions where some old folk still practiced shamanism and swilled fermented mare’s milk. We rambled the periphery of boundless Ukraine and the charmed mini-kremlins of the Golden Ring around Moscow.

HUNTERS IN THE WINTER!
appealed a sign in the gauzy Ukrainian steppe.
PLEASE ARRANGE TO FEED THE WILD ANIMALS
.

Our first driver was Seryoga, my cousin Dasha’s blond wispy husband, who’d fought in the Afghan war.

“So we’re near Kabul,” went a typical Seryoga road tale. “So this
frigging muezzin’s not letting us sleep. So my pal Sashka takes out his Kalashnikov. BAM! Muezzin’s quiet.
Forever.
”

Seryoga taught me several crucial survival skills of the road. How to spray Mace, for instance, which we practiced on his grandmother’s pig. Also bribery. For this you positioned an American five
baks
note so that its edge stuck out of a pack of American Marlboros, which you slid across the counter with a wink as you cooed: “I’d be obliged, very
obliged.
” The bribing of GAI (traffic police) Seryoga handled himself. Not always ably. On one particularly grim stretch of Kazan-Moscow highway we were stopped and fined “tventi baks” exactly twenty-two times. It was the GAI boys’ version of a relay.

The dizzying landscape diversity of our multicultural Rodina celebrated in poem, novel, and song? It was now obliterated by winter, dissolved in exhaust fumes, brown compressed snow, the hopeless flattening light.

Our departures from Dad’s crammed Moscow quarters … Up in the five a.m. blackness to make the most of the scant daylight ahead. My dad in the kitchen in his baggy blue track pants, packing our plastic bags with his radiator-dried rusks. Broth in his Chinese aluminum thermos; a coiled immersion heater for tea. Rationed sugar cubes. Twelve skinny lengths of salami from the hard-currency store to last the trip. We embrace. Sit for exactly one minute in silence—a superstitious Russian departure rite.

Our arrivals … Whether in Hanseatic Tallinn or Orientalist Tashkent, the potholed socialist road always led to an anonymous Lego sprawl of stained concrete blocks—five, nine, thirteen stories—in identical housing developments on identical streets.

“
Grazhdanka
(citizen)!” you plead, exhausted, desperate, starving. “We’re looking for Union Street, House five, structure seventeen B, fraction two-six.”

“
Chavo
—WHA?” barks the
grazhdanka
. “This is
Trade
Union Street.
Union
Street is …” A vague motion somewhere into snowy Soviet infinity.

No map, no public phone without the receiver torn out. No idea if
your friends-of-friends hosts are still awaiting you with their weak tea and their sauerkraut. An hour slogs by, another. Finally the address is located; you stand by the sardine can on wheels in shivering solidarity, a half-petrified icicle, as Seryoga dismantles the Zhiguli for the night so it won’t be “undressed.” Off come the spare tire, the plastic canisters of extra gas, the mirrors, the knobs. The pathetic moron who relaxes his vigilance for even one night? He buys his own windshield wipers at a car-parts flea market, as we did the next day. I think Tula was where this road lesson occurred. Tula—proud home of the samovar and stamped Slavic gingerbread, where we nearly keeled over from a black market can of expired
saira
fish. Or was it in the medieval marvel of Novgorod? Novgorod, which I remember not for the glorious icon of a golden-tressed angel with the world’s saddest twelfth-century eyes, but for the hostile drunks who spat at our license plates and pulled our wispy Afghan vet out of the car to “tear open his Moscow ass.” Novgorod, where I got to use Mace on actual humans.

We’d stopped in Novgorod en route to the more civilized Baltic capitals—Estonian Tallinn, Lithuanian Vilnius, and Latvian Riga. It was the empty-shelves December of 1990; Gorbachev, floundering, had just replaced half his cabinet with hard-liners. The previous spring, the Baltic republics had declared their independence. To which the Kremlin responded with intimidation tactics and harsh fuel sanctions.

And yet we found the Baltic mood uplifting, even hopeful.

In Vilnius we crashed with a sweet, plump, twenty-something TV producer with a halo of frizzy hair, a dusky laugh, and boundless patriotism. Regina was the fresh modern face of Baltic resistance: earnest, cultured, convinced that
now
was the time to right historic injustices. Her five-meter kitchen chockablock with birchbark Lithuanian knickknacks felt like the snug home branch of Sajudis, Lithuania’s anti-Communist liberation movement. Boho types in coarse-knit Nordic sweaters came and went, bearing scant edibles and the latest political news—Gorbachev’s foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, had
just resigned, warning about a return to dictatorship! Regina’s friends held hands and prayed,
actually prayed
for the end of Soviet oppression.

I’d been to Vilnius when I was eight, on a movie shoot. To my dazzled young eyes, cozy “bourgeois” Vilnius seemed a magical porthole onto the unattainable West. Particularly the local
konditerai
scented with freshly ground coffee and serving
real
whipped cream. The whipped cream drowned my sense of unease. Because, boy, the Lithuanians really hated us Russians. Later, Mom, ever eager to bust up my friendship-of-nations fantasy, explained about the forced annexations of 1939. This might have been my opening foretaste of Soviet dis-Union. I remember feeling terribly guilty, as if I myself had signed the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact handing the Baltics over to Stalin. So now I prayed along with Regina.

With Christmas approaching, Regina got a crazy idea.
Šakotis!

Šakotis
(it means “branched”) is the stupendously elaborate Lithuanian cake resembling a spiky-boughed tree. Even in bountiful times nobody made it at home: besides fifty eggs per kilo of butter,
šakotis
demanded to be
turned on a spit
while you brushed on new dripping layers of batter. Regina was, however, a girl on a mission. If Vytautas Landsbergis—the soft-spoken, pedantic ex-musicologist who led the Sajudis movement—could defy the Godzilla that was the Soviet regime,
she
could make
šakotis
. Friends brought butter, eggs, and a few inches of brandy. We all sat in the kitchen, broiling each craggy layer of batter to be stacked on an improvised “tree trunk.”

The
šakotis
came out strange and beautiful: a fragile, misshapen tower of optimism. We ate it by candlelight. Someone strummed on guitar; the girls chanted Lithuanian folk songs.

“Let’s each make a wish,” Regina implored, clapping her hands. She seemed so euphoric.

Three weeks later she called us in Moscow. It was January 13, long past midnight.

“I’m at work! They’re storming us! They’re shooting—” The connection went dead. Regina worked at the Vilnius TV tower.

In the morning we tuned in Voice of America on Dad’s short-wave radio. Regina’s TV tower was under Soviet assault; tanks were rolling over unarmed crowds. The violence had apparently ignited the previous day when the Soviets occupied the main print media building. A mysterious Moscow-backed force, the “National Salvation Committee,” claimed to have seized power. Huge numbers of Lithuanians kept vigil around their Parliament, defending it. Everyone sang, linking hands. Thirteen people were killed and hundreds injured.

“Hello, 1968,” Dad kept muttering darkly, invoking the Soviet crackdown of Prague.
TAKE AWAY GORBACHEV
’
S NOBEL PEACE PRIZE!
demanded a slogan at a Moscow protest rally. Russia’s liberal media, previously Gorby supporters, bawled in outrage—so he promptly rein-troduced censorship. All the while insisting he hadn’t learned about the bloodshed in Vilnius until the day after it happened. Was he lying, or had he lost control of the hard-liners? That dark new year of 1991, all I could think of was Regina’s cake. Smashed by tanks, spattered with blood. Our friendship-of-nations fantasy—where was it now?

I wonder if Gorbachev phrased the question this way himself. For he too must have bought into our anthem’s gilded cliché of indomitable friendship—of the
“unbreakable
Union of Soviet Republics.” What Party ideologue hadn’t?

And yet from its very inception this friendly vision of a permanent Union contained a lurking flaw, a built-in lever for self-destruction. In their nation-building and affirmative-action frenzy, the twenties Bolsheviks had insisted on full equality for hundreds of newly Sovietized ethnic minorities. So—on paper at least—the founding 1922 Union Treaty granted each republic the right to secede, a right maintained in all subsequent constitutions. Each republic possessed its own fully articulated government structure. Paradoxically, such nation-building was meant as a bridge to the eventual merging of nations into a single communist unity. More paradoxical was how aggressively the
Party-state fostered ethnic identities and diversity—in acceptable
Soviet
form—while suppressing any
authentic
expressions of nationalism.

The post-Stalin leadership had generally been blind to the potential consequences of this paradox. Whatever genuine nationalist flare-ups occurred under Khrushchev and Brezhnev were dismissed as isolated holdovers of bourgeois national consciousness and quickly put down. The response of Gorbachev-generation Party elites to the national question was … 
What
national question? Hadn’t Brezhnev declared such issues solved? The Soviet people were one “international community,” Gorbachev pontificated at a 1986 Party congress. “United in a unity of economic interests, ideological and political aims.” Were this not his real conviction—so I ask myself to this day—would he have risked glasnost (literally “public voicing”) and perestroika (restructuring) in the republics?

“We never expected an upsurge of emotional and ethnic factors,” the supposedly sly Shevardnadze later admitted.

Unexpectedly, the floodgates burst open.