The Best Friend of All Children, Pensioners, Nursing Mothers, Kolkhoz Workers, Hunters, Chess Players, Milkmaids, and Long-Distance Runners was no more.
He was gone.
The nation was Stalin-less.
In the sleety early March days right before Stalin’s death, Larisa, dressed in perpetually leaking boots and a scratchy orange turtleneck under a gray pinafore dress, was navigating the cavernous bowels of INYAZ. This was the Moscow state institute of foreign languages, home to Kafka-esque corridors and an underheated canteen with that eternal reek of stewed cabbage. Home to elderly multilingual professors: prime targets of Stalin’s vicious campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans.”
Closed vowels, open vowels. In her phonetics class my mother was sighing. Land—Lend. Man—Men. A Russian ear is deaf to such subtleties. Anyway, how to concentrate on vowels and the like when Comrade Stalin lay dying?
Irrespective of the Vozhd’s condition, an English major at INYAZ didn’t figure into Mom’s idea of any Radiant Future. It was a dull, respectable career compromise, as her fervent dreams of the stage kept crashing. “I probably lacked the talent,” Mom admits nowadays. “And the looks.” Back then it seemed more, well, dramatic to blame her crushed hopes on a “history of drama” exam at the fashionable GITIS theater academy. At her entrance orals, having memorized the official texts, Mom delivered the requisite critique of rootless cosmopolitanism to a pair of stately professors. Did they really grimace at her declaiming how art belongs to narod, the people? Why did they give her a troika, a C, for her faultless textbook recitation? Only much later Mom realized, with great shame, that those two erudite connoisseurs of Renaissance drama were themselves being hounded and harassed for their “unbridled, evil-minded cosmopolitanism.”
On March 6, as word of Stalin’s passing spread, the INYAZ corridors echoed with sobs. Classes were canceled. Janitorial babushkas leaned on their mops, wailing over their buckets like pagan Slavs at a funeral. Mom’s own eyes were dry but her teeth rattled and her limbs felt leaden under the historic weight of the news. On the tram home, commuters hunched on wooden seats in tense silence. Through the windows Mother watched funerary banners slowly rise across buildings. Workmen were plastering over the cheerful billboards advertising her favorite plays. She closed her eyes and saw blackness, a gaping void instead of a future.
Three days later, my mother, Liza, and Yulia set off for the funeral, but seeing the mobs on the streets, they turned back. My teenage dad persevered. Sergei, then sixteen and a bit of a street urchin, managed to hop forward on rooftops, thread through the epic bottleneck in Moscow’s center, crawl under a barrier of official black Studebakers, squeeze past policemen atop panicked horses, and sneak into the neo-classic pomp of the Hall of Columns where Iosif Vissarionovich lay in state, gold buttons aglint on his gray Generalissimo uniform. Sergei’s best friend, Platosha, wasn’t so lucky, however: his skull was cracked in the infamous funeral stampede into Trubnaya Square. Nobody’s sure of the exact number of fatalities, but at least several hundred mourners were trampled to death on March 9 in the monstrous surge to see Stalin’s body. Even in his coffin, Stalin claimed victims.
Weeks after the funeral, Mom was still shaken. There were two things she just couldn’t get over. The first was galoshes. Images of black galoshes strewn all over Moscow in the wake of the funeral, along with hats, mittens, scarves, fragments of coats. The second was unreality—the utter unreality of Levitan’s health bulletins during Stalin’s final days.
Urine. The Great Leader had urine? Pulse? Respiration? Blood? Weren’t those words she heard at the shabby neighborhood polyclinic?
Mom tried to imagine Stalin squatting on a toilet or having his blood drawn by someone with sweat stains under his arms from fear. But it didn’t seem possible! And in the end how could Stalin do something as mundane, as mundanely human, as die?
When Stalin’s passing finally began to sink in, Mom’s bewilderment gave way to a different feeling: bitter and angry disappointment. He had left them—left her. He would never come to see her triumph in a play. Whether rehearsing for auditions, Mom realized, or picturing herself on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater in some socially meaningful Gorky production—she yearned for his approbation, his presence, his all-wise, discriminating blessing.
After Mom confided all this to me recently, I couldn’t sleep. Larisa Naumovna Frumkina. The dissident heart who had always shielded me from Soviet contamination…
She wanted to be an actress for Stalin?
So here it was, then: the raw emotional grip of a totalitarian personality cult; that deep bond, hypnotic and intimate, between Stalin and his citizenry. Until now, I’d found this notion abstract. The State of my childhood had been a creaking geriatric machine run by a cartoonish Politburo that inspired nothing but vicious political humor. With the fossilized lump of Brezhnev as Leader, it was, at times, rather fun. But Mom’s response to Stalin’s death suddenly illuminated for me the power of his cult. Its insidious duality. On the one hand the Great Leader was a divinity unflawed by the banalities of human life. A historical force, transcendental, mysterious, and somehow existing outside and above the wretched regime he’d created. At the same time, he was father figure to all—a kind, even cozily homely paterfamilias to the whole Soviet nation, a man who hugged kids on posters and attracted propaganda epithets like prostoy (simple), blizky (intimate), and rodnoy, an endearment reserved for the closest of kin, with the same etymology as the equally resonant rodina (homeland).
By the time Stalin died, Mother was no longer an alienated child; but neither was she a bumpkin or a brainwashed Komsomol (Communist Youth) hack. She was a hyperliterary nineteen-year-old, a worshipper of dissident cultural heroes like Shostakovich and Pasternak, appalled by their harassment—and all the while spouting anti-cosmopolitan vitriol. In short, she suffered from a full-blown case of that peculiar Stalinist split-consciousness.
“Look,” Mom explained, “I was anti-Soviet from the time I was born—in my gut, in my heart. But in my head psychologically somehow… I guess I was a young Stalinist. But then after he died,” she concluded, “my head became clear.”
In certain dissident-leaning USSR circles there arose a tradition of celebrating March 5. Although de-Stalinization didn’t take place overnight, for many, Stalin’s deathday came to mark a watershed both historic and private; a symbolic moment when the blindfolds came off and one attained a new consciousness.
It so happened that March rolled along just as I was writing this chapter. In the spirit of these old dissident get-togethers, Mom decided that we should host our own deathday gathering. Again we turned to the cookbook my mother had fallen in love with at the age of five.
One sixth of the measured world, eleven time zones, fifteen ethnic republics. A population of nearly 300 million by the empire’s end. This was the USSR. And in the best spirit of socialist communality, our polyglot behemoth Rodina shared one constitution, one social bureaucracy, one second-grade math curriculum—and one kitchen bible for alclass="underline" The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. Begotten in 1939, Kniga (The Book) was an encyclopedic cooking manual, sure. But with its didactic commentaries, ideological sermonizing, neo-Enlightenment scientific excursions, and lustrous photo spreads of Soviet production plants and domestic feasts, it offered more—a compete blueprint of joyous, abundant, cultured socialist living. I couldn’t wait to revisit this socialist (un)realist landmark.