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

_{CHAPTER THREE} 1930s: THANK YOU, COMRADE STALIN, FOR OUR HAPPY CHILDHOOD

Like most Soviet kids of her time, my mother was raised on stories by Arkady Gaidar. Gaidar’s tales are suffused with a patriotic romanticism that doesn’t ring insincere even today. They fairly brim with positive characters—characters who know that the true meaning of happiness is “to live honestly, toil hard, and deeply love and protect that vast fortunate land called The Soviet Country.” Mom was particularly struck by a story titled “The Blue Cup.” After overcoming a spell of conflict, a young family sits under a tree ripe with cherries on a late-summer night (spring and summer, one ironic critic remarked, being the only two seasons permissible in socialist realism). A golden moon glows overhead. A train rumbles past in the distance. The main character sums things up, closing the story: “And life, comrades, was good… entirely good.”

This phrase filled my five-year-old mother with alienation and dread.

To this day she can’t really explain why. Her parents, youthful, striving, and faithful to the State, exemplified Gaidarian virtues and the Stalinist vision of glamour. Liza, her mother, was a champion gymnast, an architect, and a painter of sweet watercolors. Naum, her father, possessed a radiant smile and a high, honest forehead to go along with his spiffy naval caps, which smelled of the foreign cologne he brought back from frequent trips abroad. If Mom and her younger sister, Yulia, were good, Naum would let them pin his shiny badges on their dresses and dance in front of the mirror. On his rare days off he’d take them to the Park of Culture and Relaxation named after Gorky.

Mother had a second father, of course. Like her kindergarten classmates, she began each school day gazing up at a special poster and thanking him for her joyous, glorious childhood. On the poster the youthfully middle-aged Genius of Humanity and Best Friend of All Children was smiling under the black wings of his mustaches. In his arms a beautiful little girl also smiled. With her dark hair cut in a bowl shape, the girl reminded Mom of herself, only with Asiatic features. She was the legendary Gelya (short for Engelsina, from Friedrich Engels) Markizova. Daughter of a commissar from the Buryat-Mongol region, she came to the Kremlin with a delegation and handed a bouquet of flowers to the Supreme Leader, whereupon he lifted her in his arms, warming her with his amused, benevolent gaze. Cameras flashed. After appearing on the front page of Izvestia, the photograph became one of the decade’s iconic images. It was reproduced on millions of posters, in paintings and sculptures. Gelya was the living embodiment of every Soviet child’s dream.

Comrade Stalin kept a watchful eye over Mom and her family, she was sure of that. And yet a pall hung over her. Life, she suspected, was not “entirely good.” In place of big bright Soviet happiness, my mother’s heart often filled with toska, a word for which there is no English equivalent. “At its deepest and most painful,” explains Vladimir Nabokov, “toska is a sensation of great spiritual anguish…. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul.”

When Mom heard cheerful choruses on the radio, she imagined squalid people singing drunkenly around a putrid-smelling barrel of pickles. Sometimes she’d refuse to go out into the street, frightened of the black public loudspeakers broadcasting the glories of the Five-Year Plan. Many things about Moscow made her feel scared and small. At the Revolution Square station of the new metro, she ran as quickly as she could past bronze statues of athletic figures with rifles and pneumatic drills. No use. Night after night she was haunted by nightmares of these statues coming alive and tossing her mother into a blazing furnace, like the one in the mural at the Komsomolskaya station.

Perhaps she had such dreams because the parents of other children were disappearing.

There were many things my mother didn’t know, couldn’t have known, at the time. She didn’t know that Arkady Gaidar, beloved writer for the young, had brutally murdered civilians, including women and children, as a Red commander during the civil war. She didn’t know that one year after that bouquet at the Kremlin, Gelya Markizova’s father was accused of a plot against Stalin and executed—just one of an estimated twelve to twenty million victims of Stalin. Gelya’s mother perished as well. The poster child for a happy Stalinist childhood was deported and raised in an orphanage.

Darkness. The unyielding blackness of Arctic winter in Murmansk is my mother’s earliest memory. She was born in sunny Odessa, a barely alive five-pound preemie bundled in wads of coarse cotton. Her father was then sent to Russia’s extreme northwest to head the intelligence unit of the newly formed Northern Flotilla. The year was the relatively benign 1934. The harvest was decent. Collectivization’s famines and horrors were slowly subsiding. Ration cards were being phased out, first for bread and sugar, then meat.

Myska—childspeak for “little mouse”—was Mother’s very first word, because mice scurried along the exposed wires above her bed in the tiny room she shared with her sister and parents. Thinking back on those days, Mother imagines herself as a mouse, burrowing through some dark, sinister tunnel of early consciousness. She remembers the thunderous crunch of Murmansk’s snow under their horse-drawn sled, the salty taste of blood in her mouth after the icicles she liked to lick stuck to her tongue.

Leningrad, where Naum was transferred in 1937, was a thousand kilometers south but still on the chill sixtieth degree of north latitude. Its darkness was different, though. Russia’s former imperial capital suggested various conjugations of gray: the steely reflection off the Neva River, with its somber granite embankments; the dull aluminum of the grease-filmed kasha bowls at Mother’s nursery school. In place of mice there were rats—the reason Uncle Vasya, their communal apartment neighbor, was missing half his nose. Too bad Mom’s name rhymed with krysa (rat). “Larisa-krysa, Larisa-krysa,” children taunted her in the courtyard. Liza occasionally took the girls to see museums and palaces in the center of town. Their melancholy neoclassical grandeur contrasted starkly with the web of bleak alcoholic alleys near their apartment. Mother was inconsolable when a drunk trampled and ruined her brand-new galoshes, so shiny and black, so red inside.

Bleak too was the mood in the city. Three years earlier, Leningrad’s charismatic Communist boss Sergei Kirov had been shot down in the corridors of the Smolny Institute, local Party headquarters, by a disgruntled ex-Party functionary. His killing signaled the prologue to the years of paranoia, midnight knocks on the door, denunciations, witch hunts for “enemies of the people,” and mass slaughter that would come to be known as the Great Terror of 1937–38. Stalin’s suspected involvement in Kirov’s murder has never been proved. But the Friend of All Children was quick to seize the moment. After planting a sorrowful kiss on Kirov’s brow at his operatic show funeral, Stalin unleashed an opening paroxysm of violence against his own political enemies. The show trials would follow. The charge of conspiracy to kill Kirov was used until 1938; it offered one of the key justifications of terror among the grab bag of crimes against the Soviet State and betrayals thereof. Thousands were arrested without cause and shipped to the gulags or killed. Moscow staged the most notorious trials (including the trial of Zelensky, my great-great-grandmother Anna Alexeevna’s boss), but Leningrad’s suffering was possibly deeper still. By 1937 the former capital had been ravaged by deportations and executions. It was Stalin’s vendetta against the city he hated, the locals whispered. Indeed, after Kirov’s coffin left Leningrad for Moscow, the Great Leader never set foot by the Neva again.

I look at a picture of my mother from that time. She has an upturned nose, a bob of black hair, wary, defiant eyes. She’s laughing, but in her laughter there seems to lurk a shadow. In constructing the narrative of her childhood, Mother likes to portray herself as Dissident-Born, a young prodigy of distress, instinctively at odds with the land of happy children of Stalin. A thousand times I’ve heard her tales of constantly running away from summer camps and health sanatoria. Of how she finally escaped to America as an adult and at last stopped running.

But to when and what, exactly, does she trace the origins of her childhood toska? I’ve always wanted to know. And now I learn about one particular wintry day.

It’s still pitch-black outside when Liza yanks Larisa from her blanket cocoon. “Hurry hurry, we have to get there by six for the start,” she urges, blowing furiously on Mom’s farina to cool it. On the sled ride wet snow cakes Mother’s face; the tubercular Baltic chill pierces right through her limbs still heavy with slumber. Despite the early hour she hears marching songs in the distance, sees people hurrying somewhere. Why is this? Her stomach tightens with alarm and foreboding. A sick worm of fear comes alive; it keeps gnawing at her intestines as she finally reaches a thronged hall inside a building decked out with life-size posters of Great Comrade Stalin. Her parents push through the crowds toward officials bellowing greetings on loudspeakers behind a long table covered with kumach, the crimson calico of the Soviet flag. The march music turns deafening. Her parents fill out some papers and momentarily she loses them in the commotion. “They’re voting!” a woman in the crowd cries, handing Mom a red baby-size flag—on this day, December 12, 1937. Voting. It’s a new word. It stems from golos, or “voice.” Could her parents be screaming for her? She starts to scream too, but her shrieks are drowned out by song.

“Shiroka strana moya rodnaya” (“O vast is my country!”), the people are singing. “There’s no other country where a man breathes more freely.” Swept up in the collective elation, Mom inhales as deep as she can, filling her lungs with what she will always describe as “that smell”—the Soviet institutional odor of dusty folders, karbolka cleaner, woolen coats, and feet stewing in rubber galoshes, which will haunt her all her adult life in the USSR, at offices, schools, political meetings, at work. Her parents find her at last. They are beaming with pride, laugh at her anguish.

By evening Mom is happy again. On the family’s afternoon stroll, Leningrad’s vast squares look dazzling, decked out in red slogans and posters. Tiny lights outline the buildings in the early dusk. And now on their way to Uncle Dima’s house Naum is promising that they will see the salut from his balcony. What’s salut? Why on the balcony? “Just wait, you’ll see!” says Naum.

Mom’s excited to be visiting Uncle Dima Babkin. He isn’t really her uncle; he’s her dad’s tall, bald naval boss. In his high-ceilinged apartment, he has a rosy-cheeked baby and twin girls a little older than Mom, and, always, a never-ending supply of sugary podushechki candies. When they arrive, the family is celebrating full-throttle. Bottles burst open with a loud popping of corks; toasts are drunk to Russia’s historic election and to the arrival of Uncle Dima’s elderly father from Moscow. “Vast is my country,” sing the children, dancing around the baby’s crib, which Uncle Dima’s wife has filled with sweet raisin rusks. Any minute Aunt Rita, Dima’s sister, will arrive with her famous cake called Napoleon.

Uncle Dima’s whole building is, in fact, celebrating Election Day; neighbors stream in and out, borrowing chairs, carrying treats.

“Aunt Rita? Napoleon?” scream the children constantly darting up to the door.

There is a short, harsh buzz of the doorbell—but instead of cake Mom sees three men in long coats by the entrance. How come they don’t bring tangerines or pirozhki, she wonders? Why haven’t they shaken the snow off their felt valenki boots before entering—as every polite Russian must do?

“We’re looking for Babkin!” barks one of the men.

“Which Babkin?” Uncle Dima’s wife asks with an uncertain smile. “Father or son?”

The men look confused for a moment. “Well… both—sure, why not?” they say, and they shrug. “Both.” They almost giggle.

The silence that follows, and the smile that’s turned strangely petrified on Uncle Dima’s wife’s face, reawakens the worm in Mom’s stomach. As if in slow motion, she watches Uncle Dima and his old father go off with the men. To her relief, the family’s babushka orders the children onto the balcony to see the salut. Outside, the black night erupts in glitter. Fiery thrills shoot through Mom’s body with each new soaring, thundering explosion of fireworks. Green! Red! Blue!—blooming in the sky like giant, sparkling, jubilant bouquets. But when she goes back inside she is startled to see Uncle Dima’s wife splayed out on the couch, panting. And the house is filled with the sweet-rotten odor of valerian drops. And silence—that dead, scary silence.

Arrests to the popping of corks, horror in the next room from happiness, fear emblazoned with fireworks and pageantry—this was the split reality, the collective schizophrenia of the 1930s. Venom-spitting news accounts of the show trials of “fascist dogs of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite gang” ran beside editorials gushing over crepe de chine dresses at “model department stores” and the “blizzards of confetti” at park carnivals.

People sang. Sometimes they sang on their way to the firing squad, chanting “O Vast Is My Country,” a tune used as a station signal for Radio Moscow even during my youth. Featured in Circus, a Hollywood-style musical comedy, “O Vast Is My Country” was composed to celebrate Stalin’s new 1936 constitution, heralded as “the world’s most democratic.” On paper it even restored voting rights to the formerly disenfranchised classes (kulaks, children of priests). Except now arrests were not so much class-based as guided by regional quotas affecting every stratum of the society.

Chronicles of Stalin’s terror have naturally shaped the narrative of the era. They dominate so completely, one can forgive Westerners for imagining the Soviet thirties as one vast gray prison camp, its numbed inhabitants cogs in the machinery of the State that promoted itself solely through murder, torture, and denunciation. This vision, however, doesn’t convey the totalizing scope of the Stalinist civilization. A hypnotic popular culture, the State’s buoyant consumer goods drive, and a never-ending barrage of public celebrations—all stoked a mesmerizing sense of building a Radiant Future en masse.

Those who didn’t perish or disappear into the gulags were often swallowed up in the spectacle of totalitarian joy. Milan Kundera describes it as “collective lyrical delirium.” Visiting Russia in 1936, André Gide couldn’t stop marveling at the children he saw, “radiant with health and happiness,” and the “joyous ardor” of park-goers.

When I think of the Stalinist State, which I knew only as a banished ghost, these are the images that come to my mind: Nadezhda Mandelstam’s description of her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, being led away to the sounds of a Hawaiian guitar in a neighbor’s apartment. Anna Akhmatova’s unbearably tragic poem “Requiem” (dedicated to the victims of purges) juxtaposed with the indomitable cheer of Volga-Volga, an infectiously kitsch celluloid musical comedy of the time. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of the voronki (black Mariahs), prison transports disguised as brightly painted comestibles trucks, their sides eventually featuring ads for Sovetskoye brand champagne with a laughing girl.

The frenzy of industrialization of the first Five-Year Plan (1928–32) had bulldozed and gang-marched a rural society into something resembling modernity—even as officials suppressed details of the millions of deaths from famines brought on by collectivization. In 1931, more than four million peasant refugees flooded the overwhelmed cities. The state needed something to show for all the upheavals. And so in 1935 Stalin uttered one of his most famous pronouncements.

“Life has gotten better, comrades, life has gotten more cheerful,” he declared at the first conference of Stakhanovites, those celebrated over-fulfillers of socialist labor quotas, whose new movement emulated the uberminer Alexei Stakhanov, famed for hewing 102 tons of coal in one workshift. “And when life is happier, work is more effective,” Stalin added.

After the speech, reported one participant, the Leader of Progressive Mankind joined all in a song from the wildly popular screen farce Jolly Fellows, released weeks after Kirov’s murder. The Genius of Humanity liked music, and occasionally even edited song lyrics himself. He had personally instigated Soviet movie musical comedy by expounding to director Grigory Alexandrov—former assistant to Sergei Eisenstein in Hollywood—on the need for fun and cheer in the arts. The melodies and mirth that exploded onto Soviet screens in the late thirties were the socialist realist answer to Hollywood’s dream factory. Instead of Astaire and Rogers, dashing shepherds burst into song and gutsy girl weavers achieved fairy-tale Stakhanovite apotheoses. “Better than a month’s vacation,” pronounced Stalin after seeing Jolly Fellows, which was Alexandrov’s jazzy, madcap debut. The Leader saw the director’s 1938 musical Volga-Volga more than a hundred times. Never mind that the main cameraman had been arrested during filming and executed, and the screenwriter had written the lines in exile.

Quoted on posters and in the press and, of course, set to music, Stalin’s “life is happier” mantra established the tonality for the second half of the decade. It was more than just talk. In a fairly drastic redrawing of Bolshevik values, the State ditched the utopian asceticism of the twenties and encouraged a communist version of bourgeois life. The Radiant Future was arriving, citizens were told. Material rewards—offered for outstanding productivity and political loyalty—were the palpable proof. Promises of prosperity and abundance invaded public discourse so thoroughly, they shimmered like magical incantations in the collective psyche. Stakhanovite superworkers boasted in the pages of Pravda and Izvestia about how many rubles they earned. They stood beaming beside their new furniture sets and gramophones—rewards for “joyous socialist labor.” Anything capitalism could do for hardworking folk, went the message, socialism could do better—and happier.

The masses even got to pop a cork on occasion. Scant years after the paroxysms of the first Five-Year Plan, Stalin turned his thoughts to reviving Russia’s fledgling, pre-revolutionary champagne industry, centered by the Black Sea near the Crimea. Sovetskoye Shampanskoye became a frothy emblem of Stalin’s directive, in his words “an important sign… of the good life.” Garbo’s Ninotchka may have cooed about only knowing bubbly from newsreels. But by the thirties’ end Soviet fizzy, mass-produced in pressurized reservoir vats, would be embraced by the Soviet common man. It could even be found on tap in stores.

Alongside abundance and prosperity, the third pillar of Stalin’s new cultural edifice was kulturnost’ (culturedness). Hence, Soviet citizens—many of them formerly illiterate—were exhorted to civilize themselves. From table manners to tangos, from perfume to Pushkin, from tasseled lampshades to Swan Lake, the activities and mores reviled by the earlier Bolsheviks as bourgeois contamination were embraced as part of the new Homo sovieticus. If a member of the nomenklatura (Communist political elite) showed up at a meeting in his trophy silk pajamas and carrying a chocolate bar, it just went to show that socialism was doing swell. The teetotaler Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet premier, took tango lessons. His imperious wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, delivered perfume to the masses in her role as chairman of the cosmetics trust. The food supply commissariat established and codified a Soviet cuisine canon.

Russia’s annus horribilus of 1937, which closed with the carnival-esque December election festivities, was launched with a lavish New Year’s Day yolka (fir tree) party for kids at the Kremlin. The tubby comedian Mikhail Garkavi played Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost), the Russian answer to Santa. Banned by the Bolsheviks for ten years as religious obscurantism, New Year’s fetes—and fir trees—had just returned from the political cold with the Great Leader’s approval, at the initiative of one Pavel Postyshev. This man whom Soviet children could thank for their new winter gaiety was also one of the chief engineers of the Ukrainian famine; he himself would be shot a year later. Still wearing his long, flowing Ded Moroz robe and white beard, Garkavi appeared later that New Year’s Day at a Stakhanovite ball attended by Stalin. “All are strictly cautioned to leave their sadness outside,” joshed a placard inside the ballroom. Garkavi popped a cork of Sovetskoye Shampanskoye. The tradition is still going strong to this day, even if the brand is being eclipsed by Dom Perignon.

When Mom was five and Yulia was four they moved to Moscow. It was 1939. The country was celebrating Stalin’s sixtieth birthday, and Naum his promotion—to the “Capital of the New World,” to Headquarters.

Mom still had her bouts of toska, but life did get a bit better in Moscow. A little jollier, you could say.

For one thing, Moscow wasn’t dark. Their ninth-floor apartment boasted an airy panorama of shingled old city roofs from the window. It was still a communal apartment, to be shared with shrill, dumpling-like Dora and her henpecked husband. But it had new plywood furniture, and it had gas—gas!—in place of their Leningrad burzhuika (bourgeois) coal-burning stove, which always ran out of fuel by morning, leaving a veil of frost on the walls.

Best of all was the building itself. Constructed the year before in the fashionable Stalinist Empire style—a bulky mash-up of deco and neoclassical—it resembled an organ, or perhaps musical staves, its vertical lines zooming up from an imposing ground-floor loggia. The musical reference was not accidental. Neither were the extra-thick walls (such a boon in this era of eavesdropping). The house was created as a co-op for the Union of Soviet Composers, with a small quota of apartments for the military. Songs poured out of the open windows the summer Mother moved in.

I always get goose bumps thinking of my five-year-old mom living among the George Gershwins and Irving Berlins of the socialist order. They were the people whose buoyant, jubilant marches I still sing in the shower. Along with generations of Russians, I’ve got them under my skin—which of course was the plan. “Mass song” was a vital tool in molding the new Soviet consciousness. Song set the romantic-heroic tone of the era. Song fused individual with kollektiv, comrade with State. It carried the spirit of sunny, victorious optimism into every choking communal apartment, glorifying labor, entrenching ideology—all in catchy tunes you couldn’t stop humming.

Mom didn’t actually share the collective zest for mass song. But there was no escaping the iron grip of Ninka, her new best chum in the building. Daughter of a Jewish symphonist and an Armenian pianist, brash and imperious Ninka had raven-black eyebrows and fingertips callused from violin lessons. She appointed herself Mom’s musical instructor.

“We’re eternally warmed… by the sun-ny Stalinist glor-y! C’mon, haven’t you memorized the words yet?” she’d demand.

“Reason gave us steel wings for arms,” she’d continue, trying another popular tune, wincing at Mom’s off-key attempts to keep up. “And a fiery motor instead of a heart.”

“People had mechanical parts in their bodies?” asked Mom.

“The song celebrates Stalin’s Falcons!”

“What are Stalin’s Falcons?”

“Our Soviet Aviators—clueless dimwit!”

In good weather Ninka conducted her tutorials on the building fire escape. “Ooh… the brothers Pokrass!” she’d swoon, pointing at two men passing below, one lanky, the other plump and short, both with big frizzy hair that sat like hats on their heads. Didn’t Mom know their song “The Three Tankmen”? From the film Tractor Drivers? Mom couldn’t admit to Ninka she hadn’t yet seen real kino. With perfect pitch (she did truly have a golden ear), Ninka chanted another “very important” Pokrass work. “Bustling! Mighty! Invincible! My country. My Moscow. You are my true beloved!” In my own childhood this was the song Mom always turned off when it played on the radio. The radio played it a lot.

Ninka’s musical bullying was tiresome. But at least now Mom could sing along at the parades Naum zealously attended whenever he returned to Moscow from his mysterious, vaguely explained absences. The parades… well, they were deafening, overwhelming. And what of all those small kids perched on their dads’ shoulders, shouting, “Look, papochka, what a scary mustache!” when they saw Comrade Stalin? Eyes stark with fear, papa would clap a big, unclean hand over his kid’s mouth. Naum never had to muzzle Larisa or Yulia. He was dashing and funny, his squarish nails were immaculate, and he had a privileged view of the Leadership’s podium from his special Red Square parade bench. “Comrade—are you Stalin’s Falcon?” Mom would ask in a small, polite voice whenever an aviator she’d recognize from newspaper photos shook Naum’s hand.

And so it went. May Day. Constitution Day. Revolution Day. Thunderous welcomes for aviators and polar explorers. Citizens marched; their children sucked sticky ruby-red Kremlin Star lollipops. Meanwhile, just outside the city, on one busy day alone in 1938, 562 “enemies of the people” were shot and dumped in trenches by the NKVD, the secret police, at its Butovo firing range. There were many thousands more. The German historian Karl Schlögel sums up the atmosphere of the times in his description of Red Square. “Everything converges: a ticker-tape parade and a plebiscite on killing, the atmosphere of a folk festival and the thirst for revenge, a rollicking carnival and orgies of hate. Red Square… at once fairground and gallows.”

I was born in Moscow. The seventies capital of my childhood seemed as familiar and comforting to me as a pair of old slippers. Mother’s anti-Soviet zeal assured I never trooped in a single parade in my life, never once peered at Lenin’s cosmeticized corpse at his Red Square mausoleum.

But often I lie awake nights imagining Mom, a tiny, reluctantly choral protagonist in the mythology of high Stalinist Moscow. The city of her childhood was engulfed in newcomers—from the upwardly mobile nomenklatura like Naum to dispossessed victims of collectivization fleeing the countryside. Pharaonic construction works boomed nonstop. Avenues became behemoths ten lanes wide, historic churches were turned to rubble, from vast pits rose socialist public magnificences. “Bustling. Mighty. Invincible.” How overwhelming the “Heart of the Socialist Homeland” must have seemed to an alienated, sad child.

Sometimes I picture Mom clutching Liza’s hand on the escalator sinking 130 feet below ground into the electrified blaze of the palatial, newly built Moscow Metro. What did Larisa make of the lofty stained glass and acres of steel and colored granite—of more marble than had been used by all the czars? Did her neck hurt from gazing up at the Mayakovskaya station’s soaring subterranean cupolas, with their mosaics of parachutists and gymnasts and Red Army planes pirouetting against baroque blue skies? Were they really so nightmarish, those eighty-two life-size bronze statues half crouching under the rhythmic arches of the Revolution Square station? Didn’t they produce in Mom the stunned awe of a medieval child at Chartres?

Looking back, ever-dissident Mom wavers about the metro, one minute gushing, the next bashing it as vile propaganda.

But about the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition she is unequivocal.

“In September 1939, at six years of age,” she says, “I saw earthly paradise!”

On a crisp autumn morning in the northern part of Moscow, young Larisa and her family strolled into Eden through monumental entry arches crowned by Vera Mukhina’s triumphant sculpture The Worker and the Kolkhoz Woman. They passed into a wide alley of dancing fountains and on toward an eighty-foot statue of Stalin. Stakhanovite growers told them tales of their achievements in the Sugarbeet Pavilion. At the marbled courtyard of the star-shaped Uzbekistan Pavilion, dark, round-faced women with myriad braids flowing from their embroidered skullcaps dispensed green tea and puffy round breads. Uzbeks, Tajiks, Tatars! Never had Mother suspected that such a riot of physiognomies and ethnic costumes existed.

Designed as a microcosm of the Soviet Empire’s glories, the Exhibition’s sprawling six hundred acres showcased exotic USSR republics and feats in practically every agricultural realm from dairy farming to rabbit breeding. The republics’ pavilions were fabulously decorated in “native” styles—“national in form, socialist in content,” as Stalin, Father of All Nations, prescribed. Inside Armenia’s pink limestone edifice Mom rushed over to a giant aquarium where mountain trout nosed and flitted. At Georgia’s Orientalist headquarters, she and Yulia brazenly grabbed at tangerines on a low branch in a subtropical garden where persimmon trees flowered and palms swayed. Soon it all became one dazzling blur. Model socialist hen eggs. Pink prizewinning pigs. Everything more beautiful, more “real” than life. The mini-fields sprouted perfect rye, wheat, and barley. Mom recalled her bullying pal Ninka’s favorite song: “We were born to turn fairy tale into reality.” A very true song, thought Mom, tonguing the chocolate shell off her Eskimo pie as they toured the mini-kolkhoz replete with a culture club and a maternity ward.

My poor dissident mother: in moments of candor she admits to this day that her vision of ideal love is walking arm in arm amid the splendiferous gardens of the Georgia Pavilion. But what inflamed her imagination the most was the food. If she closes her eyes, she claims to smell the musky striped adjui melons at the Uzbek Pavilion; taste the crunch of red Kazakh apples that were sometimes the size of those Uzbek melons—thank you, Grandpa Michurin, the Soviet miracle plant breeder whose motto was “We cannot wait for favors from Nature; our task is to take them from her.”

It was as if my mother had discovered a world beyond the universe of parades and blaring loudspeakers and institutional smells. The discovery sparked a fascination with food that has animated her all her life.

“Finish your bouillon. Have another kotleta.” Liza’s admonitions now sounded inviting, caressing. They whispered to Mom of a different, far more intimate happiness than Comrade Stalin’s collective ideals. And when Naum was at the table, life seemed particularly cheerful. With him there, Liza reached with special abandon into the box hung outside their window—Stalin-era refrigeration—for their nomenklatura food parcels wrapped in blue paper.

Out came a rosy bologna called Doctor’s Kolbasa. Or sosiski, Mom’s favorite frankfurters. Boiled taut, they squirted salty juice into your mouth when you bit into them, and they tasted particularly good with sweet gray-green peas from a can. Stores didn’t usually carry those cans. For them Mom and Liza had to trudge to an unmarked depot guarded by an unsmiling man. Naum was “attached” to such a depot store—as were many Moscow bigwigs. The babushka working the lift, on the other hand, wasn’t attached. Mom could tell this from her sad lunch of rotten-smelling boiled eggs sprinkled with salt she kept in little foldings of Pravda.

When visitors came, Liza made fish suspended in glistening aspic and canapes with frilly mayonnaise borders. The guests—men in dressy naval suits, women with bright red lips—brought with them the crisp fall air and candies with names like Happy Childhood and Soviet North Pole. A momentous event was the gift of a dinner service with golden borders around tiny pink flowers, replacing their mismatched chipped plates and cups. The same high-ranking naval officer who brought the service gave Liza a book.

The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food was hefty, with a somber parsley-green cover. Opening it, Mom gasped at the trove of fantastical photos… of tables crowded with silver and crystal, of platters of beef decorated with tomato rosettes, of boxes of chocolates and wedges of frilly cake posed amid elaborate tea sets. The images roused the same euphoria Mom had felt at the agricultural exhibition. They conjured up skatert’ samobranka, an enchanted tablecloth from a Russian folk fairy tale that covered itself with food at the snap of a finger. Mom thought again about Ninka’s song. Liza could even turn this fairy tale into reality, it seemed. She said the book contained recipes, and the dinner sets pictured were identical to the new one they’d been given.

Fish. Juices. Konservi (conserves). One day Mom shocked Liza by announcing that she could now read the words in the book. And the book, and the labels of the packaged foods in their house—many of these delicious things often contained an exotic word: Mi-ko-yan. Was it a kind of sosiski? Or perhaps kotleti—not the uninspired homemade meat patties, but the trim store-bought ones that fried up to a fabulous greasy crunch. “Mi-ko-yan,” said Mom to herself when Liza was cooking a dinner for guests, and scrupulously comparing her table setting to the photographs in the parsley-green book. In those moments life seemed good to my mother. Yes, entirely good.

Mikoyan—first name Anastas, patronymic Ivanovich—was a petite Bolshevik from Armenia with a hawk nose angling over a mustache trimmer and more dapper than that of his fellow son of the Caucasus, Stalin. His gait was quick and determined, his gaze unsettlingly sharp. But petitioners in his office would on occasion be offered an orange. Fellow Kremlinites also knew that Anastas Ivanovich grew an exotic, some might say extravagant vegetable called asparagus at his dacha. Anastas Mikoyan was the narkom (people’s commissar) of the Soviet food industry. If writers were “engineers of the human soul” (per Comrade Stalin), then Mikoyan was the engineer of the Soviet palate and gullet.

Three years before Mom got hooked on sosiski made by the Mikoyan Meat Processing Plant and opened the green cookbook he’d sponsored, the narkom had his suitcases packed for a Crimean vacation. It was a holiday he’d long promised his wife, Ashkhen, and their five sons. He dropped by the Kremlin to say goodbye to his boss and old comrade, whom he addressed with ty, the familiar intimate form of “you.”

“Why don’t you go instead to America,” Stalin proposed unexpectedly. “It, too, will be a pleasant vacation; besides, we need to research the American food industry. The best of what you discover,” he declared, “we’ll transplant here.”

Mikoyan gauged the Supreme Leader’s mood: the proposal was impromptu but serious. Even so, he demurred: “I’ve promised Ashkhen a holiday.” Mikoyan was famously family-minded.

Stalin must have been in good spirits.

“Take Ashkhen with you,” he suggested.

Who knows how Soviet food would have tasted had Stalin not allowed the narkom’s wife to join her husband. Had the Mikoyans sunned themselves on the Black Sea instead.

One wonders too how the Armenian managed for so long to retain Stalin’s favor while other Politburo members were “liquidated” or saw their wives off to the gulags. “Anastas seems more interested in cheese varieties than in Marxism and Leninism,” Stalin would quip without reproach. Perhaps this escape into the world of sosiski, kolbasa, and condensed milk was Mikoyan’s secret of survival. Formerly ascetic in the old Bolshevik manner, Stalin by now was developing quite a palate himself.

Mikoyan and his foodie squad landed in New York on the SS Normandie on a sweltering August morning in 1936. In their stopover in Germany they had drawn giggles with their identical new “European-style” outfits. For two months the Soviet expedition covered 12,000 miles of America by car and train, coast to coast. They toured fish, ice cream, and frozen fruit plants. They inspected production of mayonnaise, beer, and “inflated seeds” (Mikoyan-speak for popcorn). They studied corrugated cardboard and metal jar lids. Wisconsin dairies, Chicago slaughterhouses, California fruit farms—not exactly the holiday Ashkhen had been promised. They ate intently at self-service cafeterias. (“Here,” noted Mikoyan, “was a format born out of the bowels of capitalism but most suited to communism.”) They studied Macy’s display strategies—models for the trendsetting department stores that would emerge in Moscow by the end of the decade.

In Detroit, Henry Ford told Mikoyan not to waste time on meat production. “Meat’s bad for you,” he insisted. Soviet workers should eat vegetables, soy products, and fruit. The Armenian narkom found Ford most peculiar.

Urbane but unsmiling, Mikoyan could barely restrain himself in his rather dull late-life memoirs from gushing about the wonders of his American trip. Here was the efficient industrialized society for Stalinist Russia to emulate. Was it flash freezing or mechanized cow milking (take that, Stakhanovite milkmaids) that impressed him more? Maybe the fruit juices? True, Russia didn’t have enough oranges, but Mikoyan dreamed of turning tomato juice into a Soviet national drink. (Mission accomplished: in my school days I gagged on the red stuff.) The ever-practical narkom showed no ideological qualms about adopting techniques and mass standardization from the capitalist West. These were the internationalist Soviet thirties, before World War II unleashed Stalinist xenophobia. Unlike evil, devious Britain, the United States was considered a semifriendly competitor—though having American relatives could still land you in the gulag.

Perhaps what struck Mikoyan most was the American guy at a stainless-steel griddle who swiftly cooked a curious-looking kotleta, which he inserted into a split white bun, then flourished with pickles and dabs of red sauce. “For a busy man it is very convenient,” marveled Mikoyan. Didn’t Soviet workers deserve this efficient, cheap, filling snack on their parades, their outings to Parks of Culture and Relaxation?

Mikoyan plunked down Stalin-approved scarce hard currency for twenty-two American hamburger grills, with the capacity to turn out two million orders a day. Burger production launched in select major cities, to some acclaim. But World War II intervened; the bun got lost in the shuffle. Soviet food planning settled instead for a take-out kotleta, unsandwiched.

“So that’s it?” I gasped, reading Mikoyan’s memoirs.

“So that’s it?” gasped Mother when I passed her the book.

Our mythic all-Soviet store-bought kotleta—the lump-in-the-throat nostalgic treat from five generations of childhoods. That’s what it was? An ersatz burger that mislaid its bun? Mikoyan’s account of the origins of Soviet ice cream further wounded what was left of my food patriotism. Morozhennoye—our national pride? The hard-as-rock plombir with its seductive cream rosette I licked at thirty below zero? The Eskimos on a stick from Mom’s childhood outings? Yup, all the result of Yankee technology, imported by Mikoyan. The savvy Armenian even coveted Coca-Cola but couldn’t wangle the syrup recipe. As for sosiski and kolbasa, those other ur-Soviet food icons… they were German sausages that, in Mikoyan’s words, “changed their citizenship.” So much for our ideologically charged native madeleines.

Mikoyan returned from America loaded with samples, information, and brand-new wardrobes for himself and his wife. The Mickey Mouse pens he carried home for his sons were promptly stolen at the boys’ school for Politburo offspring.

Given Russia’s still rudimentary consumer conditions, the narkom was able to introduce a surprising number of American novelties—from mass-produced ice cream (hitherto made by hand) to kornfleks to the concept of prepackaged foods. A 1937 newspaper ad even urged Soviets to embrace a “spicy aromatic condiment” that “every American housewife keeps in her cupboard.” Ketchup! Occasionally Stalin objected. Russian winters were long, he said, and there was no need to produce the GE-style home fridges that Mikoyan wanted. What’s more, heavy-industry factories were preoccupied with defense orders. So until the end of the war Soviets made do with a box outside the window.

Stalin took great personal interest in Mikoyan’s business. The Leader took great personal interest in many things. When he wasn’t busy signing execution orders or censoring books or screening Volga-Volga, the Standardbearer of Communism opined on fish (“Why don’t we sell live fish like they did in the old days?”) or Soviet champagne. A fan of sweet bubbles, he wanted to ban brut production wholesale, but here Mikoyan held firm. Suds? Indeed. Mikoyan recalls how with his bloodthirsty henchmen Molotov and Kaganovich, Stalin fingered, sniffed, and critiqued trial soap bars, deciding which should go into production. “Our comrade Stalin has a boundless resource of wisdom,” gushed Mikoyan of the soap venture. Clearly, the bathing habits of Homo sovieticus were a matter of great national concern.

An obsessive micromanager himself, Mikoyan taste-tested each new food product, approved all recipes and label designs, okayed punishments for wreckers and saboteurs. Stalin’s directive for happiness, abundance, and cheer loomed large. “Since life has gotten better,” wrote Mikoyan in a report, “we need to produce more aromatic high-quality cigarettes.” In a speech: “What kind of cheerful life can we have if there’s a shortage of beer and liqueurs?” Period food industry trade magazines portray their workers practically agog with joy and enthusiasm. Inspired by Stalin’s credo, they’d even staged an amateur theater production called Abundance, featuring singing sausages. One of the comrades playing a sausage recalled using the Stanislavsky method to interpret her role.

Or picture this. May Day. The Mikoyan Meat Plant procession parades toward Red Square under the portrait of the mustachioed Armenian and a festive panel of children with flowers beneath the slogan THANK YOU COMRADE STALIN FOR OUR HAPPY CHILDHOODS. Banners emblazoned with sosiski, kolbasa, and bacon wave alongside—emblems of Soviet-issue smoked goodness.

One pauses at the grotesquery of such scenes in this most murderous decade of a political regime in which abundance would remain a myth for another half-century. For those not attached to privileged stores—in the thirties and later—shortages of basic essentials were the grinding reality. And yet—Mom’s elderly friends remember equally vividly the prewar chocolates and champagne, the caviar and smoked fish magically materializing in stores before holidays.

In 1937 Mikoyan’s favorite Red October Chocolate Factory produced more than five hundred kinds of confections, his meat plant close to 150 kinds of sausages. True, these were mainly available at flagship stores in larger cities. (Moscow, with 2 percent of the population, got 40 percent of the country’s meat allocation.) True, basics were often neglected in favor of luxury items; the champagne, chocolates, and smoked sturgeon all served as shining political symbols, furthering the illusion that czarist indulgences were now accessible to the masses. And yet in his push to create a socialist consumer culture—based on Western models, ironically—and to democratize certain foodstuffs, Mikoyan delivered moments of happiness to the common folk. A pink slice of kolbasa on a slab of dark bread, Eskimo on a stick at a fair—in the era of terror these small tokens had an existential savor.

On Stalin’s death in 1953, the secret police chief Beria was executed and Molotov was effectively exiled to outer Mongolia. But Mikoyan prospered. His ability to side with winners matched his uncanny managerial skills. He backed Stalin against Trotsky, then denounced Stalin’s legacy and rose to the lofty post of Supreme Soviet chairman under Khrushchev. He voted for Khrushchev’s ouster and retained Brezhnev’s favor, tactfully retiring in 1965. Thirteen years later, he died of old age.

A jingle summed up his career: “From Ilyich to Ilyich [Lenin’s and Brezhnev’s shared patronymic] without infarkt [heart attack] and paralich [stroke].”

More resilient still were his kolbasa and sosiski. Just like my mother, when I was growing up I thought Mikoyan was the brand name of a kotleta. To our minds he was the Red Aunt Jemima or Chef Boyardee. The Mikoyan meat plant remains operational. These days it produces actual hamburgers.

In the seventies, when Soviet Jews began emigrating, many packed Mikoyan’s hefty cookbook in their paltry forty-pound baggage. The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food had become a totalitarian Joy of Cooking—a kitchen bible so cherished, people lugged it with them even as they fled the State that published it. But the book didn’t keep its original parsley-green cover for long. Its color—physical and political—kept changing with each new regime and edition: a dozen editions in all, more than eight million copies in print, and still selling. Most iconic and politicized is the 1952 version, which I will revisit later.

Mom, though, left her copy behind. The tattered volume that had taught her and her mother good socialist housekeeping was by then ideologically radioactive to her. She even despised the gaudy photos with the Soviet food industry logos meant to drive home the idea that the State was our sole provider.

In the fall of 2010, I presented my mother with an original 1939 edition of Mikoyan’s masterwork. She flinched. Then she fell for it—hard. “Drab, dreary recipes,” she’d grumble while cooking up a storm from the book and matching her table settings in Queens to the ones in the photos as her mother had done in Moscow seventy years before. She piped mayonnaise borders onto “Stalinist-Baroque” crab salads. She carved tomato rosettes, trapped fish in aspic, and fashioned kotleti from meat, carrots, cabbage, and beets. Every night she telephoned friends, roaring at the book’s introduction, its vaunting invocations of “mankind’s centuries-old dream of building a communist society… of an abundant, happy, and joyous life.”

“I’m not nostalgic!” she would correct me. “I just like old cookbooks, and this one, wow, a real antique!”

Then: “Anyuta, what do they call that syndrome… when victims fall for their tormentors?”

Followed by: “You dragged me into this!”

Finally: “So what, I like all foods.”

But never an admission of sentiment.

One blustery Saturday night Mom’s elderly friends gather for a thirties-style dinner around her table set with ornamental cut-crystal bowls and bottles of sickly sweet Sovetskoye Shampanskoye.

At first, the ladies recall their Stalinist childhoods with the guarded detachment of people who’ve long entombed their pasts. But with each new toast, fragments of horror and happiness tumble out, intermingled. They talk of the period’s dread silence, the morbid paralysis of families of the newly arrested, and in the same breath they remember the noise.

“Living in the thirties was like being inside a giant metal forge,” says Inna. “Incessant drumbeats and songs, street loudspeakers, radios blasting behind every door.”

“It was feast in a time of plague,” declares another friend, Lena, quoting the title of Pushkin’s play. “You were happy each new day you weren’t arrested. Happy to simply smell tangerines in your house!”

“My father had murdered Kirov,” announces Musya, an octogenarian former Leningrader, in a clear, spirited voice. “I was convinced of this as a child. Why else would he and my uncle silently pass notes to each other at dinner?”

Did she think of denouncing him? asks Inna.

Musya vehemently shakes her head. “We Leningraders hated Stalin!” she retorts. “Before anyone else in the country, we knew.” When Musya’s uncle was arrested, men in long coats showed up and confiscated her family’s furniture. Sometime afterward Musya recognized their chairs and sideboard at a secondhand shop. She jumped with joy, hugging and stroking the plush blue upholstery. Her mother just yanked her away. “I lost my innocence at that moment,” says Musya.

“I remained innocent—I knew nothing until Stalin died,” Katya confesses. A vivacious former translator near ninety who still smokes and swears like a sailor, Katya grew up—“a true Soviet child”—in provincial Ukraine. Happiness to her meant the clean, toasty smell in the house when her mom ironed the pleats on her parade skirts. And singing along with the crowds.

“I too knew nothing about Stalin’s crimes,” Inna puts in ever so quietly, nervously stroking her immaculate chignon. “But I hated him for taking my mother away.” What she means is that her fanatical mother devoted her every breath to the Party. “On the day she noticed me, hugged me, and promised to mend my socks, I went to bed the most euphoric child on the planet,” Inna tells us. Her mother never did mend the socks. When she was forced to relinquish her Party ID card because Inna was emigrating, “she howled like an animal.”

The ladies finish their champagne and Mom’s Soviet-style truffles and prepare to depart. “Living under Stalin,” Inna reflects at the door, “we censored our thoughts, terrified when anything bad crossed our minds. Then when he died, we kept on censoring, purging any traces of happiness from our childhoods.” Everyone nods.

The autumn cold of 1939 ended Mom’s fire escape music lessons. She and her pal Ninka found a different occupation: helping older kids in the building chase spies. All children in paranoid Russia played at chasing spies. Anyone could be a suspect. The lift lady, for instance, with her single odd metal coat button. Comrades wearing glasses, or fedora hats instead of proletarian caps.

Along twisting lanes, through dim podvorotni (deep archways), into silent, half-hidden courtyards—Mom and the gang pursued would-be evil betrayers of Rodina (Homeland). Mom liked the podvorotni. They smelled, not unpleasantly, of piss and decaying fall leaves. Under one of them a babushka in a tatty beret stood hawking an old doll. Forty whole rubles she was asking. Unlike the usual bald, grinning Soviet toy babies, this doll had flaxen hair, a frayed velvet dress, and melancholy eyes out of a tragic Hans Christian Andersen tale. In late November Naum relented; at home Mom inhaled the doll’s musty mystery. The next morning Naum went away on a trip.

December brought soft, flaky snowfalls, the resinous aroma of fir trees, and invasions of gruff out-of-towners in stores. New Year’s festivities were still new to Soviets. Some simply hung their trees with walnuts in tinfoil; Liza propped a bright Kremlin star on top of their tree and bought presents for Larisa and Yulia. Mom only wanted things for her doll. There was no news from Naum, and Liza’s face had assumed a grim, absent expression. Silently she stood in lines for toy washboards and miniature versions of the dinner sets depicted in Mikoyan’s parsley-green cookbook.

Every day Mom consulted the cookbook for dollhouse decoration. Every day Liza perused its pages, churning out panfuls of kotleti and trays of cottage cheese korzhiki (biscuits). Uncharacteristically, she baked elaborate dried apricot pies—listening intently to the rattle of the approaching elevator. But it was usually Dora or the composers next door. Ninka and the Pokrass children ate most of the pies—their cheerful chewing filling Mom’s heart with toska.

For New Year’s Eve Liza draped a brand-new tablecloth over the table. It was deep red like a theater curtain, as plush as a teddy bear’s cheek. Naum didn’t come home to admire it. The Sovetskoye champagne stood unopened as fireworks exploded above the Kremlin clock.

“Nichevo, mozhet nichevo.” (Nothing, maybe it’s nothing.) Their neighbor Dora had been whispering this lately to Liza while Mom hid under the table chewing on the tablecloth tassels.

“Nichevo, nichevo,” Mom whispered to her doll, licking tears off her face. The doll’s eyes said that she understood everything: the worm of despair in Mom’s stomach, the mystery of her father’s absence, her gnawing suspicion that the Radiant Future was passing them by. Stroking and braiding the doll’s flaxen hair, Mom desperately wanted at least to make her silent friend’s life happy, abundant, and cheerful. She had an inspiration. With Liza out of sight, she reached for her scissors. The first piece of tablecloth she cut off didn’t fit, so she kept cutting more: for the doll’s tablecloth, for her toy bedspread. When Mom was done the doll’s house was draped in red velvet, golden tassels lining its floor.

Seeing Mom’s handiwork, Liza flailed a dishrag at her, but without her usual vigor. That day, and for days after, she kept looking for the key to Naum’s desk. She was trying to decide if now was the time to read Larisa and Yulia the letter he had written and locked in a drawer. The letter that urged his children to love him, love their mother, and love their Rodina—no matter what might suddenly have happened to him.

_{CHAPTER FOUR} 1940s: OF BULLETS AND BREAD

On the weekend of June 21, 1941, in honor of the official arrival of summer, Liza finally switched from listless hot winter borscht to the chilled summer version. Tangy and sweet, the soup was alive with the crunch and vitality of the season’s first cucumbers and radishes. Following a short cold spell, Saturday’s weather was heartbreakingly lovely. Sun beamed on the lipstick-red tulips and dressy white lilies at the Pushkin Square flower beds; petunias scented the Boulevard Ring. Girls in their light graduation dresses floated past couples embracing on the Moskva River embankment. Summer plans, stolen kisses, blue and white cans of Mikoyan’s condensed milk packed for the dacha. Even the babushkas who hawked fizzy water with cherry syrup at parks somehow looked decades younger. The happiness in the air was palpable, stirring. Or so it seemed to my mother on her Saturday stroll with Yulia and their father.

Naum was back with them—for a brief while at least. Ever since his alarming disappearance in 1939, when Liza thought him arrested or dead, his absences had gotten more prolonged and frequent. One morning Liza sat on the narrow cot that Mom shared with Yulia and explained Papa’s job.

“Soviet spy?” Mom squealed with glee.

“Nyet, nyet! Razvedchik (intelligence worker).”

That too sounded thrilling. To protect their dad’s secrets from enemies of the people, Mom and Yulia took to stealthily eating his papers. They’d tear them into confetti, soak them in milk, and dutifully chew, handful by handful. This felt heroic—until Naum threw a fit after they swallowed his sberkassa (savings bank) documents.

The girls now learned to put the names of foreign countries to his absences; they learned where their presents were coming from. The Russo-Finnish war of that winter in 1940—a hapless bloodbath that sent Russians home badly mauled but with a strategic chunk of the chilly Ladoga Lake—yielded Larisa and Yulia a festive tin box of Finnish butter cookies. Bright yellow neck scarves of fine flimsy cotton were the girls’ trophies from the ugly Soviet occupation of Estonia in July of 1940. From Naum’s intelligence missions in Stockholm came sky-blue princess coats with fur trim. Scandinavia and the Baltic were Naum’s specialties. He never mentioned the ugliness.

There were six of them now sharing two communal rooms in the house of composers. Liza’s widowed dad from Odessa was living with them, snoring in the living room where the girls slept. Dedushka Yankel was obliging and doleful. A retired old Jewish communist shock-worker (pre-Stakhanovite uberlaborer), he hated the Talmud and detested the Bible. Mom liked to tug at the wispy clumps of hair on his temples as he sat in the kitchen copying The Short Course of the History of the All-Union Communist Party into his notebook over and over and over. He knew it by heart, Stalin’s Party catechism.

Sashka, their new baby brother, was noisier. Liza had him in May while Naum was in Sweden, and her heart nearly broke in the maternity ward when she saw the nurse carry a huge bouquet of pink roses to some other lucky new mamochka. “For you,” said the nurse, smiling. “Look out the window.” Below, Naum waved and grinned. Since the baby was born he hadn’t left Moscow.

Sashka wasn’t crying and Dedushka wasn’t snoring late on Saturday, June 21. Still, Mom couldn’t sleep. Perhaps she was overexcited at the prospect of seeing the famous chimp Mickey at the Moscow Circus the next day. Or maybe it was the thunderstorm that broke the still, airless sky after ten. Waking up often from her uneasy slumber, Mom noticed Naum in the room, crouched by his Latvian VEF shortwave radio. The radio’s flashing green light and the non-Russian voices—Hello… Bee Bee See—finally lulled my mother to sleep.

Naum had his ear to the radio, fists clenched. Damn VEF! Were it not for the sleeping girls he’d have smashed it to pieces. It was shortly after dawn on Sunday. A static-crackly foreign voice had announced what he and his superiors had been warning about for months with desperate near certainty. His small suitcase had been packed for a week. Why wasn’t headquarters calling? Why did he have to crouch by the whining, buzzing radio for information when intelligence had been so overwhelming, when he himself had reported menacing activity at the new Soviet-Baltic border for more than a year? Top-level defense professionals had been aghast at the TASS news agency statement of June 14, which dismissed as base rumor the possibility of attack by Russia’s Non-Aggression Treaty cosigner—Nazi Germany. But the directive for the TASS pronouncement had come from the Vozhd (Leader) himself. Certain top commanders left for vacations; others went to the opera.

Meanwhile, early the previous evening, a small, somber group had gathered nervously in Stalin’s Kremlin office. Among those present was Naum’s uberboss, naval commissar Admiral Kuznetsov. He’d brought along Captain Mikhail Vorontsov, a longtime acquaintance of Granddad’s (and his direct boss some months later). Vorontsov had just landed from Berlin, where he was Soviet naval attaché. Hitler would invade at any hour, he warned. Stalin had been hearing these kinds of detailed alarms for months. He rejected them with contempt, even fury. Tellingly, the meeting started without his new chief of military staff, General Georgy Zhukov.

The signs, however, were too ominous to dismiss. The Dictator was noticeably agitated. General Zhukov rang at around eight p.m. from the defense commissariat: a German defector had crossed the border to warn that the attack would start at dawn. After midnight he rang again: another defector said likewise. Stalin grudgingly allowed a High Alert to be issued—with the bewildering caution not to respond to German “provocations.” He also ordered the latest defector shot as a disinformer.

At his dacha the Leader, an insomniac usually, must have slept deeply that night. Because Zhukov was kept waiting on the line for a full three minutes when he telephoned just after dawn.

“The Germans are bombing our cities!” Zhukov announced.

Heavy breathing on the other end of the line.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” asked Zhukov.

Upon returning to the Kremlin, Stalin appeared subdued, even depressed, his pockmarked face haggard. Refusing to address the nation himself, he delegated it to Molotov, who was then foreign commissar and stuttered badly. Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in the history of warfare, comprising more than three million German troops augmented by Axis forces, and ranging from the Baltic to the Black Sea, had been allowed to commence in effective surprise.

In the early light of June 22, lying in bed with her eyes half closed, Larisa saw her father pull her mother to his chest with a force she’d never witnessed before. The embrace—desperate, carnal—told her that the circus was off even before Naum’s one-word announcement: war.

At midday they all stood among panicked crowds under the black, saucer-shaped public loudspeakers.

“Citizens of the Soviet Union!… Today, at four a.m…. German troops… have attacked our, um um, country… despite… a treaty of non-aggression…”

Mercifully, Comrade Molotov didn’t stutter as much as usual. But his halting speech was that of a clerk struggling through an arcane document. “Our cause is just. The enemy will be beaten,” concluded the world’s worst public speaker.

“What does perfidious mean?” asked children all over Moscow. What happened to Stalin? wondered their parents, joining the stampedes for salt and matches at stores.

At two p.m. that afternoon, amid the wrenching chaos of departures at the Leningradsky railway station, Mother couldn’t help but admire Naum’s spiffy gray civilian suit.

“Please, please, take off that hat!” Liza yelled, running after his train. “It makes you look Jewish—the Germans will kill you.”

The Father of all Nations finally spoke on July 3.

“Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters! I am addressing you, my friends!”

It was a moving speech. The brothers and sisters line went down in history as possibly the only time Stalin called out to Russians in such an un-godlike familial fashion. Stalin had been even less godlike in private, though that was not known until years after his death.

“Lenin left us a great legacy and we shitted it away,” the Vozhd had blurted dismally a few days before his speech, after a frantic session at the defense commissariat where the ruthless General Zhukov had fled the room sobbing.

Indeed. By the time Stalin spoke to the nation, the Germans had swept some four hundred miles into Soviet territory along three fronts. By late October they counted three million Russian POWs. The tidal roar of the Wehrmacht with its onrushing Panzer tanks, Luftwaffe overhead, and SS rear guard would not begin to be turned until Stalingrad, a year and a half away.

After Naum’s departure, though, life in Moscow seemed to Mom almost normal. Except that it wasn’t. People carried home masks resembling sinister elephant trunks. Women with red swollen eyes clutched the hands of their husbands and sons all the way to conscription points. Dedushka Yankel glued X-shaped strips of tape on the windows and covered them with dark curtains, as officially required. The wails of the air raid sirens awoke in Mom the familiar sensations of alarm and toska, but now with an edge of adrenaline. Strakh (fear) was more tolerable somehow than toska. Falling asleep fully clothed, a rucksack packed with water and food by her bed for the frantic run to the bomb shelter—it was terrifying and just a little bit thrilling.

In the dark, freshly plastered shelter beneath the house of composers, familiar faces were fewer with each air raid. Loudspeakers urged remaining Muscovites to evacuate. “Nonsense,” Liza kept murmuring. “Haven’t they said the war’s almost over? Why go?” Following one particularly long mid-August night on the concrete shelter floor, they came back to the house. Liza opened the curtains. Her hollow scream still rings in Mother’s ears after seventy years.

The entire panorama of shingled Moscow roofs Mom so loved stood in flames in the gray morning light.

The telephone call came at seven a.m. The evacuation riverboat was leaving that day. Someone from Naum’s headquarters could collect them in a couple of hours.

Liza stood in the living room, lost. Scattered around her were the cotton parcels and pillowcases she’d been distractedly stuffing. She was five feet tall, as thin as a teenager at thirty-one years of age, still exhausted from childbirth, fragile and indecisive by nature.

Sergei’s baritone jolted her out of her stupor. He was their driver. Everything ready? One glance at Liza’s flimsy parcels sent him into a tornado of packing.

“Your winter coats. Where are they?”

“Winter? Please, the war will be over by then!”

“Whose clothes are these?”

“My husband’s—but don’t touch them. He doesn’t need them—he’s fighting.”

Sergei now swung open the sunduk in the hallway. It was a lightweight blue trunk that had once belonged to an aunt who’d fled long ago to America, where she ran a chicken farm. It still held her stuff. The smell of mothballs wafted into the air as Sergei wrenched out Aunt Clara’s old petticoats and filled the blue sunduk with Naum’s dandyish suits, his dazzling white shirts, and the ties he wore on his intelligence missions. Dedushka’s old sheepskin coat. Liza’s fuzzy Orenburg shawl. The girls’ valenki boots. Done packing, Sergei picked up both girls at once and tickled them with his breath. He had a wide smile and honest Slavic blue eyes. He also had a raging case of TB he’d pass on to the children.

The building manager came to seal off the apartment per regulations. Approaching the riverboat station, Liza screamed: they’d forgotten little Sashka. Sergei raced back to the house while the family waited on board, sick with anxiety. Smiling broadly, Sergei made it back with the baby.

“But is he lucky?” Napoleon famously asked when promoting a general.

The good fortune of Naum Solomonovich Frumkin, my grandfather, was the stuff of family lore. He was, in that regard, a Bonapartian whiz. “Dedushka,” my older cousin Masha would plead, tugging at the three gold stars on his old uniform shoulder boards, “tell how your car was bombed and you escaped without even a scratch!” Or she’d ask to hear about the time when he had been adrift in freezing waters, hanging on for life—to a mine. Which “forgot” to explode!

Everyone’s favorite was the day they finally came to arrest him. True to his luck, Naum was away, sick in the hospital. Oh, and the date was March 5, 1953. The day Stalin died. The beginning of the end of the repressions.

After joining the RKKA (Workers and Peasants Red Army) in 1921, Granddad went into intelligence in 1931. For the two prewar years he had a perilous job recruiting and coordinating agents abroad. Yet this international cloak-and-dagger—and later even the hazards of combat—seemed to Naum like afternoons in the park compared to the perils from within. Between 1937 and 1941, purges utterly ravaged the leadership of the Soviet military and in particular of GRU, its intelligence branch. GRU’s directorship became a blood-soaked revolving door; five of its chiefs were executed in the four years leading up to Hitler’s attack. A domino effect then took down the heads of departments and branches, liquidating the top GRU cadres almost entirely.

In this harrowing, half-paralyzed environment, Naum in 1939 became a section head himself, supervising spies for the naval commissariat in Moscow. In a sense, my fortunate grandfather was a beneficiary of the chistki (cleansings), swiftly moving up the career ladder from fleet to fleet, filling the empty desks of the purged. But he was also a target, his own arrest lurking outside every window. “I developed eyes in the back of my head,” Naum the retired spy would tell anyone willing to listen. Tailed by the NKVD (secret police) almost continuously, he perfected the art of vanishing into courtyards, of jumping onto fast-moving trolleys. He knew the drill: training spies was part of his job. When the stress got to him, he fantasized about wheeling on his shadowers, demanding to their faces: “Either arrest me or stop following me!”

My grandfather was a vain man. He esteemed his power to charm. To explain his improbable survival, he often mentioned an NKVD comrade called Georgadze, the officer in charge of signing arrest warrants for lieutenant colonels (each rank was assigned its own man, according to Naum). Apparently, this Georgadze fell under Granddad’s spell at a gathering. Naum imagined Georgadze deliberately overlooked or “misplaced” his arrest papers. Mainly, though, Granddad would shrug. Gospozha udacha, Lady Luck—she was quite charmed by him too.

Stalin’s intelligence decimations had left the Red Army hierarchy “without eyes and ears,” as one insider put it, on the eve of war. But here was the paradox: by June 22 the Vozhd had been flooded with ongoing, extremely precise details of the looming Nazi attack. A major font of these warnings—all scoffed at by Stalin—was someone whom Naum, the pro charmer, never could stop talking about.

Meet playboy Richard Sorge (code name Ramzai): philanderer, drunkard, and, in the words of John le Carré, “the spy to end spies.” “The most formidable spy in history,” agreed Ian Fleming. “Unwiderstehliche” (irresistible), marveled one of his main dupes, the German ambassador to Japan. With his cover as a Nazi journalist in Tokyo starting in 1933, the half-German, half-Russian Sorge and his ring of false-front cohorts steadily passed top-level Japanese and German secrets to GRU headquarters in Moscow. (Larisa particularly recalls Japan specialists as guests at their apartment in 1939 and 1940.) Incredibly, Sorge’s detailed alarms about the exact onset of Operation Barbarossa, up to its very preceding hours, only roused Stalin’s scorn. “A shit,” the Vozhd dismissed him, according to one commentator, “who has set himself up with some small factories and brothels in Japan.”

Stalin was even less cordial to another accurate warning, from code name Starshina at the Nazi Air Ministry less than a week before Hitler’s onslaught. This “source,” sneered the Great Strategist of the Revolution, signaling contempt with quotation marks, should be sent to his fucking mother.

Why the delusional ignorance, the vitriol? Stalin’s rejection of the intelligence continues to foment countless theories among historians, both Western and Russian. But it deserves noting that Hitler orchestrated a disinformation campaign fine-tuned to Stalin’s suspicions of capitalist Britain and Churchill, and to the Vozhd’s faith that Germany would never attack during hostilities with England—the supposed German dread of a two-front war. In May 1941 Hitler even wrote a very nice personal letter to Stalin to calm his unease, pledging “his word as a foreign leader.” He went so far as to ask Stalin not to give in to any border provocations by unruly Nazi generals! As Solzhenitsyn later suggested, the ogre of the Kremlin, who trusted no one, somehow trusted the monster of Berchtesgaden.

In his memoirs General Zhukov later sensationally (and rather improbably) asserted that the defense commissariat never saw the crucial bulletins Stalin received from Soviet foreign spies. As for Sorge, who had stayed away from Russia, fearing the purges, he was unmasked and arrested in Tokyo in the fall of 1941. The Japanese wanted to exchange him, but Stalin replied he’d never heard of him. Sorge was hanged in 1944, on the holiday of the October Revolution. He had the ultimate lousy luck: he depended on Stalin.

For his part, Naum always claimed that he saw Sorge’s urgent alerts.

Still, this hardly prepared him for what was about to unfold in the north.

On the morning of June 22, when Grandma ran waving after his train, Naum was bound for Tallinn, the Estonian capital. The Baltic Fleet headquarters had moved there the previous summer after the USSR occupied the three Baltic states.

Like stranded ducks, the Baltic ports almost immediately began falling to the German onslaught.

By late August the Nazis were closing on Tallinn. The Baltic Fleet under Naum’s old boss Admiral Tributs was ordered, frantically and at the last minute, to evacuate through the Gulf of Finland to Kronstadt near Leningrad, the fleet’s former traditional base. Red Army units and civilians were packed aboard. Tallinn often gets called the Soviet Dunkirk. Except it was an all-out disaster—one of the gravest naval fiascos in warfare history. Despite being the fleet’s intelligence chief, Naum supervised a ship’s scuttling under shellfire to block Tallinn’s harbor as the residue of Soviet smoke screens drifted murkily overhead. He was one of the last out. Some two hundred Russian vessels tried to run a 150-nautical-mile gauntlet through heavily mined waters, with no air protection against German and Finnish onslaughts. The result was apocalyptic. The waves resounded with explosions and Russian screams, with desperate choruses of “The Internationale” and the gun flashes of suicides as ships sank. More than sixty Soviet vessels were lost, and at least 12,000 people drowned. Naum made it to Kronstadt with only four other survivors from his scuttling mission. His own luck had held, but he was badly shaken.

By fall, the juggernaut of Operation Barbarossa pounded at Leningrad’s gates. On September 8, Shlisselburg, a strategically important town nearby on Lake Ladoga, fell to the Germans. Russia’s second-largest city was now completely cut off by land: no transport, no provisions, no fuel. It was the start of blokada, the Siege of Leningrad, which would last a mythic nine hundred days. Stalin was furious. He’d only learned the Shlisselburg news from a German communiqué; Marshal Kliment (Klim) Voroshilov, Leningrad’s bumbling commander, had been too scared to tell him. The Vozhd rushed General Zhukov north with a terse note for Voroshilov: he was fired. Zhukov was taking over. Klim bade stoic farewells to his aides, assuming he would be shot. (Somehow he wasn’t.)

On September 22 Naum stood in Zhukov’s office at the Smolny in Leningrad. The general seemed even more abrupt and severe than usual, pacing with his arm behind his back. A bold, brutal campaigner, Georgy Konstantinovich was notoriously callous with the lives of his men. He cleared minefields by sending troops attacking across them. The cheapness of Russian blood fueled the future marshal’s combat strategy.

Zhukov ordered Naum to lead an amphibious reconnaissance mission as part of a counterattack on Shlisselburg, to try to break the Nazi encirclement. Immediately.

Naum quickly calculated. Zero time for preparations. Boats for the counterattack in wretched shape. Number of men: grossly inadequate. His troops were to include 125 naval school cadets—mere kids. Granddad had recently delivered an address to them. He remembered one eager boy: dark-haired, small, with pensive eyes and crooked teeth, a pimply face.

Despite his survival instinct, almost despite himself, Naum blurted out his objections.

A bolt of rage familiar to everyone under Zhukov’s command flashed in the general’s eyes. His bullmastiff jaw tightened.

“We’ll execute you for this,” Zhukov snarled quietly. “You have your orders!”

Orders were orders, even if suicidal.

High winds on Lake Ladoga postponed the counterattack the first night. The second night three boats overturned, drowning two men, and the operation was aborted. The main force’s commander was arrested on the spot and sent to the gulag. The third night Naum and his scouting party were able to land, though the main force still couldn’t. Granddad and his men had to wade two kilometers through chest-high, ice-cold water. With their radio soaked, they were unable to relay reconnaissance but managed some sabotage before fighting their way back to Soviet lines the following night, losing four men.

The main assault force was ordered to try yet again the day after. It was obliterated in the shallows by the Germans.

But Russian blood was cheap; that was the ongoing lesson from Zhukov, who would be anointed the great architect of the Soviet victory to come, then brutally demoted by Stalin (saved from arrest by a heart attack), repromoted by Khrushchev, then demoted again.

Back from his mission, Naum lay semiconscious, wheezing and grunting. The acute pneumonia he’d contracted from his forty-eight drenched hours could finish him, he knew, here in this anonymous hospital bed. Or he could perish in another “meat-grinder” like Shlisselburg—the best death, since his kids would remember him as a hero. Zhukov’s firing squad was the most agonizing scenario. Families of “enemies of the people” were usually exiled, or worse; their children grew up in orphanages, branding their fathers as betrayers of Homeland. This last possibility deprived Naum of sleep. It pierced like a red-hot iron. For several years now he’d been writing to his kids almost daily, letters composed mostly in his head, but some actually written and left in locked drawers.

Only one of those letters was ever opened in front of Larisa, Yulia, and Sashka. Three sentences jabbed out there on that hospital bed: “Liza, teach the children to throw grenades. Make sure they remember their papa. He loved them so.”

These lines reached Liza at the end of 1941 in a seven-hundred-square-foot room on the second floor of a crumbling warehouse. She, the children, and Dedushka Yankel shared the room with six other families evacuated from Moscow. The September journey, during which Nazi Messerschmitt fighters circled low over their riverboat, had brought them here, to the relative safety of Ulyanovsk, an old Volga town with muddy streets and folkloric carved wooden shutters.

“Look, look, Jews!” pale-blond street kids greeted them upon arrival.

“We are not Jews,” Mother corrected them. “We are from Moscow.”

Now, several months into their stay, Liza had barely unpacked Aunt Clara’s blue sunduk. Why bother? Peace, she still believed, would surely come any day. She attended to their makeshift existence while Dedushka Yankel dug trenches—and sometimes potatoes—outside the city, both his fingers and the potatoes harder and blacker as the earth froze. The five of them slept and did most of their living on two striped mattresses pushed together on the room’s cement floor. Beyond the flimsy curtain partition a sound tormented them around the clock: the piercing shriek of a toddler slightly older than Sashka. The boy was barely nursed, barely touched by Katya, his mother, who disappeared all day to return after midnight with nylon negligee and Coty perfume. “Prostitutka and black marketeer” everyone in the room said, taking turns holding and rocking the inconsolable child, who wouldn’t eat.

Katya wasn’t home when the boy stopped crying. The next day Larisa watched in solemn exultation as a small sheet-wrapped bundle was carried out the door. She knew exactly what had happened: death had been her constant obsession ever since she’d read about a little frozen match girl in a Hans Christian Andersen tale.

Death. It was in the wail of Dasha their neighbor when she unfolded the triangular letter from the front, the official notification known as a pokhoronka, or funeral letter. Death came every day from the radio where the Voice announced it, in numbers so catastrophic, they baffled a child who could barely count over one hundred.

“Vnimaniye, govorit Moskva!” (Attention, Moscow speaking!) the Voice always began. The dramatic, sonorous baritone that awed and hypnotized not just my mother but the whole country belonged to Yuri Levitan, a bespectacled Jewish tailor’s son. Russia’s top radio man delivered most of his broadcasts—some 60,000 throughout the war—not from Moscow but from cities hundreds of miles away, to which radio staff had been evacuated. Such was Levitan’s power, Hitler marked him as a personal enemy. A whopping 250,000 reichsmarks was offered for his head.

Reading aloud soldiers’ letters home, the Voice conjured tender, intimate chords. Reporting the fall of each new city as the Germans advanced, it turned slow and grave, chanting out and accenting each syllable. Go-vo-rit Mos-kva.

More frightening still was a song on the radio. “Arise, our vast country. Arise to mortal battle. With dark fascist forces, with the accursed horde!” After a blood-chilling staccato opening, the vast choral refrain gathered force and crescendoed in a massive wave of sheer terror.

The song was playing when Liza opened Naum’s letter from the Baltic, hand-delivered by his red-haired young adjutant, Kolya.

“Liza, teach the children to throw grenades…”

There was a parcel as well, of raisins and rock-hard prunes for the kids. “Naum, he’s fine…” Kolya assured them. The letter’s jolting past tense and Kolya’s averted gaze told Liza otherwise. And there was something else. A paper slipped out of the parcel. Kolya leapt to tear it up and throw it in the trash. Liza spent half the night assembling the pieces into a photo of a brunette in a nurse’s cap. To my dear Naum, read the inscription. And that’s how my petite grandmother, who was terrified even of mice, decided to leave the children with Dedushka and start north, north toward besieged Leningrad—to claim her husband.

Heading up past Moscow, Liza was already pushing her own version of Naum’s improbable luck. Late for a military chopper, she could only watch helplessly as it took off—and exploded in the air, struck by a bomb. A train carried her now through snowy wastes in the direction of Leningrad. The entire way a general held Liza’s hand, crying. She reminded him of his daughter, who’d just starved to death in the Siege. The train reached Kobona, a village on the span of Lake Lagoda’s frigid southeastern shore still in Russian hands. A makeshift hospital had been set up for evacuees from Peter the Great’s imperial city, which Hitler meant to raze to the ground. The emaciated arrivals, mostly women and children, were given half a liter of warm water and spoonfuls of gruel. Some ate and instantly died, their dystrophied bodies unable to handle the food. I can only imagine my grandmother confronting all this with her characteristic half daze, half denial. In the years to come, she would rarely discuss her own feelings, modestly deferring instead to the collective narrative of the Leningrad tragedy.

The lone route in and out of blockaded Leningrad lay across twenty perilous miles of windswept snow-covered lake ice to the opposite shore—through enemy fire. This was the legendary Doroga Zhizni, the Road of Life, a route desperately improvised by authorities and meteorologists in the second month of the Siege as temperatures sank and the lake froze over. This first terrible winter—the coldest in decades—and the two following, trucks laboring over the Road of Life carried the only supplies into a city where rations fell to four ounces of ersatz bread a day, and vintage parquet floors and precious rare books were burned as fuel in the minus-thirty-degree cold. The besieged ate sweetened soil around a sugar warehouse bombed by the Germans, and papier-mâché bookbinding, even jelly made out of softened carpenter glue—not to mention far more gruesome stuff. More than fifty thousand people perished in December 1941 alone.

On their two daily runs along the Road of Life, exhausted drivers fought sleep by hanging a metal pot from the cab ceiling, which rattled and hit them on the head. German shells and bombs fell constantly. Often the ice caved in. Liza rode on a truck on top of a flour sack. In the open back, wind-whipped snow, like an icy sandstorm, lashed her face.

All my grandmother possessed was a special pass and an official letter asking for assistance. Reaching besieged, frozen Leningrad at last, she had no idea how or where to find Naum. At city naval headquarters, harried men in uniform kept shrugging, waving her off.

Naum Solomonovich Frumkin? Baltic intelligence chief? Could be anywhere.

Finally the desperation in Liza’s gray eyes moved a staffer to suggest she try Baltic Fleet headquarters at Kronstadt—nineteen miles away, in the Gulf of Finland. As it happened, a naval glisser, an ice-gliding hovercraft, was going there shortly. In fact a driver was about to take someone to the glisser that very minute. If Liza rushed…

My grandmother made the hovercraft, too weak and shaken to even hope. Someone brought her to the onboard cafeteria to scrounge for something to eat. A group of naval commanders was sitting at a table. And among them, who else? Naum. Smiling (of course), smelling of cologne. Lucky as ever, he had survived pneumonia and then escaped Zhukov’s execution threat by reporting the Shlisselburg mission to Voroshilov, who still retained a seat on the Soviet High Command—going around Zhukov, essentially. Instead of a firing squad, Naum got a medal.

“I SAW WAR, I SAW DEATH, I SAW BULLETS AND BLOOD!” Grandma would yell years later. “There I was, scratched up, starving, braids flying… and there he is, flashing his idiotic white teeth at me!”

“Lizochka!” Granddad famously greeted my grandma. “And what brings you here?”

The tale of finding Naum on the glisser has always been among my grandmother’s wartime chestnuts. My cousin Masha and I preferred the one about Liza returning to the family in Ulyanovsk and finding Larisa burning with scarlet fever. Every evening Grandma would trudge miles through the snow to the hospital carrying potato peel pancakes for Larochka. Until one night, caught in a blizzard, she fell through a snow slope into a trench and couldn’t climb out.

“I dozed half frozen inside the trench, leaning on some hardened tree trunks,” she’d tell us repeatedly. “At the morning’s first light I realized that those ‘tree trunks’ were…”

Amputated arms and legs! Cousin Masha and I would squeal the punchline in unison.

Of her monthlong hospital stay Mother herself remembers only the pancakes. Indeed, in her mind food dominates all other wartime recollections. For instance, the ration during her first school year in Ulyanovsk. Lunch was at 11:15 during grand recess. From a smudgy zinc tray children were allotted one bublik and one podushechka each. Bublik: a flimsy chewy bagel scattered with poppy seeds. Podushechka (little pillow): a sugar-coated pebble, green, blue, or pink, the size of a fingernail, with a center of jam. Eating them together was a ritual, a sacrament really. You stuck the candy under your tongue and sat without breathing as a pool of sweetened saliva collected on the floor of your mouth. A cautious oral maneuvering delivered a stronger sweet rush and the sublime coarseness of sugar grains against the tip of your tongue. Dizzy with desire you pressed the bublik hard against your face and inhaled for a while. Then you spat out the candy into your hand and took the first careful bite of the bublik; it tasted like the greatest of pastries in your candy-sweet mouth. A bite of bublik, a lick of podushechka. The pleasure had to last the entire fifteen minutes of recess. The hardest part was putting off the rapturous moment when the surface of the podushechka cracked and jam began to ooze from inside. Some stoic classmates managed to spit out the half-eaten candy for younger siblings. Mom wasn’t one of them.

My mother has impeccable manners, is ladylike in every respect. But to this day she eats like a starved wolf, a war survivor gobbling down her plate of food before other people at table have even touched their forks. Sometimes at posh restaurants I’m embarrassed by how she eats—then ashamed at myself for my shame. “Mom, really, they say chewing properly is good for you,” I admonish her weakly. She usually glares. “What do you know?” she retorts.

From her I do know that civilians distilled survival into one word: kartochki. They were printed on one large sheet of paper, these ration cards, a month’s worth of square coupons with an official stamp, the recipient’s name and signature, and a stern warning—CARDS NOT REPLACEABLE—because corruption and counterfeiting ran rampant. Lost your kartochki? Good luck surviving.

At seven years of age my mother was a kartochki veteran. She was the one dispatched to trade them at stores while Dedushka Yankel dug his trenches and Liza and Yulia minded baby Sashka. The most crucial kartochki were for khleb (bread). One morning long before opening time Larisa joined hundreds of puffy-eyed, red-nosed people outside the bakery door. She tried not to gulp and swallow cold air too hard when the bread truck arrived and two men carted the aromatic, thick-crusted dark bricks inside. Behind the counter severe women in splotchy blue robes over shapeless padded coats weighed each ration of bread to the last milligram. They stomped their feet to keep warm and wore fingerless gloves so they could easily snip off the right coupon.

As her turn in the line neared, Mom felt a slight panic. Back in the house a power outage had prevented her from sorting through the ration books. It was the first of the month. All the coupon sheets—for grain, sugar, bread, meat for each family member—sat folded in the pocket of the blue princess coat Naum had brought from Sweden. Now she could barely feel them there; she couldn’t even feel her own hands from the cold.

Why did she put all the cards on the counter when her turn came? But how else to sift through the rationing sheets with people behind pushing and barking? Why panic so completely, so utterly at the invasion of arms? Arms, hands, mittens and gloves, smelly coat armpits, anxious breath. Fingers swarming the counter like tentacles—gnarled, blackened digits; gaunt fingers with white anemic nails; red swollen fingers. The kartochki were gone from the counter. The saleslady gave a bleak grin and a wag of a nail-bitten finger.

Standing outside the bread store, Mother imagined what she’d always imagined ever since she remembered imagining anything. She saw Naum coming back home. He’d be dressed in the gray civilian suit he wore at the station for Leningrad; she could almost smell the lavanda cologne on his cap. “Lizochka, I’m home!” he would shout, peering at the thin, shoddy figures in the warehouse room. Then he’d spy them. Arms open, he’d rush over. And what would he find? Liza, Dedushka, and Sashka—and Larisa and Yulia, pale and majestically beautiful in their identical fur-trimmed princess coats. All silent and motionless on their striped mattress, like Katya’s small baby. Dead, all of them.

Dead is what happened to people who lost their rationing cards on the first of the month. Dead from golod (starvation), from thirty whole days without kasha or bread or the tiny ration of milk for the baby. Would Naum wail like Dasha their neighbor did when she opened her funeral letter? Or would he find a new wife, one who didn’t shriek and convulse in hysterics like Liza surely would when Larisa came home without bread and without rationing cards.

Going home wasn’t an option. And so Mother went to the only place in the city where electricity always shone brightly and where a sprit of cozy, prosperous happiness wafted through every beautiful room. She went there often, to that traditional wooden two-story house up the street from their warehouse. She came to escape from the sight of her pitiful dedushka peeling warty potatoes, from the catastrophic Voice on the radio. The house was untouched by all this. Here the mother, Maria Alexandrovna, never yelled at her children. She played the grand piano while everyone had tea from a samovar in the living room. There were six kids in the house, but the apple of everyone’s eye was a boy called Volodya. Larisa liked to examine his baby picture, a brim of blond curls fringing his high, stubborn forehead. As a student Volodya had a proud, focused expression and a shrewd direct gaze. He got the best grades in his class. He never lied to his parents. He fought for justice and truth. Volodya’s attic bedroom with its patterned beige wallpaper was where Mom often sat daydreaming in the wooden chair between the boy’s small, neat desk and his bookshelf filled with volumes by Pushkin, Turgenev, and Gogol. Lucky Volodya got to sleep alone in bed, unlike Larisa and Yulia. He had such a nifty map of the world on his wall. The green lamp on his desk was so hypnotic, so peaceful.

“Devochka, little girl, wake up, time to go.” Someone was clutching Larisa’s shoulder, shaking her gently.

“The Lenin House Museum closes at five,” said the attendant.

Back at her own house Larisa sat with her arms closed around Liza, stroking the sharp shoulder blade under her mother’s coarse woolen dress. They sat like this a long while. About the lost kartochki Liza said nothing. She remembered too well her own childhood loss of a ration in the twenties: a loaf of bread yanked out of her hand by a bearded giant who gorged on the entire half pound in front of her eyes.

Salvation came from Katya, of all people, the prostitutka and black marketeer.

“Liza, you fool—you have the sunduk!”

So every few days Liza and Katya went to the black market on the outskirts of Ulyanovsk to trade Naum’s spiffy shirts, suits, and ties from inside the blue trunk. His best suit went for a sack of millet that they ate for the rest of the month. Millet for thin, watery breakfast gruel. Millet soup for lunch, flavored with herring heads. Best was millet baked for supper in a cast-iron pot inside the clay Russian stove in their warehouse. Russian war survivors fall into two categories: those who idolize millet and those who can’t stand it. But they all agree: millet was life.

The Nazi invasion caught Stalin’s Soviet Union with yet another food supply crisis looming. Two years of below-average harvests had combined with the drain of the 1940 war with Finland and mammoth defense spending. But if the Soviets had scant grain reserves, they had even scantier strategies for handling wartime supply problems.

The Reich, however, had a strategy: Hungerplan, the “Hunger Plan.” Brainchild of corpulent, gourmandizing Hermann Göring and the Reich’s Food Ministry, the Hunger Plan was possibly history’s most sinister and cynical blueprint. The “agricultural surplus” of the Ukraine—which the Nazis intended to capture immediately—would be diverted to feed only Wehrmacht soldiers and Germany’s civilians. Thirty million Russians (a sixth of the population), mainly in cities, would be left without food. In other words: genocide by programmatic starvation.

By late fall of 1941, Hitler controlled half of the Soviet grain acreage. Crucially, however, he had not yet achieved the lightning victory he was so sure of. Despite staggering initial losses and blunders, the Soviet forces resisted. Moscow shuddered, bled, but didn’t yield. Russian generals regrouped. Instead of swollen Ukrainian granaries and willing slave labor, the advancing Wehrmacht usually found only burnt crops and demolished farm equipment, as per Stalin’s scorched earth policy. (“All valuable property, including non-ferrous metals, grain, and fuel which cannot be withdrawn, must without fail be destroyed,” instructed the Leader in early July.)

Then winter descended and it was the Germans whose poor planning was brutally exposed. Counting on three months of blitzkrieg at most, the Reich hadn’t provided warm clothes to the men at its front. The war lasted four long years, much of the duration bitterly cold.

Soviet citizens got their first rationing cards in July of 1941. Average kartochki allotments, though symbolic and crucial, were nowhere near adequate for survival. Daily, it was only a bit more than a pound of bread; monthly, about four pounds of meat and under three pounds of flour or grain. Substitutions became the norm: honey for meat, rotten herring instead of sugar or butter. Under the slogan “All for the Front, All for the Victory,” supplies and rail transport were prioritized for the Red Army, which often fought in a state of near-starvation. How did Stalin’s state manage the food supply for civilians? By temporarily encouraging near-NEP conditions. Economic ideology was suspended and centralization loosened, meaning local authorities and citizens were left to fend for themselves. Schools and orphanages, trade unions and factories, all set up ad hoc green plots. Even in cities, people foraged, learning to digest birch buds, clover, pine needles, and tree bark. At the front, chronically hungry soldiers ate not just fallen horses but saddles and straps—anything made of leather that could be boiled for hours with some aromatic twigs to stun the tar smell.

“Naum’s clothes and Aunt Clara’s sunduk saved our lives!” Grandma Liza used to say, gravely nodding at the blue trunk still in her hallway during my childhood. Indeed. Markets of every shade from white (legal) to black (illegal) were central to daily survival. With rubles almost useless, food itself, bread especially, became currency.

Diaries from the Leningrad Siege leave bone-chilling details of the economics of starvation. Ushanka (flap hat) = four ounces of bread; men’s galoshes = five ounces of bread; used samovar = two pounds of bread. Families hid the deaths of relatives so they could continue using the deceased’s monthly bread kartochki. The cost of an individual grave = four and a half pounds of bread plus five hundred rubles.

Starvation was nowhere as horrifying, as extreme, as it was in Leningrad, during those nine hundred days. But for any Russian who suffered hunger contractions at all, a wartime food glossary was etched in his or her memory:

Shokolad.

Of all the gifts that made their way from Naum during those days, one struck Mother right in the heart. It made her delirious. Not just because it was shokolad in war-torn Russia. Not even because it tasted far better than the chalky American lend-lease stuff. No. It was because of the dark-eyed young man on the wrapper: prodigious of nose, young and steely of glare, with a gloriously embossed collar. The crush Mom developed on this chocolate hero was instant and hopeless. His swoony Orientalist name matched his fiery looks. Mohammed Reza Pahlavi—crowned shah of Iran in 1941 after his father was forced into exile by occupiers Soviet Union and Britain.

Oil. Petroleum was the reason the Frumkin children were getting Pahlavi Jr. chocolates.

The second summer of war marked the Soviet low ebb of the conflict: six million soldiers killed or captured, most of Ukraine occupied, Leningrad faltering under blokada, Moscow unfallen but vulnerable. As the Germans headed southeast, Naum had yet again been transferred, this time to Baku, the hot, windy, uneasily quiet capital of Soviet Azerbaijan. This vital Caucasian republic, bordering Iran on the Caspian Sea, pumped the majority of Russia’s oil. It was oil Hitler coveted for himself. Launching Operation Blau at the Caucasus in June 1942, the Fuhrer aimed to take Baku by September. His overconfident generals presented him with an extravagantly frosted cake with a sign that said KASPISCHES MEER (Caspian Sea). Film footage shows Hitler smiling suavely as he takes the slice labeled BAKU. But the Luftwaffe left Baku alone: its vast petroleum infrastructure had to be delivered intact. The Fuhrer wanted to eat his cake but have it too.

Iran, meanwhile, occupied but still nominally neutral, simmered with international intrigue. Tehran was thick with German agents and operatives. Shuttling between Baku and the Iranian capital, Naum was back in the familiar world of cloak-and-dagger. So highly classified was his work that he never confided its details to any of us—aside from bragging about having met the dashing young shah on the chocolates.

From Baku, Naum dispatched Ivan Ivanych, his intelligence aide, to Ulyanovsk to bring the family south. Gray-eyed and sinewy, Ivan looked the part of an elite GRU spy guy—lend-lease black leather coat, tall boots, a pistol, plus a mysterious attaché case he watched like a hawk. The journey to Baku lasted three nightmarish weeks, or maybe six, Mother can’t remember. Mostly they bivouacked for days at train stations on layovers between hopelessly delayed, crawling teplushki, the wartime cattle freights overcrowded with orphaned children and wounded combatants whose bandages undulated with black swarms of lice. At one point Ivan dozed off on a station bench and someone snatched his attaché case. Mom watched the GRU hero chase down the culprit and whack him on the head with the butt of his gun. The police intervened, the attaché case sprang open, and to her utter astonishment, Mom saw watches—big clunky watches!—tumble out onto the pavement. Larisa was little, but not too little to smell a black marketeer, even though Granddad later insisted that the watches were “crucial intelligence tools.” (Who knew?) For the final leg of the journey there was a boat at a filthy port in Turkmenistan where women in headscarves hawked quince and men with Turkic features rode atop camels. For several days everyone vomited crossing the Caspian during a storm.

Naum met the family on a pier in Baku with an armful of tangerines. An oily Caspian darkness smothered the city. Mom could barely make out Naum’s features, but the overwhelming aroma of citrus made her weep. The family was together again. Their luck had held.

Compared to hungry Ulyanovsk, Baku was a different planet, a lush Orientalist dreamscape similar to the magical pavilions Larisa had encountered at Moscow’s agricultural exhibition back in prewar 1939. At the bazaars men with splendiferous mustaches not unlike Comrade Stalin’s whistled at Liza as she bartered her bread rations for fuzzy porcelain-looking peaches, sun-dried figs threaded on strings, and tubs of Azeri yogurt, piercingly tart. There were swims in the polluted Caspian Sea; mouths and fingers stained from climbing mulberry trees. Local Caspian Flotilla dignitaries hosted rice pilaf feasts aboard destroyers and cruisers. Only the foul smell from the oil rigs marred Mother’s happiness.

Once in a while Naum’s family even got a taste—literally—of his intelligence work. A few of his “boys” would haul a big table into the courtyard of the house where they shared one narrow closetlike room, but with a balcony and a view. On the table lay a sturgeon the size of a man, or a small whale. Fishing was the cover for Naum’s spies in the Caspian. The sturgeon was split open, glistening caviar scooped from its belly. For weeks after, the family ate sturgeon pickled, brined, dried, and minced into kotleti. To this day Mother can’t look at sturgeon or caviar, still riven, she says, by the guilt of eating those delicacies while the rest of the country was starving. During the entire eighteen months they spent by the Caspian, Mom couldn’t shake the sense that she was hallucinating. She was dazed and overwhelmed by her family’s luck—their improbable luck.

By early 1943, Russia’s luck, too, was changing at last. Hitler’s lunge for the Caucasus oil fields had collapsed. It collapsed because it started so well that the Fuhrer split his forces to grab for another prize simultaneously: the strategic city on the Volga named after Stalin. The fate of the Reich was cast. Operation Blau (for the blue of the Caspian) was sucked into what the Germans now called the “War of the Rats” in the freezing rubblescape of bombed-out Stalingrad. Over the course of more than six months, Hitler’s forces, commanded by Field Marshal Paulus, were annihilated by the combined power of the Russian winter, hunger, and the Red Army under bloody Zhukov and General Vasily Chuikov. It was the first and the worst Nazi defeat since the beginning of Operation Barbarossa. Germans killed and wounded numbered some three-quarters of a million. The Russians suffered more than a million casualties (a figure that exceeds the total World War II losses for both the United States and Britain). But with Paulus’s surrender in February 1943, the momentum had swung. Come May 1945, Zhukov and Chuikov’s Red banner would wave over Berlin’s ruins.

As for Naum, he stayed on in Baku even after Stalingrad and the passing of the Caucasus oil threat. In autumn of 1943 the Azeri capital became the hub of technical and logistical support for the Soviet presence at the Tehran Conference. Yalta and Potsdam might be more famous, but Tehran was the grand rehearsal, the first time the “Big Three”—Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill—came together around a table. Stalin himself arrived in Baku by train in November, from there flying to Tehran. The plane ride was another first: the phobic Wise Helmsman had never been airborne before.

On a notably balmy afternoon on November 29, midconference, the Big Three and their aides sat down to a white-tablecloth late lunch in the Soviet embassy’s snug living room. Stalin was desperate for a second front in Europe, and the menu was part of his charm offensive. The lunch card featured zakuski (appetizers), clear bouillon with pirozhki, then steak followed by plombir ice cream. To drink: wines from the Caucasus, and the ever-indispensable Sovetskoye brand champagne, Stalin’s pride. In Leningrad the Siege wouldn’t be lifted for another two months yet, and close to a million had perished from hunger. In Tehran, as waiters passed around vodka, Armenian brandy, and vermouth, Marshal Stalin rose to offer a welcoming toast. No longer the abject gray-faced figure of June 1941, our Vozhd acted the part of the Nazi vanquisher of epic Stalingrad.

Not all the Soviet attendees showed Stalin’s poise. The Vozhd’s ravenous interpreter, Valentin Berezhkov, was caught with a mouthful of steak just as Churchill began to speak. There was awkward silence, tittering, laughter. Stalin’s eyes flashed. “Some place you found for a dinner,” he hissed at the hapless Berezhkov through clenched teeth. “Look at you stuffing your face. What a disgrace!” (Berezhkov survived to record the incident, and the meal, in his memoirs.)

But mainly Stalin waxed gastronomic to his Allied invitees. He invoked the subtleties of his spicy native Georgian cooking. FDR revved up his own charm, praising the inky Caucasian wines and enthusing about Sovetskoye Shampanskoye—shouldn’t this “marvelous wine” be imported to the United States? A Pol Roger aficionado, Churchill tactfully chose to admire the Armenian brandy. No one mentioned the epidemic looting and black marketeering of American lend-lease food supplies, or that Soviet wine-bottling plants were mostly producing containers for Molotov cocktails. (Sovestkoye Shampanskoye? Among Russian troops this was the nickname for an explosive blond concoction of sulphur and phosphorus.)

To cap off the lunch, Stalin arranged for a pescatorial showstopper. Four stout uniformed men trailed by a pair of Filipino chefs trailed by a U.S. security guy carried in a giant fish, again as big as a man or a small whale. No, it wasn’t one of Naum’s spy-cover belugas, but a salmon freighted in from Russia.

“I want to present this to you, Mr. President,” Stalin announced.

“How wonderful! I’m touched by your attention,” said FDR graciously.

“No trouble at all,” said Stalin, just as graciously.

Reboarding his plane, the lunch host had what he wanted: a commitment to a European second front, Operation Overlord (D-Day), for early 1944; and the eastern slice of Poland as lawful property of the USSR.

Tastier pieces of European cake would follow at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. And a much fancier banquet proper. As the country still reeled from starvation, a grandiose Potemkin village resort was set up for the Big Three in the war-devastated Crimea in just under three weeks. Suddenly there appeared two service airports, lavish fountains, sixty-eight remodeled rooms across three czarist palaces, ten thousand plates, nine thousand pieces of silverware, and three kitchens fueled with masses of firewood magically transported along paralyzed railway networks. At the main feast—white fish in champagne sauce, Central Asian quail pilaf, kebabs from the Caucasus—the host and soon-to-be Generalissimo was reported by attendees to be “full of fun and good humor,” even “smiling like a benign old man.” And why not? He’d gotten himself de facto the rest of Poland and the keys to most of post-war Eastern Europe.

“Govorit Moskva”—Moscow Speaking. Later that spring of 1945, the radio man Yuri Levitan made one of his most operatic announcements. In a steely, officious baritone, he announced that Soviet forces had concluded the destruction of Germany’s Berlin divisions. “Today, on the Second of May,” he continued, his voice rising, gathering force, “they achieved total control… of the German capital… of the city… of BEAR-LEEEEEEEEEEEN!!!”

Without understanding Russian you might think he was a South American soccer commentator shouting out news of a goal. The iconic image of the Soviet Victory Banner on the roof of the Reichstag, however, is unambiguous.

On May 9, 1945, at 2:10 a.m., Levitan read the German Instrument of Surrender, and everything inside my mother froze. She couldn’t help it. Dread and terror. She felt them, without fail, every time she heard Levitan’s voice and the words “Moscow Speaking.” It no longer mattered that for months now the Voice had been bringing good news, that following its announcements of the Soviet retaking of each new Russian city, fireworks and artillery salvos boomed through the center of Moscow, where the Frumkin family had been reunited for more than a year now. To this day the thought of Levitan’s baritone paralyzes my mother.

Mom remembers as vividly the spontaneous, overwhelming outpouring of orgiastic relief and elation that swept the capital on May 9. More than two million revelers streamed toward Moscow’s old center. An undulating sea of red carnations and white snowdrops. Soldiers tossed into the air. Delirious people—hugging, kissing, dancing, losing their voices from shouting OORAAAA (hooray). That night powerful strobes flashed on the Kremlin’s towers, illuminating the visage of Stalin, seemingly floating above Red Square, and the fireworks were extravagant: thirty blasts fired from one thousand mortars.

Among the celebrants was a reed-thin, six-foot-tall beauty with green sirenlike eyes and a hastily applied smear of red lipstick. She was in her late twenties, yanking along a recalcitrant eight-year-old boy. The louder everyone cheered, the harder the woman sobbed. Andrei Bremzen, her husband, my paternal grandfather, was one of the eight million men who didn’t return from the front.

If one adds civilian deaths, the Great Patriotic War (as we officially called it) took 27 million lives, although some estimates are far higher. In Russia it left tragedy and devastation unprecedented in history, unfathomable in its scale. For four uninterrupted years war had camped on Soviet soil. There were 25 million citizens homeless, 1,700 towns and more than 70,000 villages reduced to rubble, an entire generation of men wiped out.

By war’s end my mother was eleven, a bookish daydreamer with two thick black braids who’d graduated from Hans Christian Andersen to Hugo’s Les Miserables in its mellifluous Russian translation. Really, any book permeated with romantic tragedy attracted my mother. The first post-war summer found her family at a cozy dacha on the outskirts of Pushkino, a town north of Moscow where Naum was now directing a spy-training academy. “Counterintelligence, counterintelligence!” Granddad kept correcting, brows furrowed, when anyone blurted out the “spy” word. Later that year he’d be in Germany to debrief Hermann Goering amid the ruins at the Nurenberg Trials.

Swatting flies and picking at gooseberries, Mom read her sad books and contemplated what was happening to Russia. What to make of the crippled men now thronging stations, begging and playing the accordion? How to grieve for the fathers of her friends who hadn’t come back? Strangely, no one else in her family shared these thoughts. Liza plunged herself into household chores; Naum, who anyway never really talked to the kids, was busy with his steely-eyed spy colleagues and their coiffed wives, who boasted of the furniture their husbands scored in Berlin. Yulia quoted Generalissimo Stalin so often now, it made Mother nauseated. And so Larisa started a diary. Carefully she selected a small book with glossy white pages and a gold-embossed cover, a prewar Scandinavian present from Naum. She dipped her pen in the inkpot and paused for so long that ink drops ruined the page and she had to tear it out.

“Death,” she then wrote, pressing hard on the pen so it squeaked. “Death inevitably comes at the end of life. Sometimes a very short life.” She thought a bit and continued. “But if we are meant to die anyway, what should we do? How must we live that short hour between birth and death?”

To these questions Mom had no answers, but simply writing them down she felt relief. She thought some more about such matters out on the grass by the house, sucking on a sweet clover petal as dragonflies buzzed overhead.

“DEATH!! DEATH???” Liza’s screams broke Mom’s contemplation.

Liza pulled at Mom’s braid, brandishing the notebook she’d just found on the table. “We beat the Germans! Your father fought for your happiness! How dare you have such bad, silly thoughts. Death!” Liza ripped up the notebook and stormed back into the house. Mom lay on the grass looking at the shreds of paper around her. She felt too hollow even to cry. Her parents and the voices on the black public loudspeakers, she suddenly realized—they were one and the same. Her innermost thoughts were somehow all wrong and unclean, she was being told, and in her entire life she had never felt more alone.

_{CHAPTER FIVE} 1950s: TASTY AND HEALTHY

In the prework hours of March 4, 1953, a time of year when mornings are still disagreeably dim and the icicles on roofs begin their thawing and refreezing act, classical music aficionados in Moscow woke up to a pleasant surprise. From early morning that day, instead of the usual Sovietica cheer, the radio was serving up a veritable banquet of symphonic and chamber delights in sad minor keys. Grieg, Borodin, Alexander Glazunov’s most elegiac string quartet. It was when the radio’s “physical culture” lesson was replaced with yet another somber classical piece that people began to have thoughts.

“Someone in the Politburo kicked the bucket?”

The shocking announcement came around nine a.m.

“Comrade Stalin has suffered a brain hemorrhage… loss of consciousness. Paralysis of right arm and leg… loss of speech.”

Throughout that day a familiar baritone boomed on the airways. Declaiming medical bulletins of the beloved leader’s declining condition, Yuri Levitan was back in combat mode. Pulse. Breathing rate. Urinalyses. The Voice infused such clinical details with the same melodrama with which it announced the retaking of Orel and Kursk from the Nazis, or the drops in prices immediately after the war.

“Over last night Comrade Stalin’s condition has seriously de-te-rio-ra-ted!” announced Levitan next day, March 5. “Despite medical and oxygen treatments, the Leader began Cheyne-Stokes res-pi-ra-ti-on!”

“Chain what?” citizens wondered.

Only doctors understood the fatal significance of this clinical term. And if said doctors had “Jewish” as Entry 5 (their ethnicity) on their passports? Well, they must have felt their own death sentences lifting with Stalin’s last, comatose breath. In his paranoid, sclerotic final years, the Generalissimo was outdoing himself with an utterly fantastical anti-Semitic purge known as the Doctors’ Plot. Being a Jewish medic—Jewish anything, really—in those days signified all but certain doom. But now Pravda abruptly suspended its venomous news reports of the Doctors’ Plot trial. And in the Lubyanka cellars where “murderers in white coats” were being worked over, some torturers changed their line of questioning.

“What’s Cheyne-Stokes?” they now demanded of their physician-victims.

By the time the media announced Stalin’s condition on March 4, the Supreme Leader had been unconscious for several days. It had all begun late on the morning of March 1 when he didn’t ask for his tea. Alarmed at the silence of motion detectors in his quarters, the staff at his Kuntsevo dacha proceeded to do exactly… nothing. Hours went by. Finally someone dared enter. The seventy-three-year-old Vozhd was found on the floor, his pajama pants soaked in urine. Comrade Lavrenty Beria’s black ZIS sedan rolled up long after midnight. The secret police chief exhibited touching devotion to his beloved boss. “Leave him alone, he’s sleeping,” the pince-nezed executioner and rapist instructed, and left without calling an ambulance.

Medical types were finally allowed in the following morning. Shaking from fear, they diagnosed massive stroke. Suspecting he might have been Stalin’s next victim, Comrade Beria had reasons for keeping assistance away. Ditto other Politburo intimates, including a sly, piglike secretary of the Moscow Party organization named Nikita Khrushchev. Whatever the Kremlin machinations, the pockmarked shoemaker’s son né Iosif Dzhugashvili died around 9:50 p.m. on March 5, 1953.

He was gone.

The country was fatherless. Father of Nations–less.

Also Generalissimo–, Mountain Eagle–, Transformer of Nature–, Genius of Humanity–, Coryphaeus of Science–, Great Strategist of the Revolution–, Standard-bearer of Communism–, Grand Master of Bold Revolutionary Solutions and Decisive Turns–less.

The Best Friend of All Children, Pensioners, Nursing Mothers, Kolkhoz Workers, Hunters, Chess Players, Milkmaids, and Long-Distance Runners was no more.

He was gone.

The nation was Stalin-less.

In the sleety early March days right before Stalin’s death, Larisa, dressed in perpetually leaking boots and a scratchy orange turtleneck under a gray pinafore dress, was navigating the cavernous bowels of INYAZ. This was the Moscow state institute of foreign languages, home to Kafka-esque corridors and an underheated canteen with that eternal reek of stewed cabbage. Home to elderly multilingual professors: prime targets of Stalin’s vicious campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans.”

Closed vowels, open vowels. In her phonetics class my mother was sighing. Land—Lend. Man—Men. A Russian ear is deaf to such subtleties. Anyway, how to concentrate on vowels and the like when Comrade Stalin lay dying?

Irrespective of the Vozhd’s condition, an English major at INYAZ didn’t figure into Mom’s idea of any Radiant Future. It was a dull, respectable career compromise, as her fervent dreams of the stage kept crashing. “I probably lacked the talent,” Mom admits nowadays. “And the looks.” Back then it seemed more, well, dramatic to blame her crushed hopes on a “history of drama” exam at the fashionable GITIS theater academy. At her entrance orals, having memorized the official texts, Mom delivered the requisite critique of rootless cosmopolitanism to a pair of stately professors. Did they really grimace at her declaiming how art belongs to narod, the people? Why did they give her a troika, a C, for her faultless textbook recitation? Only much later Mom realized, with great shame, that those two erudite connoisseurs of Renaissance drama were themselves being hounded and harassed for their “unbridled, evil-minded cosmopolitanism.”

On March 6, as word of Stalin’s passing spread, the INYAZ corridors echoed with sobs. Classes were canceled. Janitorial babushkas leaned on their mops, wailing over their buckets like pagan Slavs at a funeral. Mom’s own eyes were dry but her teeth rattled and her limbs felt leaden under the historic weight of the news. On the tram home, commuters hunched on wooden seats in tense silence. Through the windows Mother watched funerary banners slowly rise across buildings. Workmen were plastering over the cheerful billboards advertising her favorite plays. She closed her eyes and saw blackness, a gaping void instead of a future.

Three days later, my mother, Liza, and Yulia set off for the funeral, but seeing the mobs on the streets, they turned back. My teenage dad persevered. Sergei, then sixteen and a bit of a street urchin, managed to hop forward on rooftops, thread through the epic bottleneck in Moscow’s center, crawl under a barrier of official black Studebakers, squeeze past policemen atop panicked horses, and sneak into the neo-classic pomp of the Hall of Columns where Iosif Vissarionovich lay in state, gold buttons aglint on his gray Generalissimo uniform. Sergei’s best friend, Platosha, wasn’t so lucky, however: his skull was cracked in the infamous funeral stampede into Trubnaya Square. Nobody’s sure of the exact number of fatalities, but at least several hundred mourners were trampled to death on March 9 in the monstrous surge to see Stalin’s body. Even in his coffin, Stalin claimed victims.

Weeks after the funeral, Mom was still shaken. There were two things she just couldn’t get over. The first was galoshes. Images of black galoshes strewn all over Moscow in the wake of the funeral, along with hats, mittens, scarves, fragments of coats. The second was unreality—the utter unreality of Levitan’s health bulletins during Stalin’s final days.

Urine. The Great Leader had urine? Pulse? Respiration? Blood? Weren’t those words she heard at the shabby neighborhood polyclinic?

Mom tried to imagine Stalin squatting on a toilet or having his blood drawn by someone with sweat stains under his arms from fear. But it didn’t seem possible! And in the end how could Stalin do something as mundane, as mundanely human, as die?

When Stalin’s passing finally began to sink in, Mom’s bewilderment gave way to a different feeling: bitter and angry disappointment. He had left them—left her. He would never come to see her triumph in a play. Whether rehearsing for auditions, Mom realized, or picturing herself on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater in some socially meaningful Gorky production—she yearned for his approbation, his presence, his all-wise, discriminating blessing.

After Mom confided all this to me recently, I couldn’t sleep. Larisa Naumovna Frumkina. The dissident heart who had always shielded me from Soviet contamination…

She wanted to be an actress for Stalin?

So here it was, then: the raw emotional grip of a totalitarian personality cult; that deep bond, hypnotic and intimate, between Stalin and his citizenry. Until now, I’d found this notion abstract. The State of my childhood had been a creaking geriatric machine run by a cartoonish Politburo that inspired nothing but vicious political humor. With the fossilized lump of Brezhnev as Leader, it was, at times, rather fun. But Mom’s response to Stalin’s death suddenly illuminated for me the power of his cult. Its insidious duality. On the one hand the Great Leader was a divinity unflawed by the banalities of human life. A historical force, transcendental, mysterious, and somehow existing outside and above the wretched regime he’d created. At the same time, he was father figure to all—a kind, even cozily homely paterfamilias to the whole Soviet nation, a man who hugged kids on posters and attracted propaganda epithets like prostoy (simple), blizky (intimate), and rodnoy, an endearment reserved for the closest of kin, with the same etymology as the equally resonant rodina (homeland).

By the time Stalin died, Mother was no longer an alienated child; but neither was she a bumpkin or a brainwashed Komsomol (Communist Youth) hack. She was a hyperliterary nineteen-year-old, a worshipper of dissident cultural heroes like Shostakovich and Pasternak, appalled by their harassment—and all the while spouting anti-cosmopolitan vitriol. In short, she suffered from a full-blown case of that peculiar Stalinist split-consciousness.

“Look,” Mom explained, “I was anti-Soviet from the time I was born—in my gut, in my heart. But in my head psychologically somehow… I guess I was a young Stalinist. But then after he died,” she concluded, “my head became clear.”

In certain dissident-leaning USSR circles there arose a tradition of celebrating March 5. Although de-Stalinization didn’t take place overnight, for many, Stalin’s deathday came to mark a watershed both historic and private; a symbolic moment when the blindfolds came off and one attained a new consciousness.

It so happened that March rolled along just as I was writing this chapter. In the spirit of these old dissident get-togethers, Mom decided that we should host our own deathday gathering. Again we turned to the cookbook my mother had fallen in love with at the age of five.

One sixth of the measured world, eleven time zones, fifteen ethnic republics. A population of nearly 300 million by the empire’s end. This was the USSR. And in the best spirit of socialist communality, our polyglot behemoth Rodina shared one constitution, one social bureaucracy, one second-grade math curriculum—and one kitchen bible for all: The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. Begotten in 1939, Kniga (The Book) was an encyclopedic cooking manual, sure. But with its didactic commentaries, ideological sermonizing, neo-Enlightenment scientific excursions, and lustrous photo spreads of Soviet production plants and domestic feasts, it offered more—a compete blueprint of joyous, abundant, cultured socialist living. I couldn’t wait to revisit this socialist (un)realist landmark.

As a young woman, my mother learned to cook from the 1952 version. This was the iconic edition: bigger, better, happier, more politically virulent, with the monumental heft of those Stalinist neo-Gothic skyscrapers of the late forties and the somber-brown hard cover of a social science treatise. The appearance was meaningful. Cooking, it suggested, was no frivolous matter. No! Cooking, dear comrades, represented a collective utopian project: Self-Improvement and Acculturation Through Kitchen Labor.

You could also neatly follow post-war policy shifts by comparing the 1939 and 1952 editions of The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food.

In the late thirties, a Bolshevik internationalist rhetoric still held sway. This was the internationalism celebrated, for example, by the hit 1936 musical comedy film Circus of “O Vast Is My Country” song fame. Circus trumpets the tale of Marion, a white American trapeze artist chased out of Kansas with her illegitimate mulatto baby. Marion winds up in Moscow. In the Land of the Soviets, she’s not in Kansas anymore! Here she finds an entire nation eager to cuddle her kid, plus a hunky acrobat boyfriend. In a famous scene of the internationalist idyll, the renowned Yiddish actor Shloyme Mikhoels sings a lullaby to the African-American child.

That scene was later deleted. So was Mikhoels—assassinated in 1948 on Stalin’s orders amid general anti-Semitic hysteria. America? Our former semifriendly (albeit racist) competitor was now fully demonized as an imperialist cold war foe. Consequently, xenophobia reigns in the 1952 Kniga. Gone is the 1939’s Jewish teiglach recipe; vanished Kalmyk tea (Kalmyks being a Mongolic minority deported en masse for supposed Nazi collaboration). Canapés, croutons, consommés—the 1952 volume is purged of such “rootless cosmopolitan” froufrou. Ditto sendvichi, kornfleks, and ketchup, those American delicacies snatched up by Mikoyan during his thirties trip to America.

In the next reprint, released in August 1953… surprise! All quotations from Stalin have disappeared. In 1954, no Lavrenty Beria (he was executed in December 1953)—and so no more my favorite 1952 photo, of a pork factory in Azerbaijan named after him. A pork factory in a Muslim republic, named after “Stalin’s butcher.”

Kremlin winds shifted, commissars vanished, but the official Soviet myth of plenty persisted, and people clung to the magic tablecloth fairy tale. Who could resist the utopia of the socialist good life promoted so graphically in Kniga? Just look at the opening photo spread! Here are craggy oysters—oysters!—piled on a silver platter between bottles of Crimean and Georgian wines. Long-stemmed cut-crystal goblets tower over a glistening platter of fish in aspic. Sovetskoye brand bubbly chills in a bucket, its neck angling toward a majestic suckling pig. Meanwhile, the intro informs us, “Capitalist states condemn working citizens to constant under-eating… and often to hungry death.”

The wrenching discrepancy between the abundance on the pages and its absence in shops made Kniga’s myth of plenty especially poignant. Long-suffering Homo sovieticus gobbled down the deception; long-suffering H. sovieticus had after all been weaned on socialist realism, an artistic doctrine that insisted on depicting reality “in its revolutionary development”—past and present swallowed up by a triumphant projection of a Radiant Future. In socialist realist visions, kolkhoz maidens danced around cornucopic sheaves of wheat, mindless of famines; laboring weavers morphed into Party princesses through happy Stakhanovite toil. Socialist realism encircled like an enchanted mirror: the exhausted and hunger-gnawed in real life peered in and saw only their rosy future-transformed reflections.

Recently, I shared these musings with Mom. “Huh?” she replied. Then she proceeded to tell me her own Kniga story.

December 1953, she said, was as frigid as any in Russia. The political climate, however, was warming. Gulag prisoners had already begun their return; Beria had just been executed. And Moscow’s culturati were in an uproar over a piece in the literary magazine Novy mir. “On Sincerity in Literature” the essay was called, by one Vladimir Pomerantsev, a legal investigator. It dared to bash socialist realism.

Larisa recalls that she was cooking her way through The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food when Yulia handed her the Novy mir conspiratorially wrapped in an issue of Pravda. In those days Mom cooked like a maniac. Her childhood suspicions of life not being “entirely good” and the future not radiant had strengthened by now into a dull, aching conviction. Cooking relieved the ache somewhat. Into the meals she whipped up from scant edibles, she channeled all her disappointed theatrical yearnings. Her parent’s multicornered, balconied kitchen offered a stage for a consoling illusion, that somehow she might cook her way out of the bleak Soviet grind.

The Novy mir sat on the white kitchen table as Mom assembled her favorite dish. It was a defrosted cod with potatoes in a fried mushroom sauce, all baked with a cap of mayo and cheapo processed cheese. The cod was Mom’s realist-realist riff on a Kniga recipe. The scents of cheese, fish, and mushrooms had just started mingling when Mom, scanning the “sincerity” article, came to the part about food. Overall, Pomerantsev was condemning socialist realist literature for its hypocritical “varnishing of reality”—a phrase that would be much deployed in liberal attacks on cultural Stalinism. Pomerantsev singled out among the clichés the (fake) smell of delicious pelmeni (meat dumplings). He complained that even those writers who didn’t set the table with phony roast goose and suckling pigs still removed “the black bread” from the scene, airbrushing out foul factory canteens and dorms.

Mom leafed through her Kniga and suddenly laughed. Oysters? Champagne buckets? Fruit cornucopias spilling out of cut-crystal bowls? They positively glared with their hypocrisy now. “Lies, lies, lies,” Mom said, stabbing her finger into the photo of the suckling pig. She slammed shut The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food and pulled her cod out of the oven. It was her dish, her creation stripped of the communal abundance myth—liberated from the Stalinist happiness project.

She never opened the Kniga again until I pushed it on her in New York.

Prepping for our Stalin’s Deathday dinner, Mom phoned constantly for my menu approval.

Her overarching concept, as usual, was maddeningly archival: to nail the cultural pastiche of late Stalinism. One dish had to capture the era’s officious festive pomposity. We settled finally on a crab salad with its Stalinist-baroque decoration of chimerical anchovy strips (never seen in Moscow), coral crab legs, and parsley bouquets. Pompous and pastiche-y both.

As a nod to the pauperist intelligentsia youth of the emerging Thaw generation, Mom also planned on ultra-frugal pirozhki. The eggless pastry of flour, water, and one stick of margarin enjoyed a kind of viral popularity at the time.

This left us needing only an “ethnic” dish.

Stalin’s imperialist post-war policies treated Soviet minorities as inferior brothers of the great ethnic Russians (or downright enemies of the people, at times). So while the 1952 Kniga deigns to include a handful of token dishes from the republics, it folds them into an all-Soviet canon. Recipes for Ukrainian borscht, Georgian kharcho (a soup), and Armenian dolmas are offered with nary a mention of their national roots.

Mom rang a day later. “To represent the ethnic republics,” she announced, unnaturally formal, “I have selected… chanakhi!”

“No!” I protested. “You can’t—it was Stalin’s favorite dish!”

“Oy,” Mom said, and hung up.

She called back. “But I already bought lamb chops,” she bleated. She had also bought baby eggplants, ripe tomatoes and peppers, and lots of cilantro—in short, all the ingredients for the deliciously soupy clay-baked Georgian stew called chanakhi.

“But, Ma,” I reasoned, “wouldn’t it be weird to celebrate liberation from Stalin with his personal favorite dish?”

“Are you totally sure,” she wheedled, “that it was his favorite dish?”

With a sigh I agreed to double check. I hung up and poured myself a stiff Spanish brandy. Grudgingly, I reexamined my researches.

“Stalin,” wrote the Yugoslav communist literatteur Milovan Djilas on encountering the Vozhd in the thirties, “ate food in quantities that would have been enormous even for a much larger man. He usually chose meat… a sign of his mountain origins.” Describing meeting him again in 1945, Djilas gasped, “Now he was positively gluttonous, as if afraid someone might snatch the food from under his nose.”

Stalin did most of his gluttonizing at his Kuntsevo dacha, not far from where I grew up, accompanied by his usual gang of invitees: Beria, Khrushchev, Molotov, and Mikoyan. The (non-refusable) invitations to dacha meals were spontaneous, the hours late.

“They were called obedi (lunches),” grumbled Molotov, “but what kind of lunch is it at ten or eleven p.m.?”

There was a hominess to these nocturnal meals that suggested Stalin himself didn’t much enjoy officious Stalinist pomp. A long table with massive carved legs was set in the dacha’s wood-paneled dining room, which was unadorned save for a fireplace and a huge Persian carpet. Waiters presided over by round-faced Valechka—Stalin’s loyal housekeeper and possible mistress—left food at one end of the table on heavy silver platters with lids, then vanished from sight. Soups sat on the side table. The murderous crew got up and helped themselves. Stalin’s favorite Danube herring, always unsalted, and stroganina (shaved frozen raw fish) could be among the zakuski. Soups were traditional and Russian, such as ukha (fish broth) and meaty cabbage shchi cooked over several days. Grilled lamb riblets, poached quail, and, invariably, plenty of fish for the main courses. It was Soviet-Eurasian fusion, the dacha cuisine: Slavic and Georgian.

I took a swallow of my Carlos I brandy.

At the dacha Stalin drank light Georgian wine—and, always, water from his favorite frosty, elongated carafe—and watched others get blotto on vodka. “How many degrees below zero is it outside?” he enjoyed quizzing guests. For every degree they were off by, they’d have to drink a shot. Such dinnertime pranks enjoyed a long regal tradition in Russia. Peter the Great jolted diners with dwarfs springing from giant pies. At his extravagant banquets, Ivan the Terrible, Stalin’s role model, sent chalices of poisoned booze to out-of-favor boyars and watched them keel over. Stalin liked to make Humpty Dumpty–like Khrushchev squat and kick his heels in a Ukrainian gopak dance, or he’d roar as his henchmen pinned paper scribbled with the word khui (dick) to Nikita’s rotund back. Mikoyan, ever practical, confessed to bringing extra pants to the dacha: tomatoes on chairs was a cherished dinner table hijink. (The tomatoes, incidentally, were grown on the dacha grounds.) Throughout this Animal House tomfoolery, Stalin sipped, “perhaps waiting for us to untie our tongues,” wrote Mikoyan. These were men who, in their bloody hands, held the summary fate of one sixth of the world.

Ever the meticulous foodie, Mikoyan left us the best recollections of the Vozhd’s dining mores. Apparently Stalin had a fondness for inventing new dishes for his chefs to perfect. One particular favorite was a certain “part soup, part entree…”

Aha, I said to myself.

“In a big pot,” Mikoyan wrote, “they’d mix eggplants, tomatoes, potatoes, black pepper, bay leaf, and pieces of unfatty lamb. It was served hot. They added cilantro… Stalin named it Aragvi.”

No, there could be no doubt: Mikoyan was describing a classic Georgian stew called chankakhi. Stalin must have dubbed it Aragvi after a Georgian river or a favored Moscow Georgian restaurant, or both.

I thought some more about Mikoyan. Seemingly bulletproof for most of his career, by 1953 Stalin’s old cohort, former food commissar, and now deputy chair of the Council of Ministers, had finally fallen into disfavor. The Vozhd trashed him and Molotov at Central Committee plenum; then the pair were left out of the Kuntsevo “lunches.” Mikoyan must have counted his days. His son recalled that he kept a gun in his desk, a quick bullet being preferable to arrest, which would drag his big Armenian family with him. Anastas Ivanovich was a brutally calculating careerist. Yet, sitting at my desk with my brandy, I felt a pang of compassion.

The phone interrupted my ruminations.

“I’ve resolved the chanakhi dilemma!” my mother proudly announced. “Before his death wasn’t Stalin plotting a genocidal purge against Georgia?”

“Well, yes. I believe so,” I conceded, bewildered. This intended purge was less famous than the one against Jews. But indeed, Stalin seemed to have had ethnic cleansing in mind for his own Caucasian kin. More specifically, he was targeting Mingrelians, a subminority of which Beria was a proud son. This could well have been a convoluted move against Beria.

“Well then!” cried Mom. “We can serve chanakhi as a tribute to the oppressed Georgians!”

“To Stalin’s death!” hoots Katya after I’ve poured out the vodka. “Let’s clink!”

Inna is shocked.

“But, Katiush, it’s a bad omen to clink for the dead!”

“Exactly! We must clink so the shit may rot in his grave!”

March 5 has arrived. Outside my mother’s windows in Queens, rain hisses down as we celebrate the snuffing of Stalin’s candle. Katya, Musya, Inna—the octogenarian ladies at Mom’s table pick at the showy crab-salad platter amid fruit cornucopias and bottles of Sovetskoye bubbly. Sveta arrives last—slight, wan of face. Many moons ago, when she was a Moscow belle, the great poet Joseph Brodsky would stay with her on his visits from Leningrad. The thought touches me now.

“I went,” Sveta boasts, grinning, “to Stalin’s funeral!”

“Mishugina,” clucks Katya, making a “crazy” sign with her finger. “People were killed!”

As the monstrous funeral procession swelled and mourners got trampled, Sveta hung on to her school’s flower wreath—all the way to the Hall of Columns.

“The lamb, a little tough, maybe?” says Musya, assessing Mother’s chanakhi tribute to the oppressed Georgians. I pile insult on injury by slyly noting the connection to Stalin’s dacha feasts. Mom flashes me a look. She leaves for the kitchen, shaking her head.

“Here we are, girls,” Inna muses. “Arrests, repressions, denunciations… Been through all that… and still managed to keep our decency.”

Mom reappears with her intelligentsia-frugal pirozhki. “So enough with Stalin already,” she implores. “Can we move on to ottepel?”

Less than a year after Stalin’s death, Ilya Ehrenburg, a suave literary éminence grise, published a mediocre novella critiquing a socialist realist hack artist and a philistine Soviet factory boss. Or something like that; nobody now remembers the plot. But the title stuck, going on to define the era of liberalization and hope under Khrushchev.

Ottepel. Thaw.

By 1955, after an intense power struggle—Stalin hadn’t designated any heir—Khrushchev was assuming full leadership of our Socialist Rodina. Except that nobody called the potbellied gap-toothed former metal worker Mountain Eagle or Genius of Humanity. Father of All Nations? You must be kidding. Politely, they called him Nikita Sergeevich, or simply Nikita, a folkloric Slavic name that contrasted starkly with Stalin’s aloof exotic Georgian otherness. But mostly comrades on the street called the new leader Khrushch (beetle), or Lisiy (the bald); later, Kukuruznik (Corn Man) for his ultimately self-destructive penchant for corn.

Referring to our leader with such familiar terms—that in itself was a tectonic shift.

“My elation was unforgettable, the early Thaw times—as intense as the fear during Stalin!” Inna leads off. She was working in those heady days at Moscow’s Institute of Philosophy. “Nobody worked or ate, we just talked and talked, smoked and smoked, to the point of passing out. What had happened to our country? How had we allowed it to happen? Would the new cult of sincerity change us?”

“The Festival!” Katya and Sveta squeal in unison. The memory has them leaping out of their seats.

If there was a main cultural jolt that launched the Thaw, it was “the Festival.” In February 1956 Khrushchev made his epochal “secret speech” denouncing Stalin. Seventeen months later, to show the world the miraculous transformation of Soviet society, Komsomol bosses with the Bald One’s encouragement staged the Sixth International Youth Festival in the freshly de-Stalinized Russian capital.

For Muscovites that sweltering fortnight in July and August of 1957 was a consciousness-bending event.

“Festival? Nyet… skazka (a fairy tale)!” Sveta croons, her pallid face suddenly flushed.

Skazka indeed. A culture where a few years earlier the word inostranets (foreigner) meant “spy” or “enemy” had suddenly yanked open the Iron Curtain for a brief moment, letting in a flood tide of jeans, boogie-woogie, abstract art, and electric guitars. Never—never!—had Moscow seen such a spectacle. Two million giddy locals cheered the thirty thousand delegates from more than one hundred countries in the opening parade stretching along twelve miles. Buildings were painted, drunks disciplined, city squares and parks transformed into dance halls. Concerts, theater, art shows, the street as an orgy of spontaneous contact. That internationalist summer is credited with everything from spawning the dissident movement to fostering Jewish identity. (Jews flocked from all over the USSR to meet the Israeli delegation.) More than anything else perhaps was this: the first real spark of the all-powerful myth of zagranitsa—a loaded word meaning “beyond the border” that would inflame, taunt, and titillate Soviet minds until the fall of the USSR.

And love, that picnic of love, the Khrushchevian Woodstock.

Sveta fell for a seven-foot-tall red-haired American. La bella Katya, translating for a delegation of Italian soccer players, had one of her inamoratos threaten suicide as they parted. In farewell, the distraught Romeo tossed her a package out of his hotel window.

“So I unwrap it at home,” cries Katya. “Panties! Transparent blue panties!”

Mom’s guests rock with laughter. “Remember our Soviet underpants? Two colors only: purple or blue, knee length. Sadistic elastic!”

Larisa, too, fell in love with an International Youth Festival foreigner. And he with her.

Lucien was petite and deeply tanned, with chiseled features and dark, lively eyes. He wore a dapper short leather jacket and suede loafers so pristine and comfortable-looking, they instantly betrayed him as ne nash—“not ours.” Born in Paris, raised on Corsica, Lucien ran a French lycée in the Moroccan town of Meknes, a cultural cocktail Mom found intoxicating. In my mother’s cracked vinyl photo album, the fortnight’s worth of pictures of him outnumber the ones of my dad three to one.

It was their mutual interest in Esperanto that brought the lovers together. Lucien sat next to Mom at the Festival’s first Esperanto plenary session, and when two days later, under one of the behemoth Stalinist facades on Gorky Street, he put his arm around her, it seemed the most natural thing in the world. Lucien radiated charm and goodwill. In all her life Mom, then twenty-three, had never had a suitor who expressed his attraction with such disarming directness, such sweetness. Somehow her three words of Esperanto allowed her to communicate her innermost feelings to Lucien where Russian had failed her before.

Which makes sense. For all the Thaw talk of sincerity, Soviet Russian wasn’t suited for goodwill or intimacy or, God knows, unselfconscious lyrical prattle. As our friend Sasha Genis the cultural critic wrote, the State had hijacked all the fine, meaningful words. Friendship, homeland, happiness, love, future, consciousness, work—these could only be bracketed with ironic quotation marks.

“Young lady, how about we go build Communism together” went a popular pickup line in the metro. Girls found it hysterical.

Here’s how the coyly convoluted Soviet mating ritual went: Igor meets Lida at a student dorm or party. They smoke on a windowsill. Igor needles Lida admiringly, she needles back coquettishly. Walking Lida home, Igor flaunts his knowledge of Hemingway, maybe mentions that he just happens to have sought-after tickets to the Italian film festival at the Udarnik Cinema. He lingers on her apartment landing. With studied nonchalance he mutters something about her telefonchik (ironic diminutive for phone number). After several weeks/months of mingy carnation offerings, aimless ambling along windswept boulevards, and heated groping in cat-piss-infested apartment lobbies, a consummation takes place. In some bushes crawling with ants if breezes are warm. Lida gets knocked up. If Igor is decent, they go to the ZAGS, the office that registers deaths and marriages. Their happily-ever-after involves moving into her or his family “dwelling space,” which is overcrowded with a father who drinks, a mother who yells, a domineering war widow grandmother, and a pesky Young Pioneer brother. The Young Pioneer likes to spy on newlyweds having sex. From there, married life only gets jollier.

By the time I was nine, I already suspected that such nuptial bliss wasn’t for me. I had a different plan, involving zagranitsa. A foreign husband would be my ticket out of this “dismally-ever-after” to a glorious life filled with prestigious foreign commodities. More romantic by nature, Mom belonged as well to a generation more idealistic than mine. Her zagranitsa dreams did not feature hard-currency goods. Instead, into this single loaded term she distilled her desperate longing for world culture. Or, I should probably say, World Culture. After the collapse of the Stalin cosmology and her drift away from her ur-Soviet parents, culture replaced everything else in her life. It became a private devotion.

When Lucien talked of Morocco, Mom imagined herself inside some electric Matissian dreamscape. His offhand mentions of visiting his grandmother in the French countryside fired up her Proustian reveries. She could almost touch the fine porcelain teacups in la grand-mere’s salon, hear her pearls rattling gently. Lucien’s tiny gifts—such as a leather Moroccan change purse embossed with gold stars—were not mere commodities but totems of distant, mysterious freedoms. “A souvenir from the free world to someone locked up in a prison cage,” she now puts it.

Marriage never came up between them. Lucien stayed for all of two weeks. But simply having the non-Russian softness of his palm against hers, Mom felt her lifelong alienation blossoming into a tangible shape, an articulated desire: to break physically free of Soviet reality. On the hot August day in 1957 when Lucien departed, giving her a volume of Zola’s Germinal with a passionate Esperanto inscription, she knew that she too would leave. Until it happened, almost two decades later, Mom imagined that she existed in her own fourth dimension outside the Soviet time-space continuum.

“I was anti-Soviet,” she says. “But at the same time a-Soviet: an internal émigré cocooned in my own private ‘cosmopolitan’ microcosm.” Her own fairy tale.

To fill in a void left by Lucien and the Festival, Mom plunged back into cooking—but now her kitchen fantasies took a new tack. The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food had been retired in scorn. Zagranitsa was the new inspiration. What did this imaginary Elsewhere actually taste like? Mom hadn’t a clue. While she could at least mentally savor the kulebiakas and botvinya so voluptuously cited by Chekhov and Gogol, Western dishes were mere names, undecoded signs from alternative domestic realities. The absence of recipes provided a certain enchantment; you could fill in these alien names with whatever flavors you chose.

Always stubbornly cheerful and good-natured about the paucity of ingredients in stores, Mom turned her parents’ kitchen once more into a dreamer’s home workshop. She may well have been the first woman in Moscow to make pizza, from a recipe “adapted” from a contraband issue of Family Circle lent to her by a friend whose father once worked in America. Who cared if her “pizza” bore a resemblance to a Russian meat pirog, only open-faced and smothered in ketchup and gratings of Sovetsky cheese? No ingredient, really, was too dreary for Mom to subject to a tasty experiment.

“Today I’ll make pot-au-feu!” she’d announce brightly, eyeing a head of decaying cabbage. “I read about it in Goethe—I think it’s soup!”

“Tastes like your usual watery shchi,” her brother, Sashka, would mutter.

Mom disagreed. Just renaming a dish, she discovered, had a power to transfigure the flavor.

Every couple of weeks a letter from Lucien would arrive from Morocco. “Mia kariga eta Lara—my dearest little Lara,” he always began. “My heart is wrenched,” he wrote after a year. “Why doesn’t kariga Lara answer me anymore?”

By then kariga Lara was madly in love with somebody else. Somebody named Sergei, somebody she thought looked uncannily like the French film heartthrob Alain Delon from Rocco and His Brothers, which she’d seen at an Italian film festival.

My mother and father met at the end of 1958. She was twenty-four; he was three years younger. My parents met in a line, and their romance blossomed in yet another line, which I guess makes me the fruit of the Soviet defitsit (shortage) economy with its ubiquitous queues.

Your average Homo sovieticus spent a third to half of his nonworking time queuing for something. The ochered’ (line) served as an existential footbridge across an abyss—the one between private desire and a collective availability dictated by the whims of centralized distribution. It was at once a means of ordering socialist reality; an adrenaline-jagged blood sport; and a particular Soviet fate, in the words of one sociologist. Or think of the ochered’ as a metaphor for a citizen’s life journey—starting on the queue at the birth registry office and ending on a waiting list for a decent funeral plot. I also like the notion of ochered’ as “quasi-surrogate for church” floated in an essay by Vladimir Sorokin, the postmodernist enfant terrible whose absurdist novel The Queue consists entirely of fragments of ochered’ dialogue, a linguistic vernacular anchored by the long-suffering word stoyat’ (to stand).

You stood? Yes, stood. Three hours. Got damaged ones. Wrong size.

Here’s what the line wasn’t: a gray inert nowhere. Imagine instead an all-Soviet public square, a hurly-burly where comrades traded gossip and insults, caught up with news left out of the newspapers, got into fistfights, or enacted comradely feats. In the thirties the NKVD had informers in queues to assess public moods, hurrying the intelligence straight to Stalin’s brooding desk. Lines shaped opinions and bred ad hoc communities: citizens from all walks of life standing, united by probably the only truly collective authentic Soviet emotions: yearning and discontent (not to forget the unifying hostility toward war veterans and pregnant women, honored comrades allowed to get goods without a wait).

Some lines, Mom insists, could be fun, uplifting even. Such were the queues for cultural events in Thaw-era Moscow—culture being a defitsit commodity, like everything else. Thanks to Khruschev’s parting of the Iron Curtain, Moscow was flooded with cultural exports back then. Scoffield as Hamlet, Olivier as Othello, the legendary Gérard Philipe doing Corneille; Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble led by his widow… Stokowsky, Balanchine, Bruno Walter—Mom devoured it all. And that’s not counting domestic treasures: Shostakovich performing his piano quintet or the balletic comet Galina Ulanova. “I stood in line so much, I had barely a moment to eat or inhale,” Mom likes to boast.

Like lines for cars and TV sets that could last months, years even, the Cultural Queue moved according to a particular logic and order. A whisper or a formal announcement of an upcoming tour set the wheel turning. A “line elder”—a hyperactive high-culture priest—would spring into action by starting the spisok (list). Still an eternity away from the ticket sale, friends took turns guarding the box office, day in and day out, adding newcomers to the all-powerful spisok, assigning numbers. Many of Mom’s friendships formed at the roll calls requiring everyone’s presence. These resembled intelligentsia parties but were hosted on freezing sidewalks where the cold cracked your boots, or in gusty May when winds unleashed torrents of white poplar fluff.

“AHA! Here comes treacherous Frumkina!” cried Inna, the dark-haired “line elder,” when Mom, once again, was unforgivably late for the French ballet roll call.

“AHA! Treacherous Frumkina!” mocked a stranger, so skinny, so young, with green liquid eyes offset by a vampiric pallor. Mother glared at him. But that night she kept thinking about how much he resembled Alain Delon.

In the end, the French ballet canceled. But Mom now kept noticing Sergei in different lines, finding herself more and more drawn to his shy cockiness, his spectral pallor, and most of all to his cultural queuing cred. In that department, Dad was a titan.

Sergei, my father, grew up neglected. Alla had him young, at nineteen. When he was a teenager, she was still stunning, a six-foot-tall bleached blonde war widow with a penchant for vodka, swearing, billiards, and cards, besides a busy career (city planning) and an even busier love life. During her assignations—married men usually—at their one room in a nightmarish communal apartment, Alla shooed Sergei out of the house. Dad spent most days on the streets anyway, a typical post-war fatherless youth, apathetic, cynical, disillusioned. One day he walked out of his squalid building and went rambling past the grand columned facade of the Bolshoi Theater with its chariot of Apollo rearing atop the Ionic portico. Dad was whistling. A five-ruble bill was in his pocket, a fat sum at the time, a gift from a rich uncle for dad’s fifteenth birthday. Sergei was strolling in sweet anticipation of how he could spend it when a scalper sidled up.

Five rubles for one fifty-kopek seat to Swan Lake at the Bolshoi—tonight.

On a lark, Dad handed over the fiver. Mainly because even though he passed the Bolshoi almost daily, he’d never been inside. A massive red velvet curtain inlaid with myriad tiny hammers and sickles rose slowly into the darkness. By the time it went down and the lights came on, Dad was hooked. Back in those days Moscow worshipped at the exquisite feet of Galina Ulanova, the soaring sylph regarded as the twentieth century’s most heartbreakingly lyrical ballerina. The entire performance Sergei felt as if he himself were floating on air. And so Dad became a professional Ulanova fan, seeing everything else at the Bolshoi and at the Moscow Conservatory for good measure. He soon scalped tickets himself. Dated long-necked swan-ettes from the Bolshoi corps de ballet.

His science studies, meanwhile, passed in a blur. Arrogant by nature, bored with mechanics and physics, he kept dropping in and out of prestigious technical colleges. Right before the exams in his final year, Alla was home after surgery and she roped him into an intense three-day vodka-fueled card game. Sergei never showed up for the exams, didn’t graduate, didn’t care. The Cultural Queue was his life and his drug. He did literal drugs, too, codeine mostly, hence his vampyric complexion. Upon checking into a clinic, he was advised by helpful Soviet doctors that the best way to kick a drug habit was to drink. A lot. Which he did.

The day before ticket sales started, the Cultural Queue climaxed in a raucous marathon of actual standing all the way to the finish line. It could last twelve hours, sometimes eighteen, all-nighters that left Mom physically drained but charged with adrenaline. The final push! One morning at the end of May, Larisa and Sergei staggered from the box office window like a couple of triumphant zombies. Tickets to all five performances of Leonard Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic, still months away, were nestled in their pockets. Mom bought a green-capped bottle of buttermilk and kaloriynie bulchoki, feathery buns studded with raisins, and they collapsed on the long, arching bench by the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. Its neoclassical bulk gleamed custard-yellow in the morning sun. Mom and Dad kissed for the first time under the statue of a seated Tchaikovsky summoning his music. Men with lumpy briefcases were plodding to work. Burly women in kerchiefs hawked the season’s first lilacs.

For a few weeks Larisa and Sergei were inseparable. Then he cooled. He behaved like a smug, mysterious cat, appearing and then vanishing, passionate one minute, listless and disengaged the next. By July he was gone. The cultural season was over. Days turned into weeks with no news of him, summer was passing, and Mom’s insides twisted in a knot when someone whispered that Sergei was involved with Inna, the line elder. Inna with her glossy black hair, luminous skin, and a rich father.

All of Moscow, meanwhile, stood in another line, not as epic and devastating as the lines at Stalin’s funeral, but as long and tedious as the ochered’ at Lenin’s mausoleum. They were standing to taste Pepsi-Cola at Sokolniki Park. Even my despondent mom was among them.

Well before the official opening of the American National Exhibition, Muscovites streamed to Sokolniki in the north of the city to see what was up, or, rather, what was going up. Amid the raw greenery, U.S. construction workers were helping to erect Buckminster Fuller’s spectacular geodesic dome, all thirty thousand golden, anodized aluminum square feet of it. Even the workers’ colorful hard hats provoked wild curiosity.

To urban intelligentsia, Amerika, imagined from novels and music and movies, loomed as a fervently desired mythical Other. Khrushchev, too, was obsessed with Amerika. Nikita Sergeevich displayed the typical H. sovieticus mix of envy, fascination, resentment, and awe. (He would impetuously tour the United States later that year.) While “churning out missiles like sausages,” as he liked to boast, the verbose, erratic premier simultaneously blathered on about “peaceful coexistence,” promising to beat capitalist frenemy number one nonviolently—“in all economic indicators.” Dognat’ i peregnat’ (catch up and overtake), this was called—the long-standing socialist slogan now recast to target the mighty Yanks. As in, “Let’s catch up and overtake America in dairy and beef production!” Comrades on the streets knew the score, though. “We’d better not overtake,” went a popular wisecrack, “or the Yanks will see our bare asses!” Less cynical Americans, meanwhile, stocked their shelters against Red ICBMs and had nightmares about brainwashing.

In such a heated context, Russia floated a temporizing gesture: a first-ever exchange of exhibitions of “science, technology and culture.” The United States said yes. The Soviets went first. At the New York Coliseum in June 1959, three glistening Sputniks starred with their insectlike trailing filaments and a supporting cast heavy on models of power stations and rows of bulky chrome fridges.

A month later in Moscow, on about a third of the Soviets’ budget, the Yanks retorted with consumerist dazzle—acre upon acre of it at Sokolniki Park. Almost eight hundred companies donated goods for the exhibit.

“What is this,” thundered Izvestia, “a national exhibit of a great country or a branch of a department store?”

Cannily, it was both.

As a girl Mom had visited the socialist fairyland of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow. Now, exactly two decades later, just a mile or so away in Sokolniki, here she was in the Potemkin village of consumer capitalism. Which was more overwhelming? Mom usually giggles and rolls her eyes when I ask.

Inside Bucky’s golden dome, seven giant screens positioned overhead by the designers Charles and Ray Eames flashed with their composite short film Glimpses of the USA. Mom stood open-mouthed, blinking hard as 2,200 still photos pulsed through a “typical” workday and Sunday in suburban America, closing on a lingering image of flowers.

“Nezabudki…” Mom murmured along with the entranced crowd. “Forget-me-nots.”

Beyond the dome waited an empire of household stuff in the Glass Pavilion. Inside stood a model apartment, outside, a model home. A Corvette and a Caddie enticed oglers. There were abstract expressionist paintings to puzzle over, a book exhibit to filch from, Disney’s 360-degree Circarama travelogue of America to crane at. Fashion models ambled along runways while decadent jazz played and ever-smiling American guides answered all comers in fluent Russian. One of the guides was having a fling with Mom’s close friend Radik. My mother couldn’t get over this amerikanka’s non-Soviet directness and her fantastic big teeth.

In this setting, on press preview day, July 25, the spontaneous dialectic known as the Kitchen Debate erupted between Nikita and Nixon. Tension was still running high over the Western insistence on continued free access to West Berlin, surrounded as it was by East Germany. Khrushschev was agitated further by the U.S. Congress’s renewal of its annual “Captive Nations” Resolution to pray for Iron Curtain satellite countries. He carried a chip on his shoulder, vowing not to be overawed by America’s vision of bounty. Nixon in turn hankered for the 1960 Republican presidential nomination. He had to look tough.

Cue the scenario at Sokolniki:

Secret polling later showed that Russians were equally unimpressed by the Miracle Kitchen. Voters rated it last. Jazz ranked first, along with Disney’s Circarama. But so what? To U.S. minds the exhibition was its finest cold war propaganda action ever, and it was pronounced so.

My mom didn’t vote in the poll. But to her surprise and dismay, she found herself among those underwhelmed by the kitchen. If anything, it left her feeling more lonely and down than before. She wanted to love the American exhibition, almost desperately she did. Had counted on it to be a vision of pure zagranitsa, to spirit her out of her socialist gloom, away from the deeper, more wounding gloom of her heartache. But for days afterward, she imagined cheery Yankee housewives trapped and frightened amid their sci-fi fridges and washing machines. She couldn’t picture herself—ever—cooking her “pot-au-feu” shchi in one of those blinding steel pots. This paradigm of happiness, fashioned from plastic tumblers, bright orange juice cartons, extravagantly frosted, unnaturally tall American layer cakes, seemed just as miserably phony as anything in the Kniga. It violated her intimate, private dream of Amerika. In any case, domestic bliss, whether socialist or capitalist, seemed more elusive than ever. She ate a slice of black bread with a raw onion ring now and then, that was all, and though it was August, buried herself under the scratchy beige woolen blanket with her blue-green volume of Swann’s Way. The Soviets had stolen the lovely Russian term for “companion” and “fellow traveler” and fixed it to a glistening ball of metal hurtling through darkest space. Sputnik. Swann, suffering at Odette’s infidelities, was Mom’s sputnik in misery. There was still no word from Sergei.

And then on a dank September day, crossing a pedestrian underpass near the Bolshoi, she ran into him. Sergei looked pale, defenseless, and shivery. Larisa handed him three rubles; he seemed badly in need of a drink. He took it and walked off, gaze averted.

A few weeks later the doorbell rang at her parents’ house in the Arbat. It was Sergei—returning the money, he said. Oh, and something else. “I’ve been running into all these ballerinas,” he mumbled, “so seductive and pretty in their bell skirts. But I have this short Jewish girl on my mind … you are the one.”

This is how my father proposed.

Mom should have slammed the door right then and locked it and dived back deep under the scratchy beige blanket and stayed there. Instead, she and Sergei formalized their love on a gray December afternoon in 1959, after three months of living together.

My parents’ generation, the generation of the Thaw, scoffed at white dresses and bourgeois parties. Mom and Dad’s uncivil non-ceremony took place at a drab ZAGS registry office near the Tretyakov Art Gallery. Outside, a wet snow was falling.

Under her shapeless coat with squirrel trim, Mom wore her usual blue hand-sewn poplin blouse. Sergei yet again looked pale and disheveled; he’d knocked back a hundred grams—rubbing alcohol, was it?—with buddies at work. But my parents’ spirits were good. Everything amused them in the dingy reception area. Pimply sixteen-year-olds waiting for their very first Soviet internal passports. Non-sober families, and a war invalid with his accordion serenading nervous couples reemerging from their assembly-line knot-tying. On this occasion Mom didn’t even mind the institutional smell of galoshes and acrid disinfectant that had nauseated her ever since her first elections in 1937.

A tiny head peeped out of the marriage hall area.

“Next couple!”

My parents passed through a vast hollow room beautified by a pair of forlorn chandeliers into a smaller room, this one bare save for a giant portrait of Lenin thrusting an arm out and squinting. The arm pointed conspicuously in the direction of the toilet. Behind a crimson-draped table sat a judge fringed by two dour clerks. The wide red ribbons draped across their gray-clad chests gave them the appearance of moving banners.

The judge cast a suspicious glance at Mom’s homemade blouse. Her small face resembled a vydra’s (an otter’s), squished below a towering hairdo.

“ON BEHALF OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION”—the vydra’s petite mouth suddenly boomed like a megaphone at a parade—“WE CONGRATULATE THE…”

Mom clenched her jaw tight. She looked up at the ceiling, then over at squinting Lenin, then at Sergei, then exploded with hysterical laughter.

“STOP THIS DISGRACE, COMRADE BRIDE,” thundered the vydra, “OR YOU WILL BE ESCORTED FROM HERE IMMEDIATELY!”

“DO YOU PROMISE TO RAISE YOUR CHILDREN,” she resumed, “IN THE BEST TRADITIONS OF MARXISM AND LENINISM?” Mom nodded, fighting the next eruption of laughter.

“RINGS!!!” shouted the vydra.

Mom and Dad had none.

“WITNESSES—WHERE ARE YOUR WITNESSES?”

Ditto the witnesses.

The vydra didn’t bother with further felicitations. My parents didn’t seem worthy of the customary wishes of good luck in creating a new socialist family.

“SIGN HERE, NOW!”

The vydra shoved a stack of documents across the red table.

Mom picked up the heavy blue fountain pen with a sharp, menacing metal tip. The vydra snatched it away and whacked it across my mother’s knuckles.

“GROOM SIGNS FIRST!”

Three months after being assaulted with a fountain pen, Larisa moved into her mother-in-law’s communal apartment, where eighteen families shared one kitchen.