Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing

_{CHAPTER ONE} 1910s: THE LAST DAYS OF THE CZARS

My mother is expecting guests.

In just a few hours in this sweltering July heat wave, eight people will show up for an extravagant czarist-era dinner at her small Queens apartment. But her kitchen resembles a building site. Pots tower and teeter in the sink; the food processor and blender drone on in unison. In a shiny bowl on Mom’s green faux-granite counter, a porous blob of yeast dough seems weirdly alive. I’m pretty sure it’s breathing. Unfazed, Mother simultaneously blends, sautés, keeps an eye on Chris Matthews on MSNBC, and chatters away on her cordless phone. At this moment she suggests a plump modern-day elf, multitasking away in her orange Indian housedress.

Ever since I can remember, my mother has cooked like this, phone tucked under her chin. Of course, back in Brezhnev’s Moscow in the seventies when I was a kid, the idea of an “extravagant czarist dinner” would have provoked sardonic laughter. And the cord of our antediluvian black Soviet telefon was so traitorously twisted, I once tripped on it while carrying a platter of Mom’s lamb pilaf to the low three-legged table in the cluttered space where my parents did their living, sleeping, and entertaining.

Right now, as one of Mom’s ancient émigré friends fills her ear with cultural gossip, that pilaf episode returns to me in cinematic slow motion. Masses of yellow rice cascade onto our Armenian carpet. Biddy, my two-month-old puppy, greedily laps up every grain, her eyes and tongue swelling shockingly in an instant allergic reaction to lamb fat. I howl, fearing for Biddy’s life. My father berates Mom for her phone habits.

Mom managed to rescue the disaster with her usual flair, dotty and determined. By the time guests arrived—with an extra four non-sober comrades—she’d conjured up a tasty fantasia from two pounds of the proletarian wurst called sosiski. These she’d cut into petal-like shapes, splayed in a skillet, and fried up with eggs. Her creation landed at table under provocative blood-red squiggles of ketchup, that decadent capitalist condiment. For dessert: Mom’s equally spontaneous apple cake. “Guest-at-the-doorstep apple charlotte,” she dubbed it.

Guests! They never stopped crowding Mom’s doorstep, whether at our apartment in the center of Moscow or at the boxy immigrant dwelling in Philadelphia where she and I landed in 1974. Guests overrun her current home in New York, squatting for weeks, eating her out of the house, borrowing money and books. Every so often I Google “compulsive hospitality syndrome.” But there’s no cure. Not for Mom the old Russian adage “An uninvited guest is worse than an invading Tatar.” Her parents’ house was just like this, her sister’s even more so.

Tonight’s dinner, however, is different. It will mark our archival adieu to classic Russian cuisine. For such an important occasion Mom has agreed to keep the invitees to just eight after I slyly quoted a line from a Roman scholar and satirist: “The number of dinner guests should be more than the Graces and less than the Muses.” Mom’s quasi-religious respect for culture trumps even her passion for guests. Who is she to disagree with the ancients?

And so, on this diabolically torrid late afternoon in Queens, the two of us are sweating over a decadent feast set in the imagined 1910s—Russia’s Silver Age, artistically speaking. The evening will mark our hail and farewell to a grandiose decade of Moscow gastronomy. To a food culture that flourished at the start of the twentieth century and disappeared abruptly when the 1917 revolution transformed Russian cuisine and culture into Soviet cuisine and culture—the only version we knew.

Mom and I have not taken the occasion lightly.

The horseradish and lemon vodkas that I’ve been steeping for days are chilling in their cut-crystal carafes. The caviar glistens. We’ve even gone to the absurd trouble of brewing our own kvass, a folkloric beverage from fermented black bread that’s these days mostly just mass-produced fizz. Who knows? Besides communing with our ancestral stomachs, this might be our last chance on this culinary journey to eat really well.

“The burbot liver—what to do about the burbot liver?” Mom laments, finally off the phone.

Noticing how poignantly scratched her knuckles are from assorted gratings, I reply, for the umpteenth time, that burbot, noble member of the freshwater cod family so fetishized by pre-revolutionary Russian gourmands, is nowhere to be had in Jackson Heights, Queens. Frustrated sighing. As always, my pragmatism interferes with Mom’s dreaming and scheming. And let’s not even mention viziga, the desiccated dorsal cord of a sturgeon. Burbot liver was the czarist foie gras, viziga its shark’s fin. Chances of finding either in any zip code hereabouts? Not slim—none.

But still, we’ve made progress.

Several test runs for crispy brains in brown butter have yielded smashing results. And despite the state of Mom’s kitchen, and the homey, crepuscular clutter of her book-laden apartment, her dining table is a thing of great beauty. Crystal goblets preen on the floral, antique-looking tablecloth. Pale blue hydrangeas in an art nouveau pitcher I found at a flea market in Buenos Aires bestow a subtle fin-de-siècle opulence.

I unpack the cargo of plastic containers and bottles I’ve lugged over from my house two blocks away. Since Mom’s galley kitchen is far too small for two cooks, much smaller than an aristocrat’s broom closet, I’ve already brewed the kvass and prepared the trimmings for an anachronistic chilled fish and greens soup called botvinya. I was also designated steeper of vodkas and executer of Guriev kasha, a dessert loaded with deep historical meaning and a whole pound of home-candied nuts. Mom has taken charge of the main course and the array of zakuski, or appetizers.

A look at the clock and she gasps. “The kulebiaka dough! Check it!”

I check it. Still rising, still bubbling. I give it a bang to deflate—and the tang of fermenting yeast tickles my nostrils, evoking a fleeting collective memory. Or a memory of a received memory. I pinch off a piece of dough and hand it to Mom to assess. She gives me a shrug as if to say, “You’re the cookbook writer.”

But I’m glad I let her take charge of the kulebiaka. This extravagant Russian fish pie, this history lesson in a pastry case, will be the pièce de résistance of our banquet tonight.

“The kulebiaka must make your mouth water, it must lie before you, naked, shameless, a temptation. You wink at it, you cut off a sizeable slice, and you let your fingers just play over it…. You eat it, the butter drips from it like tears, and the filling is fat, juicy, rich with eggs, giblets, onions…”

So waxed Anton Pavlovich Chekhov in his little fiction “The Siren,” which Mom and I have been salivating over during our preparations, just as we first did back in our unglorious socialist pasts. It wasn’t only us Soviet-born who fixated on food. Chekhov’s satiric encomium to outsize Slavic appetite is a lover’s rapturous fantasy. Sometimes it seems that for nineteenth-century Russian writers, food was what landscape (or maybe class?) was for the English. Or war for the Germans, love for the French—a subject encompassing the great themes of comedy, tragedy, ecstasy, and doom. Or perhaps, as the contemporary author Tatyana Tolstaya suggests, the “orgiastic gorging” of Russian authors was a compensation for literary taboos on eroticism. One must note, too, alas, Russian writers’ peculiarly Russian propensity for moralizing. Rosy hams, amber fish broths, blini as plump as “the shoulder of a merchant’s daughter” (Chekhov again), such literary deliciousness often serves an ulterior agenda of exposing gluttons as spiritually bankrupt philistines—or lethargic losers such as the alpha glutton Oblomov. Is this a moral trap? I keep asking myself. Are we enticed to salivate at these lines so we’ll end up feeling guilty?

But it’s hard not to salivate. Chekhov, Pushkin, Tolstoy—they all devote some of their most fetching pages to the gastronomical. As for Mom’s beloved Nikolai Gogol, the author of Dead Souls anointed the stomach the body’s “most noble” organ. Besotted with eating both on and off the page—sour cherry dumplings from his Ukrainian childhood, pastas from his sojourns in Rome—scrawny Gogol could polish off a gargantuan dinner and start right in again. While traveling he sometimes even churned his own butter. “The belly is the belle of his stories, the nose is their beau,” declared Nabokov. In 1852, just short of his forty-third birthday, in the throes of religious mania and gastrointestinal torments, Nikolai Vasilievich committed a slow suicide rich in Gogolian irony: he refused to eat. Yes, a complicated, even tortured, relationship with food has long been a hallmark of our national character.

According to one scholarly count, no less than eighty-six kinds of edibles appear in Dead Souls, Gogol’s chronicle of a grifter’s circuit from dinner to dinner in the vast Russian countryside. Despairing over not being able to scale the heights of the novel’s first volume, poor wretched Gogol burned most of the second. What survives includes the most famous literary ode to kulebiaka—replete with a virtual recipe.

“Make a four-cornered kulebiaka,” instructs Petukh, a spiritually bankrupt glutton who made it through the flames. And then:

Generations of Russians have smacked their own lips at this passage. Historians, though, suspect that this chimerical “four-cornered” kulebiaka might have been a Gogolian fiction. So what then of the genuine article, which is normally oblong and layered?

To telescope quickly: kulebiaka descends from the archaic Slavic pirog (filled pie). Humbly born, they say, in the 1600s, it had by its turn-of-the-twentieth-century heyday evolved into a regal golden-brown case fancifully decorated with cut-out designs. Concealed within: aromatic layers of fish and viziga, a cornucopia of forest-picked mushrooms, and butter-splashed buckwheat or rice, all the tiers separated by thin crepes called blinchiki—to soak up the juices.

Mom and I argued over every other dish on our menu. But on this we agreed: without kulebiaka, there could be no proper Silver Age Moscow repast.

When my mother, Larisa (Lara, Larochka) Frumkina—Frumkin in English—was growing up in the 1930s high Stalinist Moscow, the idea of a decadent czarist-era banquet constituted exactly what it would in the Brezhnevian seventies: laughable blue cheese from the moon. Sosiski were Mom’s favorite food. I was hooked on them too, though Mom claims that the sosiski of my childhood couldn’t hold a candle to the juicy Stalinist article. Why do these proletarian franks remain the madeleine of every Homo sovieticus? Because besides sosiski with canned peas and kotleti (minced meat patties) with kasha, cabbage-intensive soups, mayo-laden salads, and watery fruit kompot for dessert—there wasn’t all that much to eat in the Land of the Soviets.

Unless, of course, you were privileged. In our joyous classless society, this all-important matter of privilege has nagged at me since my early childhood.

I first glimpsed—or rather heard—the world of privileged food consumption during my first three years of life, at the grotesque communal Moscow apartment into which I was born in 1963. The apartment sat so close to the Kremlin, we could practically hear the midnight chimes of the giant clock on the Spassky Tower. There was another sound too, keeping us up: the roaring BLARGHHH of our neighbor Misha puking his guts out. Misha, you see, was a food store manager with a proprietary attitude toward the socialist food supply, likely a black market millionaire who shared our communal lair only for fear that flaunting his wealth would attract the unwanted attention of the anti-embezzlement authorities. Misha and Musya, his blond, big-bosomed wife, lived out a Mature Socialist version of bygone decadence. Night after night they dined out at Moscow’s few proper restaurants (accessible to party bigwigs, foreigners, and comrades with illegal rubles), dropping the equivalent of Mom’s monthly salary on meals that Misha couldn’t even keep in his stomach.

When the pair stayed home, they ate unspeakable delicacies—batter-fried chicken tenders, for instance—prepared for them by the loving hands of Musya’s mom, Baba Mila, she a blubbery former peasant with one eye, four—or was it six?—gold front teeth, and a healthy contempt for the nonprivileged.

“So, making kotleti today,” Mila would say in the kitchen we all shared, fixing her monocular gaze on the misshapen patties in Mom’s chipped aluminum skillet. “Muuuuusya!” she’d holler to her daughter. “Larisa’s making kotleti!”

“Good appetite, Larochka!” (Musya was fond of my mom.)

“Muuusya! Would you eat kotleti?”

“Me? Never!”

“Aha! You see?” And Mila would wag a swollen finger at Mom.

One day my tiny underfed mom couldn’t restrain herself. Back from work, tired and ravenous, she pilfered a chicken nugget from a tray Mila had left in the kitchen. The next day I watched as, red-faced and teary-eyed, she knocked on Misha’s door to confess her theft.

“The chicken?” cackled Mila, and I still recall being struck by how her twenty-four-karat mouth glinted in the dim hall light. “Help yourself anytime—we dump that shit anyway.”

And so it was that about once a week we got to eat shit destined for the economic criminal’s garbage. To us, it tasted pretty ambrosial.

In 1970, into the eleventh year of their on-and-off marriage, my parents got back together after a four-year separation and we moved to an apartment in the Arbat. And kulebiaka entered my life. Here, in Moscow’s most aristocratic old neighborhood, I was shooed out of the house to buy the pie in its Soviet incarnation at the take-out store attached to Praga, a restaurant famed “before historical materialism” (that’s ironic Sovietese for “distant past”) for its plate-size rasstegai pies with two fillings: sturgeon and sterlet.

Even in the dog days of Brezhnev, Praga was fairly dripping with klass—a fancy restoran where Misha types groped peroxide blondes while a band blasted, and third-world diplomats hosted receptions in a series of ornate private rooms.

“Car of Angola’s ambassador to the door!”

This was music to my seven-year-old ears.

If I loitered outside Praga intently enough, if my young smile and “Khello, khau yoo laik Moskou?” were sufficiently charming, a friendly diplomat might toss me a five-pack of Juicy Fruit. The next day, in the girls’ bathroom, aided by ruler and penknife, I would sell off the gum, millimeter by millimeter, to favored classmates. Even a chewed-up blob of Juicy Fruit had some value, say a kopek or two, as long as you didn’t masticate more than five times, leaving some of that floral Wrigley magic for the next masticator to savor. Our teacher’s grave warnings that sharing capitalist gum causes syphilis only added to the illegal thrill of it all.

I loved everything about shopping at Praga. Loved skipping over the surges of brown melted snow and sawdust that comrade janitors gleefully swept right over the customers’ feet. Loved inhaling the signature scent of stale pork fat, peregar (hangover breath), and the sickly sweet top notes of Red Moscow perfume. Loved Tyotya Grusha (Aunt Pear), Praga’s potato-nosed saleslady, clacking away on her abacus with savage force. Once, guided by some profound late socialist instinct, I shared with Grusha a five-pack of Juicy Fruit. She snatched it without even a thank-you, but from then on she always made sure to reserve a kulebiaka for me. “Here, you loudmouthed infection,” she’d say, also slipping me a slab of raisin-studded poundcake under the counter.

And this is how I came to appreciate the importance of black marketeering, blat (connections), and bribery. I was now inching my own way toward privilege.

Wearing shiny black rubber galoshes over my valenki (felt boots) and a coat made of “mouse fur” (in the words of my dad), I toted the Pravda-wrapped kulebiaka back to our family table, usually taking the long way home—past onion-domed churches now serving as warehouses, past gracious cream and green neoclassical facades scrawled with the unprintable slang that Russians call mat. I felt like Moscow belonged to me on those walks; along its frozen streetscape I was a flaneur flush with illicit cash. On Kalinin Prospect, the modernist grand boulevard that dissected the old neighborhood, I’d pull off my mittens in the unbearable cold to count out twenty icy kopeks for the blue-coated lady with her frosty zinc ice cream box. It was almost violent, the shock of pain on my teeth as I sank them into the waffle cup of vanilla plombir with a cream rosette, its concrete-like hardness defying the flat wooden scooping spoon. Left of Praga, the Arbatskaya metro station rose, star-shaped and maroon and art deco, harboring its squad of clunky gray gazirovka (soda) machines. One kopek for unflavored; three kopeks for a squirt of aromatic thick yellow syrup. Scoring the soda: a matter of anxious uncertainty. Not because soda or syrup ran out, but because alkogoliks were forever stealing the twelve-sided beveled drinking glass—that Soviet domestic icon. If, miraculously, the drunks had left the glass behind, I thrilled in pressing it hard upside down on the machine’s slatted tray to watch the powerful water jet rinse the glass of alcoholic saliva. Who even needed the soda?

Deeper into Old Arbat, at the Konservi store with its friezes of socialist fruit cornucopias, I’d pause for my ritual twelve-kopek glass of sugary birch-tree juice dispensed from conical vintage glass vats with spigots. Then, sucking on a dirty icicle, I’d just wander off on a whim, lost in a delta of narrow side streets that weaved and twisted like braids, each bearing a name of the trade it once supported: Tablecloth Lane, Bread Alley. Back then, before capitalism disfigured Moscow’s old center with billboards and neons and antihistorical historicist mansions, some Arbat streets did retain a certain nineteenth-century purity.

At home I usually found Mom in the kitchen, big black receiver under her chin, cooking while discussing a new play or a book with a girlfriend. Dad struck a languid Oblomovian pose on the couch, playing cards with himself, sipping cold tea from his orange cup with white polka-dots.

“And how was your walk?” Mother always wanted to know. “Did you remember to stop by the house on Povarskaya Street where Natasha from War and Peace lived?” At the mention of Tolstoy, the Juicy Fruit in my pocket would congeal into a guilty yellow lump on my conscience. Natasha Rostova and my mom—they were so poetic, so gullible. And I? What was I but a crass mini-Misha? Dad usually came to the rescue: “So, let’s have the kulebiaka. Or did Praga run out?” For me, I wanted to reply, Praga never runs out! But it seemed wise not to boast of my special blat with Aunt Grusha, the saleslady, in the presence of my sweet innocent mother.

Eating kulebiaka on Sundays was our nod to a family ritual—even if the pie I’d deposit on the kitchen table of our five-hundred-square-foot two-room apartment shared only the name with the horn of plenty orgiastically celebrated by Gogol and Chekhov. More bulka (white breadroll) than pirog, late-socialist kulebiaka was a modest rectangle of yeast dough, true to Soviet form concealing a barely there layer of boiled ground meat or cabbage. It now occurs to me that our Sunday kulebiaka from Praga expressed the frugality of our lives as neatly as the grandiose version captured czarist excess. We liked our version just fine. The yeast dough was tasty, especially with Mom’s thin vegetarian borscht, and somehow the whole package was just suggestive enough to inspire feverish fantasies about pre-revolutionary Russian cuisine, so intimately familiar to us from books, and so unattainable.

Dreaming about food, I already knew, was just as rewarding as eating.

For my tenth birthday my parents gave me Moscow and Muscovites, a book by Vladimir Giliarovsky, darling of fin-de-siècle Moscow, who covered city affairs for several local newspapers. Combining a Dickensian eye with the racy style of a tabloid journalist, plus a dash of Zola-esque naturalism, Giliarovsky offered in Moscow and Muscovites an entertaining, if exhausting, panorama of our city at the turn of the century.

As a kid, I cut straight to the porn—the dining-out parts.

During the twentieth century’s opening decade, Moscow’s restaurant scene approached a kind of Slavophilic ideal. Unlike the then-capital St. Petersburg—regarded as pompous, bureaucratic, and quintessentially foreign—Moscow worked hard to live up to its moniker “bread-and-salty” (hospitable)—a merchant city at heart, uncorrupted by the phony veneer of European manners and foods. In St. Petersburg you dressed up to nibble tiny portions of foie gras and oysters at a French restaurant. In Moscow you gorged, unabashedly, obliviously, orgiastically at a traktir, a vernacular Russian tavern. Originally of working-class origins, Moscow’s best traktirs in Giliarovsky’s days welcomed everyone: posh nobles and meek provincial landowners, loud-voiced actors from Moscow Art Theater, and merchants clinching the million-ruble deals that fueled this whole Slavophilic restaurant boom. You’d never see such a social cocktail in cold, classist St. Petersburg.

Stomach growling, I stayed up nights devouring Giliarovsky. From him I learned that the airiest blini were served at Egorov’s traktir, baked in a special stove that stood in the middle of the dining room. That at Lopashov traktir, run by a bearded, gruff Old Believer, the city’s plumpest pelmeni—dumplings filled with meat, fish, or fruit in a bubbly rosé champagne sauce—were lapped up with folkloric wooden spoons by Siberian gold-mining merchants. That grand dukes from St. Petersburg endured the four-hundred-mile train journey southeast just to eat at Testov, Moscow’s most celebrated traktir. Testov was famed for its suckling pigs that the owner reared at his dacha (“like his own children,” except for the restraints around their trotters to prevent them from resisting being force-fed for plumpness); its three-hundred-pound sturgeons and sterlets transported live from the Volga; and Guriev kasha, a fanciful baked semolina sweet layered with candied nuts and slightly burnt cream skins, served in individual skillets.

And kulebiaka. The most obscenely decadent kulebiaka in town.

Offered under the special name of Baidakov’s Pie (nobody really knew who this Baidakov was) and ordered days in advance, Testov’s golden-cased tour de force was the creation of its 350-pound chef named Lyonechka. Among other things, Lyonechka was notorious for his habit of drinking shchi (cabbage soup) mixed with frozen champagne as a hangover remedy. His kulebiaka was a twelve-tiered skyscraper, starting with the ground floor of burbot liver and topped with layers of fish, meat, game, mushrooms, and rice, all wrapped in dough, up, up, up to a penthouse of calf’s brains in brown butter.

And then it all came crashing down.

In just a bony fistful of years, classical Russian food culture vanished, almost without a trace. The country’s nationalistic euphoria on entering World War I in 1914 collapsed under nonstop disasters presided over by the “last of the Romanovs”: clueless, autocratic czar Nicholas II and Alexandra, his reactionary, hysterical German-born wife. Imperial Russia went lurching toward breakdown and starvation. Golden pies, suckling pigs? In 1917 the insurgent Bolsheviks’ banners demanded simply the most basic of staples—khleb (bread)—along with land (beleaguered peasants were 80 percent of Russia’s population) and an end to the ruinous war. On the evening of October 25, hours before the coup by Lenin and his tiny cadre, ministers of Kerensky’s foundering provisional government, which replaced the czar after the popular revolution of February 1917, dined finely at the Winter Palace: soup, artichokes, and fish. A doomed meal all around.

With rationing already in force, the Bolsheviks quickly introduced a harsher system of class-based food allotments. Heavy manual laborers became the new privileged; Testov’s fancy diners plunged down the totem pole. Grigory Zinoviev, the head of local government in Petrograd (ex–St. Petersburg), announced rations for the bourgeoisie thusly: “We shall give them one ounce a day so they won’t forget the smell of bread.” He added with relish: “But if we must go over to milled straw, then we shall put the bourgeoisie on it first of all.”

The country, engulfed now by civil war, was rushed toward a full-blown, and catastrophic, centralized communist model. War Communism (it was given that temporary-sounding tag after the fact) ran from mid-1918 through early 1921, when Lenin abandoned it for a more mixed economic approach. But from that time until the Soviet Union’s very end, food was to be not just a matter of chronic uncertainty but a stark tool of political and social control. To use a Russian phrase, knut i prianik: whip and gingerbread.

There was scarce gingerbread at this point.

Strikes in Petrograd in 1919 protested the taste (or lack thereof) of the new Soviet diet. Even revolutionary bigwigs at the city’s Smolny canteen subsisted on vile herring soup and gluey millet. At the Kremlin in Moscow, the new seat of government, the situation was so awful that the famously ascetic Lenin—Mr. Stale Bread and Weak Tea, who ate mostly at home—ordered several investigations into why the Kremlyovka (Kremlin canteen) served such inedible stuff. Here’s what the investigation found: the cooks couldn’t actually cook. Most pre-revolutionary chefs, waiters, and other food types had been fired as part of the massive reorganization of labor, and the new ones had been hired from other professions to avoid using “czarist cadres.” “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, the dread founding maestro of Soviet terror, was besieged by requests from Kremlin staffers for towels for the Kremlyovka kitchens. Also aprons and jackets for cooks. Mrs. Trotsky kept asking for tea strainers. In vain.

Part of the Kremlyovka’s troubles sprang from another of War Communism’s policies: having declared itself the sole purveyor and marketer of food, and setter of food prices, the Kremlin was not supposed to procure from private sources. And yet. The black market that immediately sprang up became—and remained—a defining and permanent fixture of Soviet life. Lenin might have railed against petty speculators called meshochniki (bagmen), the private individuals who braved Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka (secret police) roving patrols to bring back foodstuffs from the countryside, often for their own starving families. But in fact most of the calories consumed in Russia’s cities during this dire period were supplied by such illegal operators. In the winter of 1919–20, they supplied as much as 75 percent of the food consumed, maybe more. By War Communism’s end, an estimated 200,000 bagmen were riding the rails in the breadbasket of the Ukraine.

War Communism showed an especially harsh face to the peasantry. An emphatically urban party, the Bolsheviks had little grasp of peasant realities, despite all the hammer-and-sickle imagery and early nods toward land distribution. To combat drastic grain shortages—blamed on speculative withholding—Lenin called down a “food dictatorship” and a “crusade for bread.” Armed detachments stalked the countryside, confiscating “surpluses” to feed the Red Army and the hungry, traumatically shrunken cities. This was the hated prodrazverstka (grain requisitioning)—a preview of the greater horrors to come under Stalin. There was more. To incite Marxist class warfare in villages, the poorest peasants were stirred up against their better-off kind, the so-called kulaks (“tight-fisted ones”)—vile bourgeois-like objects of Bolshevik venom. “Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers,” Lenin instructed provincial leaders in 1918. Though as Zinoviev later noted: “We are fond of describing any peasant who has enough to eat as a kulak.”

And so was launched a swelling, unevenly matched war by the radicalized, industrialized cities—the minority—to bring to heel the conservative, religion-saturated, profoundly mistrustful countryside—the vast majority. Who were never truly fervent Bolshevik supporters.

Agriculture under War Communism plummeted. By 1920, grain output was down to only 60 percent of pre–World War I levels, when Russia had been a significant exporter.

It goes without saying that the concept of cuisine went out the window in those ferocious times. The very notion of pleasure from flavor-some food was reviled as capitalist degeneracy. Mayakovsky, brazen poet of the revolution, sicced his jeering muses on gourmet fancies:

Food was fuel for survival and socialist labor. Food was a weapon of class struggle. Anything that smacked of Testov’s brand of lipsmacking—kulebiaka would be a buttery bull’s-eye—constituted a reactionary attack on the world being born. Some czarist traktirs and restaurants were shuttered and looted; others were nationalized and turned into public canteens with the utopian goal of serving new kinds of foods, supposedly futuristic and rational, to the newly Soviet masses.

Not until two decades later, following the abolition of yet another wave of rationing policies, did the state support efforts to seek out old professional chefs and revive some traditional recipes, at least in print. It was part of a whole new Soviet Cuisine project courtesy of Stalin’s food-supply commissariat. A few czarist dishes came peeping back, tricked out in Soviet duds, right then and later.

But the bona fide, layered fish kulebiaka, darling of yore, resurfaced only in Putin’s Moscow, at resurrect-the-Romanovs restaurants, ordered up by oligarch types clinching oil deals.

Mom and I have our own later history with kulebiaka.

After we emigrated to America in 1974, refugees arriving in Philadelphia with two tiny suitcases, Mom supported us by cleaning houses. Miraculously, she managed to save up for our first frugal visit to Paris two years later. The French capital I found haughty and underwhelming. Mom, on the other hand, was euphoric. Her decades-long Soviet dream had finally been realized, never mind the stale saucissons we fed on all week. On our last night she decided to splurge at a candlelit smoky bistro in the sixteenth arrondissement. And there it was! The most expensive dish on the menu—our fish-filled kulebiaka! That is, in its French incarnation, coulibiac—one of the handful of à la russe dishes to have made the journey from Russia in the mainly one-way nineteenth-century gastronomic traffic. Nervously counting our handful of tourist francs, we bit into this coulibiac with tongue-tingled anticipation and were instantly rewarded by the buttery puff pastry that shattered so pleasingly at the touch of the fork. The lovely coral pink of the salmon seemed to wink at us—scornfully?—from the opened pie on the plate as if to suggest France’s gastronomic noblesse oblige. The Gauls, they just couldn’t help being smug. We took a second bite, expecting total surrender. But something—wait, wait—was wrong. Messieurs-dames! Where did you hide the dusky wild mushrooms, the dilled rice, the blinchinki to soak up all those Slavic juices? What of the magically controlled blend of tastes? This French coulibiac, we concluded, was a fraud: saumon en croute masquerading as Russian. We paid the bill to the sneering garçon, unexpectedly wistful for our kulebiaka from Praga and the still-unfulfilled yearnings it had inspired.

It was back in Philadelphia that we finally found that elusive holy grail of Russian high cuisine—courtesy of some White Russian émigrés who’d escaped just before and after the revolution. These gray-haired folk had arrived via Paris or Berlin or Shanghai with noble Russian names out of novels—Golitsyn, Volkonsky. They grew black currants and Nabokovian lilacs in the gardens of their small houses outside Philadelphia or New York. Occasionally they’d attend balls—balls! To them, we escapees from the barbaric Imperium were a mild curiosity. Their conversations with Mother went something like this:

“Where did you weather the revolution?”

Mom: “I was born in 1934.”

“What do the Soviets think about Kerensky?”

Mom: “They don’t think of him much.”

“I heard there’ve been major changes in Russia since 1917.”

Mom: “Er… that’s right.”

“Is it really true that at the races you now can’t bet on more than one horse?”

The Russian we spoke seemed from a different planet. Here we were, with our self-consciously ironic appropriations of Sovietese, our twenty-seven shades of sarcasm injected into one simple word—comrade, say, or homeland. Talking to people who addressed us as dushechka (little soul) in pure, lilting, innocent Russian. Despite this cultural abyss, we cherished every moment at these people’s generous tables. Boy, they could cook! Suckling pig stuffed with kasha, wickedly rich Easter molds redolent of vanilla, the Chekhovian blini plumper than “the shoulder of a merchant’s daughter”—we tasted it all. Mom approached our dining sessions with an ethnographer’s zeal and a notebook. Examining the recipes later, she’d practically weep.

“Flour, milk, yeast, we had all those in Moscow. Why, why, couldn’t I ever make blini like this?”

One day, an old lady, a Smolianka—a graduate of the prestigious St. Petersburg Smolny Institute for Young Women, where culinary skills were de rigueur—invited us over for kulebiaka. This was the moment we had been waiting for. As the pie baked, we chatted with an old countess with a name too grand to even pronounce. The countess recounted how hard she cried, back in 1914, when she received a diamond necklace as a birthday gift from her father. Apparently she had really wanted a puppy. The kulebiaka arrived. Our hearts raced. Here it was, the true, genuine kulebiaka—“naked, shameless, a temptation.” The mushrooms, the blinchiki, even viziga, that gelatinous dried sturgeon spine our hostess had unearthed somewhere in deepest Chinatown—all were drenched in splashes of butter inside a beautifully decorated yeast pastry mantle.

As I ate, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina flashed into my mind. Because after some three hundred pages describing Vronsky’s passion for Anna, his endless pursuits, all her tortured denials, the consummation of their affair is allotted only one sentence. And so it was for us and the consummate kulebiaka. We ate; the pie was more than delicious; we were satisfied. Happily, nobody leapt under a train. And yet… assessing the kulebiaka and studying our hostess’s recipe later at home, Mom started scribbling over it furiously, crossing things out, shaking her head, muttering, “Ne nashe”—not ours. I’m pretty sure I know what she meant. Dried sturgeon spine? Who were we kidding? Whether we liked it or not, we were Soviets, not Russians. In place of the sturgeon, defrosted cod would do just fine.

It took us another three decades to develop a kulebiaka recipe to call our own—one that hinted at Russia’s turn-of-the-century excess, with a soupçon of that snooty French elegance, while staying true to our frugal past.

But that recipe just wouldn’t do for our 1910s feast tonight.

We needed to conjure up the real deal, the classic.

My mother is finally rolling out her kulebiaka dough, maneuvering intently on a dime-size oasis of kitchen counter. I inhale the sweetish tang of fermented yeast once again and try to plumb my unconscious for some collective historical taste memory. No dice. There’s no yeast in my DNA. No heirloom pie recipes passed down by generations of women in the yellowing pages of family notebooks, scribbled in pre-revolutionary Russian orthography. My two grandmothers were emancipated New Soviet women, meaning they barely baked, wouldn’t be caught dead cooking “czarist.” Curious and passionate about food all her life, Mom herself only became serious about baking after we emigrated. In the USSR she relied on a dough called na skoruyu ruku (“flick of a hand”), a version involving little kneading and no rising. It was a recipe she’d had to teach her mother. My paternal babushka, Alla, simply wasn’t interested. She was a war widow and Soviet career woman whose idea of dinner was a box of frozen dumplings. “Why should I bake,” she told Mother indignantly, “when I can be reading a book?” “What, a detektiv,” Mom snorted. It was a pointed snort. Russia’s top spy thriller writer, the Soviet version of John le Carré, was Grandma’s secret lover.

Peering into the kitchen, I prod Mom for any scraps of pre-revolutionary-style baking memories she might retain. She pauses, then nods. “Da, listen!” There were these old ladies when she was a child. They were strikingly different from the usual bloblike proletarian babushkas. “I remember their hair,” says Mom, almost dreamily. “Aristocratically simple. And the resentment and resignation on their ghostly faces. Something so sad and tragic. Perhaps they had grown up in mansions with servants. Now they were ending their days as kitchen slaves for their own Stalin-loving families.”

My mom talks like that.

“And their food?” I keep prodding. She ponders again. “Their blini, their pirozhki (filled pastries), their pirogs… somehow they seemed airier, fluffier…” She shrugs. More she can’t really articulate. Flour, yeast, butter. Much like their counterparts who had fled Bolshevik Russia, Mom’s Moscow old ladies possessed the magic of yeast. And that magic was lost to us.

And that was the rub of tonight’s project. Of the flavor of the layered Silver Age kulebiaka we had at least an inkling. But the botvinya and the Guriev kasha dessert, my responsibilities—they were total conundrums. Neither I nor Mom had a clue how they were meant to taste.

There was a further problem: the stress and time required to prepare a czarist table extravaganza.

Over an entire day and most of the night preceding our guests’ arrival, I sweated—and sweated—over my share of the meal. Have you ever tried making Guriev kasha during one of the worst New York heat waves in memory?

Thank you, Count Dmitry Guriev, you gourmandizing early-nineteenth-century Russian minister of finance, for the labor-intensive dessert bearing your name. Though actually by most accounts it was a serf chef named Zakhar Kuzmin who first concocted this particular kasha (kasha being the Russian word for almost any grain preparation both dry and porridgy). Guriev tasted the sweet at somebody’s palace, summoned Kuzmin to the table, and gave him a kiss. Then he bought said serf-chef and his family.

Here is how Kuzmin’s infernal inspiration is realized. Make a sweetened farina-like semolina kasha, called manna kasha in Russian. Then in a pan or skillet layer this manna with homemade candied nuts, and berries, and with plenty of penki, the rich, faintly burnished skins that form on cream when it’s baked. Getting a hint of the labor required? For one panful of kasha, you need at least fifteen penki.

So for hour after hour I opened and closed the door of a 450-degree oven to skim off the cream skins. By two a.m. my kitchen throbbed like a furnace. Chained to the oven door, drenched in sweat, I was ready to assault palaces, smash Fabergé eggs. I cursed the Romanovs! I cheered the Russian Revolution!

“Send your maid to the cellar.” That charming instruction kicked off many of the recipes in the best surviving (and Rabelaisian) source of pre-revolutionary Russian recipes, A Gift to Young Housewives by Elena Molokhovets. How my heart went out to that suffering maid! Serfdom might have been abolished in Russia in 1861, but under the Romanovs the peasants—and, later, the industrial workers—continued to live like subhumans. Haute bourgeois housewives gorged on amber fish broths, rosy hams, and live sterlets, while their domestics had to make do with tyuria (a porridgy soup made with stale bread and water), kvass, and bowlfuls of buckwheat groats. Yes, the revolution was necessary. But why, I pondered in my furnace kitchen, why did things have to go so terribly wrong? Woozy from the heat, I brooded on alternative histories:

Suppose Kerensky’s provisional government had managed to stay in power?

Or suppose instead of Stalin, Trotsky had taken over from Lenin?

Or suppose—

Suddenly I realized I’d forgotten to skim off new penki. I wrenched open the oven. The cream had transformed into cascades of white sputtering lava covering every inside inch with scorched white goo. I’d need a whole cadre of serfs to clean it all off. I screamed in despair.

Somehow, at last, at five a.m., I was done. A version of Guriev kasha, no doubt ersatz, sat cooling in my fridge under a layer of foil. Falling asleep, I recalled how at the storming of the Winter Palace thirsty, violent mobs ransacked the Romanovs’ wine cellar, reportedly the largest and the best-stocked in the world. I congratulated them across the century, from the bottom of my heart.

Unlike me, my septuagenarian mom actually relishes late-night kitchen heroics. And her political thinking is much clearer than mine. Yes, she loathes the Romanovs. But she despises the Bolsheviks even more. Plus she had no reason for pondering alternative histories; she was sailing along smoothly with her kulebiaka project.

Her dough, loaded with butter and sour cream, had risen beautifully. The fish, the dilled rice, the dusky wild mushrooms, the thin blinchinki for the filling layers, had all come out juicy and tasty. Only now, two hours before the party, right before constructing the pie, does Mom suddenly experience distress.

“Anyut, tell me,” she says. “What’s the point of the blinchiki? Filling dough with more dough!”

I blink blearily. Ah, the mysteries of the czarist stomach. “Maybe excess is the point?” I suggest meekly.

Mom shrugs. She goes ahead and arranges the filling and its anti-mush blinchiki into a majestic bulk. Not quite a Testov-style skyscraper, but a fine structure indeed. We decorate the pie together with fanciful cut-out designs before popping it into the oven. I’m proud of Mom. As we fan ourselves, our hearts race in anticipation, much like they did for our encounter decades ago with that true kulebiaka chez White Russian émigrés.

But the botvinya still hangs over me like a sword of doom.

A huge summer hit at Giliarovsky’s Moscow traktirs, this chilled kvass and fish potage—a weird hybrid of soup, beverage, fish dish, and salad—confounded most foreigners who encountered it. “Horrible mélange! Chaos of indigestion!” pronounced All the Year Round, Charles Dickens’s Victorian periodical. Me, I’m a foreigner to botvinya myself. On the evening’s table I set out a soup tureen filled with my homemade kvass and cooked greens (botva means vegetable tops), spiked with a horseradish sauce. Beside it, serving bowls of diced cucumbers, scallions, and dill. In the middle: a festive platter with poached salmon and shrimp (my stand-in for Slavic crayfish tails). You eat the botvinya by mixing all the elements in your soup bowl—to which you add, please, ice. A Gift to Young Housewives also recommends a splash of chilled champagne. Ah yes, booze! To drown out the promised “chaos of indigestion,” I’ll pour my horseradish vodka.

“Fish and kvass?” says my mother. “Foo.” (Russian for eek.)

“Aga (Yeah),” I agree.

“Foo,” she insists. “ ’Cause you know how I hate poached salmon.”

Mom harbors a competitive streak in the kitchen. I get the feeling she secretly wants my botvinya to fail.

“You’ve made what? A real botvinya? Homemade kvass?”

Our first guests, Sasha and Ira Genis, eyeball Mom’s table, incredulous. Mom hands them the welcome kalach, a traditional bread shaped like a purse. Their eyes grow wider.

Sasha (the diminutive of Alexander) is a freewheeling émigré essayist and cultural critic, something of a legend in Russia, where his radio broadcasts are adored by millions. He’s a serious gourmet, too. Dinners at the Genis home in New Jersey feature mushrooms gathered under a Siberian moon and smoked lamprey eels smuggled from Latvia.

Mom’s face blossoms with pride as Sasha confesses that, in his whole life, he’s never tasted botvinya and tiered kulebiaka.

“And Guriev kasha?” he cries. “Does it really exist outside literature?”

Suddenly all the guests are here, crowding Mom’s tiny foyer, kissing hello three times, handing over bouquets and bottles. At table, we are: a documentary filmmaker, Andrei, and his wife, Toma, sexy in her slinky, low-cut cocktail frock; my South African–born partner, Barry; and “distinguished American guests”—a couple from Brooklyn, both in the culture business.

“A proper fin-de-siècle traktir setting,” Mom expounds to the Brooklynites in her museum-docent tones, “should be a blend of art nouveau and Russian folkloric.” The Brooklynites nod respectfully.

Zakuski devoured, first vodkas downed, everyone addresses my botvinya. Mom barely touches hers, wrinkling her nose at the salmon. I both like the botvinya and don’t: it tastes utterly alien.

And then, gasp, Mom carries out her kulebiaka. A choral whoop goes up. She cuts into the layers, releasing fishy, mushroomy steam into the candlelight. Slowly, bite by bite, I savor the voluptuousness of the dough-upon-dough Slavic excess. The fluffy layers put me in the mind of luxurious Oblomovian sloth, of collapsing into a huge feather bed. I think I finally get the point of the blinchiki. They’re like marbling in a steak.

Sasha Genis raises his vodka glass to Larisa. “This is the most patriotic meal of my life!” he enthuses. “Putin should be taking note!”

His toast puzzles me. More, it perplexes, touching on what I’ve been turning over in my mind. Patriotic about what? The hated czarist regime? The repressive State we fled decades ago? Or some collective ur-memory of a cuisine never rightfully ours? Back in the USSR, patriotism was a dirty word in our dissident circles. And for that matter, what of our supposed Russianness? At table we’re a typical pan-Soviet émigré crew. Andrei is a Ukrainian Jew; his wife, Toma, is Russian; both are from Kiev. Although the Genises hail from Riga, they’re not Latvian. Mom, also Jewish, was born in Odessa and lived in Murmansk and Leningrad before moving to Moscow. I’m the only born Muscovite among us.

My ruminations on patriotism are drowned out by more toasts. Mom’s air conditioner chugs and strains; the toasts grow more ironic, more Soviet, more “ours” …

What was going on in the Russia we’re bidding adieu to here, in the year 1910? our Brooklyn culturati are asking. “Well, Chekhov has been dead for six years,” answers Sasha. “Tolstoy has just died at a remote railway station.”

“His strange death a major cultural milestone,” Mother chimes in, not to be outdone. “It caused a massive media frenzy.”

In 1913, I add myself, revisiting my patriotism theme, the tone-deaf Czar Nicholas II created a minor public relations disaster by serving a Frenchified menu at the banquet celebrating three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty. Potage a tortue—definitely not patriotic.

Cautiously I dig my spoon now into my Guriev kasha. Rich yet light, with a texture somewhere between pudding and torte, it tastes like a celestial version of my dreaded kindergarten breakfast farina. The guests giggle at my three a.m. penki fiasco.

And then it’s suddenly time for au revoirs. To Mom, to me, to czarist excess. The Genises head off down the hallway to the elevator. Suddenly Sasha comes running back.

“Devochki (Girls)! The kulebiaka, I just have to say again: wow! Inserting blini into yeast pastry!? Unreal.”

Maybe I do understand Sasha’s brand of patriotism and nostalgia. It’s patriotism for that nineteenth-century Russian idea of Culture with a capital C—an idea, and an ideal, that we ex-Soviets from Ukraine and Moscow and Latvia have never abandoned. They still stir us, those memories of savoring orgiastic descriptions of edibles in Chekhov and Gogol while dunking stale socialist pies into penitentiary-style soups.

I want to ask Mom what she thinks of all this, but she looks too exhausted. And sweaty. I have a feeling she’s welcoming the seven and a half decades of frugal Soviet eating ahead of us.

_{CHAPTER TWO} 1920s: LENIN’S CAKE

When I was four, I developed a troubling fascination with Lenin. With Dedushka (Grandpa) Lenin, as the leader of the world proletariat was known to us Soviet kids.

For a grandfather, Vladimir Ilyich was distressingly odd. I puzzled over how he could be immortal—“more alive than all the living,” per Mayakovsky—and yet be so clearly, blatantly dead. Puzzling too how Lenin was simultaneously the curly-haired baby Volodya on the star-shaped Octobrists badge of first-graders and yet a very old dedushka with a tufty triangular beard, unpleasantly bald under his inescapable flat cap. Everyone raved about how honest he was, how smart and courageous; how his revolution saved Russia from backwardness. But doubts nagged at me. That cheesy proletarian cap (who ever wore such a thing?) and that perpetual sly squint, just a bit smirky—they made him not entirely trustworthy. And how come alkogoliks sometimes kicked his stony statues, mumbling “Fucking syphilitic”? And what awesome revolutionary, even if bald, would marry Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, who resembled a misshapen tea cozy?

I decided the only way to resolve these mysteries would be to visit the mausoleum in Red Square where Vladimir Ilyich—dead? alive?—resided. But a visit to the mavzoley wasn’t so easy. True, it stood just a short distance from my grandma Alla’s communal apartment, where I was born. All I had to do was walk out of her house, then follow the block-long facade of GUM department store into Red Square. But here you encountered the mausoleum line. It was longer than the lines at GUM for Polish pantyhose and Rumanian ski boots combined. No matter how early I’d trudge over, thousands would already be there in a mile-long orderly file. Returning in the afternoon, I’d see the same people, still waiting, the bright enthusiasm of a socialist morning now faded from their glum, tired faces. It was then I began to understand that rituals required sacrifice.

But the foremost obstacle between me and Lenin’s mavzoley was my mother’s dogged anti-Soviet hostility. When I started kindergarten, where instructive mausoleum field trips were frequent, she forbade me from going, warning the teachers that I threw up on buses (true enough). On class trip days the kindergarten became eerily peaceful—just me and cleaners and cooks. I had instructions to sit in the Lenin Corner and draw the mausoleum and its bald occupant. The red and black stone ziggurat of the low little building—that I could reproduce perfectly. But the mysterious interior? All I came up with was a big table around which my kindergarten mates and Dedushka Lenin were having tea. On the table I always drew apple cake. All Soviet children knew of Lenin’s fondness for apple cake. Even more, we knew how child-Lenin once secretly gobbled up the apple peels after his mom baked such a cake. But the future leader owned up to his crime. He bravely confessed it to his mother! This was the moral. We all had to grow up honest like Lenin.

Actually, the person who knew all about Lenin and the mausoleum was my father, Sergei.

In the seventies, Dad worked at an inconspicuous two-story gray mansion near the Moscow Zoo on the Garden Ring, discreetly accessed through a courtyard. Most passersby had no clue that this was the Ministry of Health’s Mausoleum Research Lab, where the best and brightest of science—some 150 people in many departments—toiled to keep Lenin looking his immortal best under the bulletproof glass of his sarcophagus. The hand-washing and sterilizing of his outfit, of his underwear, shirts, vests, and polka-dot ties, were strictly supervised at the lab, too, by a certain zaftig comrade named Anna Mikhailovna. A physics of color guy, Dad manned the kolorimeter, monitoring changes in the hue of Lenin’s dead skin. (In his seven years there, there weren’t any.)

Dad and those of his rank of course were never allowed near the “object” itself. That required top security clearance. Mere mortal researchers practiced on “biological structures”—cadavers embalmed in the exact same glycerin and potassium acetate solution as the star of the show. There were twenty-six practice stiffs in all, each with its own name. Dad’s was “Kostya,” a criminal dead from asphyxiation and unclaimed by relatives. On Dad’s first day his new colleagues watched cackling as he nearly fainted at a display of severed heads. It was a pretty gruesome, over-the-top place, the lab. Embalmed limbs and fetuses bobbed in the basement bathtubs. But my father quickly got used to the work. In fact, he came to quite like it, he says. Because it was classified as dangerous to employees’ health, the job brought delightful perks. Shortened work hours, a free daily carton of milk, and, best of all, a generous monthly allotment of purest, highest-grade spirt (ethyl alcohol). In his reports, Dad noted the alcohol’s use for cleaning “optical spheres,” but he often came home with the robust smell of mausoleum spirits on his breath. Behold Soviet science.

I was sufficiently older and smarter by the time of my father’s necroemployment that Lenin no longer bewitched and bothered me. But certain curiosities linger even today, such as:

What did Lenin and his fellow Bolshevik revolutionaries actually eat?

Mom, on the other hand, has no such curiosity. “Over my dead body!” she almost bellows at my suggestion that we reproduce some Lenin-esque menus. Although she does chuckle when I mention Dad’s pet cadaver. Her own memory of his mausoleum days is just the alcohol breath, and she doesn’t find that one amusing.

Mom has her own notions of how the 1920s should be dealt with gastronomically. Rightly, she characterizes the decade as a fractured chaos of contradictory utopian experiments and concessionary schemes leading nowhere—all forgotten once Stalin’s leaden hand fell in the thirties.

“For us today,” she propounds, ever the culture vulture, “the Soviet twenties are really remembered for the writers. And the avant-garde art—the Maleviches, Rodchenkos, and Tatlins on museum walls all over the world!”

So besides digging into family history for her grandmother’s gefilte fish recipe, Mom assigns herself the task of leafing through art albums to troll for food references.

And I’m left to tackle Lenin. Dedushka Lenin.

From my kindergarten nanny, Zoya Petrovna, I knew that her dear Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born in 1870, some 430 miles from the Kremlin, in the provincial Volga town of Simbirsk. Volodya (the diminutive of Vladimir) was the smart, boisterous third child of six in a large and happy family. At the cozy Ulyanov homestead there were musical evenings, tea in the garden gazebo, gooseberry bushes for the kids to raid. Mom Maria—a teacher of Germanic and Jewish descent—cooked stolid Russo-Germanic fare. The family enjoyed Arme Ritter (“poor knights,” a German French toast) and lots of buterbrodi, the open-faced sandwiches that would become staples of our Soviet diets. About the proverbial apple cake reliable scholarly sources are silent, alas.

The Ulyanovs’ idyll ended when Volodya was sixteen. His father died from a brain hemorrhage. The next year his older brother Alexander was arrested and hanged for conspiring to assassinate the czar. Most historians see Alexander’s fate as the trauma that radicalized the future Bolshevik leader. They also acknowledge the influence of Alexander’s favorite book, Chto delat’? or What Is to Be Done? In 1902 Vladimir Ilyich borrowed the title for a revolutionary pamphlet he signed using for the first time his adopted name: Lenin.

The original was penned in 1863 by an imprisoned socialist, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and is widely acknowledged as some of the most god-awful writing ever spawned under the northern sun. A didactic political tract shoehorned into a breathtakingly inept novel, it gasses on and on about free love and a communal utopia populated by a “new kind” of people. Writers as disparate as Nabokov and Dostoyevsky mocked it. And yet, for future Bolsheviks (Mensheviks too) the novel wasn’t just inspirational gospel; it was a practical guide to actually reaching utopia.

Vera Pavlovna, the book’s free-loving do-goodnik heroine, inspired Russian feminists to open labor cooperatives for poor women. And Rakhmetov, its Superman of a revolutionary, became the model for angry young men aspiring to transform Russia. Half Slavic secular saint, half Enlightenment rationalist, this Rakhmetov was ascetic, ruthlessly pragmatic, and disciplined, yet possessed of a Russian bleeding heart for the underprivileged. He abstained from booze and sex and grabbed his forty winks on a bed of nails to toughen up—a detail gleefully recalled by any former Soviet teen who slogged through a ninth-grade composition on What Is to Be Done?

And to eat?

For Rakhmetov, an oddball “boxer’s” diet sufficed: raw meat, for strength; some plain black bread; and whichever humble fare was available (apples, fine; fancy apricots, nyet).

As I reread Chto delat’? now, this stern menu for heroes strikes me as very significant. Rooted in mid-nineteenth-century Russian liberal thought, culinary austerity—not to say nihilism—was indeed the hallmark of the era’s flesh-and-blood radicals and utopians. The father of Russian populism, Alexander Herzen—Chernyshevsky’s idol, admiration alas unreturned—had condemned the European petite bourgeoisie’s desire for “a piece of chicken in the cabbage soup of every little man.” Tolstoy preached vegetarianism. Petr Kropotkin, the anarchist prince, avowed “tea and bread, some milk… a thin slice of meat cooked over a spirit lamp.” And when Vera Zasulich, a venerated Marxist firebrand, was hungry, she snipped off pieces of wretchedly done meat with scissors.

True to the model, Lenin qua Lenin ate humbly. Conveniently, his wife, Krupskaya, was a lousy cook. On the famous “sealed” train headed for Petrograd’s Finland Station in 1917, Lenin made do with a sandwich and a stale bread roll. During their previous decade of European exile, the Bolshevik first couple, though not poor, dined like grad students on bread, soups, and potatoes at cheap boardinghouses and proletarian neighborhood joints. When she did cook, Krupskaya burned her stews (“roasts,” Lenin called them ironically). She even made “roast” out of oatmeal, though she could prepare eggs a dozen ways. But she needn’t have bothered: Lenin, she reported later, “pretty submissively ate everything given to him.” Apparently Lenin didn’t even mind horsemeat. Occasionally his mother would send parcels of Volga treats—caviar, smoked fish—from Simbirsk. But she died in 1916. So there were no such treats in 1918 when her son and daughter-in-law moved into the Kremlin, by the wall of which I would later brood over the endless line for the mausoleum.

Ascetic food mores à la Rakhmetov carried over, it might be said, into the new Bolshevik state’s approach to collective nutrition. Food equaled utilitarian fuel, pure and simple. The new Soviet citizen was to be liberated from fussy dining and other such distractions from his grand modernizing project.

Novy sovetsky chelovek. The New Soviet Man!

This communal socialist prototype stood at the very heart of Lenin and company’s enterprise. A radically transforming society required a radically different membership: productive, selfless, strong, unemotional, rational—ready to sacrifice all to the socialist cause. Not letting any kind of biological determinism stand in their way, the Bolsheviks held that, with proper finagling, the Russian body and mind could be reshaped and rewired. Early visions of such Rakhmetovian comrade-molding were a goony hybrid of hyper-rational science, sociology, and utopian thinking.

“Man,” enthused Trotsky (who’d read What Is to Be Done? with “ecstatic love”), “will make it his purpose to… raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness… to create a higher social biologic tongue type, or, if you please, a superman.”

A prime crucible for the new Soviet identity was byt (everyday life and its mores)—to be remade as novy byt (the new lifestyle). A deeply Russian concept, this byt business, difficult to translate. Not merely everyday life in the Western sense, it traditionally signified the metaphysical weight of the daily grind, the existentially depleting cares of material living. The Bolsheviks meant to eliminate the problem. In Marxian terms, material life determined consciousness. Consequently, novy byt—everyday life modernized, socialized, collectivized, ideologized—would serve as a critical arena and engine of man’s transformation. Indeed, the turbulent twenties marked the beginning of our state’s relentless intrusion into every aspect of the Soviet daily experience—from hygiene to housekeeping, from education to eating, from sleeping to sex. Exact ideologies and aesthetics would vary through the decades, but not the state’s meddling.

“Bolshevism has abolished private life,” wrote the cultural critic Walter Benjamin after his melancholy 1927 visit to Moscow.

The abolition started with housing. Right after October 1917, Lenin drafted a decree expropriating and partitioning single-family dwellings. And so were born our unbeloved Soviet kommunalki—communal apartments with shared kitchens and bathrooms. Under the Bolsheviks, comforting words such as house and apartment were quickly replaced by zhilploshchad’, chilling bureaucratese for “dwelling space.” The official allowance—nine square meters per person, or rather, per statistical unit—was assigned by the Housing Committee, an all-powerful institution that threw together strangers—often class enemies—into conditions far more intimate than those of nuclear families in the West. An environment engineered for totalitarian social control.

Such was the domicile near Red Square where I spent the first three years of my life. It was, I’m sad to report, not the blissful communal utopia envisaged in the hallowed pages of What Is to Be Done? Sadder still, by the seventies, the would-be socialist ubermensch had shrunk to Homo sovieticus: cynical, disillusioned, wholly fixated on kolbasa, and yes, Herzen’s petit bourgeois chicken.

Naturally, the Bolshevik reframing of byt ensnared the family stove. Despite the mammoth challenge of feeding the civil-war-ravaged country, the traditional domestic kitchen was branded as ideologically reactionary, and downright ineffectual. “When each family eats by itself,” warned a publication titled Down with the Private Kitchen, “scientifically sound nutrition is out of the question.”

State dining facilities were to be the new hearth—the public cauldron replacing the household pot, in the phrase of one Central Committee economist. Such communal catering not only allowed the state to manage scarce resources, but also turned eating into a politically engaged process. “The stolovaya [public canteen] is the forge,” declared the head of the union in charge of public dining, “where Soviet byt and society will be… created.” Communal cafeterias, agreed Lenin, were invaluable “shoots” of communism, living examples of its practice.

By 1921 thousands of Soviet citizens were dining in public. By all accounts these stolovayas were ghastly affairs—scarier even than those of my Mature Socialist childhood with their piercing reek of stewed cabbage and some Aunt Klava flailing a filthy cleaning rag under my nose as I gagged on the three-course set lunch, with its inevitable ending of desolate-brown dried fruit compote or a starchy liquid jelly called kissel.

Kissel would have appeared ambrosial back in the twenties. Workers were fed soup with rotten sauerkraut, unidentifiable meat (horse?), gluey millet, and endless vobla, the petrified dried Caspian roach fish. And yet… thanks to the didactic ambitions of novy byt, many canteens offered reading rooms, chess, and lectures on the merits of hand-washing, thorough chewing, and proletarian hygiene. A few model stolovayas even had musical accompaniment and fresh flowers on white tablecloths.

Mostly though, the New Soviet slogans and schemes brought rats, scurvy, and filth.

There were rats and scurvy inside the Kremlin as well.

Following Lenin’s self-abnegating example, the Bolshevik elite overworked and under-ate. At meetings of the Council of People’s Commissars, comrades fainted from illness and hunger. As the flames of civil war guttered, the victorious socialist state came staggering into the century’s third decade “never so exhausted, so worn out,” to quote Lenin. An overwhelming roster of crises demanded solution. War Communism and its “food dictatorship” had proved catastrophic. Grain production was down; in February of 1921, a drastic cut in food rations in Petrograd set off major strikes. At the end of that month, the sailors at Kronstadt Fortress—whose guns had helped to launch the October Revolution—rose against Bolshevik authoritarianism. The mutiny was savagely suppressed, but it reverberated all over the country. In a countryside still seething from the violent forced grain requisition, peasants revolted in every corner.

What was to be done?

Lenin’s pragmatic shock remedy was NEP—the New Economic Policy. Beginning in mid-1921, grain requisition was replaced by tax in kind. And then the bombshell: small-scale private trade was permitted alongside the state’s control of the economy’s “looming heights.” It was a radical leap backward from the Party ideal, a desperate tack to nourish frail socialism through petty capitalism. And it was done even as the utopian New Soviet Man program pushed ahead in contradictory, competitive parallel.

Such were the Soviet twenties.

Despite the policy turnabout, famine struck southeastern Russia in late 1921. Five million people were dead before the horrors subsided the next year. But between this famine and the one that would follow under Stalin, the NEP’s seven years lit up a frenzied, carnal entr’acte, a Russian version of Germany’s sulfurous Weimar. Conveniently, the nepachi (NEPmen) made a perfect ideological enemy for the ascetic Bolsheviks. Instantly—and enduringly—they were demonized as fat, homegrown bourgeois bandits, feasting on weakened, virtuous socialist flesh.

And yet for all its bad rap, NEP helped tremendously. A reviving peasant economy began feeding the cities; in 1923 practically all Russia’s bread was supplied by private sources. Petrograd papers were gleefully reporting oranges—oranges!—to be had around town.

For a few years the country more or less ate.

Images of gluttonous conmen aside, most NEP businesses were no more than market stands or carts. This was the era of pop-up soup counters, blini stalls, and lemonade hawkers. Also of canteens run out of citizens’ homes—especially Jewish homes, according to Russia’s top culinary historian, William Pokhlebkin.

Checking in on Mom and her twenties research, I find her immersed in reconstructing the menu of one such canteen. It’s in NEP-era Odessa as she imagines it, half a decade before she was born.

The focus of my mother’s imagining is one sprawling room in Odessa’s smokestack factory neighborhood of Peresyp. Owner? Her maternal grandmother, Maria Brokhvis, the best cook in all of Peresyp. To make ends meet, Maria offers a public table. And there’s a regular customer, dining right now. Barely in his twenties, with dark hair already starting to recede but with lively, ironic eyes and dazzling white teeth that make him a natural with the ladies. Often he comes here straight from work in his suave blue naval uniform. He’s new to Odessa, to his posting in the Black Sea naval intelligence. Naum Solomonovich Frumkin is his name, and he will be my mother’s father.

Naum pays lavish attention to Maria Brokhvis’s chopped herring and prodigious stuffed chicken. But his eye is really for Liza, the second of Maria and Yankel Brokhvis’s three daughters. There she is in the corner, an architectural student running gray, serious eyes over her drafting board. Ash blond, petite and athletic, with a finely shaped nose, Liza has no time for Naum. He suggests a stroll along the seaside cliffs, hints at his feelings. Not interested.

But how could she ever say nyet to tickets to Odessa’s celebrated, glorious opera house? Like everyone in town, Liza is crazy for opera, and tonight it’s Rigoletto—her favorite.

Naum proposes right after Rigoletto. And is turned down flat. She must finish her studies, Liza informs him indignantly. Enough with his “amorous nonsense”!

So Naum, the crafty intelligence officer, turns his focus to the parents at whose table he dines. How could Maria and Yankel refuse such a fine young New Soviet Man for their pretty komsomolochka (Communist youth)?

How indeed?

Naum and Liza would be happily married for sixty-one years. Their first daughter, Larisa, was born in Odessa in 1934.

“So you see,” Mom says grandly, “I owe my birth to NEP’s petty capitalism!”

The enduring union of my grandparents, on the other hand, owed nothing to cooking. Like Lenin’s Krupskaya, Grandma Liza had scant passion for her stove; and just like Dedushka Lenin, my grandpa Naum submissively ate whatever was on his plate. Occasionally, Liza would make fish meatballs from frozen cod, awkwardly invoking her mother Maria’s real Jewish gefilte fish. She even made noises to us about someday making the actual stuff—but she never did. In our “anti-Zionist” State of the seventies, gefilte fish was an unpatriotic commodity. And Babushka Liza was the wife of a longtime Communist intelligence chief.

But I did encounter real gefilte fish as a kid—in Odessa, in fact, the city of my grandparents’ Bolshevik-NEP courtship more than forty years before. And it shook my young self, I recall again now, with the meaning of our Soviet Jewishness. A Jewishness so drastically redefined for my mother’s and my generations by the fervent Bolshevik identity policies forged in the 1920s.

That first taste of gefilte fish in Odessa still torments me, here across the years in Queens.

“Ah, Odessa, the pearl by the sea,” goes the song. Brought into being by Catherine the Great, this rollicking polyglot port on the Black Sea was by the nineteenth century one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe; its streets remain a riot of French and Italian Empire–style architecture, full of fantastical flourishes.

Ah, the Odessa of my young Augusts! The barbaric southern sun withered the chestnut trees. The packed tram to Langeron Beach smelled thickly of overheated socialist flesh, crayfish bait, and boiled eggs, that sine qua non of Soviet beach picnics. We stayed with Tamara, Grandma Liza’s deaf, retired older sister, formerly an important local judge. Tamara’s daughter, Dina, had a round doll’s face perched on a hippo’s body; she worked as an economist. Dina’s son, Senka, had no neck and no manners. Dina’s husband, Arnold, the taxi driver, told jokes. Loudly—how else?

“Whatsa difference between Karl Marx and Dina?” he’d roar. “Marx was an economist, our Dina’s a senior economist! HA HA HA!!”

“Stop nauseating already into everyone’s ears!” Dina would bellow back.

This was how they talked in Odessa.

In the morning I awoke—appetiteless—to the tuk-tuk-tuk of Dina’s dull chopping knife. Other tuk-tuk-tuks echoed from neighborhood windows. Odessa women greeted the day by making sininkie, “little blue ones,” local jargon for eggplants. Then they prepared stuffed peppers, and then sheika, a whole stuffed chicken that took hours to make. Lastly they fried—fried everything in sight. Odessa food seemed different from our Moscow fare: greasier, fishier, with enough garlic to stun a tramful of vampires. But it didn’t seem particularly Jewish to me; after all, black bread and salo (pork fatback) was Judge Tamara’s favorite sandwich.

Then one day I was dispatched on an errand to the house of some distant relations in the ramshackle Jewish neighborhood of Moldovanka. They lived in an airless room crowded with objects and odors and dust of many generations. In the kitchen I was greeted by three garrulous women with clunky gold earrings and fire-engine-red hair. Two were named Tamara just like my great-aunt; the third was Dora. The Tamaras were whacking a monstrous pike against the table—“to loosen its skin so it comes off like a stocking.” They paused to smother me with noisy, blustery kisses, to ply me with buttermilk, vanilla wafers, and honeycake. Then I was instructed to sit and watch “true Jewish food” being prepared.

One Tamara filleted the fish; the other chopped the flesh with a flat-bladed knife, complaining about her withered arm. Dora grated onions, theatrically wiping away tears. Reduced to a coarse oily paste and blended with onion, carrots, and bread, the fish was stuffed back into the skin and sewn up with thick twine as red as the cooks’ hair.

It would boil now for three whole hours. Of course I must stay! Could I grate horseradish? Did I know the meaning of Shabbos? What, I hadn’t heard of the pogroms? More wafers, buttermilk?

Suffocating from fish fumes, August heat, and the onslaught of entreaties and questions, I mumbled some excuse and ran out, gasping for air. I’m sure the ladies were hurt, mystified. For some time afterward, with a mixture of curiosity and alienation, I kept wondering about the taste of that fish. Then, back in Moscow, it dawned on me:

On that August day in Odessa, I had run away from my Jewishness.

I suppose you can’t blame a late-Soviet big-city kid for fleeing the primal shock of gefilte fish. As thoroughly gentrified Moscow Jews, we didn’t know from seders or matzo balls. Jewishness was simply the loaded pyaty punkt (Entry 5) in the Soviet internal passport. Mandated in 1932, two years before my mother was born, Entry 5 stated your ethnicity: “Russian, Uzbek, Tatar… Jew.” Especially when coupled with an undesirable surname, “Jew” was the equivalent of a yellow star in the toxic atmosphere of the Brezhnev era. Yes, we were intensely aware of our difference as Jews—and ignorant of the religious and cultural back-story. Of course we ate pork fat. We loved it.

The sense that I’d fled my Jewishness in Odessa added painful new pressure to the dilemma I would face at sixteen. That’s when each Soviet citizen first got an internal passport—the single most crucial identity document. As a child of mixed ethnicities—Jewish mom, Russian dad—I’d be allowed to select either for Entry 5. This choice-to-come weighed like a stone on my nine-year-old soul. Would I pick difficult honor and side with the outcasts, thereby dramatically reducing my college and job opportunities? Or would I take the easy road of being “Russian”? Our emigration rescued me from the dilemma, but the unmade choice haunts me to this day. What would I have done?

In the early 1920s, hundreds of thousands of Jews made their own choice—without anguish they renounced Judaism for Bolshevism.

One such Jewish convert was Mom’s Grandpa Yankel. He too became a New Soviet Man, albeit a short, potbellied, docile one. But he was a fanatical proletarian nevertheless, a blacksmith who under Stalin would become a decorated Hero of Socialist Labor.

Yankel came to Odessa in the early 1900s from a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement—the zone where since 1772 the Russian Empire’s Jews had been confined. Though within the Pale, the port of Odessa was a thriving melting pot of Greeks, Italians, Ukrainians, and Russians as well as Jews. Here Yankel married Maria, began to flourish. And then in 1905, he returned from the disastrous Russo-Japanese War to something unspeakable. Over four October days, street mobs killed and mutilated hundreds in an orgy of anti-Jewish atrocities. Yankel and Maria’s firstborn, a baby boy, was murdered in front of them.

The civil war revived the pogrom of 1905 with anti-Semitic marauding by counterrevolutionary Whites. The Red Army—commanded by one Lev Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky—vehemently denounced the violence. Jews flocked to the Reds. Too old for combat now, Yankel cheered from the sidelines.

At first the revolution was good to the Jews. The official birth of the USSR in 1922 brought them rights and opportunities unprecedented in Russia’s history. Anti-Semitism became a state crime; the Pale was dismantled. Jews could rise through the bureaucratic and cultural ranks. At the start of the decade Jews made up one fifth of the Party’s Central Committee.

But there was a catch.

Like the Russian Empire before it, the Soviet Union was vast and dizzyingly multiethnic. For the Bolsheviks the ethnic or “nationalities” issue was fraught. In Marxist terms, nationalism was reactionary. Yet not only did ethnic minorities exist, but their oppression under the czar made them ripe for the socialist cause. So Lenin, along with the early Bolshevik nationalities commissar, Stalin, an ethnic Georgian, contrived a policy of linguistic, cultural, and territorial autonomy for ethnic minorities—in a Soviet format—until international socialism came about and nationalities became superfluous.

The USSR, in the words of the historian Terry Martin, became the world’s first affirmative-action empire.

The catch for Jews? Jewishness was now defined in strictly ethno-national terms. The Talmud had no place in building the Radiant Future. Reforming and modernizing the so-called “Jewish Street” fell to the Yevsektsii, the Jewish sections of the Communist Party. They worked savvily. Religious rituals were initially semitolerated—in Sovietized form. Passover? Well, if you must. Except the Soviet Haggadah substituted the words “October Revolution” for “God.”

In 1920s Odessa, the Soviet supporters Yankel and Maria Brokhvis continued to light candles on Shabbos at their one-room flat in Peresyp—but without mentioning God. Maria saw no wrong in gathering their three daughters around Friday table; she was a proud Jew. As the terrible times of the 1921 famine gave way to NEP’s relative bounty, she shopped every week at Odessa’s boisterous Privoz market for the pike for her famous gefilte fish. It was her second daughter Liza’s favorite. Maria made challah bread too, and forshmak (chopped herring), and bean tzimmes, and crumbly pastries filled with the black prune jam she cooked over a primus stove in the courtyard.

Then one Friday Liza returned from school and sat at the Shabbos table staring down at the floor, lips pursed, not touching a thing. She was fourteen years old and had just joined the Komsomol, the youth division of the Communist Party. After dinner she rose and declared: “Mother, your fish is vile religious food. I will never eat it again!”

And that was it for the Brokhvis family’s Friday gefilte fish. Deep in her heart, Maria understood that the New Soviet Generation knew better.

I had no idea about any of this. Not the baby dead in the pogrom, not Grandma Liza’s ban on Maria’s religious food. Only when Mom and I were in her kitchen making our gefilte tribute to Maria did I find out.

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.

So imagine Alla’s surprise when in the mail arrived a death certificate; the photo of her grandmother, the only one that remains, taken in the gulag; and a money order for a whopping ten thousand rubles, most likely Anna Alexeevna’s hoardings from performing black market abortions in the prison camps.

Alla and Sergei burned through the inheritance at Moscow’s best restaurants. Alla favored the soaring dining room at the Moskva Hotel, fancying it for its green malachite columns and famously tender lamb riblets—and not, incidentally, because the mustachioed maestro of the gulags had liked to celebrate his birthdays there. Dad spent his gulag money at Aragvi, the Georgian hot spot on Gorky Street, again not because it was a favorite of Stalin’s last chief of secret police, Lavrenty Beria. It was just that the iron rings of Soviet life overlapped with all others.

With the rest of Anna Alexeevna’s rubles Alla bought a pair of suits for Sergei, which he wore for two decades. Also two blankets under which I slept when I stayed at Alla’s kommunalka near the mausoleum as a kid. They were wondrous blankets, one green, the other blue: feather-light and exquisitely silky-soft.

And there it was: two Chinese silk coverlets, two fancy suits, and a dish of Uzbek lamb—the only legacy of a Bolshevik feminist with her round, high-cheekboned Slavic face, a fierce crusader for women’s rights in the early days who helped in the assault, so dramatic, so ill-conceived, against the horsehair veil. And then disappeared.

The radical Bolshevik identity policies expanded rights for women, for Jews, for even the most obscure ethnic minorities, be they Buryat, Chuvash, or Karakalpak.

But one category of the disempowered got pushed off into the shadows of the Radiant Future, treated as an incorrigible menace. They happened to be 80 percent of the population, the ones feeding Russia. The peasants.

The “half-savage, stupid, ponderous people of the Russian villages,” as Maxim Gorky, village-born himself, called them in 1920.

“Avaricious, bloated, and bestial,” as Lenin termed them—specifically the kulaks, whose proportion was small, but whose name made an easily spread ideological tar.

The NEP offered a temporary lull in the ongoing conflict between town and country, but by the end of 1927, a full-blown grain crisis erupted once more.

Cue the cunning Georgian: Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.

Stalin, as he was known (his Bolshevik pseudonym derived from “steel”), had since 1922 been the Party’s general secretary—a supposedly inconsequential post by which he’d maneuvered to be Lenin’s successor. (Trotsky, his chief rival, thought him slow-witted. It was brilliant, arrogant Trotsky, however, who was banished in 1929, and who had an ice ax driven into his skull in 1940.)

The 1927 grain crisis arose partly from fears of war—of an attack by Britain or some other vile capitalist power—that seized the country that year. Panic hoarding flared; peasants shied from selling grain to the state at low prices. Raising these prices might well have solved things. Instead, crying sabotage, the government turned again to repression and violence. On a notorious 1928 trip to Siberia, Stalin personally supervised coercive requisitioning. As his henchman Molotov later explained: “To survive, the State needed grain. Otherwise it would crack up. So we pumped away.”

The NEP market approach was effectively dead. About to replace it was Stalin’s final solution to the “peasant problem”—the problem of a reliable supply of cheap grain.

In 1929 the Soviet Union wrenched into Veliky Perelom (The Great Turn). As embodied in the first Five-Year Plan, this fantastically, fanatically ambitious project aimed to industrialize the country full throttle—at the expense of everything else. Long-backward Russia was to be transformed into “a country of metal, an automobilizing country, a tractorized country,” in Stalin’s booming phrases. Rationing reappeared, privileging industrial workers and leaving poorer peasants to fend for themselves.

The first thing to be rationed was bread. “The struggle for bread,” growled Stalin, with an echo of Lenin, “is the struggle for socialism.” Meaning the Soviet State would brook no more trouble from its 80 percent.

The furies of collectivization and “dekulakization” were unleashed now on the countryside. Up to ten million kulaks (that toxically elastic term) were thrown off their land, either killed or shipped to prison-labor settlements known after 1930 as the gulags, where great numbers died. The rest of the peasant households were forced onto kolkhozes (giant collective farms overseen by the state), from which the industrial engine could be dependably fed (or at least that was the idea). Peasants resisted this “second serfdom” by force, destroying their livestock on a catastrophic scale. By 1931 more than twelve million peasants had fled to the towns. In 1933 the country’s breadbasket, the fertile Ukraine, would plunge into man-made famine—one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century. Roads were blocked, peasants forbidden to leave, reports of the ongoing devastation suppressed. A dead peasant mother’s dribble of milk on her emaciated infant’s lips had a name: “the buds of the socialist spring.” Out of the estimated seven million who died in the Soviet famine, some three million perished in the Ukraine.

From these horrors Soviet agriculture would never recover.

By this point Lenin had been dead for almost ten years.

Dead—but not buried.

Following his long, mysterious illness (the “syphilis” whispers of many decades have lately reintrigued historians) Lenin expired in effective isolation on January 21, 1924. Stalin, a seminarian in his youth, understood the power of relics and was one of the early proponents of keeping the cadaver “alive.” At a 1923 Politburo session he’d already proposed that “contemporary science” offered a possibility of preserving the body, at least temporarily. Some Bolsheviks howled at the reek of deification. Krupskaya objected too, but nobody asked her.

From January 27 on, Lenin’s body lay in state at the unheated Hall of Columns in Moscow. The weather was so bitter that the palm trees laid on inside for the funeral froze. An icy fog hung over Red Square; mourners were treated for frostbite. But the cold helped preserve the “mournee” for a while.

The idea to replace the temporary embalmment with something eternal apparently arose spontaneously among the Funeral Commission—swiftly renamed the Immortalization Commission. Refrigeration was being mulled over, but as the weather warmed the body deteriorated, and the Commission panicked. Enter Boris Zbarsky, a self-promoting biochemist, and Vladimir Vorobyev, a gifted provincial pathologist. The pair proposed a radical embalming method. Miraculously, their wild gambit worked. Even a reluctant Krupskaya later told Zbarsky: “I’m getting older and he looks just the same.”

So the USSR had a New Soviet Eternal Man. Proof in the flesh that Soviet science could defeat even the grave. Socialist reshaping of humanity, it seemed, had soared beyond wildest imagining—far beyond a new everyday life. The antireligious Bolshevik of Bolsheviks, who had ordered clergy murdered and churches destroyed, was now a living relic, immortal in the manner of Orthodox saints.

From August 1924 on, the miraculous Object No. 1 (as it would later be code-named) preened for Red Square crowds inside a temporary wooden shrine created by the Constructivist architect Alexei Shchusev. Shchusev would go on to build the permanent mausoleum, the now iconic ziggurat of red, gray, and black stone the inner sanctum of which I was so desperate to penetrate as a child. The mavzoley was unveiled in 1930, but without particular fanfare. By then the USSR had a successor-God, one who was relegating Lenin to hazy Holy Spirit status.

Lenin, incidentally, transmigrated from this distant, idealized Spirithood into warm and fuzzy dedushka-hood during the Brezhnevian phase of his cult. That’s when the didactic cake stories became popular, along with that silly iconographic cap on his bald head—asserting Ilyich’s modest, friendly, proletarian nature.

The country would by then be wary of God-like personality cults.