Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (9 page)

Suddenly I understood why Grandma Liza had looked pensive and hesitant whenever she mentioned the dish. She too had run from her Jewishness back in Odessa. To her credit, Liza, who was blond and not remotely Semitic-looking, became enraged, proclaiming herself Jewish, if ever anyone made an anti-Semitic remark. Granddad Naum … not so much. About his family past Mom knows almost nothing—only that his people were shtetl Zionists and that Naum ran away from home as a teen, lied about his age to join the Red Army, and never looked back.

In Jackson Heights, Mom and I are both ecumenical culturalists. We light menorahs next to our Christmas trees. We bake Russian Easter kulich cake and make ersatz gefilte fish balls for Passover. But our gefilte fish this time was different—
real Jewish food
. We skinned a whole pike, hand-minced the flesh, cried grating the onion, sewed the
fish mince inside the skin, and cooked the whole reconstituted beast for three hours.

The labor was vast, but for me it was a small way of atoning for that August day in Odessa.

Returning to twenties Bolshevik policies, I reflected again on how kitchen labor, particularly the kind at Maria’s politically equivocal NEP home canteen, got so little respect in the New Soviet vision. Partly this was pragmatic. Freeing women from the household pot was a matter of lofty principle, but it was also meant to push them into the larger workforce, perhaps even into the army of political agitators.

I haven’t mentioned her yet, this New Soviet Woman. Admittedly a lesser star than the New Soviet Man, she was still decidedly not a housewife-cook. She was a liberated
proletarka
(female proletarian)—co-builder of the road to utopia, co-defender of the Communist International, avid reader of
Rabotnitsa
(
Female Worker
), an enthusiastic participant in public life.

Not for her the domestic toil that “crushes and degrades women” (Lenin’s words). Not for her nursery drudgery, so “barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying” (Lenin again). No, under socialism, society would assume all such burdens, eventually eradicating the nuclear family. “The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin,” predicted Lenin in 1919, “only where and when an all-out struggle begins … against … petty … housekeeping.”

In one of my favorite Soviet posters, a fierce New Soviet
proletarka
makes like a herald angel under the slogan
DOWN WITH KITCHEN SLAVERY
, rendered in striking avant-garde typography. She’s grinning down at an aproned female beleaguered by suds, dishes, laundry, and cobwebs. The red-clad
proletarka
opens wide a door to a light-flooded vision of New Soviet byt. Behold a multistoried Futurist edifice housing a public canteen, a kitchen-factory, and a nursery school, all crowned with a workers’ club.

The engine for turning such utopian Bolshevik feminist visions into reality was the Zhenotdel, literally “women’s department.” Founded in 1919 as an organ of the Party’s Central Committee, the Zhenotdel and its branches fought for—and helped win—crucial reforms in childcare, contraception, and marriage. They proselytized, recruited, and educated. The first head of Zhenotdel was the charismatic Inessa Armand—Paris-born, strikingly glamorous, and by many accounts more than simply a “comrade” to Lenin (Krupskaya being strikingly
not
glamorous). Ravaged by overwork, Armand died of cholera in 1920, desperately mourned by Vladimir Ilyich. The Zhenotdel mantle then passed to Alexandra Kollontai, who was perhaps
too
charismatic. Kollontai stands out as one of communism’s most dashing characters. A free-love apostle and scandalous practitioner of such (the likely model for Garbo’s Ninotchka), Kollontai essentially regarded the nuclear family as an inefficient use of labor, food, and fuel. Wife as homebody-cook outraged her.

“The separation of marriage from kitchen,” preached Kollontai, “is a reform no less important than the separation of church and state.”

In our family, we had our own Kollontai.

As Russian families go, mine represented a rich sampling of the pre-Soviet national pot. Mom’s people came from the Ukrainian shtetl. Dad’s paternal ancestors were Germanic aristocracy who married Caspian merchants’ daughters. And Dad’s mom, my extravagant and extravagantly beloved grandmother Alla, was raised by a fiery agitator for women’s rights in remote Central Asia.

When I was little, Alla cooked very infrequently, but when she bothered, she produced minor masterpieces. I particularly remember the stew my mom inherited from her and cooks to this day. It’s an Uzbek stew. A stew of burnished-brown lamb and potatoes enlivened with an angry dusting of paprika, crushed coriander seeds, and the faintly medicinal funk of
zira
, the Uzbek wild cumin. “From my childhood in Ferghana!” Alla would blurt over the dish, then add, “From a
person very dear to me …” And then the subject was closed. But I knew whom she meant.

Alla Nikolaevna Aksentovich, my grandmother, was born a month before the October Revolution in what was still called Turkestan, as czarist maps labeled Central Asia. She was an out-of-wedlock baby, orphaned early and adopted by her maternal grandmother, Anna Alexeevna, who was a Bolshevik feminist in a very rough place to be one.

Turkestan. Muslim, scorchingly hot, vaster than modern India, much of it desert. One of the czars’ last colonial conquests, it was subjugated only in the 1860s. A decade later, Anna Alexeevna was born in the fertile Ferghana valley, Silk Road country from which the Russian Empire pumped cotton—as would the Soviet Empire, even more mercilessly. The lone photo we have of her, taken years later and elsewhere, shows Anna with a sturdy round Slavic face and high cheekbones. Her father was a Ural Cossack, definitely no supporter of Reds. In 1918, when she was already forty, a midwife by training, she defied him and joined the Communist Party. By 1924, she and little orphaned Alla were in Tashkent, the capital of the new republic of Uzbekistan. The Soviets by then had carved up Central Asia into five socialist “national” entities. Anna Alexeevna was the new deputy head of the “agitation” department of the Central Asian Bureau of the Central Committee.

There was much agitating to be done.

The civil war thereabouts had dragged on for extra years, Reds pitched against the
basmachi
(Muslim insurgents). With victory came—as elsewhere—staggering challenges. Unlike the Jews, Uzbeks weren’t easy converts to the Bolshevik cause. If Russia itself lacked the strict Marxian preconditions for communism—namely, advanced capitalism—agrarian former Turkestan, with its religious and clan structures, was downright feudal. How does one build socialism without a proletariat? The answer was women. Subjugated by husbands, clergy, and ruling chiefs, the women of Central Asia were “the most oppressed of the oppressed and the most enslaved of the enslaved,” as Lenin put it.

So the Soviets switched their rallying cry from class struggle and
ethno-nationalism to gender. In the “women of the Orient” they found their “surrogate proletariat,” their battering ram for social and cultural change.

Anna Alexeevna and her fellow Zhenotdel missionaries toiled against the
kalym
(bride fee) and underage marriage, against polygamy and female seclusion and segregation. Most dramatically, they battled the most literal form of seclusion: the veil. In public Muslim women had to wear a
paranji
, a long, ponderous robe, and a
chachvan
, a veil. But
veil
sounds so flimsy. Imagine instead a massive, primeval head-to-knee shroud of horsehair, with no openings for eyes or mouth.

“The best revolutionary actions,” Kollontai reportedly once pronounced, “are pure drama.” Anna Alexeevna and the feminists had their coup de théâtre: The veil had to go! Few Soviet revolutionary actions were more sensational than the
hujum
(onslaught), the Central Asian campaign of unveiling.

March 8, 1927: International Women’s Day. In Uzbek cities veiled women go tramping en masse, escorted by police. Bands and native orchestras play. Stages set up on public squares swarm with flowers. There are fiery speeches by Zhenotdelki. Poems. Anna is on Tashkent’s main stage no doubt when the courageous first ones step up, pull off their horsehair mobile prisons, and fling them into bonfires. Thousands are inspired to do the same then and there—ten thousand veils are reportedly cast off on this day. Unveiled women surge through the streets shouting revolutionary slogans. Everyone sings. An astounding moment.

The backlash was wrathful and immediate.

Trapped between Lenin and Allah, Moscow and Mecca, the unveiled became social outcasts. Many redonned the
paranji
. Many others were raped and murdered by traditionalist males or their families, their mutilated bodies displayed in villages. Zhenotdel activists were threatened and killed. The firestorm lasted for years.

By decade’s end the radical theatrics of unveiling were abandoned. And all over the country the Zhenotdeli were being dismantled because Stalin pronounced the “women’s question”
solved
. By the midthirties, traditional family values were back, with divorce discouraged, abortions and homosexuality banned. On propaganda posters the Soviet
Woman had a new look: maternal, full-figured, and “feminine.” And for the rest of the USSR’s existence, female comrades were expected to carry on their shoulders the infamous “double burden” of wage labor and housework.

And my great-great-grandmother, the New Soviet feminist?

In 1931 Anna Alexeevna moved with the teenage Alla to Moscow, to follow her boss Isaak Zelensky. A longtime Party stalwart, Zelensky was one of the engineers of War Communism’s grain requisitioning; he’d been brought back now to the capital from Central Asia to run the state’s consumer cooperatives. In 1937, in the midst of the purges, Zelensky was arrested. A year later he was in the dock with Bolshevik luminary Nikolai Bukharin at Stalin’s most notorious show trial. As ex-head of cooperative food suppliers, Zelensky breathtakingly “confessed” to sabotage, including the spoiling of fifty trainloads of eggs bound for Moscow, and the ruining of butter shipments by adding nails and glass.

He was promptly shot and deleted from Soviet history.

A year later my great-great-grandmother Anna was arrested as Zelensky’s co-conspirator and also deleted from history. From our
family
history, by my grandma Alla, who destroyed all photographs of her and stopped mentioning her name. Then one day, after the end of World War II, shaking with fear, Alla opened a letter from the gulag, from Kolyma in furthest Siberia. With blood-chilling precision, Anna Alexeevna had detailed the tortures she’d been subjected to and pleaded with the granddaughter she’d adopted and raised to inform Comrade Stalin. Like millions of victims, she was convinced the Supreme Leader knew nothing of the horrors going on in the prison camps. In my dad’s various retellings, Alla immediately burned the letter, flushed it down the communal apartment toilet, or ate it.

Only when drunk, very drunk, and much later, when I was a child, would Alla chase her shot glass of vodka with herring and crocodile tears and bellow how her grandma Anna Alexeevna had been stripped naked in minus-forty-degree weather, beaten in the cellars of the secret
police’s Lubyanka Prison, kept from sleep for weeks. Then Dad would whisper to me the inheritance story. How Anna Alexeevna had been released in 1948 at the age of seventy, without a right of return to Moscow, and had lived in the Siberian city of Magadan. How Alla never visited her, not once. How Anna died in 1953, a few months before Stalin.