Vera Pavlovna, the book’s free-loving do-goodnik heroine, inspired Russian feminists to open labor cooperatives for poor women. And Rakhmetov, its Superman of a revolutionary, became the model for angry young men aspiring to transform Russia. Half Slavic secular saint, half Enlightenment rationalist, this Rakhmetov was ascetic, ruthlessly pragmatic, and disciplined, yet possessed of a Russian bleeding heart for the underprivileged. He abstained from booze and sex and grabbed his forty winks on a bed of nails to toughen up—a detail gleefully recalled by any former Soviet teen who slogged through a ninth-grade composition on What Is to Be Done?
And to eat?
For Rakhmetov, an oddball “boxer’s” diet sufficed: raw meat, for strength; some plain black bread; and whichever humble fare was available (apples, fine; fancy apricots, nyet).
As I reread Chto delat’? now, this stern menu for heroes strikes me as very significant. Rooted in mid-nineteenth-century Russian liberal thought, culinary austerity—not to say nihilism—was indeed the hallmark of the era’s flesh-and-blood radicals and utopians. The father of Russian populism, Alexander Herzen—Chernyshevsky’s idol, admiration alas unreturned—had condemned the European petite bourgeoisie’s desire for “a piece of chicken in the cabbage soup of every little man.” Tolstoy preached vegetarianism. Petr Kropotkin, the anarchist prince, avowed “tea and bread, some milk… a thin slice of meat cooked over a spirit lamp.” And when Vera Zasulich, a venerated Marxist firebrand, was hungry, she snipped off pieces of wretchedly done meat with scissors.
True to the model, Lenin qua Lenin ate humbly. Conveniently, his wife, Krupskaya, was a lousy cook. On the famous “sealed” train headed for Petrograd’s Finland Station in 1917, Lenin made do with a sandwich and a stale bread roll. During their previous decade of European exile, the Bolshevik first couple, though not poor, dined like grad students on bread, soups, and potatoes at cheap boardinghouses and proletarian neighborhood joints. When she did cook, Krupskaya burned her stews (“roasts,” Lenin called them ironically). She even made “roast” out of oatmeal, though she could prepare eggs a dozen ways. But she needn’t have bothered: Lenin, she reported later, “pretty submissively ate everything given to him.” Apparently Lenin didn’t even mind horsemeat. Occasionally his mother would send parcels of Volga treats—caviar, smoked fish—from Simbirsk. But she died in 1916. So there were no such treats in 1918 when her son and daughter-in-law moved into the Kremlin, by the wall of which I would later brood over the endless line for the mausoleum.
Ascetic food mores à la Rakhmetov carried over, it might be said, into the new Bolshevik state’s approach to collective nutrition. Food equaled utilitarian fuel, pure and simple. The new Soviet citizen was to be liberated from fussy dining and other such distractions from his grand modernizing project.
Novy sovetsky chelovek. The New Soviet Man!
This communal socialist prototype stood at the very heart of Lenin and company’s enterprise. A radically transforming society required a radically different membership: productive, selfless, strong, unemotional, rational—ready to sacrifice all to the socialist cause. Not letting any kind of biological determinism stand in their way, the Bolsheviks held that, with proper finagling, the Russian body and mind could be reshaped and rewired. Early visions of such Rakhmetovian comrade-molding were a goony hybrid of hyper-rational science, sociology, and utopian thinking.
“Man,” enthused Trotsky (who’d read What Is to Be Done? with “ecstatic love”), “will make it his purpose to… raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness… to create a higher social biologic tongue type, or, if you please, a superman.”
A prime crucible for the new Soviet identity was byt (everyday life and its mores)—to be remade as novy byt (the new lifestyle). A deeply Russian concept, this byt business, difficult to translate. Not merely everyday life in the Western sense, it traditionally signified the metaphysical weight of the daily grind, the existentially depleting cares of material living. The Bolsheviks meant to eliminate the problem. In Marxian terms, material life determined consciousness. Consequently, novy byt—everyday life modernized, socialized, collectivized, ideologized—would serve as a critical arena and engine of man’s transformation. Indeed, the turbulent twenties marked the beginning of our state’s relentless intrusion into every aspect of the Soviet daily experience—from hygiene to housekeeping, from education to eating, from sleeping to sex. Exact ideologies and aesthetics would vary through the decades, but not the state’s meddling.
“Bolshevism has abolished private life,” wrote the cultural critic Walter Benjamin after his melancholy 1927 visit to Moscow.
The abolition started with housing. Right after October 1917, Lenin drafted a decree expropriating and partitioning single-family dwellings. And so were born our unbeloved Soviet kommunalki—communal apartments with shared kitchens and bathrooms. Under the Bolsheviks, comforting words such as house and apartment were quickly replaced by zhilploshchad’, chilling bureaucratese for “dwelling space.” The official allowance—nine square meters per person, or rather, per statistical unit—was assigned by the Housing Committee, an all-powerful institution that threw together strangers—often class enemies—into conditions far more intimate than those of nuclear families in the West. An environment engineered for totalitarian social control.
Such was the domicile near Red Square where I spent the first three years of my life. It was, I’m sad to report, not the blissful communal utopia envisaged in the hallowed pages of What Is to Be Done? Sadder still, by the seventies, the would-be socialist ubermensch had shrunk to Homo sovieticus: cynical, disillusioned, wholly fixated on kolbasa, and yes, Herzen’s petit bourgeois chicken.
Naturally, the Bolshevik reframing of byt ensnared the family stove. Despite the mammoth challenge of feeding the civil-war-ravaged country, the traditional domestic kitchen was branded as ideologically reactionary, and downright ineffectual. “When each family eats by itself,” warned a publication titled Down with the Private Kitchen, “scientifically sound nutrition is out of the question.”
State dining facilities were to be the new hearth—the public cauldron replacing the household pot, in the phrase of one Central Committee economist. Such communal catering not only allowed the state to manage scarce resources, but also turned eating into a politically engaged process. “The stolovaya [public canteen] is the forge,” declared the head of the union in charge of public dining, “where Soviet byt and society will be… created.” Communal cafeterias, agreed Lenin, were invaluable “shoots” of communism, living examples of its practice.
By 1921 thousands of Soviet citizens were dining in public. By all accounts these stolovayas were ghastly affairs—scarier even than those of my Mature Socialist childhood with their piercing reek of stewed cabbage and some Aunt Klava flailing a filthy cleaning rag under my nose as I gagged on the three-course set lunch, with its inevitable ending of desolate-brown dried fruit compote or a starchy liquid jelly called kissel.
Kissel would have appeared ambrosial back in the twenties. Workers were fed soup with rotten sauerkraut, unidentifiable meat (horse?), gluey millet, and endless vobla, the petrified dried Caspian roach fish. And yet… thanks to the didactic ambitions of novy byt, many canteens offered reading rooms, chess, and lectures on the merits of hand-washing, thorough chewing, and proletarian hygiene. A few model stolovayas even had musical accompaniment and fresh flowers on white tablecloths.