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

_{CHAPTER EIGHT} 1980s: MOSCOW THROUGH THE SHOT GLASS

At the start of the eighties, less than a decade into our American exile, I went to a gadalka, a fortune-teller.

Trudging up to her fifth-floor lair in New York’s Little Italy, I murmured curses at every landing. This gadalka, Terri by name, charged a whopping ninety bucks for her readings—and I didn’t even trust fortune-tellers. But an attack of professional angst had driven me there.

“I hear music.”

The gadalka Terri announced this on her threshold in a thick Italian New Yorkese.

I stared at her, panting and amazed. My angst involved my piano studies at Juilliard. How’d she know I was a musician?

But from here the reading went nowhere. Terri, in her thirties, sipped tea from a chipped I Heart NY mug, squinted and strained, conjured trivialities.

“Your cousin doesn’t love her husband… In your mama’s life there’s a person named Bennett…” I nodded along. I felt the ninety bucks evaporating in my pocket.

Then came her big finale. “Soon,” exclaimed Terri, waving her tea mug, “soon you’ll see your papa and the rest of your family!”

I handed over the cash and tramped back downstairs fuming, my angst unaddressed, my real question—Will I become a famous pianist?—unanswered. Outside I went and consoled myself with a jumbo cannoli.

My mother had by then followed me from Philadelphia to New York, where we shared a one-bedroom on a drab street in the mostly Colombian enclave of Jackson Heights, Queens. But still. After the doldrums of Philadelphia, immigrant multiculti New York felt like home. I loved how our hallway smelled of garlicky pernil and stewed beans. Salsa and cumbia blasted from every apartment, while our own was filled with the lofty, competing sounds of Beethoven and Brahms. Despite my career angst, generally, life was okay. Mom taught ESL at a nearby elementary school, and what’s more, she’d rekindled her Moscow lifestyle of concerts, theaters, and endless ticket lines. She was even happier seeing me worship at the altar of High Culture. Ever since I at thirteen had begun taking the train up from Philly to attend Julliard’s pre-college program—and then the college proper in 1980—I’d lived and breathed piano. The keyboard completely took over my life, sustained me through years of immigrant dislocation, repaired my fractured identity.

“So? What did the gadalka say about your piano?” Mom wanted to know. I shrugged. I asked if she knew anybody named “Bennett.” Mom nearly fell out of her chair.

“Mrs. Bennett? She’s our Board of Education comptroller—I just saw her today!”

Amid the Bennett hue and cry I almost forgot Terri’s last bit about our family reuniting. Mom slackened to a wistful smile when I remembered. It was her turn to shrug. Oh well… The Soviet State was eternal, intractable. Reunions just weren’t in the cards.

And then they all began dropping dead.

In the Russian vernacular the early eighties are known as the “pompous funeral era.” Or “the three-coffin Five-Year Plan.”

“Got your funeral pass?” went a Kremlin guard joke.

“Nah,” replies the attendee. “Got a season ticket.”

Most of the doddering Politburo were pushing seventy. The death of Alexei Kosygin, the sometime reformer, kicked off the decade. Dear Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev followed on November 10, 1982, three days after he’d been seen looking his usual self—a fossilized turtle—at the sixty-fifth anniversary of the revolution parade.

On Leonid Ilyich’s death day, Soviet TV turned true to form—mysteriously weird. A droopy Tchaikovsky symphony instead of a much-anticipated hockey match? A didactic Lenin flick in place of the Militia Day pop concert?

The following morning, “with great sorrow,” the Kremlin announced the passing of the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee and chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet.

Nobody wailed.

Dear Leonid Ilyich, seventy-five, was neither feared nor loved. In the last of his almost twenty years ruling the 270-million-person socialist empire, he was a decrepit pill-popper who washed his sedatives down with zubrovka, a vodka flavored with buffalo grass. He’d survived strokes, a clinical death, and a jaw cancer that made mush out of his five-hour-long speeches. He still gave them—often. His rezhim clanked along, just as sclerotic as he, resuscitated somewhat by hard currency from soaring oil and gas prices.

This domino player had a nice life for himself. His cartoonish extravagance held a perfect mirror to the kitsch materialist epoch he led. Brezhnev adored foreign cars and bespoke jackets of capitalist denim. Right before dying he indulged in his favorite sport, killing boar at the Zavidovo hunting estate, where choice prey were brought in from all over the USSR and fattened on fish and oranges. The Politburo hunting party fattened itself on caviar straight out of sturgeons, steaming crayfish soup, and spit-roasted boar au plein air. It was an age of crony banquets and hyperelite food allocations, and Dear Leonid Ilyich was the empire’s first epicure, with a habit of sending culinary souvenirs—a pheasant, a rabbit, a bloody hunk of bear—to favored friends. By many accounts he was a harmless, fun-loving man. Too bad about the Prague Spring, the torture of dissidents in psychiatric wards, the war in Afghanistan.

Above all Brezhnev loved baubles—which presented a peculiar funeral problem. Protocol required each medal to be borne behind the casket on its own velvet cushion. But Dear Leonid Ilyich had amassed more then two hundred awards, including a Lenin Prize for Literature for a fabricated ghostwritten autobiography. Even with several medals per cushion, the award-bearing cortège consisted of forty-four men.

Mom and I during all this sat glued to our TV in New York. But any wild flicker of hope from the gadalka Terri’s prediction died when they announced the successor.

Yuri Andropov, the ex-KGB chief, a hunter of dissidents, was definitely not a nice man.

But though his heart was hard, Andropov’s kidneys barely functioned. Thirteen months later men in shiny mink hats once again followed a coffin out of the mint-green and white Hall of Columns to the tune of Chopin’s funeral march.

Andropov’s successor’s health was summed up by another joke: “Without regaining consciousness, Comrade Konstantin Chernenko assumed the post of general secretary.” He lasted just over three hundred days.

“Dear Comrades,” went a mock news announcement, “don’t laugh, but once again with great sorrow we inform you…”

In March 1985 a barely known agricultural secretary who had been Andropov’s protégé became the Soviet Union’s newest leader. Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was only fifty-four, vigorous, with functioning organs, a law degree from Moscow State University, a thick southern Russian accent, a pushy wife, and an emphatic manner that instantly seduced the Western media. Initially Russians didn’t joke too much about the South America–shaped blotch on his bald scalp. The venom came later. Gorbachev was the sixth—and last—general secretary of the country known as the USSR.

It’s become fashionable in Russia these days to glance backward through a mist of rosy nostalgia, particularly at the Mature Socialism of Brezhnev.

“We stole to our heart’s content…”

“Oh, but still we were so honest, so innocent…”

“Families were closer… the ice cream more wholesome.”

From the Gucci-ed and Prada-ed to the miserably pensioned, Russians wax fondly today about lines; recall defitsit jokes; praise the flavor of the Stagnation Era kolbasa. I’m no different here in Queens. Is it not a special privilege, really, to possess such a rich, weird past? To have worn the Young Pioneer tie in that scarlet Atlantis known as the USSR? To savor such a bittersweet lode of socialist madeleines?

Then, over a couple of days in 2011, the violence of the historical reality bears down on me—really, for the first time in my adult life.

I’m sick and keeping to bed. Instead of the new Boris Akunin thriller, I have at my bedside an enormous squishy blue plastic bag Mom has lugged over from her apartment. The blue bag holds letters—two decades of correspondence from Russia from the seventies and eighties. Mom has kept it all, it turns out, crammed helter-skelter into folders, manila envelopes, shoeboxes. Despite the thirty-odd years that have passed, the USSR-issue graph paper and square envelopes with hammer-and-sickle airmail logos and sixteen-kopek stamps saying Mir (Peace) are barely frayed or yellowed. There are birthday cards with garish Soviet roses, and New Year’s greetings featuring the snowy Kremlin we were certain we’d never see again.

Sipping lemon tea, I reach in.

Razluka. The faintly folkloric Russian word for “separation” engulfs me.

This is the third new year we greet without you, my aunt Yulia’s anarchic hand protests. How long can this all last?

In the slanted scrawl and sweetly screwy old person’s grammar of my grandma Liza: litany upon litany of small daily laments to cover the existential pain of losing her daughter to exile.

Navsegda—forever. What was our emigration but death with the concession of correspondence?

But from Granddad Naum not one line in the crowded blue bag. Yulia recently told me that after Mom departed, he morally and mentally shriveled, his face a stony mask of Soviet-intelligence-worker denial. A longtime pal denounced him to the authorities, so that Naum, having escaped war bullets and Stalin’s gulags, faced arrest for his daughter’s “treason to Rodina.” He was saved by Admiral Tributs, the World War II hero. Mother found this out much later and wept.

My beloved little swallow who flew away from me…

The words are Grandmother Alla’s, a few days after we’d left her on a bench by our Moscow apartment. The biggest cache of letters is hers. Her round, emphatic script brings back her hoarse, tobacco-y laugh; as I read I can almost see her, there by her dim bedroom mirror, forcing metal hairpins into her bleached blonde bun.

Raw despair brims in her letters. A woman in her fifties who, after neglecting her son, poured all her latent maternal love onto a child who “flew away.”

My last hope has been crushed, she writes—after months of fresh pleading with the OVIR visa office have ended yet again with the denial of a visit permit. I have nothing to live for…

In November 1977, not long after Grandma Alla’s sixtieth birthday, there’s a four-page letter from my dad.

I can barely lift a pen to write about what has come to pass, he begins.

Alla had been staying over with him when she felt a terrible burning in her chest. She moaned, threw up. The ambulance took forty minutes to arrive. A haughty, very young doctor examined her. She was histrionic and the doc decided she was a hysteric—informed me so directly. He injected her with a tranquilizer and left.

The next evening Sergei found his mother facedown on the floor. This time the ambulance came fairly rapidly. But it was all over. He sat the rest of the night stroking his mother’s hair. Her face was calm and beautiful.

The autopsy showed an embolism: a piece of arterial plaque had torn off and gradually blocked the blood flow over twenty-four hours. In any other country Grandma Alla could have been saved.

Babushka loved you with total abandon, Anyuta, I read, blinking away the stabbing tears. She lived for your letters, leaping twice a day to the mailbox. She died in Brezhnev’s Moscow on a Friday. On Sunday, Dad found my last letter to her, from 4,700 untraversable miles away in Philadelphia.

There are other letters from Sergei, but not many. Barely two dozen in the thirteen years we were apart. Another memorable one dates from May 1975. My first Philadelphia spring was in full, saturated azalea bloom. When Mom came home from work, her eyes were red, and it wasn’t from hay fever. She’d opened Dad’s letter at lunch.

After a bit more Masha explaining, he announces: God willing, in October we will have a child, and these circumstances force me to apply for a divorce.

But apparently divorcing an émigré is extremely complicated. So would Larisa help by sending by registered mail, asap, a letter to the Soviet international court stating she has no objections?

My mother did object. She objected passionately. She’d been secretly hoping all along that Sergei would eventually join us. But being my proud, overly noble mom, she mailed the registered letter the following day.

Folded in Dad’s letter I find now a response that was never sent. It’s from a betrayed eleven-year-old—me:

Sergei. This is the last time you will hear from me. OK, you got married, but only a scumbag could write such a mean cynical letter to Mother. Then a coda in my still-shaky English. OK, gud-buye forever. PS. I dont’ have father any more. PPS. I hope your baby will be stupid and ugly.

A year after Dad’s treachery, a trickle of contact eked back between me and him—if contact applies to a very occasional letter and an annual birthday telephone call. Those static-tormented transatlantic conversations ruined the day for me. Dad sounded not entirely sober, both cocky and timid, tossing off thorny little insults. “I got the tape with you playing Brahms. Hmm, you have a long way to go.” He fancied himself a classical music critic.

By the time I was finishing high school, Grandma Liza wrote to say that Sergei had left his second family—for a much younger woman. And that Grandma had gotten a call from Masha, the scorned second wife, warning that his secret plan was “to reunite with his first family.”

At this news, Mom just gave a snide giggle. She had by then moved on with her life.

And the Rodina we’d left behind forever?

It appeared in dreams.

I dreamed all the time I was in the Arbat by our gray building there at the corner of Merzlyakovksy and Skatertny Lanes. A low, ominous sky loomed. I gazed up yearningly at our corner window, seeing the black space where I’d once broken the glass. Somebody would let me inside. I’d take the elevator to the fifth floor and push open our door. Ghostlike, I’d sneak along to our old multicornered balconied kitchen… where a strange woman stood pouring tea from our chipped enameled kettle into Dad’s orange polka-dot cup. It was the kettle that had me waking up in a cold sweat.

Mom was tormented by the classic Soviet-émigré anxiety dream. Not about going back and being trapped behind the Iron Curtain. No, the one about finding herself back in Moscow with her family—empty-handed, with nary a single present for them. She’d wake up seared with guilt and send more money, more gifts to Russia. Our fellow émigrés bought row houses, then semidetached houses, then split-level private houses with patios. Mom to this day owns nothing.

It was the 1987 New Year’s card from Grandma Liza that sounded the first genuine hope.

Consulted the OVIR about processing your invitation to Moscow. They don’t anticipate any problems!!!

By then perestroika (restructuring), glasnost (openness), and the now-forgotten early-Gorbachev term uskorenie (acceleration) had become the new Soviet slogans.

“You wouldn’t believe what’s being said on TV,” breathless relatives cried in their crackly calls. “But shhh… it’s not for telephone conversation!”

Even my mom, bitterly wised up by the demise of the Thaw and cynical about any USSR leadership, was suddenly buying the Gorbachev optimism. The Radiant Future—perhaps it was finally coming. For real this time! Once again a utopian, fairy-tale Russia beckoned, where store shelves would groan with bananas, wheat bulge in the fields, and the borders swing open.

And the borders did open.

In the early fall of 1987, thirteen years after our departure from Moscow, shortly before my twenty-fourth birthday, Mom came home from the Soviet consulate in New York. “Your gadalka Terri, the fortune-teller…” she muttered, shaking her head in wonderment. She displayed our blue American passports. Affixed to each was the official visitor visa to Moscow.

My mother’s nightmares of returning to Rodina empty-handed set off a frenzy of gift buying, as though she were trying to pack all her years of guilt at leaving her family into the suitcases we were lugging back to the USSR.

What unbeautiful suitcases they were.

Four monster discount-store duffel bags, each resembling a lumpy black refrigerator on wheels. In the chaos of buying and packing I kept flashing back to our lean exodus with barely twenty pounds apiece. “Madam Frumkin, you’re a very wise woman,” a refugee greeter had complimented Mom in Rome in 1974.

Now we were hauling back half a warehouse.

What do you take to a country entirely deprived of consumer commodities? Seventeen packets of two-for-a-dollar panty hose, nude and black, as “just in case” presents; instant coffee; eight batons of salami; ballpoint pens; wristwatches; garish flashing cigarette lighters; heart medicine; calculators; shampoo—and anything with any American logo, for kids.

The specific requests from Moscow were simultaneously maddeningly particular and vague. Hooded terrycloth robes, must be blue. Two jumpsuits for a 125-centimeter-long baby of the nice nomenklatura physician treating Grandpa Naum. Knitting yarn—red with some golden thread—for a friend of a friend of someone who might one day help with admission to an exclusive health sanatorium. Door locks—because apparently perestroika unleashed criminals all over Moscow. Disposable syringes. Because Russians had now heard of AIDS.

Requests for parts for Ladas and Zhigulis (Soviet autos) made Mom groan and gnash her teeth.

I for my part insisted that Dad get no presents. Mom counterinsisted on something neutral yet classy. She settled on a lavishly illustrated book about Proust.

Meanwhile, intent on a grand entrance to the country that scorned us for leaving, I outfitted myself with an extravagant vintage forties raccoon coat.

“Going back to visit Soyuz (the Union)?” asked the owner of the ninety-nine-cent store we’d emptied in Queens. He had a wise smile, a guttural Soviet-Georgian accent.

“How many computers you taking with?” he inquired.

None, we told him.

“You’re allowed two!” he said brightly. “So you’ll bring one IBM!”

Which is how we got involved in a shady Georgian’s black market transaction, in exchange for three hundred bucks and a ride to Kennedy Airport from his cousin. The broad-shouldered cousin arrived promptly in a dented brown Chevy. He clucked approvingly at our monstrous duffel bags.

A few miles along the Long Island Expressway he announced: “First time on highway!”

It started pouring. We drove in tense silence. Then our dented, baggage-heavy Chevy skidded on the slippery road and, as if in slow motion, banged into a yellow cab alongside us. We felt our limbs; nothing seemed broken. The cops arrived and discovered the cousin had no driver’s license and an expired American guest visa. The word deportation was uttered.

How we got to JFK I can’t recall. I remember only the check-in lady at Delta informing us that while we might still catch the flight, our bags certainly wouldn’t.

“My nightmare,” Mom bleated in a very small voice.

“They’ll put the bags on the next plane,” a fellow returnee reassured us. “Of course, Soviet baggage handlers slash bags. Or if your lock is shitty-discount they just stick a hand in. Anything valuable by the surface?”

Mom stayed awake the ten hours of the flight nervously trying to remember what exactly she’d put near the surface inside our duffel bags.

“Salami,” she finally said.

And what is it like to be emigrants returned from the dead? To be resurrected in glasnost-gripped Rodina?

Your plane touches down right after a late-December snowstorm. There’s no jetway or bus. You descend and tramp along the white-muffled tarmac toward the terminal. You tramp very slowly. Or so it seems, because the clock freezes when you enter another dimension.

The northern darkness and the sharp chill awaken a long-buried sensation from a childhood that suddenly no longer feels yours. For thirteen years you haven’t smelled a true winter, but you’re inhaling it now through the cloudy, warm cocoon of your breath. You keep tramping. In the eerily slowed time you hear your pulse throbbing in your temples, and the squeaking of snow amplified as if Styrofoam were being methodically crushed by your ear.

You glance at your mother; her face looks alien in the poisonous yellow of the airport lights. Her lips are trembling. She’s squeezing your hand.

With each loud, squeaky step you grow more and more terrified. Of what exactly you’re not quite sure.

Normal time resumes in the chaos of the passport control lines.

The uniformed kid in the booth stares at my photo, then at my raccoon coat, then back at the photo, frowns, goes to consult with a colleague. I catch myself hoping that we’ll be sent back to New York. But he returns, stamps my American passport, and asks, in Russian:

“So… you missed Rodina?”

I detect a familiar sarcasm in the way he says Rodina, but I muster my best American smile and nod earnestly, realizing as I do that everything I’ve missed will probably have vanished. The loss of the imaginary Rodina. Was that what terrified me in the snow on the way to the terminal?

From the baggage area through the glass pane, a distant heaving wall of greeters waves, gesticulates.

“Papa!” Mom shrieks.

“Dedushka Naum? Where… where?”

And then I spot them—Granddad’s thick dark glass frames peering above a bouquet of mangy red carnations.

Wild with excitement, Mom is now waving frantically to her brother and sister. Standing next to them, also waving, is a man with a mane of gray hair and vaguely familiar features.

Something more familiar comes looming along the baggage carousel. They have arrived with us—our four epic duffel bags, with the Georgian’s IBM carton trailing behind. Each bag sports a neat slash near the zipper.

“The salami…” murmurs Mom.

In the frenzy of hugging, crying, touching, I finally recognize the man with the thick gray hair. It’s my father. But not the father I’d imagined from across the Atlantic—a romantically nihilist Alain Delon look-alike who abandoned us with cruel matter-of-factness.

The man now kissing me awkwardly is heavy and old, with polyester brown pants, shabby, square shoes with thick rubber soles, and a collapsed, sunken jaw.

This is Sergei, my father, I’m thinking. And he has no teeth.

“The salami, they stole our salami!” Mom keeps repeating, laughing madly, to Sashka, my gimpy uncle who wears a spiffy, furry karakul cap and seems jarringly, uncharacteristically sober.

“Chudo, chudo—miracle, miracle.” My aunt Yulia is wiping tears onto my raccoon coat.

Glancing sideways at Dad’s toothless mouth, I realize this: I have forgiven him everything.

The anguished nights back in Davydkovo with Mom, waiting for his key to turn in the lock, the divorce letter, the horrible birthday calls. Because while Mom and I have prospered, even flourished, my father’s life and his looks have been decaying. And I’m pretty sure this is true about Rodina generally.

A triumphant mini-armada of two Lada cars delivered us to our former apartment in Davydkovo. The squat USSR-issue Fiats, resembling soap dishes on wheels, proudly bore our epic duffel bags on their roofs. Their socialist trunks weren’t designed for ninety-nine-cent U.S. abundance.

“The rich, they have their own ways…” snorted the pimply traffic cop who stopped us to extract the usual bribe.

The forty-meter khrushcheba apartment where Liza and the entire family tearfully awaited wasn’t designed for our epic duffel bags either. Especially since my grandparents had invited two elephantine Odessa relatives to stay with them while we visited.

And then we were there, thirteen years after our farewell dinner, back around Liza’s laden table.

Nobody missed our eight stolen batons of New York salami. We didn’t realize this at the time, but 1987 was virtually the farewell year for the zakaz, the elite take-home food package Granddad still enjoyed, thanks to his naval achievements. Very soon the zakaz would vanish forever, along with most any sort of edible and, eventually, the USSR itself. I could still kick myself for not making a photo documentation of Babushka Liza’s table. It was straight out of the 1952 Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. There were the vile, prestige cod liver conserves under gratings of hard-boiled eggs, the buttery smoked sturgeon balik, the Party-favored tongue, the inescapable tinned saira fish in tomato sauce—all arrayed on Stalinist baroque cut-crystalware my grandparents had scored as fiftieth wedding anniversary gifts.

“Black bread!” Mother kept squealing. “How I missed our black bread.” She squealed too about the sushki (dried mini-bagels), the zefir (pink rococo marshmallows), and the prianiki (gingerbread). That night, through my fitful sleep as we all bivouacked on cots in my grandparent’s boxy living room, I heard the fizz of Mom’s Alka-Seltzer tablet dissolving in water, drowned out by the droning legal soap operas of her deaf aunt Judge Tamara, up from Odessa.

“Chudo, chudo, chudo—miracle miracle.” Relatives tugged on our sleeves, as though we might be a mirage. Grandpa Naum was the happiest customer of all. His smile was wide, his tense intelligence worker’s frown smoothed—as if thirteen years of shame and fear and moral dilemmas had magically slid away. His dogged loyalty to whatever regime was in power had paid off. All was ending well. The omniwise Gorbachevian State had magnanimously forgiven us prodigal traitors to Rodina. It was now fine even to openly condemn Stalinist crimes, a sentiment Granddad had bottled up for over three decades.

“If only Gorbachev would restore the navy to its former glory” was his one lament.

“Let’s thank the Party,” he thunderingly toasted, “for bringing our girls back to our Rodina!”

“Fuck the Party!” shrieked the young glasnost generation.

“Fuck Rodina!” the entire family chimed in unison.

Our Moscow fortnight passed in a blur. Never in our lives have we felt so desired and loved, been kissed so hard, listened to with such wild curiosity.

A demonic hospitality possessed Mom to invite people she barely knew to visit us in America. Because now they could.

“I’ll send you a visa, stay with us a month, we’ll show you our New York!”

I kept pinching her under the table. Our New York was a small one-bedroom in Queens that Mom and I shared with my antique Steinway grand and my six-foot-three boyfriend, a haughty British poststructuralist.

“That first visit,” Aunt Yulia confided recently, “we found you so adorable, so American in your fancy fur coats. And more than a little demented!” She giggled. “How you loved everything about our shabby, shithole Rodina! Perhaps because of the snow?”

True. A fairy-tale white had camouflaged all the sores and socialist decay. To our now-foreign eyes Moscow appeared as a magical Orientalist cityscape, untainted by garish capitalist neon and billboards. Even my mother the Rodina-basher found herself smitten. With everything.

The store signs: RYBA. MYASO. MOLOKO. (Fish. Meat. Milk.) These captions formerly signifying nothing but empty Soviet shelves and unbearable lines were now to Mom masterpieces of neo-Constructivist graphic design. The metro stops—those teeming mosaic and marble terrors of her childhood, now stood revealed as shining monuments of twenty-four-karat totalitarian kitsch. Even the scowling pirozhki sales dames berating their customers were enacting a uniquely Soviet linguistic performance.

Mom for her part very politely inquired what coins one might use for the pay phones.

Grazhdanka, she was snarled at. “Citizen, you just fell from Mars?” Me in my vintage raccoon coat? I was branded as chuchelo, a scarecrow, a raggedy bum.

In retrospect 1987 was an excellent year to visit. Everything had changed. And yet it hadn’t. A phone call still cost two kopeks, and a three-kopek brass coin bought you soda with thick yellow syrup from the clunky gazirovka (soda) machine outside the maroon-hued, star-shaped Arbat metro station. Triangular milk cartons still jumbled and jabbed in avoska bags; Lenin’s bronze outstretched arm still pointed forward—often to Dumpsters and hospitals—with the slogan YOU’RE ON THE RIGHT PATH, COMRADE!

At the same time, perestroika announced itself at every turn. I marveled at the new fashion accessory: a chain with an Orthodox cross! Mom couldn’t get over the books. Andrei Platonov (Russia’s Joyce, unpublished since the twenties), Mikhail Bulgakov’s previously suppressed works, collections of fiery contemporary essays exposing past Soviet crimes—all now in handsome official hardcovers, openly devoured on the bus, on the metro. People read in lines and at tram stops; they read as they walked, drunk on the new outpouring of truths and reassessments.

Along newly pedestrianized Arbat Street, we stared at disgruntled Afghan war vets handing out leaflets. Then gaped at the new private “entrepreneurs” selling hammer-and-sickle memorabilia as ironic souvenirs. Nestling matryoshka dolls held a tiny Gorbachev with a blotch on his head inside bushy-browed Brezhnev inside bald Khrushchev inside (yelp) mustachioed Stalin—all inside a big squinty-eyed, goateed Lenin. We bought lots.

Back at the Davydokovo apartment, we sat mesmerized in front of Granddad’s Avantgard brand TV. It was all porn all the time. Porn in three flavors: 1) Tits and asses; 2) gruesome close-ups of dead bodies from war or crimes; 3) Stalin. Wave upon wave of previously unseen documentary footage of the Generalissimo. Of all the porn, number three was the most lurid. The erotics of power.

And there was another phenomenon, one that reverberated deep in our imagination: Petlya Gorbacheva (Gorbachev’s Noose). The popular moniker for the vodka lines.

They were astonishing. Enormous. And they were blamed entirely on the Party’s general (generalny) secretary, now dubbed the mineral (mineralny) secretary for his crusade to replace booze with mineral water. Even the abstemious leader himself would later amusedly cite a widespread gag from that very dry period.

“I’m gonna go kill that Gorbachev motherfucker!” yells a guy in the vodka line. Hours later he comes slumping back. “The line at the Kremlin to kill him was even longer.”

The joke barely conveys the popular wrath over Gorbachev’s antialcohol drive.

At a mobbed, shoddy liquor shop near our former Arbat apartment, Mom and I watched a bedraggled old woman with the bluish complexion of a furniture-polish imbiber. Theatrically she flashed open her filthy coat of fake fur. Underneath she was naked.

“Pila, pyu i budu pit’!” she howled. (I drank, I drink, I will drink!)

On the faces of fellow vodka queuers I noted that existential, sodden Russian compassion.

The trouble in the alcoholic empire had started in May 1985. Just two months in office, Gorbach (the hunchback) issued a decree entitled On Measures to Overcome Drunkenness and Alcoholism. It was his first major policy innovation—and so calamitous that his reputation inside the Soviet Union never recovered.

The mineral secretary was of course right about Soviet drinking being a social catastrophe. Pre-perestroika statistics were secret and scant, but it’s been estimated that alcohol abuse caused more than 90 percent of the empire’s petty hooliganism, nearly 70 percent of its murders and rapes, and almost half of its divorces—not to mention the extremely disturbing mortality rates. Perhaps a full-scale prohibition would have had some effect. Instead, Gorbachev promulgated the typical half measures that ultimately made him so reviled by Russians. In a nutshell: after 1985 drinking simply became more expensive, complicated, and time-consuming.

Vodka factories and liquor stores were shut, vineyards bulldozed, excessive boozing harshly punished. The sclerotic state sorely needed cash—among other things, to clean up the Chernobyl disaster—but it gave up roughly nine billion rubles a year from alcohol sales. Such sales, under the mineral secretary, took place only after two p.m. on workdays. Meaning the hungover workforce had to maneuver more skillfully than ever between the workplace and the liquor line.

Not the most efficient way to combat alcohol-related loss of productivity.

We had arrived in Moscow in late December. Getting booze for the holidays ranked at the top of everyone’s concerns. New Year’s festivities were about to commence, but store shelves were barren of that Soviet good-times icon: Sovetskoye champagne. Baking, too, was a wash: yeast and sugar had completely vanished, hoarded for samogon (moonshine). Fruit juices, cheapo pudushechki candies, and tomato paste had evaporated as well. Resourceful Soviet drinkers could distill hooch from anything. Kap-kap-kap. Drip-drip-drip.

Trudging around snowy, parched perestroika Moscow, Mom and I kept dropping into liquor lines to soak up alcoholic political humor. The venom poured out where vodka didn’t.

At the draconian penalties for consuming on the job: The boss is screwing his secretary. Masha, he whispers, go open the door—wide—so people don’t suspect we’re in here drinking.

At the price hikes: Kid to dad: On TV, they’re saying vodka will become more expensive, Papa. Does it mean you’ll drink less? No, son, says Papa, it means you’ll eat less.

At the effect of the antialcohol drive: Gorbach visits a factory. See, comrades, could you work like this after a bottle? Sure. After two? Yup. All right, five? Well, you see we’re working!

To properly grasp the social and political disaster of Gorbachev’s Noose, you have to appreciate Russia’s long-soaked, -steeped, and -saturated history with vodka. So allow me to put our blissful family reunion into a state of suspended animation—befitting our fairy-tale visit—while I try to explain why our Rodina can only really be understood v zabutylie (through a bottle).

Booze, as every Russian child, man, and dog knows, was the reason pagan Slavs became Christian. With the first millennium approaching, Grand Prince Vladimir of Rus decided to adopt a monotheistic religion. He began receiving envoys promoting their faiths. Geopolitically, Islam made good sense. But it banned alcohol! Whereupon Vladimir uttered his immortal line, “Drinking is the joy of the Rus, we can’t go without it.” So in 988 A.D. he adopted Byzantine Orthodox Christianity.

The story might be apocryphal, but it puts a launch date on our Rodina’s path to the drunk tank.

Originally Russians tippled mead, beer, and kvass (a lightly alcoholic fermented refreshment). Serious issues with zeleny zmey (the green serpent) surfaced sometime in the late-fourteenth century when distilled grain spirits arrived on the scene. Called variously “bread wine” or “green wine” or “burnt wine,” these drinkables later became known as vodka, a diminutive of voda (water).

Diminutive in name, a permanent spring flood in impact.

Vodka’s revenue potential caught the czars’ eyes early. By the mid-seventeenth century the state held a virtual monopoly on distilling and selling, and for most of the nineteenth century, one third of public monies derived from liquor sales. Then came the First World War. The hapless czar Nicholas II put his empire on the wagon, fearful of the debacle of the Russo-Japanese War a decade earlier, a humiliation blamed on the sodden state of the military. Bad move. Nikolai’s booze ban starved Russia’s wartime coffers; the resulting epidemic of illicit moonshining destabilized the crucial grain market. Grain shortages led to hunger; hunger led to revolution. (Perhaps the mineral secretary in the twilight of his own crumbling empire might have paid closer attention to history?)

Even so, the Bolsheviks were no fans of vodka, and they initially kept up prohibition. Lenin, who occasionally indulged in white wine or a Munich pilsner while in exile, insisted the Russian proletariat had “no need of intoxication,” and deplored his utopian State trading in “rot-gut.” The proletariat, however, felt differently. Deprived of vodka, it got blasted into oblivion on samogon supplied by the peasantry, who preferred to divert their scarce, precious grain and bread reserves to illegal distilling rather than surrender them to the requisitioning Reds. The samogon flood overwhelmed the sandbags. By the mid-1920s a full state liquor monopoly was once again in effect.

The monopoly’s most ardent advocate? One Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. “Socialism can’t be built with white gloves,” he hectored diffident comrades at a 1925 Party congress. With no other source of capital, liquor sales could and should provide a temporary cash cow. The “temporary” ran on and on, financing the lion’s share of Stalin’s roaring industrialization, and later, military defense.

World War II descended; Russia boozed on. A classic fixture of wartime lore was the “commissar’s 100 grams”—the vodka ration for combatants (about a large glass) prescribed by Grandpa Naum’s Leningrad protector, the bumbling commissar of defense, Klim Voroshilov. On the home front, too, vodka kept flowing. Despite massive price hikes, it provided one sixth of state income in 1944 and 1945—the beleaguered empire’s biggest single revenue source.

By Brezhnev’s day our Rodina was in the collective grip of “white fever” (the DTs). Or, to use our rich home-brewed slang, Russia was

By this time national drinking rituals had long been set, codified, mythologized endlessly. The seventies were the heyday of the pollitra (half-liter bottle), priced at 3.62 rubles, a number with a talismanic effect on the national psyche. There was the sacramental granenniy stakan (the beveled twelve-sided glass); the ritual of chipping in na troikh (splitting a pollitra three ways); the obligatory “sprinkling” to celebrate anything from a new tractor to a Ph.D.; and the “standing of a bottle” (a bribe) in exchange for every possible favor, be it plumbing or heart surgery.

Vodka shimmered in its glass as Russia’s poetry, its mythos, its metaphysical joy. Its cult, religion, and signifier. Vodka was a liquid cultural yardstick, an eighty-proof vehicle of escape from the socialist daily grind. And well, yes, a massive national tragedy. Just as significantly, before—and especially during—Gorbachev’s antialcohol push, the pollitra served as a unit of barter and currency far more stable than the ruble, which was guzzled away anyhow. Vodka as cure? From the common cold (heated with honey) to hypertension (infused with walnut membranes) to whatever existential malaise afflicted you. In the bottom of the vodka glass, Russians found Truth.

And this Truth Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was taking away.

To his credit, statisticians later established that male life expectancy rose during the mineral secretary’s temperance drive. Then it plummeted. Between 1989 and 1994, well into Yeltsin’s vodka-logged rule, death rates among males ages thirty-five to forty-four rose by 74 percent. But as Mayakovsky said: “Better to die of vodka than of boredom.”

Boredom meaning… the clutches of sobriety. At a research institute where Dad worked-slash-imbibed before he joined the Mausoleum Research Lab, he had a sobutilnik (“co-bottler,” the term for that crucial drinking buddy), a craggy old carpenter named Dmitry Fedorovich. After the first shot, Dmitry the Carpenter always talked of his brother. How this brother was near death from a kidney ailment, and how Dmitry Fedorovich had lovingly sneaked into the hospital with “medicine”: a chetvertinka (quarter liter) and a big soggy pickle.

The kidney sufferer partook and instantly died.

“And to think that if I hadn’t gotten there on time he’d have died sober,” the carpenter sobbed, shedding tears into his beveled vodka glass. His co-bottlers cried with him.

To die sober. Could a Russian male meet a more terrible end?

Like all Russian families, mine has its own entanglements with the green serpent, though by the Russian definition of alcoholism—trembling hands, missed workdays, full-blown delirium, untimely death—only my uncle Sashka truly qualified. As an alkogolik—a.k.a. alkash, alkanaut, alkimist—he was a figure of awe even among the most sloshed members of Moscow’s intelligentsia. His status derived chiefly from the Accident, which happened when Mom was four months pregnant with me.

One day, Dad, who’d been mysteriously disappearing, telephoned Mom from the Sklif, Moscow’s notorious trauma hospital.

“We wanted to spare you in your state,” he mumbled.

At the Sklif, Mom found her then twenty-two-year-old baby brother unconscious, every bone broken, a tube sticking out of his throat. The walls and ceiling were splattered with blood. She almost miscarried.

Several days before, Sashka had lurched up to the door of Naum and Liza’s fifth-floor Arbat apartment, blind-drunk. But he couldn’t find his keys. So he attempted the heroic route of alky bohemian admirers of Yulia, my femme fatale aunt. To win her heart they’d climb from the landing window to her balcony—a circus act even for the sober.

Not knowing that the busy balcony railing was loose, Sashka climbed out from the window.

My uncle and the railing fell all five floors to the asphalt below.

He landed right at the feet of his mother, who was walking my little cousin Masha. When the hospital gave Grandma Liza his bloodied clothes, the key was in his pocket.

After six horrific months at the Sklif, Uncle Sashka emerged a half-invalid—one leg shortened, an arm semiparalyzed, speech impaired—but with his will to drink undiminished.

When we moved to our Arbat apartment, Sashka would often be dragged home unconscious by friendly co-bottlers or kind passersby. Or Mom and Dad would fetch him from the nearby drunk tank. He spent nights in our hallway reeking so badly, our dog Biddy ran away howling. Mornings after, I sat by his slumped body, wiping blood from his nose with a wet rag, waiting for him to come to and teach me a ditty in his rich and poetic alcoholic vernacular.

I particularly remember one song charting the boozer’s sequence, its pungency alas not fully translatable.

From Dad I knew that two-hundred-proof industrial spirt (ethyl alcohol) was best drunk on the exhale, nostrils squeezed shut lest you choke on the fumes. Samogon I knew also from Dad, who sometimes distilled it in our small kitchen using Mom’s pressure cooker and high-tech lab paraphernalia pilfered from Lenin’s Mausoleum Lab. Politura (wood varnish) was clearly far grimmer stuff, and odekolon (cheapo eau de cologne) wasn’t exactly fruit compote either.

Sashka and his ilk drank many other things besides, in those lushy pre-Gorbachev years. Down the hatch went bormotukha (cut-rate surrogate port poetically nicknamed “the mutterer”), denaturat (ethanol dyed a purplish blue), and tormozok (brake fluid). Also BF surgical glue (affectionately called “Boris Fedorovich”), ingeniously spun with a drill in a bucket of water and salt to separate out the good stuff. Like all Soviet alkanauts, Sashka massively envied MIG-25 pilots, whose airplanes—incidentally co-invented by Artem Mikoyan, brother of Stalin’s food commissar—carried forty liters of the purest, highest-grade spirits as a deicer and were nicknamed the letayushchy gastronom (flying food store). That the planes crashed after pilots quaffed the deicer they’d replaced with water didn’t deter consumption.

As a kid I found nothing deviant or unpleasant about Sashka’s behavior. The best and brightest of Soviet arts, science, and agriculture imbibed likewise. Far from being a pariah, my limping, muttering uncle had a Ph.D. in art history, three gorgeous daughters, and a devoted following among Moscow intellectuals.

Our Russian heart, big and generous, reserved a soft spot for the alkanaut.

Lying dead drunk on the street he was pitied by women, the envy of men. Under our red banner he replaced Slavic Orthodoxy’s yurodivy (holy fool) as a homeless, half-naked prophet who roamed the streets and spoke bitter truths. (Bitter—gorkaya, from gore, meaning grief—was the folk synonym for vodka.) For abstainers, on the other hand, our big Russian heart had nothing but scorn. They were despised, teased, goaded to drink, regarded as anti-Russian, antisocial, antispiritual—Jewish, perhaps!—and altogether unpatriotic.

And theirs was the poisoned cloak Gorbachev chose to march forth in.

The last time I saw Sashka was in the early nineties, when he came to visit us post-Gorbach in Queens. He spent his fortnight inside our Jackson Heights apartment, afraid to go into Manhattan lest skyscrapers fall on his head. During his stay, Grandmother Liza died. When he heard, Sashka guzzled the entire bottle of Frangelico hazelnut liqueur Mom had hidden in a cupboard, except for the bit I managed to drink too. He and I sat sobbing until Mom came home from work and we told her the news.

He died prematurely a few years later, age fifty-seven, a true alkash.

“Are you NUTS?” demanded the Moscow morgue attendant, when his daughter Dasha brought in the body. “Who brings in such unsightly cadavers? Beautify him a bit, come back, and then we’ll talk.”

My grandma Alla was a happier drunk.

Alla drank beautifully. She drank with smak (savor), iskra (spark), and a full respect for the rituals and taboos surrounding the pollitra. She called her pollitra trvorcheskaya—the artistic one—a play on palitra, the painter’s palette. I was too young to be a proper co-bottler, but I was hers in spirit. I soaked up vodka rituals along with grandmotherly lullabies. We were a land in which booze had replaced Holy Water, and the rites of drinking were sacramental and strict.

Imbibing solo was sacrilege numero uno.

Lone boozers equaled antisocial scum or worse: sad, fucked-up, sick alkogoliks.

“Anyutik, never—never!—have I drunk a single gram without company!” Alla would boast.

“Alla Nikolaevna!” Mom would call from the stove with deep parental reproach in her voice. “Any reason you’re telling that to a four-year-old?”

When Alla drank with her girlfriends, she’d pour limonad into my own twelve-sided glass before apportioning vodka among real co-bottlers in exact fifty-gram rations. Glaz-almaz (eye sharp as a diamond)—the co-bottlers congratulated her pour.

Following their cue, I’d stare lovingly at my glass and bark an anticipatory nu (so) before the toasting commenced. Toasting was mandatory. Anything from an existential “Budem” (We shall be) to flowery encomiums for every dead relative. People from the Caucasus particularly excelled at encomiums.

Like the adults I’d exhale sharply—then tilt back my head. Down it all in one gulp, aimed right at the tonsils. Yelp “Khorosho poshla” (it went down well) and purposefully swallow an appetizer before properly inhaling again.

Drinking without a zakuska (a food chaser) was another taboo. Cucumber pickles, herring, caviars, sharp crunchy sauerkraut, garlicky sausage. The limitless repertoire of little extra-savory Russian dishes seems to have been created expressly to accompany vodka. In the lean post-war years Alla and the teenage Sergei grated onion, soaked it in salt, and smothered it in mayo—the zakuska of poverty. Men tippling at work favored foil-wrapped rectangles of processed Friendship Cheese, or a Spam-like conserve with a bucolic name: Zavtrak Turista (Breakfast of Tourists). Foodless altogether? After the shot you made a show of inhaling your sleeve. Hence the expression zakusit’ manufakturoy (to chase with fabric). Just one of the countless untranslatables comprehensible only to those who drank in the USSR.

Silence, finally, was also a despised drinker no-no. The Deep Truth found in a glass demanded to be shared with co-bottlers. In one of Alla’s favorite jokes, an intelligent (intellectual) is harangued by two allkogoliks to chip in to make three. (Rounding up strangers to split a pollitra was customary; co-bottling always required a quorum of three.) To get rid of the drunks, the reluctant intelligent hands them a ruble, but they insist that he drink his share. He does. He runs off. His co-bottlers chase after him halfway around Moscow.

“What… what do you want from me now?” he cries out. “A popizdet’?” Obscene slang roughly translatable as “How about shooting the shit, dude?”

The fifty-gram gulps of moonshine, the herring, the pickles, the toasts—shooting the shit in a five-meter Moscow kitchen shrouded in smoke from coarse Yava cigarettes—these were what reestablished a fragile bond between me and my father, in the snow-mantled capital of perestroika.

We’re back in December ’87 once again, our visitor fairy tale reanimated.

This bond with Dad was, and would remain, unsentimental, a friendship, masculine almost, rather than one of those histrionic, kiss-kiss Russian kinships. And in future years it would be oiled and lubricated with vodka and spirt—samogon, too. Because as an offspring of the USSR, how to truly know your own father—or Rodina?—until you’ve become his adult equal, a fellow co-bottler?

It didn’t take many hours of boozing with Dad to realize how wrong I’d been about him at Sheremetyevo Airport. I, a smiley American now, arriving from a country that urged you to put your money where your mouth was—I mistook Sergei’s sunken mouth for the sign of a terrible life of decay. He saw things differently. In the loss of his teeth he’d found liberation, it turns out—from convention, from toothpaste lines, from the medieval barbarism of Soviet dentistry. His first few teeth had been knocked out accidentally by his baby, Andrei; gum disease took the rest. With each new gap in his mouth my father felt closer and closer to freedom.

And women, they loved him regardless. Lena, the pretty mistress sixteen years his junior, waited five years while he “sorted things out” with his second wife, Masha. Masha and Dad drank well together but sucked as a couple. That marriage officially ended in 1982 after Masha hit Dad on the head with a vodka bottle. Whereupon Dad and Lena got hitched.

Better even than no teeth, Sergei had no real employment.

Not having to report daily for sluzhba—the dreaded socialist toil—this was the unholy grail of slacker intelligentsia males of his generation.

Three years after we emigrated Sergei was expelled from his prestigious and classified job at the Mausoleum Lab. It took that long for the thick resident KGB stool to realize that Dad’s first wife was a traitor to Rodina, and that Sergei co-bottled with dangerous dissidents. Under some innocent pretense Dad was summoned to the local militia office. The two KGB comrades greeted him warmly. With practically fraternal concern, they chided Dad for losing his footing in Soviet society. Hinted the hint: that all could be fixed if Comrade Bremzen agreed to inform on his dissident co-bottlers. My father declined. His nice mausoleum boss, teary-eyed, handed him resignation papers. Dad left the cadaver-crowded basement with a sense of dread, but also a certain lightness of being. He had just turned forty and no longer served Lenin’s immortal remains.

Subsequent, briefer stints at top research centers intensified Sergei’s disdain for socialist toil. At the Institute of Experimental Veterinary Science, the Ph.D.s got fat on bounty looted during collective farm calls. The head of the Bee Ailments section had amassed a particularly exciting stock of artisanal honey. Dad resigned again, though not before pilfering a Czech screwdriver set he still owns.

Full unemployment, however, was not a viable option in our righteous Rodina. To avoid prison under the Parasite Law, Dad cooked up a Dead Souls kind of scheme. A connection landed him fictitious employment at Moscow’s leading oncology research lab. Once a month he came in to collect his salary, which he promptly handed over to his boss on a deserted street corner, keeping a small cut for himself. His only obligation? The compulsory collective-farm labor stints. Together with elite oncology surgeons Dad fed cows and dug potatoes. The outings had their pastoral charms. The bottle of medical spirt made its first appearance on the morning bus to the kolkhoz. Arriving good and pulverized, the leading lights of Soviet oncology didn’t dry out for two weeks. When that “job” ended, Dad got another, better “arrangement.” His work papers now bristled with a formidable employment record; the state pension kept ticking. All the while he luxuriated Oblomov-like on his homemade divan, reading novels, listening to opera, snagging a few rubles doing technical translations from languages he barely knew. While his devoted wives toiled.

My romantic mom defied the Soviet byt (daily grind) by heroically fleeing to zagranitsa. Dad beat it in his own crafty way.

But he wasn’t simply a crafty do-nothing sloth, my dad.

The dinner invitation that December 1987 sounded almost like an awkward, weirdly formal marriage proposal.

“I would like to… er… receive you,” Sergei told Mom on one of our walks. He meant to infuse the stilted “receive” with his usual irony, but his voice shook unexpectedly.

Mother shrugged. “We can just drop by for tea sometime.”

“Chai wouldn’t do,” my dad pressed. “But please give me a few days to prepare.” The anxiety in his voice was so palpable, I accepted on Mom’s behalf with a grinning American “Thank you.”

“Amerikanka,” Father said, touching my raccoon coat with something approaching paternal affection. Ah yes, of course: Russians never dispense grins and thank-yous so easily.

For the visit Mom wore much more makeup than usual. And she too smiled, prodigiously, flashing a perfect new dental crown. At Dad’s doorstep she managed to look ten feet tall.

Sergei had long since moved from our Arbat apartment to an atmospheric lane across the cement-hued Kalinin Prospect. His snug thirty-five-meter one-bedroom overlooked the Politburo Polyclinic. From his window I peered down on the lumbering silhouettes of black official Chaika cars—hauling infirm nomenklatura for some quality resuscitation.

I stared at the Chaikas to avoid the sight of the blond, Finnish, three-legged table. It was a relic from our old life together. Familiar to the point of tears, there was a scratch from my eight-year-old vandalism, and a burn mark from Mother’s chipped enameled teakettle—the kettle of my American nightmares. On the heavy sideboard sat the pewter antique samovar Mom and I had found in the garbage dump one rainy April, carried home, lunging over the puddles, and polished with tooth powder. My insipid childhood watercolors were up on Sergei’s walls as if they were Matisses. I noted one particularly anemic still life. The faux-rustic vase filled with bluebells had been painted by Mom.

“I think he constructed a cult of us after we left,” she hissed in my ear.

As Dad scurried in and out of the tiny kitchen in his slippers, his wife, Lena, prattled in a clear, ringing Young Pioneer voice. Unsettlingly, she had the same build and short haircut as my mother, but with a turned-up nose, far less makeup, and pale eyes of startling crystalline blue. In those crystalline eyes I saw flashes of terror. She was here: the dread First Wife. Resurrected from exile, returned in triumph, and now semireclining on Dad’s maroon divan in the pose of a magnanimous Queen Mother.

“Lenochka,” Mother said to her, “can’t you persuade Sergei to get dentures?”

We’d already unloaded the gifts. Proust for Dad, choice nuggets of ninety-nine-cent American abundance for Lena, plus an absurdly expensive bottle of Smirnoff from the hard currency store, where there were no enraged mobs.

To our swank, soulless booze my toothless father replied with home brews of staggering sophistication. The walnut-infused amber samogon, distilled in Mom’s ancient pressure cooker, suggested not some proletarian hooch but a noble, mysterious whiskey. In another decanter glimmered shocking-pink spirt. Steeped in sugared lingonberries, it was known (I learned) as nesmiyanovka (“don’t-laugh-ovka”) after Alexander Nesmiyanov, Russia’s leading chemist, at whose scientific research facility the recipe had been concocted by his savvy associates. Miraculously the lingonberries softened the hundred-proof ethyl harshness, and in my stomach the potion kept on—and on—blossoming like the precious bud of a winter carnation.

“The canapés—weren’t they your favorite?” cooed my dad, handing Mom on her divan a dainty gratinéed cheese toast.

“Friendship Cheese, cilantro, and, what, adzhika (spicy Georgian chili paste)?” she commented coolly.

“Made the adzhika myself,” noted Dad—humbly, almost abjectly—as he proffered another plate, a wonder of herring and egg thingies.

His next salvo was borscht.

It was nothing like Mom’s old flick-of-the-wrist vegetarian version, that small triumph coaxed out of tired root vegetables and a can of tomato paste. My mother was a flighty, impulsive, dream-spinning cook. My deadbeat dad turned out to be a methodical, determined master craftsman. He insisted on painstakingly extracting fresh juice from carrots and beets for his borscht, adding it to the rich rounded beef stock, steeping the whole thing for a day, then flourishing a last-minute surprise of pounded garlic and shkvarki, the crisp, salty pork crackling.

Dad’s satsivi, the creamy Georgian walnut-sauced chicken, left me equally speechless. I thought of the impossible challenge of obtaining a decent chicken in Moscow. Of the ferocious price of walnuts at the Central Market near the Circus; of the punishing labor of shelling and pulverizing them; of the multiple egg yolks so opulently enriching the sauce. With each bite I was more and more in awe of my father. I forgave him every last drop there was still left to forgive. Once again, I was the Pavlovian pup of my childhood days—when I salivated at the mere thought of the jiggly buttermilk jellies and cheese sticks he brought on his sporadic family visits. This man, this crumple-mouthed grifter in saggy track pants, he was a god in the kitchen.

And wasn’t this dinner his way of showing his love?

But all the juice-squeezing and pulverizing, the monthly budget blown on one extravagant chicken dish—it wasn’t for me. It was not into my face Dad was now gazing, timidly seeking approval.

The living-slash-dining room suddenly felt stifling and overcrowded. I slipped off to the kitchen, where Lena was glumly chain-smoking Dad’s Yavas. Her glass held pink lingonberry spirt. Unwilling to let her commit the cardinal sin of drinking alone, I offered a dog-eared toast.

“’Za znakomstvo!” (Here’s to getting to know you!)

“Davay na brudershaft?” she proposed. Drinking na brudershaft (to brotherhood) is a ritual in which two new friends interlace arms, gulp from each other’s glass, kiss, and thereafter address each other as ty (the informal, familial form of you). We emptied our shot glasses, kissed. Lena’s cheek had a gullible, babyish softness. We were now co-bottlers, Dad’s new wife and me.

Pals.

Back in the living room I found Sergei murmuring away at Mom’s side. “In those days,” I overheard, “food tasted better to me…”

Mom smiled the same polite but regal smile. It never left her face the whole evening.

We drank the last, parting ritual shot. “Na pososhok.” (For the walking staff.)

“Marvelous dinner!” Mom offered in the cramped hallway as Dad longingly draped the pseudomink rabbit coat over her shoulders. “Who knew you were such a klass cook?” Then, with it’s-been-nice-seeing-you American breeziness: “You must give me your recipe for that beef stew in a clay pot.”

“Lariska!” muttered Dad, with barely concealed desperation. “It was your recipe and your clay pot. The one I gave you for your birthday.”

“Da? Really now?” said my mother pleasantly. “I don’t remember any of this.”

And that was that. Her empty Americanized smile told him the past was past.

“Bravo, Tatyana!” I growled to her in the elevator. “Stanislavsky applauds you from his grave.” Mom in her makeup gave a worn, very Soviet grin involving no teeth.

My “Tatyana” reference was to every Russian woman’s favorite scene in Pushkin’s verse novel, Eugene Onegin. Tatyana, the ultimate lyric heroine of our literature, meets up again with Onegin, the mock-Byronic protagonist who’d cruelly scorned her love when she was a melancholy provincial maiden. Now she’s all dressed up, rich and cold and imperious at a glamorous St. Petersburg ball. Encountering her after years, Onegin is the one who’s dying of love—and Tatyana is the one who does the scorning. The sad part? She’s still in love with Onegin! But she’s now married, has moved on, and the past is the past. The sadder part for Mom? It was Sergei who was married.

From my cot in the overheated darkness of my grandparents’ apartment I thought I heard my mother crying, ever so quietly. As the relatives from Odessa snored on.

_{CHAPTER NINE} 1990s: BROKEN BANQUETS

Abysta, the bland Abkhazian cornmeal mush, comes alive with lashings of salty young local suluguni cheese. And so I tucked some suluguni into my Abkhaz gruel, then watched it melt.

It was Christmas Day, 1991—a bit before seven p.m.

In the kitchen of a prosperous house in the winemaking countryside, women with forceful noses and raven-black hair tended to huge, bubbling pots. My boyfriend, John, and I had arrived a few days before in Abkhazia—a breakaway autonomous republic of Georgia one thousand long miles south of Moscow. Primal, ominous darkness consumed Sukhumi, the capital of this palm-fringed subtropical Soviet Riviera. There was no electricity, no drinking water. On blackened streets teenage boys waved rifles and a smell of catastrophe mingled with the salty, moist Black Sea wind. We’d come during the opening act of Abkhazia’s bloody conflict with Georgia, unresolved to this day. But here, in the country house of a winemaker, there still lingered an illusion of peace and plentitude.

The women hauled platters of cheese bread into the room, where dozens of men crowded around a long table. Innumerable toasts in our honor had been fueled already by homemade Izabella wine. Not allowed by tradition to sit with the men, the women cooked and watched TV in the kitchen. I dropped in to pay my respects.

At exactly seven p.m. my spoon of corn mush froze midway to my mouth.

A familiar man occupied the screen. The man wore a natty dark pinstriped suit, but exhibited none of his usual autocratic vigor. He seemed tense, spent, his skin tone a loony pink against the gray backdrop with a scarlet Soviet flag on his left. The contours of the birthmark blotches on his forehead looked drawn with thick pencil.

“Dear fellow countrymen, compatriots!” said Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev. It was six years and nine months since he’d assumed leadership of Sovetsky Soyuz, the Soviet Union.

“Due to the situation which has evolved…”

The situation being as follows: that August, a coup against Gorbachev had been attempted by eight extremely dimwitted Party hard-liners (some obviously drunk at the time). The putsch collapsed almost straightaway, but the pillars of centralized Soviet power were cracked. Boris Yeltsin, fractious new president of the USSR’s Russian republic, went leaping in, emerging as resistance leader and popular hero. Gorbachev still hung on—barely: a wobbler atop a disintegrating empire.

“Due to the situation…”

My mouth fell open all the way as Gorbachev continued speaking.

Much had changed in my own situation since my first time back in Moscow in December of 1987. Returning to Queens, I’d sobbed uncontrollably, facedown on Mother’s couch. “There everyone loves us!” I wailed. “Here we have nothing and nobody!”

I had other reasons to cry. No wonder gadalka Terri, the fortune-teller, was mute about my future as an international keyboard virtuoso. My wrist had become painfully disfigured by a lump the size of a mirabelle plum. I could barely stretch a keyboard octave or muster a chord louder than mezzo forte. The more I tortured the ivories, the more the plum on my wrist tortured me.

A stern-browed orthopedist prescribed instant surgery.

But a pianistic trauma guru had a different prescription. Because my technique was ALL WRONG. Unless I relearned piano from scratch, she inveighed, my “ganglion” lump would just return. I postponed my Juilliard MA exam and signed up for her rehabilitation course. I’d been playing since I was six, starting on our Red October upright piano in Moscow. Into the sound I produced—my sound—I’d poured my entire identity. Now, at twenty-four, I was relearning scales with my plum-lumpy wrist. I still remember my face reflected in the guru’s shiny Steinway. I looked suicidal.

To come up with her weekly wad of crisp bills I took translating gigs, using Italian mustily recalled from our refugee layover in Rome. A cookbook as hefty as a slab of Etruscan marble landed one day on my desk. Instead of andante spianato and allegro con brio, my life was now to be occupied by spaghetti al pesto and vitello tonnato. Glumly I transcribed recipes onto index cards, while in the same room John, my boyfriend, was finishing his Ph.D. thesis—so rife with Derrida-speak that it was, to me, Swahili.

John and I had met in the mideighties when he arrived in New York on a Fulbright. Cambridge-haughty, he wrote for trendy Artforum and deconstructed obscure Brit punk bands. Me, I brooded over my Schumann and lived with my mom in an immigrant ghetto. But somehow we clicked, and soon he was colonizing my bedroom in Queens. The Derridarian, Mom christened him—a being from a mystifying other planet. “And what do you do?” condescended John’s post-structuralist pals. I stared at the floor. I labored at scales and translated recipes.

The idea came out of nowhere, a flicker that lit up my dismal brain.

What if … I myself wrote a cookbook? Russian, of course. But embracing more so the cuisines of the whole USSR, in all its multiethnic diversity? My resident Derridarian magnanimously volunteered himself as coauthor, to help with my “wonky” immigrant English.

I remember our fever the day our proposal went out to publishers.

And their icy responses. “What, a book about breadlines?”

Then, stunningly, a yes—from the publisher of the cookbook of the burgeoning new foodie zeitgeist, The Silver Palate.

Contract signed, I was drifting down Broadway when a heckler piped up in my dizzied head.

“You fraud! What’re your credentials? Zero, a big fat Russian nol’!”

Sure, I’d learned some recipe-writing from my Italian job, cooked enthusiastically with my mom, occasionally even gawked at overpriced chevres at Dean & Deluca. But watching Julia or Jacques on TV or leafing through the glossy layouts in Gourmet, I felt the same émigré alienation that had gripped me during my first bleak Philadelphia winter. Some capitalists were boning duck for a gala to which I wasn’t invited. This eighties “foodie” world of pistachio pesto and mushroom duxelles—I was a rank outsider to it. A class enemy, even.

But in my floppy handbag rested our signed contract and the chicken I’d already bought for recipe testing.

By the time I finished the opening chapter, on zakuski, the lump on my wrist had disappeared. By chapter two—soups—my guru-directed fingers were effortlessly tossing off octaves. But somehow the desire was gone. The bombastic Rachmaninoff chords felt hollow under my hands. My sound wasn’t mine. For the first time in my adult life, plumbing the depths of late Beethoven no longer claimed my heart. Well into salads I played my Juilliard MA exam (adequately), shut the lid on my Steinway, and have hardly touched the ivories since.

The all-consuming passion that sustained me all these years had been supplanted. By a cookbook.

I realize, gazing back across my Brezhnevian childhood, that two particular Moscow memories propelled me on my food- and travel-writing career. Two visions from the socialist fairy tale of abundance and ethnic fraternity.

A fountain. A market.

The fountain was golden! Druzhba Narodov, or Friendship of Nations, it was called—and it glittered spectacularly inside VDNKh (Exhibition of National Economic Achievements), that sprawling totalitarian Disneyland where in 1939 my five-year-old mother saw Eden.

Grandma Alla and I liked to sit on the fountain’s red granite edge, cracking sunflower seeds as sparrows peeped and the water jetted fantastically among sixteen larger-than-life golden statues. They were of kolkhoz girls in ethnic costumes, set in a circle around a baroque eruption of wheat. The fountain was completed right after Stalin’s death, and gilded (so people whispered) at Beria’s orders. “National in form, socialist in content”—a spectacle of the happy family of our Socialist Union republics. How could I ever confess to my anti-Soviet mom that I, a cynical kid exposed to samizdat, was utterly mesmerized by this Soviet imperialist fantasy? That in their wreaths, tiaras, hats, ribbons, and braids the golden maidens were my own ethnic princesses?

The friendship of nations…

The hackneyed phrase was one of the most powerful propaganda mantras of the Soviet regime. Druzhba narodov: it celebrated our empire’s diversity. Compensated us for our enforced isolation from the unattainable zagranitsa. What comrade, went the official line, needed crap capitalist Paris when more than 130 languages were spoken inside his own borders? When to the east he could behold the tiled splendors of Samarkand; enjoy white, healthy lard in Ukraine; frolic on pine-fringed Baltic sands? Your typical comrade didn’t make it past sweaty Crimean beaches. But oh, what a powerful spell the ethnographic myth cast over our Union’s psyche!

Some Union, ours. To telescope rapidly: Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the newly aggregated Transcaucasus formed the initial Soviet fraternity, bonded by the 1922 founding treaty. Soon after, Central Asia supplied five fresh socialist –stans: Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz. Come the midthirties, the Transcaucasus was split back into Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. All the carving and adding wasn’t entirely neat, though. Samarkand, a predominately Tajik city, was given to Uzbekistan. The Christian Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh got trapped in Muslim Azerbaijan. The nasty seeds of future un-friendships were being sown across the map. By 1940 the Soviet family reached fifteen members when the three Baltic republics and Moldavia were dragged in, courtesy of the treacherous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. My gilded fountain’s enigmatic sixteenth maiden? She was the happy Karelo-Finnish Union Republic, later demoted to a subrepublic of Russia.

So there we were: the world’s largest country by far, one sixth of the planet’s land surface; a seeming infinity pitched within 37,000 miles of the border, reaching from the Atlantic to the Arctic to the Pacific Oceans. Fifteen full Union republics—all founded, please note, on ethno-national principles, from behemoth Russia (population almost 150 million) to teensy Estonia. In addition: twenty autonomous subrepublics, dozens of administrative “national” units, 126 census-recognized “nationalities” (Sovietese for ethnicity)—more than fifty languages spoken just in the Caucasus.

Such was the bomb of diversity that began to explode in the last decade of the twentieth century.

Back in my childhood, though, the Party talk was all SOLIDARITY. Profound RESPECT for ALL republics. The great Soviet COMMITMENT TO ETHNIC EQUALIZATION! (Prolonged stormy applause.) The Bolshevik fathers created nations. Stalin for his part deported them. Under Brezhnev, the Union’s original vision of federalism and affirmative action had been revived—as institutional kitsch. The Mature Socialist celebration of ethnic friendship produced a never-ending costume carnival of Dagestani metalwork, Buryat archery skills, Moldavian embroidery. As a kid I lapped it all up. And the barrage of state-sponsored multiculturalism left me in a tizzy of perpetual hunger for the “cuisines of our nations.”

So I acquired the second of my Moscow memories—of the two-storied Central Market on the Boulevard Ring, in the company once again of my hard-living Babushka Alla.

The Tsentralny Market was the friendship of nations come to throbbing, screaming, haggling life. Instead of golden statues, shrill Uzbek melon matrons wiped juice-stained fingers on striped ikat silk dresses, while Tajik dames hovered witch-like over banks of radishes, their heavy eyes kohl-rimmed, their unibrows a sinister line. I wandered the market aisles, ravenous, addled by scents of wild Uzbek cumin and Lithuanian caraway. After the greenish rot of state stores, the produce here radiated a paradisiacal glow. Kazakhs hustled soccer ball–size crimson apples (Kazakhstan’s capital was Alma-Ata: “Father of Apples”). Fast-talking Georgians with Stalinist mustaches whistled lewdly at my blond grandma and deftly formed newspaper cones for their khmeli-suneli spice mixes, tinted yellow with crushed marigold petals. I was particularly agog at the Latvian dairy queens. The Baltics were almost zagranitsa. Polite, decked out in spotless white aprons, these lady-marvels filled Grandma’s empty mayonnaise jars with their thick, tangy smetana (sour cream). In contrast to state smetana, theirs was a quality product: undiluted with buttermilk-diluted-with-milk-diluted-with-water—the usual sequence of Soviet dairy grift.

I gushed, and gushed, about the Central Market—as spectacle, as symbol—in the introduction to our cookbook.

In the friendship of nations spirit, the very first recipe I tested was my dad’s Georgian chicken with walnut sauce (with the bird from my handbag on Broadway). Georgia was the Sicily of the Soviet imagination—a mythic land of inky wines, citrus, poets, tree-side philosophers, and operatic corruption. I followed with Armenian dolmas, then on to Baltic herring rolls, Moldavian feta-stuffed peppers, Byelorussian mushrooms.

Even pre-revolutionary Russian cuisine reflected the span of the empire. With Mikoyan’s 1939 Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, this diversity got Sovietized. As the decades progressed, our socialist cuisine merged into one pan-Eurasian melting pot. Across the eleven time zones, the state’s food service canon included Ayzeri lulya kebab and Tatar chebureki (fried pies). In Moscow you dined at restaurants named Uzbekistan or Minsk or Baku. And singularly Soviet hits such as salat Olivier and the proverbial “herring under fur coat” lent socialist kitsch to Uighur weddings and Karelian birthday parties.

This was the story I wanted to tell in our book.

Please to the Table came out at the end of 1990. With four hundred recipes on 650 pages, it was heavy enough to whack someone unconscious.

A couple of months after publication, a phone call startled John and me in the dead of an Australian night. (We’d moved to Melbourne, where my Derridarian taught art history.) It was our editor in New York, very excited. Please to the Table—if you please—had just won a James Beard Award.

The news was doubly shocking to me.

Because who could ever imagine a more ironic moment for a fat, lavish book celebrating the culinary friendship of our Soviet nations? It was the spring of 1991, and our happy Union was coming apart at the seams.

For a principal pair of reasons, arguably. One was Gorbachev’s disastrous handling of ethnic conflicts and secessionist passions in the republics. The other: the piteous mess he was making of the Soviet economy, which left stores barren of almost everything edible.

“Ha! Better publish it as a USSR tear-off calendar!” my Moscow friends had joked two years earlier, while I was still researching Please to the Table.

The first salvos were erupting from our brotherly republics.

Down with Russian imperialism! Russian occupiers, go home!

Thousands of pro-independence demonstrators marched under these sentiments in Tbilisi, Georgia, in early April 1989. The protests lasted five days. That summer John and I went recipe-collecting in the romantic, mountainous Caucasus. Reaching Tbilisi, we found the histrionic Georgian capital still reeling in shock. On April 9, Moscow’s troops had killed twenty protesters, mostly young women. Everywhere, amid balconies jutting from teetering houses and restaurants dug into cliffs around the Kura River, Tbilisians seethed with opulent rage, calling down terrible curses on Moscow. The Kremlin, meanwhile, blamed the massacre on local officials.

Our hosts in town were a young architect couple, Vano and Nana, I’ll call them—flowers of a young liberal national intelligentsia. Their noble faces convulsed with hatred for Kremlin oppression. But to us Nana and Vano were Georgian hospitality personified. A guest thereabouts is revered as a holy creature of God, to be bathed in largesse. In our honor, kvevri, clay vessels of wine, were dug out from the ground. Craggy wands of churchkhella—walnuts suspended in grape must—were laid out in piles. Cute baby lambs had their throats cut for roadside picnics by the crenellated stone walls of an eleventh-century Byzantine monastery. We became more than friends with Nana and Vano—family, almost. I cheered their separatist, righteous defiance at the top of my lungs.

One evening we sat under a quince tree in the countryside. We were full of dark, fruity wines and lavash bread rolled around opal basil and cheese. I felt at home enough to mention Abkhazia. Formally an autonomous republic of Georgia, Abkhazia was making its own moves to secede—from Georgia. We’d all been laughing and singing. Suddenly Nana and Vano froze. Their proud, handsome faces clenched with re-ignited hatred.

“Abkhazians are monkeys!” sputtered Nana. “Monkeys down from the hills! They have no culture. No history.”

“Here’s what they deserve,” snarled Vano. He crushed a bunch of black grapes savagely in his fist. Red juice squirted out between his elegant knuckles.

It was a preview of what lay ahead for Gorbachev’s Soyuz (Union).

What lay ahead also was the furious rumbling of stomachs.

In trying to reform the creaking, rusting wheel of the centralized Soviet system, Gorbachev had loosened the screws, dismantled a part here, a part there, and ultimately halted the wheel—with nothing to replace it. Typical Gorbachevian flip-flops left the economy floundering between socialist planning and capitalist supply and demand. Deficits soared, output stagnated, the ruble plummeted. The economy was collapsing.

Starting in 1989, John and I began living part-time in Moscow and traveling around the USSR—this for another book now, one my Derridarian was writing himself. It was to be a dark travel picaresque about the imploding Imperium. We stayed during the winter months mainly, during his Aussie summer vacations. I loved our first arrival, after a twenty-hour flight from Melbourne, to Dad’s and Grandma Liza’s welcome spreads, touchingly, generously, improbably conjured out of thin air. Our second arrival a year later was different. In December 1990, Babushka Liza had only diseased boiled potatoes and sauerkraut. I remember the anguished embarrassment in her eyes. The “foreigners” were at her table, and she had only this to offer.

“Nichevo v magazinakh!” she cried. “There’s nothing in the stores! Pustiye prilavki—empty counters!”

The socialist shortage vernacular always reached for hyperbole, so I didn’t take her words literally. Counters might be empty of desiderata—instant coffee, bananas—but in the past you could always count on salt, eggs, buckwheat, coarse brown vermishel. The next day I went to a Davydkovo store. And came face-to-face with IT. Nichevo—nothingness. The glaring existential emptiness of the shelves. No, I lie. The nichevo was framed by castles and pyramids constructed from “sea-cabbage salad”—canned seaweed that made you vomit on contact. Two bored salesgirls sat inside the barren store. One was drawling a joke about “coupons for grade #6 dogmeat.” The joke involved fur, claws, and chopped wooden bits of the doghouse. The other was assembling a mini–Lenin mausoleum ziggurat from the cans.

“A tomb for socialist edibles!”

Her laughter echoed amid the empty counters.

On a TV concert that New Year’s Eve, the big-haired pop diva Alla Pugacheva bellowed a song called “Nyam-nyam” (yum yum). Usually Pugacheva bawled about “a million scarlet roses.” Not now.

Taloni (coupons)—one of many official euphemisms for the dread word kartochki (ration cards). Other evasions included the alarmingly suave “invitation to purchase.” They only rubbed salt in the truth: for the first time since World War II, rationing was being inflicted on Homo sovieticus. What’s more, Gorbachev’s new glasnost meant you could now scream about it out loud. “Glasnost,” explained a Soviet mutt to an American mutt in a popular joke, “is when they loosen your leash, yank away the food bowl, and let you bark all you want.” The barking? You could hear it from space.

As centralized distribution unraveled, food deliveries often de-toured into the twilight zone of barter and shady semifree commerce. Or stuff simply rotted in warehouses. There was something else, too, now: nasty economic un-friendship within our happy Soviet fraternity. Granted increased financial autonomy by Gorbachev, regional politicians and enterprises fought to keep scarce supplies for their own hungry citizenry. Georgia clung to its tangerines, Kazakhstan its vegetables. When Moscow—and scores of other cities—restricted food sales to locals, the neighboring provinces halted dairy and meat deliveries into the capital.

So everyone hoarded.

My dad’s four-hundred-square-foot apartment, besides being overcrowded with me and my six-foot-three Brit, resembled a storeroom. Blissfully unemployed, Dad had all day to forage and hunt. In the torturous food supply game, my old man was a grossmeister. He stalked milk delivery trucks, artfully forged vodka coupons, rushed to beat bread stampedes. He made his own cheese, soft and bland. His ridged radiators resembled a Stakhanovite bread rusk-drying plant. The DIY food movement of late perestroika would awe modern-day San Franciscans. On the rickety balconies of my friends, egg-laying chickens squawked among three-liter jars holding lingonberries pureed with rationed sugar, holding cucumbers pickled with rationed salt—holding anything that could be brined or preserved. 1990: the year of sauerkraut.

To shuffle as John and I did between Moscow and the West in those days was to inhabit a surreal split-screen. Western media gushed about Gorby’s charisma and feted him for the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the cold war. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the dark, frosty air swirled with conspiracies of doom, with intimations of apocalypse. Famine was on its way. Citizens were dropping dead from expired medicine in humanitarian aid packages sold by speculators. (Probably true.) “Bush’s Legs,” the frozen chicken parts sent by Bush père as relief aid had surely been injected with AIDS. The Yanks were poisoning us, trampling our national pride with their diseased drumsticks. Private kiosks sold piss inside whiskey bottles, rat meat inside pirozhki. Ancient babushkas—those kerchiefed Cassandras who’d seen three waves of famines—lurked in stores crowing, “Chernobyl harvest!” at the sight of any misshapen beet.

The histrionics of discontent possessed a carnival edge. A perverse glee, almost. Force-fed cheerful Rodina songs, Soviet society was now whooping up an anti–fairy tale of collapse.

It was during such a time—when deliveries were called off for lack of gasoline and newspapers shrank to four pages because of lack of ink; when the words razval (collapse), raspad (disintegration), and razrukha (devastation) echoed everywhere like a sick song stuck in the collective brain—that the Derridarian and I journeyed around the USSR for his book of Soviet-twilight picaresques.

Picture sardine cans on ice: rickety Zhiguli cars were our means of transport, usually on frozen roads. Lacking official Intourist permits, we couldn’t legally stay at hotels, so we depended on the kindness of strangers—friends of friends of friends who passed us along like relay batons in a Soviet hospitality race. Between summer 1989 (the Caucasus) and December 1991 (the Caucasus again) we must have clocked 10,000 miles, give or take another endless detour. We roamed Central Asia, jounced through obscure Volga regions where some old folk still practiced shamanism and swilled fermented mare’s milk. We rambled the periphery of boundless Ukraine and the charmed mini-kremlins of the Golden Ring around Moscow.

HUNTERS IN THE WINTER! appealed a sign in the gauzy Ukrainian steppe. PLEASE ARRANGE TO FEED THE WILD ANIMALS.

Our first driver was Seryoga, my cousin Dasha’s blond wispy husband, who’d fought in the Afghan war.

“So we’re near Kabul,” went a typical Seryoga road tale. “So this frigging muezzin’s not letting us sleep. So my pal Sashka takes out his Kalashnikov. BAM! Muezzin’s quiet. Forever.”

Seryoga taught me several crucial survival skills of the road. How to spray Mace, for instance, which we practiced on his grandmother’s pig. Also bribery. For this you positioned an American five baks note so that its edge stuck out of a pack of American Marlboros, which you slid across the counter with a wink as you cooed: “I’d be obliged, very obliged.” The bribing of GAI (traffic police) Seryoga handled himself. Not always ably. On one particularly grim stretch of Kazan-Moscow highway we were stopped and fined “tventi baks” exactly twenty-two times. It was the GAI boys’ version of a relay.

The dizzying landscape diversity of our multicultural Rodina celebrated in poem, novel, and song? It was now obliterated by winter, dissolved in exhaust fumes, brown compressed snow, the hopeless flattening light.

Our departures from Dad’s crammed Moscow quarters… Up in the five a.m. blackness to make the most of the scant daylight ahead. My dad in the kitchen in his baggy blue track pants, packing our plastic bags with his radiator-dried rusks. Broth in his Chinese aluminum thermos; a coiled immersion heater for tea. Rationed sugar cubes. Twelve skinny lengths of salami from the hard-currency store to last the trip. We embrace. Sit for exactly one minute in silence—a superstitious Russian departure rite.

Our arrivals… Whether in Hanseatic Tallinn or Orientalist Tashkent, the potholed socialist road always led to an anonymous Lego sprawl of stained concrete blocks—five, nine, thirteen stories—in identical housing developments on identical streets.

“Grazhdanka (citizen)!” you plead, exhausted, desperate, starving. “We’re looking for Union Street, House five, structure seventeen B, fraction two-six.”

“Chavo—WHA?” barks the grazhdanka. “This is Trade Union Street. Union Street is…” A vague motion somewhere into snowy Soviet infinity.

No map, no public phone without the receiver torn out. No idea if your friends-of-friends hosts are still awaiting you with their weak tea and their sauerkraut. An hour slogs by, another. Finally the address is located; you stand by the sardine can on wheels in shivering solidarity, a half-petrified icicle, as Seryoga dismantles the Zhiguli for the night so it won’t be “undressed.” Off come the spare tire, the plastic canisters of extra gas, the mirrors, the knobs. The pathetic moron who relaxes his vigilance for even one night? He buys his own windshield wipers at a car-parts flea market, as we did the next day. I think Tula was where this road lesson occurred. Tula—proud home of the samovar and stamped Slavic gingerbread, where we nearly keeled over from a black market can of expired saira fish. Or was it in the medieval marvel of Novgorod? Novgorod, which I remember not for the glorious icon of a golden-tressed angel with the world’s saddest twelfth-century eyes, but for the hostile drunks who spat at our license plates and pulled our wispy Afghan vet out of the car to “tear open his Moscow ass.” Novgorod, where I got to use Mace on actual humans.

We’d stopped in Novgorod en route to the more civilized Baltic capitals—Estonian Tallinn, Lithuanian Vilnius, and Latvian Riga. It was the empty-shelves December of 1990; Gorbachev, floundering, had just replaced half his cabinet with hard-liners. The previous spring, the Baltic republics had declared their independence. To which the Kremlin responded with intimidation tactics and harsh fuel sanctions.

And yet we found the Baltic mood uplifting, even hopeful.

In Vilnius we crashed with a sweet, plump, twenty-something TV producer with a halo of frizzy hair, a dusky laugh, and boundless patriotism. Regina was the fresh modern face of Baltic resistance: earnest, cultured, convinced that now was the time to right historic injustices. Her five-meter kitchen chockablock with birchbark Lithuanian knickknacks felt like the snug home branch of Sajudis, Lithuania’s anti-Communist liberation movement. Boho types in coarse-knit Nordic sweaters came and went, bearing scant edibles and the latest political news—Gorbachev’s foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, had just resigned, warning about a return to dictatorship! Regina’s friends held hands and prayed, actually prayed for the end of Soviet oppression.

I’d been to Vilnius when I was eight, on a movie shoot. To my dazzled young eyes, cozy “bourgeois” Vilnius seemed a magical porthole onto the unattainable West. Particularly the local konditerai scented with freshly ground coffee and serving real whipped cream. The whipped cream drowned my sense of unease. Because, boy, the Lithuanians really hated us Russians. Later, Mom, ever eager to bust up my friendship-of-nations fantasy, explained about the forced annexations of 1939. This might have been my opening foretaste of Soviet dis-Union. I remember feeling terribly guilty, as if I myself had signed the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact handing the Baltics over to Stalin. So now I prayed along with Regina.

With Christmas approaching, Regina got a crazy idea. Šakotis!

Šakotis (it means “branched”) is the stupendously elaborate Lithuanian cake resembling a spiky-boughed tree. Even in bountiful times nobody made it at home: besides fifty eggs per kilo of butter, šakotis demanded to be turned on a spit while you brushed on new dripping layers of batter. Regina was, however, a girl on a mission. If Vytautas Landsbergis—the soft-spoken, pedantic ex-musicologist who led the Sajudis movement—could defy the Godzilla that was the Soviet regime, she could make šakotis. Friends brought butter, eggs, and a few inches of brandy. We all sat in the kitchen, broiling each craggy layer of batter to be stacked on an improvised “tree trunk.”

The šakotis came out strange and beautiful: a fragile, misshapen tower of optimism. We ate it by candlelight. Someone strummed on guitar; the girls chanted Lithuanian folk songs.

“Let’s each make a wish,” Regina implored, clapping her hands. She seemed so euphoric.

Three weeks later she called us in Moscow. It was January 13, long past midnight.

“I’m at work! They’re storming us! They’re shooting—” The connection went dead. Regina worked at the Vilnius TV tower.

In the morning we tuned in Voice of America on Dad’s short-wave radio. Regina’s TV tower was under Soviet assault; tanks were rolling over unarmed crowds. The violence had apparently ignited the previous day when the Soviets occupied the main print media building. A mysterious Moscow-backed force, the “National Salvation Committee,” claimed to have seized power. Huge numbers of Lithuanians kept vigil around their Parliament, defending it. Everyone sang, linking hands. Thirteen people were killed and hundreds injured.

“Hello, 1968,” Dad kept muttering darkly, invoking the Soviet crackdown of Prague. TAKE AWAY GORBACHEV’S NOBEL PEACE PRIZE! demanded a slogan at a Moscow protest rally. Russia’s liberal media, previously Gorby supporters, bawled in outrage—so he promptly rein-troduced censorship. All the while insisting he hadn’t learned about the bloodshed in Vilnius until the day after it happened. Was he lying, or had he lost control of the hard-liners? That dark new year of 1991, all I could think of was Regina’s cake. Smashed by tanks, spattered with blood. Our friendship-of-nations fantasy—where was it now?

I wonder if Gorbachev phrased the question this way himself. For he too must have bought into our anthem’s gilded cliché of indomitable friendship—of the “unbreakable Union of Soviet Republics.” What Party ideologue hadn’t?

And yet from its very inception this friendly vision of a permanent Union contained a lurking flaw, a built-in lever for self-destruction. In their nation-building and affirmative-action frenzy, the twenties Bolsheviks had insisted on full equality for hundreds of newly Sovietized ethnic minorities. So—on paper at least—the founding 1922 Union Treaty granted each republic the right to secede, a right maintained in all subsequent constitutions. Each republic possessed its own fully articulated government structure. Paradoxically, such nation-building was meant as a bridge to the eventual merging of nations into a single communist unity. More paradoxical was how aggressively the Party-state fostered ethnic identities and diversity—in acceptable Soviet form—while suppressing any authentic expressions of nationalism.

The post-Stalin leadership had generally been blind to the potential consequences of this paradox. Whatever genuine nationalist flare-ups occurred under Khrushchev and Brezhnev were dismissed as isolated holdovers of bourgeois national consciousness and quickly put down. The response of Gorbachev-generation Party elites to the national question was… What national question? Hadn’t Brezhnev declared such issues solved? The Soviet people were one “international community,” Gorbachev pontificated at a 1986 Party congress. “United in a unity of economic interests, ideological and political aims.” Were this not his real conviction—so I ask myself to this day—would he have risked glasnost (literally “public voicing”) and perestroika (restructuring) in the republics?

“We never expected an upsurge of emotional and ethnic factors,” the supposedly sly Shevardnadze later admitted.

Unexpectedly, the floodgates burst open.

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

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

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

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

Could politics get any more surreal?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“VAI VAI VAI!” resounded the entire neighborhood.

Soviet tanks? I gasped. A Jewish pogrom?

“WORSE!” Rina screamed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deprived of Korean schooling by Stalin, the generation of Shura the pickle maker could no longer read hangul script.

“I know Russian, a little Uzbek,” sighed Shura. “Korean? Nyet. No language—no homeland.” She sighed again. “But at least we have this.” She pointed down to her pickles. After mixing some kachi red chile paste into a tangy salad of cabbage and peppers, she scooped some into my hand. The heat of her chiles left my face numb.

Update: Moscow, August 19, 1991. Tanks rumble up the bombastic thrust of Kutuzov Prospect. Soviet TV plays Swan Lake… over and over. Party hard-liners announce control of the government. Gorbachev? Under house arrest at his Crimean dacha. Officially the “state of his health” doesn’t permit him to continue as president. The right-winger vice president Comrade Yanaev is taking over. Comrade Yanaev’s hands tremble visibly at his press conference. Not quite sober for history’s call.

Hello, Avgustovsky putsch—the August coup.

We stare at our television in a seaside suburb of Melbourne, where Mom happens to be visiting me and John from New York.

“Vsyo, eto vsyo,” Mom is crying. “This is the end!”

I keep dialing my father in Moscow. And getting through.

“Da, putsch, putsch…” Dad giggles sardonically.

“Ma, Ma,” I keep reasoning, nine thousand miles away from the scenes. “If things were that bad they’d have cut the international phone lines!”

They’d have cut Yeltsin’s phone too. Instead, there he is in all his bearish populism, defiant atop a tank outside the White House, the Russian parliament building. In popular elections that June he’d become Russia’s first freely elected leader in a thousand years. Now he rallies Muscovites to resist the takeover. Crowds cheer him on. Citizens weep and complain openly for imperialist cameras. The plotters’ script has been botched: Is this any way to run a putsch?

Over the next two days the coup goes phhht, and in such a pratfall style that to this day Russian conspiracy theorists question what really happened. Things move at shocking speed after this. Yeltsin bans the Communist Party. More republics head for the exit. Gorbachev clings on in this crumbling world, still devoutly for the Union, even in its now hobbled form. The friendship of nations: no longer only a cherished ideological trope for Comrade Gorbachev. Without it he’s out of a job.

“I’m not going to just float like a lump of shit in an ice hole,” he informs Yeltsin in December, after 90 percent of Ukrainians icily vote to secede from his Union.

That December of 1991 my Derridarian and I returned for our final road trip—south via Ukraine to the rebellious Georgian subrepublic of Abkhazia, wedged in between Georgia and the southern border of Russia. What with the chaos and gasoline shortage, nobody wanted to drive us. Finally we found Yura, a thirty-something geology professor with a Christ-like ginger beard. “I refuse to give bribes—out of principle,” he informed us quietly. This was bad news. On the plus side: his rattletrap Zhiguli operated on both gas and propane, slightly increasing our chances of actual motion. The propane stank up the car with a rotten-egg smell. On the road Yura pensively cracked pine nuts with his big yellow teeth; his cassette tape whined with semiunderground sixties songs about taiga forests and campfires. Geologists—they were their own subculture.

Yura’s Zhiguli was a metaphor for the disintegrating state of our Soyuz. Innocent tourist side jaunts metastasized into days-long quests for accelerator components. Every fill-her-up of black market gas cost five monthly salaries. Meantime all around us they were renaming the landscape. Kharkov in Ukraine was no more; it was Kharkiv now, in Ukrainian. Lenin and Marx streets clanged into dustbins.

By the time we sputtered into Abkhazia’s civil-war-torn Black Sea capital of Sukhumi, I no longer knew whom to side with in ethnic conflicts, whom to trust. I now put my faith in anyone who put out a hot meal. I trusted and loved the wiry young Abkhazian driver lent to us by the local writers’ union to help fix our sardine can on wheels. The kid proudly took us to his parents’ village house for a meal. We ate bitterish, gamy wild duck shot that morning—smothered in a thick, tomatoey, fiery sauce. It might have been the most memorable dish of my life. Then the excellent youngster stole Yura’s last gas canister.

To Sukhumi we carried an introduction from our Moscow acquaintance Fazil Iskander, the greatest living Abkhazian writer. During an electrical blackout we called at the darkened flat of Alexei Gogua, chief of the Abkhazian Writers Union. We found the gray-haired Gogua writing in his pajama pants by a flickering candle. What terrible straits we’d landed him in! Abkhaz hospitality demanded a resplendent welcome. We were visiting foreign writers—sent by Fazil, the Abkhaz Mark Twain. But Sukhumi’s infrastructure was shattered. Which is how a Zhiguli convoy of separatist culturati accompanied us to the well-lit country house of a prominent winemaker.

Shortly before seven p.m. I slipped out to the kitchen.

“Due to the situation which has evolved…”

The inevitable/impossible was finally happening. At seven p.m. on Christmas Day, 1991, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was giving his resignation speech.

The situation had developed further and fatally for him. Several weeks earlier, his thorn-in-the-side Yeltsin had secretly met leaders of Ukraine and Byelorussia at Brezhnev’s former hunting lodge in a Byelorussian forest. The troika’s advisers and lawyers cooked up a devilish plan: As founding members of the 1922 Union Treaty, the three republics had the power to annul it—to simply dissolve the USSR! In its place they formed the Commonwealth of Independent States. Byelorussian herbal vodka lubricated the signing. Before bothering to inform Gorbachev, Yeltsin telephoned the news to George H. W. Bush. (“Dear George,” he addressed him now.) At a subsequent meeting in Kazakhstan, eight more republics went ex-Union. Clearly Gorbachev was finished.

And yet his TV announcement caught me by total surprise, there with my uneaten spoonful of Abkhazian corn mush. Reading from a paper, often awkwardly, the last leader of Sovetsky Soyuz spoke for ten minutes. He lauded his own democratic reforms. Admitted mistakes. Took credit for the elimination of a totalitarian system and for “newly acquired spiritual and political freedom.” About the new freedom and such he wasn’t fabulizing exactly, but the ladies around me gently waved him off. His phrases rang meaningless, false—simply because after all his flip-flopping, who’d ever believe him?

The USSR’s dying minutes still replay in my mind in dazed, elegiac slow motion.

I recall the exact words that Gorbachev mangled in his crass provincial accent (so at odds with his suave international image). I taste the salty cheese in the corn mush, inhale the kitchen’s garlicky pungencies; I hear the thudding splat of a pomegranate heavy with seeds that—another metaphor for the Imperium?—fell on the kitchen floor and cracked open.

The Abkhaz women had been watching impassively for the most part, chins propped in hands. But as the resignee thanked his supporters and wished his countrymen best, the lady of the house whispered:

“Zhalko, a vse-taki zhalko.”

“Zhalko,” echoed the others: “A shame, a shame, in the end.”

“Zhalko,” I murmured along, not sure what we were wistful about. The sudden humanity of a tone-deaf reformer—hero abroad, villain at home? The finis, the official, irrevocable curtain falling on our fairy-tale communal lie, the utopian social experiment for which millions of lives had been brutally sacrificed—now signing off in the most undramatic fashion imaginable? Empires! They weren’t supposed to gurgle away in ten badly colorized minutes. The locomotive carrying citizens into a brighter tomorrow wasn’t meant to just run out of gas and die in the middle of nowhere, like one more woebegone Zhiguli.

As Gorbachev later wrote in his memoirs, he got no farewell ceremony, no phone calls from presidents of former Soviet republics. They didn’t believe in the friendship of nations. Were there any murmurs of “a shame” from them at the end?

When the speech was over, the blazing red Soviet banner was lowered for the very last time in history, and a peppy Russian tricolor rose in its place.

A new day in a new state, said the announcer, and the TV reverted to regular programming. A cartoon, I think it was, or maybe a puppet show.

I know you’ll wonder how it felt to wake up next day in a new state. Only I didn’t wake up—not till two whole days later. My brain pounded violently against my temples. My blurred vision registered white-coated people bending over me with expressions of saccharine Soviet concern. “How is our golovka, our little head?” they cooed, waving smelling salts under my nose. Where was I? Ah, yes… the only place in darkened Sukhumi with its own electrical generator. The Sanatorium of the Russian Armed Forces, where we’d been lodged on arrival by the hospitable Abkhazian writers. After the USSR ended on TV there’d been toasts, many toasts—flowery prodigies of Caucasian eloquence laboriously translated from Abkhaz to Russian to English (for the sake of the Derridarian, who was now sprawled beside me, ghostly pale and grunting). Dimly I recalled the ritualistic pouring of homemade Izabella wine onto the roof of our decrepit sardine can around four a.m. The equally ritualistic guzzling down of a farewell kantsi, a horn filled with 1.5 liters of the same such Izabella. Gogua, the elderly writer-in-chief, collapsing softly into the arms of his secretary.

“Golovka, the little head, how is it?” pressed the white-coated people.

The golovka pounded and hammered and throbbed. Passed out from epic alcohol poisoning. That’s how, since you asked, I greeted the dawn of a new historical era. Ah, Izabella.

Ah, dawn; historical hungover dawn…

The Zhiguli’s engine finally expired somewhere near Kiev, and in exchange for a bottle, a GAZ truck towed Yura the Christ-like geologist eight hundred miles to Moscow. John and I took the overnight train with its red-carpeted corridor. Back in Melbourne again, where it was summer, we sat on a green hill leaning on our two massive suitcases, homeless and miserable—the sublet we’d arranged had fallen through. Soon I left my Derridarian in Australia and returned to New York. Our relationship sank under the strain of the USSR’s dying days—though it took us a few more long-distance years (he moved to California) to break up officially. His travel book never came out.

Between 1992 and 1999, Yeltsin’s dermokratiya (crapocracy) sent Russia into free-market shock. Rampaging inflation, pitiful salaries unpaid—the previous hungry years of sauerkraut were remembered as plentiful. Overnight, a giant sleazy fire sale of national resources spawned oligarchs out of former apparatchiks and gangsters. Lesser beings lost everything: identity, pride, savings, Crimean beaches, and the comforting rhetoric of imperialist prestige and power. Not to mention the Soviet state’s social benefits. What’s more, Boris “Champion of Sovereignty” Yeltsin started a war to stop Chechnya from seceding, a conflict with horrors that fester to this day.

In 2000 an obscure midget with a boring KGB past was elected post-Union Russia’s second president and started flexing his muscles. Authoritarian symbols and rhetoric were revived. Among them, the Soviet national anthem—the words “Russia–our sacred power” substituted for “unbreakable Union of Soviet Republics.” Under Putin’s petrodollar kleptocracy, narcissistic consumerism began to bloom and boom. Money and glamour—Russified as glamur—swaggered in as the new state ideology (fretfully decried by the intelligentsia). These days Muscovites still order Georgian kharcho soup and Ukrainian vareniki dumplings at cute “ethnic” restaurants. But mostly they enjoy carpaccio and sushi—at oligarch prices.

Recently, cleaning my office in Queens, I unearthed a box of recipe postcards from the seventies. Fifteen sets, each celebrating a Soviet republic’s cuisine. Arranging them slowly on my dining table, I recalled the rain-washed autumn day four decades before when I scored these defitsit treasures at the big Dom Knigi bookstore and triumphantly carried them home. Poring now over the faded Technicolor close-ups of Moscow-designated “national dishes,” I still twinged at their faintly fragrant Orientalist spell, their enticements to wanderlust. There was “Azerbaijani” sturgeon salad, inexplicably smothered in Slavic sour cream, pictured against socialist oil derricks rising from the blue Caspian Sea. Faux “Kyrgyz” cakes, exotically called “Karagat” though featuring black currants in no way native to arid Kyrgyzstan. Umpteen ethnic variations on salat Olivier and kotleti. National in form, socialist in flavor, exactly as the Party prescribed.

Why was it, then? Why, of all the totalitarian myths, had the gilded fairy tale of the friendship of nations stayed so deeply, so intimately lodged in my psyche?

Fearing the answer might expose my inner Soviet imperialist, I quit speculating. Instead I decided to throw a birthday dinner for Mom featuring the real dishes of our erstwhile republics. As celebration, as semi-expiation.

For a solid week I pulverized walnuts for Georgian chicken satsivi, folded grape leaves around scented Armenian lamb, fried pork crackling for my bonafide Ukrainian borscht. Proudly I set these out on Mom’s birthday table along with Moldovan feta strudels and abysta, that bland Abkhazian corn mush of my farewell to the USSR. For dessert, a dense Lithuanian honey cake. And in tribute to the toasts at the dissolution of the Union Treaty, I even steeped a Byelorussian herbal vodka.

Mom was touched almost to tears by my handiwork. But she just couldn’t help being herself.

“Za druzhbu narodov—To the friendship of nations!” She offered the dog-eared toast with a grin so sarcastic, it practically withered my edible panorama of the republics.

“Imagine!” she exclaimed to her guests. “The daughter I raised on Tolstoy and Beethoven—she went gaga over the stupid gilded fountain at VDNKh!”

I was a little hurt by her words, I have to admit.

That Friendship of Nations fountain, by the way, has been freshly regilded in Moscow. Kids with their grandmas still circle around it. “Babushka, Babushka, tell us what it was like to live in the USSR?” the kids want to know.

“Well, once upon a time…” begin the babushkas.

_{CHAPTER TEN} TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: PUTIN ON THE RITZ

We landed in Moscow on Good Friday, 2011—my mom, Barry, and I.

For the very first time ever, relatives weren’t there to embrace us at the airport. They still loved us, they claimed, but life now was different. Busier. Terrible airport traffic.

Earlier that afternoon we’d been devouring an epic garden lunch under late-April cherry trees in Odessa. The city of my mother’s birth, that gaudy, piratical Soviet port of my childhood seaside vacations, had been transformed into a charming, smiley, semiglobalized city in very foreign Ukraine. We’d stopped over in Odessa to do family research—only to discover that second cousin Gleb, our closest local relative, had a broken nose, a prison past, and complete alcoholic amnesia. So we researched Odessa’s garlicky cooking instead, shopping up a storm at the boisterous Privoz market. Our suitcases bulged with wholesome Ukrainian lard, folkloric garlic-studded kolbasa, and buttery smoked kambala flatfish.

None of this was presents for family. A month in the world’s fourth most expensive metropolis loomed ahead of us. We anxious American paupers stocked up on cheap, delicious Odessa edibles as if preparing for combat. Putin’s Moscow: a battleground, not for the fainthearted and shallow-pocketed.

In the new millennium our visits to Moscow had been infrequent and brief. Mother and I stayed away altogether from 1991 to 2001, missing out on the booze-soaked get-rich-or-have-your-brains-blown-out anarchy of the Yeltsin years. Not by design; it just happened. My grandparents and Uncle Sashka were dead; our surviving relatives came to visit in New York. As for rodina, we no longer mentally spelled it with a capital R. From the irony, dread, and tangle of signifiers sprouting from the dead morass of Sovietese, the word had shrunk to a de-ideologized, neutered noun, denoting, simply, where you were born. I felt more at home elsewhere, traveling and eating for a living. I’d bought an apartment in Istanbul with a Bosporus view and had devoted my latest cookbook to frenetically hospitable Spain, after writing about the tastes of Latin America and the Pacific Rim.

Moscow?

“Dubai with Pushkin statues,” Barry, my boyfriend, pronounced it on our previous visit.

It was already late evening on this Good Friday when we settled finally into our rented “highrise” flat.

“Highrise,” pronounced khi-rize in Russian, was the deluxe tag that Moscow4Rent, the rental agency, had concocted for our boxy two-bedroom apartment on Novy Arbat Avenue. The view made our jaws drop. From the twenty-second-floor windows we beheld 1) Hotel Ukraine, a showpiece of Stalinist neo-Gothic gigantomania; 2) Novy Arbat Avenue, Khrushchev’s swashbuckling slap at such feats of Stalinist ornamentalism; 3) the bulky Parliament White House, site of the 1991 attempted putsch that triggered the fall of the empire. Even at night the endless soaring construction cranes of Putin’s gangster-corporate capitalism were still at it. Moscow’s rapacious real estate schemes never sleep.

The khi-rize cost a small fortune. But leaning transfixed on a windowsill I gazed at the wide street below in breathless exhilaration at a long-ago childhood fantasy finally realized.

I had arrived!

In the early sixties bulldozers crushed a swath through crooked, archaic Old Arbat lanes, gouging out this massive, ruler-straight avenue then known as Kalinin Prospect. Strolling the renamed Novy Arbat of today, a foreigner might only see sleek BMWs cutting off sooty rheumatic city buses on a choked six-lane thoroughfare, with late-modernist towers hulking alongside, grubby-gray but with a certain brutalist je ne sais quoi. This foreigner might smirk at the tacky red-lettered globe on the tawdry Arbat center, frown at the ersatz steakhouses and yakitori joints sprawling westward and east.

Me? From the window I saw the boulevard of my young dreams.

I saw that now-tacky globe—year 1972. Magically blue it glowed inside its original wraparound logo: AEROFLOT: SPEED AND COMFORT. Rotating and flashing the locations of different mysterious foreign countries, it was a wonder cabinet of the latest Japanese electronics in Moscow. Below it shoppers in furry hats promenaded along Moscow’s widest sidewalk, past Vesna department store, in the gleaming windows of which checkered Polish coats preened, never actually for sale inside. Black Volgas and Chaikas glided by imperiously in the two lanes reserved for officials. Some lucky Muscovites toted defitsit cornflakes boxes from the swishy, American-style self-service Novoarbatsky supermarket. I saw my young self there too, gaping up at the giant Times Square–style screen where cartoons and bright propaganda reels blazed. Kalinin Prospect was my mirage of the West, my vision of technology’s march, my crystal ramp into the future. My Ginza and Broadway and Champs-Elysées packed into one.

As for our own khi-rize, it was one of four twenty-six-story prefab-concrete residential skyscrapers completed in 1968, only two years before I moved to an Old Arbat lane nearby. Strictly allocated to the nomenklatura, these towers fascinated me then with their sheer newness and geometricity. They were my own private, inaccessible residential utopia. I wanted to spend my life here at the very apex of late-sixties Soviet modernity—right here at the very spot where now in 2011 my mom is wrestling with the malfunctioning electric teakettle.

Memory likes its cruel tricks with the objects of our nostalgic yearnings. They usually turn out to be smaller, dishearteningly trite, when finally reencountered in real life. How miraculous then, I thought to myself, that not even thirty-plus years and a passport full of visa stamps could shrink the stature of ugly Kalinin Prospect.

Before collapsing onto our khi-rize Ikea beds, we snacked at our Ikea kitchen table on the sausage and pepper vodka we’d hauled with us from Ukraine. Mom and Barry too tired, I think, to parse the bounty of ironies, with the giant wedding cake of Stalin’s Hotel Ukraine blazing floodlit across the Moscow River.

Next morning we left Mom with her telephone troika—global digital, local land line, Russian cell—and headed off for a nostalgic stroll along Boulevard Ring, the route I used to take with Grandmother Alla. The day was mid-spring-like and stunning. The sky gleamed cerulean blue, and in the suddenly balmy air the tulips flashed and pansies winked from their beds. Anyutini glazki (Anyuta’s eyes—my eyes) is Russian for pansies, and I love them for it. My heart sang. The boulevard flora inspired a Nabokovian nostalgia for that “hospitable remorseful racemosa-blossoming Russia.”

As for the fauna…

“Got a car for my birthday,” a six-year-old in an Abercrombie hoodie was telling his pal. “Not a TOY, kretin. A car. With a chauffeur.”

On Nikitsky Boulevard, ladies young and old, belles and bêtes, hobbled along on sadistic ten-inch heels, like throngs of exotic giraffes. “Look!” whispered Barry, gawking at a blonde in hot pants and vertiginous pink platform-stilettos. Pink satin ribbons fluttered from her absurdly teetering ankles.

But it wasn’t her footwear attracting all the attention.

The Muscovite gaze, which blatantly sizes you up and down, assessing your clothes and accessories, piercing you with disdain or caressing you and yours with haughty approval—that collective gaze now fixed on my toes. They were bare. For our sentimental walk I’d worn sensible Adidas flip-flops, and in doing so had violated some code of Moscow propriety. Here in my old neighborhood, I suddenly felt self-conscious and foreign, as if trapped inside a “naked in public” anxiety dream.

My bare toes were glared at inside some of the world’s most expensive real estate: at the tea shop (ten dollars an ounce of “white needle” Fujian leaves), at the bakery (ten dollars a wedge of tiramisu), at the florist (ten dollars a rosebud). These fine merchants all embodied the most cherished post-Soviet attributes: eleet and ekskluziv.

We fled off the boulevards onto Tverskaya Street, ducking into the more populist Contemporary Russian History Museum.

“Woman!” thundered a custodial babushka. “Your toes will fall off from frostbite!” Outside it was well into the seventies. But instead of defending my flip-flops, I joined a debate between the frostbiter and a mothy spinster in charge of the room with the glamorized diorama of a Soviet communal apartment kitchen (!).

Who was Russia’s best-ever ruler? bickered the babushkas. The alarmist said Brezhnev: “Eighteen whole years of calm and prosperity!” The moth declared that she cried just thinking of what Bolsheviks did to poor, poor czar Nicholas II—and, in the same breath, pronounced Stalin the best-ever leader. “Bless him for leading Russia to victory.”

“What about… er… all the people he killed?” I put in, uninvited.

The Stalinist waved me off philosophically. “Cut a forest and splinters will fly.” It’s a popular expression among Stalin apologists. We left the two of them grunting in agreement with each other (and most other Russians) about the country’s worst-ever leader—Gorbachev!—and once more braved the boulevards.

“Your shlyopki (flip-flops)!” yelled an orange-haired hippo from a bench. “People spit—and worse!—on the streets! Want a leg amputated?”

“But Moscow these days seems so clean,” I cravenly bleated, overwhelmed by how quickly my leisurely, nostalgic stroll had unleashed a present-day nightmare.

“Clean??” came the answer. “When churki are doing the cleaning?”

Churki (logs) is a racial slur for Moscow’s nonwhite migrant workers from our former fraternal republics. Even on this gorgeous pre-Easter Saturday when the heart yearned to sing and Muscovites were buying Dom Perignon for Easter brunch, workers from erstwhile Soviet Central Asia were out in force, sweeping sidewalks, unloading trucks, handing out leaflets promoting sushi bargains. Brushstroke by diligent brushstroke they were painting the historic pastel-hued mansions and the nouveau-riche antihistoric replicas. Suddenly I understood why Moscow center had the eerie fake sheen of a movie set.

Migrant workers in Moscow number anywhere from two to five million, possibly as much as a quarter of the capital’s ballooning population. They’ve been flocking here since the midnineties, fleeing the post-Soviet Disasterstans. To be underpaid, abused by nationalists, harassed by police.

Beyond the hippo on her bench, a young Tajik street cleaner leaned on her broom. She gave a smile at my toes. “Finally a beautiful day,” she sighed. “Last week when it snowed, my shift started at four a.m.” Born in 1991, the year the Imperium ended, she had two babies back in Tajikistan. Her brothers were drug addicts. Her parents, she said, remembered Soviet rule as paradise.

“Moskva—zloy gorod,” she concluded. “Moscow—mean city.”

On Tsvetnoy, the last of the boulevards, finally it rose ahead, my sentimental journey’s destination—the Central Market. The charmed food fairyland of my childhood was now a viciously expensive new mall with edgy international brands, artily designed by a British architectural firm. “Very post-bling,” I’d been told.

Smiling stilettoed giraffes handed out outsize oranges by the entrance. “Visit our Farmer’s Market upstairs,” they cooed. Their gaze lightly brushed my toes and moved on.

Escalators ferried us aloft, past Commes des Garçons, Diesel, and Chloe, past puzzling conceptual art and hip displays of homegrown fashion genius.

The Farmer’s Market held nary a farmer.

The buzzy-bucolic name had been cooked up by a local restaurant group for their organically minded epicurean food hall. We wandered this New Russian arcadia, ogling hundred-dollar boxes of Italian chocolates, farmhouse French cheeses, newfangled sashimi, and Iberico hams, all arranged under the dramatic sweep of the stainless-steel ceiling. Here was Moscow throwing down its Guccied gauntlet at storied food halls like Berlin’s Ka De We and London’s Selfridges.

A dewy-cheeked Kyrgyz Eve called out from a fruit aisle with a shiny red apple.

“This, dear madam, is honey-sweet,” she enticed. “Just arrived from Bordeaux. Or perhaps something tart—a Pippin from Britain? Or here,” she sirened on, “here’s our own little apple!”

A bumpy, mottled-green specimen of the native Semerenko variety now reposed in her delicate hand.

“Looks homely,” I muttered.

“Oh, but the heavenly taste will transport you straight to your dacha childhood,” our Kyrgyz lovely promised, smiling ethereally.

I chewed on a wedge and grimaced. The apple was sour. Around us cute Central Asian boys in retro flat caps slavishly steered shopping carts for ekskluziv patrons. Somehow the sight didn’t inspire old dacha reveries. And the whole au courant local-seasonal note rang hollow too—just another bit of imported post-bling bling. Not to mention that “our” apple was crazy expensive.

“Anya,” I said, noting the Kyrgyz Eve’s name tag. “We’re namesakes!”

“Nyet.” She suddenly went glum. “Aynazik is my native name,” she murmured. “But think anyone here would bother pronouncing it?

“Moskva—zloy gorod,” she whispered, holding out an apple for the next passing customer. “Moscow—mean city.”

On the way out we received more free oranges, along with a lustrous onion from Holland. Boarding the trolley back to the flat, I felt extremely alienated from this new Moscow. I called Dad’s wife, Lena, on my cell to ask if there were any affordable food shops in this city of Cartier-priced pippins. “Not in the center, my dear!” Lena giggled. Non-elites no longer lived in the center. They sold or rented their flats and lived off the income in faraway suburbs rich in diskaunt outlets like Kopeechka (literally “Little Kopek”). “You can try taking a metro, then a shuttle bus to Kopeechka,” suggested Lena. “But their produce is often rotten.”

We found Mom in the khi-rize, prattling on three phones at once.

“Moscow,” she was saying to someone. “What a mean city.”

The Easter weekend’s unsentimental journeys were over; the work week was upon us.

So just what brought me—you might wonder by now—to Putin’s mean petro-dollar capital for an entire month? An incoherent jumble of motives, really. Seeing family. Resavoring flowering boulevards and dusty museums. Testing the scandalous scale of apple sticker shock. Fishing for socialist relics—my poisoned madeleines—amid the gleaming piers of Villeroy & Boch showrooms.

Beyond that? Beyond that I had one clear task on the agenda, and it was all Dasha’s doing.

Dasha Hubova was a professor of cultural anthropology turned TV producer. We’d met by chance at a three-star chefs’ conference in Madrid. I had read her article on the oral history of the 1932 Ukrainian famine. It was gut-wrenching stuff about the death of infants, cannibalism. Imagine my shock in Madrid when I learned that this very Dasha now ran Telecafé, the twenty-four-hour digital food channel owned by Russia’s media giant, Channel One. From famines to round-the-clock food porn—such a New Russian trajectory, I thought.

Little realizing where that trajectory would intersect with mine.

“Come to Moscow, we’ll give you a show,” tempted Dasha after filming me a bit in Madrid. She even agreed to a separate gig for my mother when I glowingly flacked Mom’s credentials. (“Ace at historic meals! Chirps like a nightingale in lilting Russian, uncorrupted by post-Soviet Americanisms!”)

Mom was ecstatic. Her luggage to Moscow held photogenic wardrobe ensembles and a thick folder of notes for her six-part show-to-be on historic cuisines. Sixty years after failing her drama school exams in Stalin’s Moscow, my mamochka, Larisa Naumovna Frumkina, was finally getting her close-up. And her cooking had gotten it for her.

Each of us was assigned a chef and filmed in his kitchen. Mom’s partner was Alexander Vasilievich, from a restaurant called CDL (the Russian acronym for Central House of Writers), part of the old Writers Union. One of Moscow’s most flagrantly historic locations, its Gothic-romantic 1889 mansion was where Soviet literary elites gathered for legendary dinners and readings—all inaccessible, of course, to us mere mortals. Here the devil dined in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

And here now, dropping in on Mom’s shoot, I heard a director shout: “Svet na geroinyu—more lights on the heroine!”

Mom beamed, glowing, ever the “heroine.” Her chef sidekick, on the other hand—middle-aged, painfully shy Alexander Vasilievich—seemed to want the floor to open and swallow him up.

I left them and headed to a retro-Soviet candy shop across the street. I had in mind an experiment. Under thick glass were arrayed sweets by the Red October Chocolate Factory—the pet confectionary of the food commissar Anastas Mikoyan, still in operation though now owned by a German concern. Earlier, among the nostalgic Little Squirrel and Mishka the Clumsy Bear chocolates, I’d spotted the ananas—object of my dread, shame, torment, and triumph in kindergarten. Now I bought myself a candy and sucked on the crunchy chocolate shell, slowly licking toward the center, exactly as I had four decades before. I was trying, I confess, to manufacture a madeleine-esque moment. But the filling, so excruciatingly luscious to me once with its synthetic-exotic flavor of pineapple, now tasted simply… synthetic. Something feebly tried to stir in me, then faded. With a sigh, I went tramping back to the khi-rize as Moscow scowled at my flip-flops.

That night, I reluctantly changed into semi-stilettos—for dinner with oligarchs. Russia’s nouveau riche are not the smug-faced gangsters in maroon velvet jackets they used to be. Now entering their post-bling stage, they send their kids to Oxford, donate to the arts, sometimes even forsake ritzy Petrus for old, noble Barolos.

And who of all people had become the biggest fan and friend of the oligarchs? My pauperist, antiestablishment mom! For some time, rich Russians had been falling madly in love with her when she squired them around the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She responded with affection. “They’ve become cultured,” she claimed. Occasionally she even entertained oligarchs at her cramped immigrant quarters in Queens. “A hundred million dollars?” repeated one very nice oil man to my question about what constituted wealth in Russia. He chuckled good-naturedly, full of Mom’s borscht. “A hundred million’s not even money.”

Now, in Moscow, our hosts were a charming fiftyish couple, veterans of my mother’s tours of the Met. They had a family bank. We dined at a panoramic Italian restaurant at the newly renovated Hotel Ukraine; it was visible through binoculars from our khi-rize. From our roof terrace table we could almost touch the mammoth stone Stalinist stars and hammer-and-sickles at the base of the hotel’s refurbished spire. Mr. Banker wore a Pucci-esque shirt; Mrs. Banker, flat shoes. She laughed heartily at my flip-flop adventures.

“No onions,” Mr. Banker told the waiter. “No garlic or hot peppers.”

“You’re… Buddhist?” I gasped.

“Da, da,” he acknowledged, ever so modest. “We converted during the 2008 financial crisis. The stress.”

“Twenty years,” murmured Mrs. Banker into her forty-dollar garlic-free pizza. “Twenty years since the USSR. How we’ve changed.”

Barry joked about all the Land Rovers and Bentleys in Moscow. Everyone laughed.

“Actually we have a Range Rover,” confessed Mr. Banker.

“And also a Bentley,” confessed his wife.

“What’s a Bentley?” asked Mom.

With Mom’s TV shoot done and mine yet to come, we went for a family reunion out in Davydkovo. My cousin Masha lived there now, in our former khrushcheba apartment. Exiting the metro, I suggested a quick pre-reunion stroll in the woods. The Davydkovo pine woods, where Stalin’s dacha still lay. Brooding, mysterious.

Him again.

The Father of All Nations had at least a dozen government dachas. But the one behind the thirteen-foot green fence in Davydkovo by my ex–Central Committee kindergarten was his actual home for more than two decades. From the Kremlin to here was a twelve-minute trip in the Leader’s armored black Packard. Hence the dacha’s nickname, Blizhnyaya, the “nearest one.”

A few years earlier, photos of the inaccessible Blizhnyaya started popping up on the Internet. I pored over the images of the neo-modernist green country house—all straight-lined functionality denounced by Stalinist ideologues but apparently privately favored by the Boss. Weirdly disturbing, his personal coat hanger; his dark, monastic bathrobes with the shortened sleeve for his withered left arm.

The Blizhnyaya, initially modest in size, had been built in 1934 by the architect Miron Merzhanov (arrested in 1943, released after his client’s death) and surrounded with thick, trucked-in trees. The nature-loving Generalissimo took special interest in the planting of beliye (porcini) mushroom patches; in our harsh northern climate the heroic dacha gardeners even raised watermelons, which were sometimes sold to unsuspecting shoppers at the opulent Yeliseevsky food emporium on Gorky Street.

Churchill, Mao, and Tito all slept on the second floor added in 1943. Their ever-paranoid host, though, hardly ever used a bedroom. He’d doze off on one of the hard Turkish couches scattered about; on one such, on March 1, 1953, he suffered his fatal stroke.

A few years earlier, too, journalists were given an unprecedented tour of the secret green house. There were hints the dacha was being declassified; in Moscow now I hoped to pull some journalistic strings and at last penetrate that tall fence in the forest, behind which lay the presence that haunted my most impressionable childhood. With Barry and Mom along, I intended a little reconnaissance.

The pine trees seemed less majestic than I remembered. Along muddy paths, yummy mommies in skinny jeans and stilettos pushed strollers; vigorous pensioners speed-walked by, arm in arm. There it loomed at last: the dacha’s fence. Two blond young guards in uniform stood by a side entrance, smoking. Unsmiling.

“The dacha… um… er… Stalin?” I mumbled.

“Classified object,” I was informed. “No questions permitted.”

As if drawn by an inner force, I led us away to another, much lower fence. Beyond it, through evergreens, I could make out a low pale-brick building—my old kindergarten, where I gagged on nomenklatura caviar and sucked in ecstasy on the ananas candy. The sight of my former prison catapulted me back to my sad-eyed bulimic past with such violence that I clutched onto a sticky pine trunk, desperately gulping the resinous air. The madeleine had attacked.

I pulled myself together and we left the woods. A deluxe apartment complex towered ahead, gleaming and shiplike. STALIN’S DACHA announced the sign on the inevitable fence. APARTMENTS FOR SALE BY INVESTORS.

“People don’t mind living in a building named after Stalin?” I asked an Uzbek guard, a fresh ripple of nausea stirring.

“Why?” He grinned. “I’m sure they’re proud.”

“How about a Molotov tennis court?” Barry asked, after we translated. “Or a Beria swimming pool?”

“Beria?” puzzled the guard, catching the name. He looked confused.

We hurried off, late now to Masha’s, and promptly got lost among Davydkovo’s identical five-story sixties-era apartment blocks. The cracked concrete walls and laundry flapping from rickety balconies were depressing and slumlike, all too familiar. But no, this was Moscow 2011: Barry had to stop, several times, to fasten his tourist lens on a Maserati parked by a rusted fence or an overflowing hulk of graffiti-scrawled garbage bins.

We recovered a little around Masha’s table. After dinner she took me into the bedroom and began pulling out small cardboard boxes from drawers and closets. I reached into one box and felt the cold metal heft of my grandfather’s medals. Masha and I tipped the whole treasure onto the bed. Order of Lenin, of Victory, of the Red Banner. Just as we had decades ago, we pinned the medals to our chests and danced a little in front of the mirror. Then we sat on the bed, holding hands.

The following noon I plucked a grape from a ruby-red crystal pedestaled bowl, cranked a heavily lipsticked smile for the cameras, and thought a monstrous thought: one of history’s bloodiest dictators likely touched this bowl I’m eating from.

Him again.

No, I hadn’t slid into obsessional fantasy. I was on my TV shoot, an hour from Moscow at the super-bourgeois dacha of Viktor Belyaev, ex–Kremlin chef and my show partner.

Until a heart attack a few years before, Viktor had spent three high-stress decades cooking for the top Soviet hierarchy. From this lofty gig he’d inherited porcelain manufactured exclusively for Kremlin banquets, and a red crystal bowl set named Rubinovy (ruby, after the Kremlin star). The crystal’s former owner? The mustachioed one himself. More astounding still, the bowls had come from the dacha—that green dacha. Date of issue: 1949, Stalin’s seventieth jubilee year, celebrated so joyously, the entire Pushkin Museum of Art was commandeered as a giant display case for gifts to Dear Leader.

Viktor was disarmingly friendly and compulsively talkative. When Dasha the producer had originally said “Kremlin chef,” I imagined a dour Party hack with a heavy KGB past. Instead, in his baby-blue cashmere sweater and discreet gold neck chain, Viktor suggested a relaxed clone of Louis Prima, the jazz man; he had a very jazzy Chevy Camaro parked in his driveway.

Bonding with him pre-shoot over a quick cigarette out on the porch, I was amazed to learn that Viktor had cooked at the dacha in 1991, right before Gorbachev’s resignation. The mineral secretary had a residence on Blizhnyaya’s grounds, which he never used and wanted to convert into a small hotel—for international biznes VIPs. Viktor was brought in to handle the food operation and do some catering in the main house.

“Gorbach,” huffed Viktor. “Nobody’s favorite boss! Half my staff quit because of Raisa—that harpy-from-hell, our First Lady. Now, Brezhnev’s wife—she was golden.”

“Viktor,” I pressed. “Please—the dacha!”

Viktor shuddered theatrically, fingered his gold chain. “Horrifying musty smell of sinister history… moats and drawbridges everywhere… some of the pine trees even hollowed out with doors and windows—for guards!” Because the Generalissimo detested all food smells, a massive three-hundred-yard corridor separated Blizhnyaya’s dining room from the kitchen. “And his closet…” Viktor grimaced. “I knew Stalin was short, but his clothes… they were for a child—or a midget.”

Viktor initially learned about the forbidding green dacha from his elderly mentor, a certain Vitaly Alexeevich (last name strictly secret), formerly one of Stalin’s personal chefs. On March 6, 1953, Vitaly Alexeevich dutifully reported for his shift. He was met on the dacha porch by Valechka, the Generalissimo’s loyal housekeeper and, possibly, mistress. She had a car waiting for him.

“Flee,” Valechka told him. “Now! Drive as far as you can. Disappear!!” Stalin’s death had just been announced.

The chef ran, while other dacha staffers perished at Beria’s orders. He returned to Moscow the day of Beria’s execution, and for the rest of his life laid flowers on the housekeeper’s grave.

“Vitaly Alexeevich was a cook ot boga (God’s talent),” sighed Viktor. “He’d sing to his dough to help it to rise.” I thought of Mom’s and my struggles to crack the mysteries of Slavic yeast dough for our kulebiaka. Crooning to it, as Stalin’s chef had done—was that the secret?

“So was it really haunted, the dacha?” I wanted to know, thinking of all the times I slinked past the green fence during kindergarten, my heart hammering.

Viktor shuddered again.

At the end of his first night catering at Blizhnyaya, he was sitting alone in Stalin’s old dining room. He leaned on the massively long wooden table, the one at which murderous Politburo men gathered for their nocturnal banquets four decades before. An eerie silence…. Suddenly Viktor heard footsteps… footsteps so ghostly, he bolted into the woods drenched in cold sweat. The same thing happened to the actor who played Stalin during a 1991 film shoot there. And when Stalin’s old dacha guard was invited back for a documentary, he suffered a heart attack. “His boot leather—” stammered the guard at the hospital. “I smelled it—his boot leather and the Karelian birch of his furniture!”

At this point we were summoned back inside. The TV cameras were ready for us.

The sight of Viktor’s table almost gave me a heart attack myself.

For our shoot—on Soviet cuisine—my partner had conjured up a Technicolor fantasia out of The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food—Politburo dreambook edition. Dainty, open-faced rasstegai fish pies nestled inside Stalinist crystal; an elaborate beef roulade layered with a delicate omelet reposed on a Kremlin-issue porcelain platter. There was even a torte outfitted with caramel rockets, contributed by a generous ex-nomenklatura confectioner. Polyot (“flight”), the torte was called: a meringue relic from the sixties kosmos-mania era.

I stared transfixed at this culinary time capsule. At the jellied ham rolls under mayonnaise curlicues, in particular. Early September, 1974: Praga restaurant take-out shop. Me standing—for the very last time, I thought—in the gigantic line for our Sunday kulebiaka as Mom at home irons out final immigration formalities. I’m eyeing the jellied curlicued ham rolls my parents couldn’t ever afford, thinking desperately: Never in my life will I see them again.

And now I learn that pre-Kremlin, Viktor cooked at Praga!

My Praga.

Was there some profound meaning in all this coincidence? Had some god of Soviet Civilization sent Viktor my way to help me properly savor my childhood’s treasures and reveal its mysteries?

Arriving in Moscow this trip I’d been crestfallen to learn that my Praga was closed. One of the city’s last pre-Soviet great restaurants had been bought by the Italian designer Roberto Cavalli, to be converted, no doubt, into a post-bling elite playground. Seeing its iconic yellow facade disfigured by scaffolding at the head of Novy Arbat, I felt as if some dear old grandparent had died.

Viktor and I mourned the closure of Praga as the cameras rolled. “A-plus,” hooted our young director. “I’m loving you guys’ chemistry!” Feeling relaxed at last, I prattled on about stalking diplomats by Praga’s entrance and hawking Juicy Fruit gum at school. The mostly youthful, post-Soviet crew lapped up my socialist misadventures.

“More! More stories like this!” they cried.

When Dasha had originally suggested a show on Soviet cuisine—“The topic is hot”—I’d been bewildered.

“But isn’t Moscow full of people who remember the USSR a lot better than I do? I mean, I’m from New York!”

“You don’t understand,” said Dasha. “Here we have mishmash for our memory. But an émigré like you—you remember things clearly!”

After the lunch, and before the shashlik (kebab) grill shoot by his dacha backyard swimming pool, Viktor clued me in on his time at the Kremlin kitchens.

Supplies were from their very own teeming farms. So damn rich was Politburo milk, truckers would loosely set deep metal lids on the milk buckets, and by arrival the clattering lids had churned up gorgeous thick, sticky cream. For instant pilfering.

I was astonished. “You mean despite all the perks—elite housing, Crimean resorts, special tailors—Kremlin employees still stole?”

“And how!” chuckled Viktor. Soon after taking over he raided his employees’ lockers and turned up sixty kilos of loot. “And that was before noon.”

There beneath the twenty-five-foot ceiling of the main old Kremlin kitchen he made other discoveries too:

“Ready for the poolside shashlik!” announced the director.

After we wrapped and the crew headed home, I sat around with Viktor and his wife, eating leftovers. I was dazed by what I’d learned at his fantasy table. It was akin to discovering that Santa Claus was somehow, after all, real. The Soviet myth of plenty that my latter-Soviet generation had scoffed at? That fabled abundance so cynically, even existentially scorned?

How spectacularly it had flourished on Kremlin banquet tables.

The Politburo loved to stun foreign guests with Soviet opulence. Train convoys from all over the empire carried sausage from the Ukraine in porcelain tubs, lavish fruit from Crimea, dairy from the Baltic republics, brandies from Dagestan. Seven pounds of food per person was the official banquet norm. Black caviar glistened in crystal bowls atop “Kremlin walls” carved from ice tinted with red beet juice. Lambs were boiled whole, then deep-fried; suckling pigs sported mayonnaise show ribbons and olives for eyes. Massive sturgeons reclined majestically on spotlighted aquarium pedestals aflutter with tiny live fish. Outside, we queued up for wrinkled Moroccan oranges in subzero winters; inside the Kremlin, there were passionfruit, kiwis, and, as Viktor put it tenderly, “adorable baby-bananchiki.”

“Just imagine,” waxed Viktor. “The colorful lights at Georgievsky Hall in the Grand Palace are finally lit, the Soviet anthem starts up, everyone’s awestruck by all that glimmering china and glittering crystal…”

Putin’s protocol guys dustbinned the glitter and glimmer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was deeply distressing.

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

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

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

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

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

Victory Day dawned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And with great dignity he walked away from me.

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

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

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

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

Asya Vasilievna met Akhmatova during their VOV evacuation in Tashkent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HIM? AGAIN?

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

Something in me snapped. I wanted to howl, bang my head against the shiny Soviet-style table, flee from this insane asylum where history has been dismantled and Photoshopped into a pastiche of victims and murderers, dictators and dissidents, all rubbing sentimental shoulders together.

I did howl after Asya finished.

“Ladies!” I burst out. “Have you lost your marbles? Akhmatova’s testament to suffering… here under STALIN’s mustaches?”

I finished, mortified at my outburst. How could I be haranguing these frail survivors of a terrible era? What right did I have to wag my finger at women who’d endured and outlived the Soviet century? My lips were shaking. I wanted to cry.

The ladies seemed unoffended by my outburst. Asya Vasilievna’s dark eyes flickered with some sly wisdom I couldn’t grasp. Her half-smile was almost mischievous. Inna Valentinovna patted me warmly on the shoulder.

“Iz pesni slov ne vykinesh,” explained Inna Valentinovna, proffering an old Russian chestnut. “You can’t yank words out of a song.”

Meaning: the past was the past, just as it was. Without executioners there would be no victims or poems.

“What kind of logic is that?” I protested to my mother later. She pressed her hands to her temples and shook her head.

“I’m glad I’m leaving soon,” she said.

Our time in Moscow was drawing to a close. Mom was headed back to New York; Barry and I would leave a couple of days after her on a two-week magazine assignment in Europe. I looked forward to life again as I knew it: breathing Stalin-less air, perusing restaurant menus without going green at the prices, trundling around proud and free in my flip-flops.

Mom finally flew off. Without her prattling on three phones at once and feeding streams of ravenous visitors, the khi-rize felt lonely and empty. Mom, I realized, had been my moral compass in Russia, my anchoring narrative. Without her Moscow had lost its point.

Except for one last mission. The mission I’d been dreaming about most of the forty-plus years of my life—one of my secret reasons for coming here. Something I could never do with Mother around.

“Mavzoley? Mausoleum?”

“Da, nu? Mavzoley,” said the brusque voice answering the phone. “Yeah, what of it?”

The voice sounded so disrespectful and young, I almost hung up in confusion.

“Da! Nu?” demanded the voice.

“Are, you… um, um… open?” I asked nervously, since some tourist websites suggested the V. I. Lenin Mausoleum was now closed on Sundays, and Sunday—today—was our last chance.

“Scheduled hours,” the voice snapped sardonically.

“What’s the admission charge?”

“In Russia we don’t charge for cemeteries!” cackled the voice. “Not yet!”

The mausoleum line was the shortest I’d ever seen it, a scant 150 meters long.

Lenin clearly wasn’t enjoying Stalin’s cachet; his days inside his eleet and ekskluziv Red Square real estate were numbered, I reckoned. Two-decades-old talk of burying him had flared up again. A prominent member of Putin’s United Russia Party noted, almost ninety years after the fact, that Lenin’s family had opposed mummification. Asked to vote at goodbyelenin.ru, 70 percent of Russians favored removal and burial. Only the Communist Party leadership yawped in outrage.

We lined up between a skinny Central Asian man and a gaggle of noisy Italians in cool high-tech nylon gear. Our Central Asian neighbor flashed us a pure gold smile. In Soviet days, I recalled, brothers from exotic republics put their money right where their mouths were, installing twenty-four-karat teeth instead of trusting sberkassa (the state savings offices).

Roughly my age, the man introduced himself as Rahmat. “It means ‘thank you’ in Tajik—ever heard of Tajikistan?”

Mr. Thank You proved to be a font of flowery, heavily accented Soviet clichés. His city, Leninabad, bore the “proud name of Lenin!” To visit the mausoleum had been his “zavetnaya mechta—cherished dream.”

“My dream, too,” I admitted, earning a round of twenty-four-karat smiles and ritual handshakes.

On entering the mausoleum’s grounds you were made to surrender the works—wallets, cell phones, cameras. Photos were strictly forbidden.

Which was unfortunate.

Because something wildly, improbably, heart-stoppingly photogenic was taking place out in the center of cordoned-off Red Square. I heard bugles, drumbeats. Kids in white and blue uniforms were drawn up in ranks for their Young Pioneer induction ceremony. A big woman in polka-dots moved along the rows, tying scarlet kerchiefs around their necks.

“ARE YOU READY?” roared a loudspeaker.

“ALWAYS READY!” cried the kids, giving the Young Pioneer salute. Was I hallucinating? Or were the girls really wearing the big Soviet white bows in their hair?

“Vzeveites’s kostrami sinie nochi…”

The relentless choral cheer of the Young Pioneer anthem filled Red Square. A scarlet myth blazed once more in the distance.

“My pioneri deti rabochikh,” Rahmat and I sang along. “We’re Young Pioneers, children of workers!” With no anti-Soviet mother there to tug at my sleeve, I sang at the top of my lungs.

“Frigging Young Pioneer Day,” a guard was explaining to someone nearby. “Every frigging year, the frigging communists with this… Look! Zyuganov!” The brick-faced current Communist Party leader was up on the makeshift podium. “Queridos compañeros,” someone began shouting in accented Spanish. “Welcoming comrades from shithole Havana,” grimaced the guard. “And for this freak show, they close Red Square!”

We filed by the Kremlin Wall burial tombs where rest the noble remains of Brezhnev, Gagarin, the American John Reed, and, yes, Himagain.

“Us! Walking this holy ground!” Rahmat apostrophized behind Barry and me. “This holy ground at the very center of our socialist Rodina!”

Such was his childish awe, I didn’t have the heart to remind him that the “proud four letters: CCCP” had been busted up twenty years ago, that in no way was Moscow his rodina.

“Scared?” I whispered to him as we descended into the mystery of mysteries of my childhood—the mausoleum burial chamber.

“Of what? Lenin isn’t scary,” Rahmat assured me serenely. “He is svetly (luminous) and krasivy (beautiful) and zhivoy (alive).”

Our face time with Vladimir Ilyich was barely two minutes, maybe less. Stony-featured sentries every ten feet in the darkness goaded us on a tight circuit around the glassed-in sarcophagus, where Object No. 1 lay, glowing, on heavy red velvet. I noted his/its polka-dot tie. And the extreme luminosity achieved by cunningly spotlighting his/its shining baldness.

“Why is one fist clenched?” Barry whispered.

“No talking!” a sentry barked from the shadows. “Keep moving toward the exit!”

And then it was over.

I emerged into the Moscow Sunday confused and untransfigured. All these years… for what? Suddenly it felt deeply, existentially trivial. Had I really expected to howl with laughter at the ritual kitsch? Or experience anything other than the faintly comical anticlimactic creepiness I was feeling right now?

Barry on the other hand seemed shaken. “That was,” he blurted, “the most fascist thing I’ve ever experienced in my life!”

Red Square had reopened by now, and freshly minted Young Pioneers streamed past us. With profound disappointment I realized that the girls’ big white Soviet bows were not the proper white nylon ribbon extravaganzas of my young days but small beribboned barrettes—fakes manufactured most likely in Turkey or China.

“I remember my pride at becoming a Young Pioneer,” Rahmat beamingly told a blonde squirrel-faced girl. She sized up his gold teeth and his third world pointy-toed shoes, then my flip-flops, and shouted, “Get lost!”

We milled around with Rahmat for a while. He’d arrived in the capital just the day before and clearly hadn’t yet learned the “Moscow—mean city” mantra. He intended to look for construction work but, knowing not a soul, had come straight to the mausoleum to see Lenin’s “kind, dearly familiar face.” We smiled and nodded some more, with the vigorous politesse of two strangers about to part after a fleeting bond on a bus tour.

Two aliens, I reflected, a migrant worker and an émigré from her past, wandering Red Square beneath the gaudy marzipan swirls of St. Basil’s Cathedral.

Finally Rahmat went trudging off to pay his respects to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I felt a deep pang of sadness as I watched his slumped, lonely figure recede. My cell phone rang. It was Mom, calling at jet-lagged dawn from New York.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Just walked out of the mausoleum,” I said.

For a while there was silence.

“Idiotka,” Mom finally snorted, then made a kiss-kiss sound and went back to bed.