I was born in Moscow. The seventies capital of my childhood seemed as familiar and comforting to me as a pair of old slippers. Mother’s anti-Soviet zeal assured I never trooped in a single parade in my life, never once peered at Lenin’s cosmeticized corpse at his Red Square mausoleum.
But often I lie awake nights imagining Mom, a tiny, reluctantly choral protagonist in the mythology of high Stalinist Moscow. The city of her childhood was engulfed in newcomers—from the upwardly mobile nomenklatura like Naum to dispossessed victims of collectivization fleeing the countryside. Pharaonic construction works boomed nonstop. Avenues became behemoths ten lanes wide, historic churches were turned to rubble, from vast pits rose socialist public magnificences. “Bustling. Mighty. Invincible.” How overwhelming the “Heart of the Socialist Homeland” must have seemed to an alienated, sad child.
Sometimes I picture Mom clutching Liza’s hand on the escalator sinking 130 feet below ground into the electrified blaze of the palatial, newly built Moscow Metro. What did Larisa make of the lofty stained glass and acres of steel and colored granite—of more marble than had been used by all the czars? Did her neck hurt from gazing up at the Mayakovskaya station’s soaring subterranean cupolas, with their mosaics of parachutists and gymnasts and Red Army planes pirouetting against baroque blue skies? Were they really so nightmarish, those eighty-two life-size bronze statues half crouching under the rhythmic arches of the Revolution Square station? Didn’t they produce in Mom the stunned awe of a medieval child at Chartres?
Looking back, ever-dissident Mom wavers about the metro, one minute gushing, the next bashing it as vile propaganda.
But about the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition she is unequivocal.
“In September 1939, at six years of age,” she says, “I saw earthly paradise!”
On a crisp autumn morning in the northern part of Moscow, young Larisa and her family strolled into Eden through monumental entry arches crowned by Vera Mukhina’s triumphant sculpture The Worker and the Kolkhoz Woman. They passed into a wide alley of dancing fountains and on toward an eighty-foot statue of Stalin. Stakhanovite growers told them tales of their achievements in the Sugarbeet Pavilion. At the marbled courtyard of the star-shaped Uzbekistan Pavilion, dark, round-faced women with myriad braids flowing from their embroidered skullcaps dispensed green tea and puffy round breads. Uzbeks, Tajiks, Tatars! Never had Mother suspected that such a riot of physiognomies and ethnic costumes existed.
Designed as a microcosm of the Soviet Empire’s glories, the Exhibition’s sprawling six hundred acres showcased exotic USSR republics and feats in practically every agricultural realm from dairy farming to rabbit breeding. The republics’ pavilions were fabulously decorated in “native” styles—“national in form, socialist in content,” as Stalin, Father of All Nations, prescribed. Inside Armenia’s pink limestone edifice Mom rushed over to a giant aquarium where mountain trout nosed and flitted. At Georgia’s Orientalist headquarters, she and Yulia brazenly grabbed at tangerines on a low branch in a subtropical garden where persimmon trees flowered and palms swayed. Soon it all became one dazzling blur. Model socialist hen eggs. Pink prizewinning pigs. Everything more beautiful, more “real” than life. The mini-fields sprouted perfect rye, wheat, and barley. Mom recalled her bullying pal Ninka’s favorite song: “We were born to turn fairy tale into reality.” A very true song, thought Mom, tonguing the chocolate shell off her Eskimo pie as they toured the mini-kolkhoz replete with a culture club and a maternity ward.
My poor dissident mother: in moments of candor she admits to this day that her vision of ideal love is walking arm in arm amid the splendiferous gardens of the Georgia Pavilion. But what inflamed her imagination the most was the food. If she closes her eyes, she claims to smell the musky striped adjui melons at the Uzbek Pavilion; taste the crunch of red Kazakh apples that were sometimes the size of those Uzbek melons—thank you, Grandpa Michurin, the Soviet miracle plant breeder whose motto was “We cannot wait for favors from Nature; our task is to take them from her.”
It was as if my mother had discovered a world beyond the universe of parades and blaring loudspeakers and institutional smells. The discovery sparked a fascination with food that has animated her all her life.
“Finish your bouillon. Have another kotleta.” Liza’s admonitions now sounded inviting, caressing. They whispered to Mom of a different, far more intimate happiness than Comrade Stalin’s collective ideals. And when Naum was at the table, life seemed particularly cheerful. With him there, Liza reached with special abandon into the box hung outside their window—Stalin-era refrigeration—for their nomenklatura food parcels wrapped in blue paper.
Out came a rosy bologna called Doctor’s Kolbasa. Or sosiski, Mom’s favorite frankfurters. Boiled taut, they squirted salty juice into your mouth when you bit into them, and they tasted particularly good with sweet gray-green peas from a can. Stores didn’t usually carry those cans. For them Mom and Liza had to trudge to an unmarked depot guarded by an unsmiling man. Naum was “attached” to such a depot store—as were many Moscow bigwigs. The babushka working the lift, on the other hand, wasn’t attached. Mom could tell this from her sad lunch of rotten-smelling boiled eggs sprinkled with salt she kept in little foldings of Pravda.
When visitors came, Liza made fish suspended in glistening aspic and canapes with frilly mayonnaise borders. The guests—men in dressy naval suits, women with bright red lips—brought with them the crisp fall air and candies with names like Happy Childhood and Soviet North Pole. A momentous event was the gift of a dinner service with golden borders around tiny pink flowers, replacing their mismatched chipped plates and cups. The same high-ranking naval officer who brought the service gave Liza a book.
The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food was hefty, with a somber parsley-green cover. Opening it, Mom gasped at the trove of fantastical photos… of tables crowded with silver and crystal, of platters of beef decorated with tomato rosettes, of boxes of chocolates and wedges of frilly cake posed amid elaborate tea sets. The images roused the same euphoria Mom had felt at the agricultural exhibition. They conjured up skatert’ samobranka, an enchanted tablecloth from a Russian folk fairy tale that covered itself with food at the snap of a finger. Mom thought again about Ninka’s song. Liza could even turn this fairy tale into reality, it seemed. She said the book contained recipes, and the dinner sets pictured were identical to the new one they’d been given.
Fish. Juices. Konservi (conserves). One day Mom shocked Liza by announcing that she could now read the words in the book. And the book, and the labels of the packaged foods in their house—many of these delicious things often contained an exotic word: Mi-ko-yan. Was it a kind of sosiski? Or perhaps kotleti—not the uninspired homemade meat patties, but the trim store-bought ones that fried up to a fabulous greasy crunch. “Mi-ko-yan,” said Mom to herself when Liza was cooking a dinner for guests, and scrupulously comparing her table setting to the photographs in the parsley-green book. In those moments life seemed good to my mother. Yes, entirely good.