Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (43 page)

“Armenian-Azeri fighting escalating in Nagorno-Karabakh; Southern Ossetians clashing
again
with Georgians—twenty dead!” Our friend Sasha Meneev, head of the newly created “nationalities” desk at the liberal
Moscow News
daily, would update us breathlessly during our times in the capital. “The Gagauz—Christian Turkish minority in Moldavia, right?—seeking full republic status. Ditto Moldavia’s
Slavic
minority. Crimean Tatars demanding repatriation; Volga Tatars threatening sovereignty over oil reserves …”

“Sooner or later,” one of Gorbachev’s advisers bitterly quipped, “someone is going to declare his apartment an independent state.”

True to form, the mineral secretary, caught between reformers and hard-liners, vacillated, flipped and flopped. Tanks or talks? Repressions or referendums? Desperate to preserve the Union—at least as some species of reformed federation—Gorbachev would try them all. Without success. The biggest blow would come from his largest republic,
specifically from his arch-nemesis, Boris Yeltsin, the Russian republic’s populist renegade head. In summer 1990 Yeltsin announced Russia’s sovereignty (not full independence, but close). Resigning from the Communist Party, he roused fellow republic leaders to “take as much sovereignty as they could swallow.”

Now, in the wake of the bloodshed in Vilnius, Yeltsin—true to
his
form—rushed to Estonia’s Tallinn to loudly support the breakaway Balts. In February 1991, another uproar. On live TV he called on the embattled Gorbachev to resign and transfer control to the collective leadership of the republics. So began Gorbachev’s annus horribilis. And the political war between USSR and Russia. Moscow vs. Moscow.

Could politics get any more surreal?

Nevozmozhno/ neizbezhno
. Inevitable/ impossible.
Nevozmozhno/ neizbezhno …

This schizophrenic refrain about the prospects of the Union’s explosion ticked through my tired brain as John and I traversed the empire in its last months—days? hours? years?—in 1990 and 1991.

What would happen? Ethnicities commandeered into Soviet kinship by Bolshevik whims—would they go on slaughtering each other inside convoluted borders drawn up by early Soviet cartographers? Or would a tidal wave of Moscow tanks enforce happiness in the big Soviet family?

From one day to the next we couldn’t imagine—any more than we knew whether at any particular nightfall we’d face rancid sauerkraut or be treated to a pathos-drenched feast by a clan of blood-baying nationalists. A world was coming unstitched. We felt helpless, bewildered, our sardine can on wheels caught up in history’s centrifuge. And how different the foods of our fraternal republics tasted to me. The dishes I revered from my childhood’s garish seventies recipe postcard collections on “cuisines of our nations” now conjured not a friendship buffet but a witches’ brew of resentments freshly stirred up by glasnost. Each family of the Soviet fraternity was unhappy after its own fashion. Each stop we made revealed the particular flavor of some tiny nation’s
past tragedy, the historical roots of the conflicts engulfing the empire. How little I, the award-winning cookbook author,
really
knew about our Union of cuisines.

Snapshot from Samarkand, winter of 1991. Everyone here fights over
palov
(meat pilaf), the Central Asian monodish. The deeper issue? Stunning Timurid-dynasty Samarkand, the tourist pride of Turkic-speaking Soviet Uzbekistan with its blue-tiled fifteenth-century mosques, is in fact a city populated mostly by Farsi-speaking Tajiks.

Pre-revolution this region was a bilingual khanate. People intermarried, ate the same pilaf, and called themselves Sarts. Unlike the Lithuanians (theirs an actual, pre-Soviet country) neither the Tajiks nor Uzbeks ever had anything resembling a separate national consciousness. Not until Stalin, fearing a pan-Turkic insurgence in the late 1920s, split Central Asia (then known as Turkestan) into five Union republics. Obsessive Bolshevik social engineering supplied each with a semifabricated history, a newly codified written language, and freshly minted ethno-identity. Nifty nationhood package aside, Tajikistan got stuck with some scrappy mountains; Uzbekistan drew the gorgeous
Tajik
cultural centers of Samarkand and Bukhara. Uzbekistan also scored Amir Timur—a.k.a. Tamerlane the warrior king—who was designated an Uzbek national hero. Funny, since Timur was actually a Mongol who fought
against
the Uzbeks.

Along came glasnost, and old scores long muzzled by the Kremlin’s heavy centralized hand were back, in full fury.

“Uzbek pilaf! Vile and greasy!” raged an elderly Tajik nationalist professor when we paid a call on him at his boxy low-rise apartment. The
Tajik
pilaf on his table—“Delicate! Reflective of our ancient Persian heritage”—had been assembled into a cumin-scented mound by his gorgeous young unibrowed wife. Talking to the local Uzbek minority, we learned, of course, that Tajik pilaf was pathetic: “Tasteless! Bland!”

These declarations were completely bewildering, because the Tajik and Uzbek pilafs of Samarkand tasted identical.

Our hosts in Samarkand were an aged Bukharan-Jewish couple, Rina and Abram.
“Interesno.”
Abram squinted from his third-party perspective. “Tajiks here listed themselves as Uzbeks on their passports when it helped with their careers. Now suddenly they remember their heritage?”

Rina and Abram had their own grief. “When
they
finish killing each other,” hissed Rina, “they’ll turn on us Jews.” Rina sat by her mulberry tree weeping tears into a bowl of tannic green tea. She and Abram had applied for an exit visa to Israel. “But how to leave
this
behind,” lamented Rina, gesturing at their palatial private house with a fully cemented backyard (a proud Bukharan-Jewish-Soviet tradition).

“Oi vai, oi vai,” cried Abram from the back door. “Tajiks, Uzbeks, Jews—under Brezhnev we all lived as one
muhallah
(community/neighborhood). Gorbachev
bud’ on proklyat
(be damned)!”

Spectacular wails and ululations awoke us our last Samarkand morning. The wailers were our hosts. Storming into our bedroom, they began frantically slashing the mattress on which we still lay. “OI OI OI!” The decibels of their shock nearly cracked the palatial walls painted with crude rococo landscapes.

“VAI VAI VAI!” resounded the entire neighborhood.

Soviet tanks? I gasped. A Jewish pogrom?

“WORSE!” Rina screamed.

The morning’s radio had just announced the government’s latest economic shock measure. All fifty- and hundred-ruble banknotes were to be withdrawn from use. Citizens were given three days only to exchange their old bills—maximum amount, one thousand rubles. Some forty dollars at black market rates. In catastrophic silence we sipped our green tea as Rina and Abram slashed fake-rococo chairs and striped cushions. Their entire life savings fluttered around the rooms in a morning breeze. Most of it in banned fifties and hundreds.

Just another day on the road, 1991. On the crumbling Imperium’s fringes.

Snapshot from Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital, later that same winter. At the Alay Bazaar the January sun angled across mottled-green Kokand melons. Men in skullcaps thronged around carts piled high with indented
non
flatbreads the size and shape of soup bowls. The biggest trade this season? Little red horoscope booklets. The future. The future. What does the future hold?

At the bazaar I gravitated again and again to the rows of Korean ladies hawking their prodigious pickles: shredded carrots laced with garlic and coriander; fiery cabbage kimchi they called
chim-che
. The Koreans were socialist Central Asia’s model farmers. At their prosperous, orderly kolkhozes with names like Politotdel (Political Department) they grew wonder onions and overfulfilled every Five-Year Plan by 500 percent. Koreans also farmed most of the rice for the pilaf Uzbeks and Tajiks argued about. But behind the Koreans’ golden success story lurked another sort of tale …

After we’d bought several rounds of her pickles, Shura Tan, in her late sixties, told us her story. She spoke in halting Russian dotted with Uzbek words. When she got nervous she flattened her shredded carrots with a strangely shaped ladle and meticulously reassembled them into perfectly triangular mounds.

Like most Soviet Koreans of her generation, Shura was born in the Russian Far East. The diaspora had been there since the 1860s, swelling after refugees from the 1910 Japanese invasion of Korea crossed over to the future USSR. The Korean comrades grew rice and fished; the Bolsheviks gave them Korean-language schools, theaters, clubs. “We Koreans were happy,” said Shura.

Then, in the fall of 1937, men in uniforms came to their kolkhoz. The Koreans were given three days to pack. Panic swept through their villages. Where were they being taken? Wrenched by despair, Shura’s mother assembled a huge sack of rice and wrapped in cloth a handful of earth for her garden plot. “Why take the earth?” protested the family. Shura’s mother took it all the same. It was her earth.

The Koreans were told to bring food for a week, but the journey lasted a month, maybe longer. Packed into sealed cattle cars, the panicked deportees traveled almost four thousand miles west across frigid
Siberia. Old people and babies died from hunger and illness, their bodies dumped from the moving train. All the way Shura wept. She was then a small child.

At last the train stopped. As far as the eye could see were reeds, mud, swamps—the endless plains of Central Asia. The Koreans began building mud huts, sometimes without window or doors

“Scorpions fell on my bed from our walls,” Shura recalled, raking her carrots. “And black snakes as long as this”—she opened her arms wide. But the worst killer was the muddy, diseased swamp water—the only drinking water available. That’s when Shura’s mother remembered her earth. She filtered the poisoned water through it.

“And that’s what saved us,” said Shura. “The earth.”

Koreans became the first Soviet ethnicity to be deported by Stalin in its
entirety
. More than 180,000 strong, down to the last child. Accusation: potential pro-Japanese espionage during Soviet-Japanese tensions over Manchuria, even though most Koreans hated Japan. Another motive for their deportation: the hard-toiling Koreans could farm the barren Central Asian steppes.

Between 1937 and 1944 these steppes served as Stalin’s dumping ground for scores of other, smaller ethnicities he charged with treason. Sealed cattle cars—“crematoria on wheels”—ferried in Chechens, Ingushi, Karachai, Kalmyks, and Balkars. Also Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, Ingrian Finns, Kurds, Poles from the Ukraine. The Koreans assimilated and stayed. Others, like the Chechens and the Ingushi, returned to their Northern Caucasus homeland under Khrushchev’s Thaw, only to find their houses occupied by Russians and neighboring ethnic minorities, and the stone tombs of their ancestors employed as construction material. Mountain nations venerate their ancestors. The insults were never forgiven. Gorbachev’s glasnost reawakened the memories.

Nation builder and nation destroyer—simultaneously—is how the historian Terry Martin describes the Soviet State. As whole ethnic populations drew Stalin’s black marks, the officious encomiums to Union minorities rang out undiminished. Propaganda reels after the Great Patriotic War showed happy Korean collective farmers at their
glorious socialist toil. There were even well-financed Korean theater productions. A Korean-language newspaper—
Lenin Kichi
(Lenin’s Banner)—was imposed on every Korean kolkhoz, representing yet another socialist irony.