Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (48 page)

Putin’s protocol guys dustbinned the glitter and glimmer.

I suppose in a city with the world’s thickest swarm of billionaires—where a Pilates studio is never far away and sashimi is flown in daily from Tokyo—there wasn’t much call for gastronomic Potemkin villages anymore. So the staged fairy tales of abundance had finally been retired—along with all that crystal and nonsustainable caviar. Instead of fifteen zakuski, Kremlin banquets now featured bite-size pirozhki, and small bowls of berries sat where receptacles piled with glowing fruit once towered triumphant.

Fairly recently Putin added a wrinkle: USSR nostalgia. “Herring under fur coat,” meat brawn—current Kremlin chefs now served communal-apartment dishes in dainty individual portions alongside
foie gras and carpaccio. Which struck me as a perfect expression of the New Russian pastiche.

Today’s streamlined service made sense, Viktor conceded as he poured us a rare Masandra Port from Crimea. But he missed those days of yore, I could tell. Who
wouldn’t
miss actually living inside a socialist fantasy? Me? Misty-eyed, I told Viktor that his table was the closest I’d ever come to the
skatert’ samobranka
, the magic tablecloth of Russian folklore.

Viktor left the Kremlin after his heart attack and now ran a catering company and a restaurant. He headed the association of Russian restaurateurs, trying to promote native cuisine. That battle was lost, though, he thought.

“Young Russian chefs can do pizzas—but who remembers how to cook
our
kasha?” And he sighed a heartfelt sigh. He who had presided over the gleam of Kremlin walls carved out of red ice.

Back at the
khi-rize
I was reviewing my notes—
Gorbachev, per Viktor: Ate little. Drank even less. Left banquets after forty minutes. Yeltsin
:
Loved lamb chops. Lousy dancer
—when my email pinged. It was a message from another world, from El Bulli near Barcelona.

The world’s most magical and important restaurant was about to close forever, and Ferran (the chef) and Juli (co-owner) wanted me to attend a farewell dinner. I’d known the two of them since 1996. Their Catalan temple of avant-garde cooking was an intimate part of my professional history. My first visit fifteen years before had transformed everything I thought and wrote about food. “You’re family,” Ferran always told me. And now here I was, stuck in mean, alien Moscow, ungrounded in past or present, fumbling with madeleines. My visa was single-entrance, so I couldn’t even slip out to say a hurried farewell.

I slumped in my chair, stung by loss from my
real
life.
Queridos Amigos!
I started to type,
Estoy en Moscu cruel, muy lamentablemente no puedo
 … A strange rumbling from below interrupted my Spanish. There was something world-devouring and cataclysmic to it, as if a tsunami were approaching. My desk began to vibrate.

We all ran to the windows. Way down below us tanks slowly rolled through the rainy night along deserted Novy Arbat. Missile launchers came prowling after them, then troop carriers, artillery.

The phone rang. “Watching Victory Day rehearsal?” my dad chortled almost merrily. “The
tekhnika
(hardware) should be passing you now—right under the big billboard for that movie
Malchishnik Dva
(
Hangover
2)!”

“
Tanki i banki
, tanks and banks,” grumbled my mom. “Welcome to Putinland.”

The great celebrations of Victory Day—May 9—drew closer. Putinland’s officious militaristic patriotism went into overdrive. To judge from the hype, the lollapalooza promised to out-wow even anything we’d seen under Brezhnev.

The airwaves overflowed now with the Great Patriotic War (VOV in abbreviated Russian). Forties black-and-white films, close-ups of
blokada
bread, piercing footage of a little girl playing piano with frozen hands in besieged Leningrad—suddenly there was no escaping them. On buses old people and migrant workers hummed along to war songs piped over the sound systems. Helpful ads enticed cell phone users to dial 1–9–4–5 and get a free VOV tune as a ringtone.

In Brezhnev’s time the State had co-opted the mythic traumas and triumph of the Great Patriotic War to reinfuse ideology into a cynical young generation. Russians had grown a lot more cynical since. In today’s society, one so desperately lacking an anchoring national narrative, the Kremlin was once again exploiting the cult of VOV to mobilize what was left of national patriotism, to bring generations together in a tightly scripted rite of remembering.
“My narod pobeditel”
(We, nation victorious)—I now heard it ad nauseam, just as I had in my childhood. Unheard: the catastrophic official blunders costing millions of lives, the brutal post-war deportations of ethnic minorities. In case anyone
mis
remembered? A “Commission for Countering Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of the Interests of Russia” had been established in 2009.

And who was it that had led Russia to its May 9 Victory?

Perhaps I’d finally slid into obsessional fantasy. The run-up to Victory Day appeared to my inflamed mind as a veritable Springtime for Stalin.

Men with rotten teeth and sour breath hawked sundry Staliniana at street stalls on cheesily pedestrianized Arbat Street, and even respectable bookstores did a brisk business in Stalin fridge magnets. The Kremlin had been careful about an open endorsement. Vernacular opinion, however, told a different story. Nearly half of all Russians polled saw Stalin in a positive light. A notorious 2008 TV survey had the Generalissimo rated third for “most important Russian in history”—barely edged by Prince Alexander Nevsky of Eisenstein film fame, and Pyotr Stolypin, a reformist early-twentieth-century prime minister noisily admired by Putin. But everyone believed the results had been cooked to suppress the controversial truth.

I noticed that in the popular imagination his figure seemed split. The
bad
Stalin was the orchestrator of the gulags. The
good
Stalin was an ur-Russian brand projecting power and victory.

It was deeply distressing.

A mid all this ideological ghoulism and ahistorical mishmash the
khi-rize
became my refuge, the haven of my own pre-post-Soviet innocence. What a perfect comfort it was, easily idealized and yet so authentic. I got a lump in my throat every time I entered the woody, cozily modernist lobby. I loved the achingly familiar USSR reek of cat spray and acrid cleaning detergent. Loved the coarse blue oil-paint trim and the rotating gallery of very Soviet concierge babushkas.

Inna Valentinovna, my favorite babushka, was one of the
khi-rize
’s original residents. She had scored her prestige apartment during the late sixties for her scientific achievements and now whiled away her bustling, bossy retirement by concierging part-time. As May 9 drew nigh, she transformed our lobby into a maelstrom of veteran-related activity.

“How our
veterani
love this!” she enthused, showing me the forlorn
state gift packages of buckwheat groats, second-rate sprats, and emphatically non-elite chocolates.

“Dusty buckwheat,” groused Mom. “Putin’s thank-you to those who defended his Rodina.”

Among our
khi-rize
VOV vets, I was particularly eager to meet a woman named Asya Vasilievna. She’d just completed a memoir, so Inna informed me, about her mentor and friend Anna Akhmatova, the great Russian poet of our sorrows after whom I was named. “Wait,” Inna kept admonishing me in her lobby stronghold. “Wait for her here!” But elderly Asya Vasilievna never appeared.

Victory Day dawned.

We watched the Red Square parade on TV. The Kremlin midgetry, Medvedev and Putin, commemorated the world’s largest catastrophe (a.k.a. VOV) wearing vaguely fascistic black overcoats. Vigorous octogenarians shingled in medals surrounded them on the podium. “Arise, Our Vast Country,” the solemn 1940s VOV anthem, blared as elite guards began the old Soviet-imperial goose step—dressed in weirdly czarist-looking uniforms thick with blingy gold braid.

“PPP,” scoffed my mom. “Putin’s Patriotic Pastiche.”

In the afternoon Inna Valentinovna shepherded us to a neighborhood parade on Arbat Street. The local vets looked much frailer than the heroes on Putin’s podium. Some could barely walk under the weight of their medals; others wheezed and coughed in the wind. Muscovites watched the shuffling throng of veterans with indifference, whereas Ayzeri men in black leather jackets whistled and clapped with great feeling.

Inna Valentinovna pushed me toward one tall, sloped-shouldered, medal-hung nonagenarian. He had fought in the Baltic navy at the same time as my granddad. His gaze remained serene and absent even as schoolkids shoved big thorny roses into his leathery hands.

“I’m from New York,” I stammered, feeling suddenly shy. “Perhaps you knew my grandfather—chief of Baltic naval intelligence Naum Solomonovich Frumkin.”

After an uncertain pause, a glimmer animated his pale, ghostly features.

“New York,” he quavered. “Not even the Nazis matched the enemy we faced after the war.
New York! Vile imperialist America!
”

And with great dignity he walked away from me.

The reception was warmer in the bitterly cold shadows by Arbat’s hulking Vakhtangov Theater, where Inna Valentinovna beckoned us over to a cordoned-off vets’ VIP area of outdoor tables. A mock field kitchen was dispensing convincingly unappetizing wartime kasha from a fake cauldron and weak tea from a fake kettle. But the breaths around our wobbly plastic table reeked with reassuring eighty-proof authenticity. Our Styrofoam cups of tea were emptied and filled with vodka. A pickle materialized. Despite the droning, officious speeches, despite the sad spectacle of impoverished vets paraded around like stuffed dolls instead of receiving long-overdue benefits, a glow blossomed inside me. How precious, co-bottling in the cold with this crowd. How little time with them we had left.

I soggily proposed a toast to my granddad. Tears of remorse ran down my cheeks as I recalled how Mom and Yulia threw out his Sorge memorabilia, how Cousin Masha and I giggled when, for the umpteenth time, he reminisced about debriefing Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials. Now there were only fraying cardboard boxes of his medals and a yellowed German magazine cover on which Dedushka’s high forehead and ironic eyes hovered over the puffy-faced Hermann Goering.

Next morning in the lobby I finally encountered the elusive Asya Vasilyevna.

The memoirist friend of Anna Akhmatova had dark, quick, intelligent eyes and sported a smart vest. Overwhelmed, I kept holding and stroking her ancient hand.

Asya Vasilievna met Akhmatova during their VOV evacuation in Tashkent.

Vets got to make free phone calls on May 9, and Asya had spent hers talking to the granddaughter of Nikolai Punin, Akhmatova’s lover in the twenties and thirties. Punin brought Akhmatova into the Fountain House in St. Petersburg. There, in a dismal communal apartment
carved out of a wing of that former palace, Akhmatova resided for almost three decades.

I once visited Akhmatova’s movingly curated museum at the Fountain House. A copy of Modigliani’s sketch of her hung on the wall of the monastically sparse room she once occupied. In this room Akhmatova had her epic all-night encounter with a young Isaiah Berlin from England, for which she was denounced by the state, her son sent back to the gulag. It was her bronze ashtray that brought me to tears. Knowing the apartment was bugged, Akhmatova and her friend and biographer, Lydia Chukovskaya, would utter loud trivialities—“Autumn is so early this year”—while the poet scribbled a new poem in pencil and Chukovskaya memorized the lines. Then they’d burn the page in the ashtray.

“Hands, matches, an ashtray,” wrote Chukovskaya. “A ritual beautiful and bitter.”

Now in our
khi-rize
lobby, unbidden, Asya Vasilievna launched into Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem,” dedicated to the victims of purges. She began with the blood-curdling preface:
In the dreadful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison lines in Leningrad …

She spoke as if in a trance, mimicking the low, slow, mournful recitation I knew from Akhmatova’s recordings.

“Let’s go sit so you’re more comfortable,” interrupted Inna Valentinovna, ushering us into a special vets’ room—a tiny pink-walled cubbyhole off the lobby, plastered with photos of VOV heroes.

My gaze drifted across the gallery on the wall as Asya declaimed on. Marshal Zhukov. Voroshilov. Dashing Rokossovsky. And presiding over all, squinting his yellowish feline eyes …

HIM? AGAIN?

In Germany you’d be arrested for displaying the visage of Hitler, I thought. Here? Here a woman recited a searing dirge to those crushed in the purges—right beneath the executioner’s portrait!