This left us needing only an “ethnic” dish.
Stalin’s imperialist post-war policies treated Soviet minorities as inferior brothers of the great ethnic Russians (or downright enemies of the people, at times). So while the 1952 Kniga deigns to include a handful of token dishes from the republics, it folds them into an all-Soviet canon. Recipes for Ukrainian borscht, Georgian kharcho (a soup), and Armenian dolmas are offered with nary a mention of their national roots.
Mom rang a day later. “To represent the ethnic republics,” she announced, unnaturally formal, “I have selected… chanakhi!”
“No!” I protested. “You can’t—it was Stalin’s favorite dish!”
“Oy,” Mom said, and hung up.
She called back. “But I already bought lamb chops,” she bleated. She had also bought baby eggplants, ripe tomatoes and peppers, and lots of cilantro—in short, all the ingredients for the deliciously soupy clay-baked Georgian stew called chanakhi.
“But, Ma,” I reasoned, “wouldn’t it be weird to celebrate liberation from Stalin with his personal favorite dish?”
“Are you totally sure,” she wheedled, “that it was his favorite dish?”
With a sigh I agreed to double check. I hung up and poured myself a stiff Spanish brandy. Grudgingly, I reexamined my researches.
“Stalin,” wrote the Yugoslav communist literatteur Milovan Djilas on encountering the Vozhd in the thirties, “ate food in quantities that would have been enormous even for a much larger man. He usually chose meat… a sign of his mountain origins.” Describing meeting him again in 1945, Djilas gasped, “Now he was positively gluttonous, as if afraid someone might snatch the food from under his nose.”
Stalin did most of his gluttonizing at his Kuntsevo dacha, not far from where I grew up, accompanied by his usual gang of invitees: Beria, Khrushchev, Molotov, and Mikoyan. The (non-refusable) invitations to dacha meals were spontaneous, the hours late.
“They were called obedi (lunches),” grumbled Molotov, “but what kind of lunch is it at ten or eleven p.m.?”
There was a hominess to these nocturnal meals that suggested Stalin himself didn’t much enjoy officious Stalinist pomp. A long table with massive carved legs was set in the dacha’s wood-paneled dining room, which was unadorned save for a fireplace and a huge Persian carpet. Waiters presided over by round-faced Valechka—Stalin’s loyal housekeeper and possible mistress—left food at one end of the table on heavy silver platters with lids, then vanished from sight. Soups sat on the side table. The murderous crew got up and helped themselves. Stalin’s favorite Danube herring, always unsalted, and stroganina (shaved frozen raw fish) could be among the zakuski. Soups were traditional and Russian, such as ukha (fish broth) and meaty cabbage shchi cooked over several days. Grilled lamb riblets, poached quail, and, invariably, plenty of fish for the main courses. It was Soviet-Eurasian fusion, the dacha cuisine: Slavic and Georgian.
I took a swallow of my Carlos I brandy.
At the dacha Stalin drank light Georgian wine—and, always, water from his favorite frosty, elongated carafe—and watched others get blotto on vodka. “How many degrees below zero is it outside?” he enjoyed quizzing guests. For every degree they were off by, they’d have to drink a shot. Such dinnertime pranks enjoyed a long regal tradition in Russia. Peter the Great jolted diners with dwarfs springing from giant pies. At his extravagant banquets, Ivan the Terrible, Stalin’s role model, sent chalices of poisoned booze to out-of-favor boyars and watched them keel over. Stalin liked to make Humpty Dumpty–like Khrushchev squat and kick his heels in a Ukrainian gopak dance, or he’d roar as his henchmen pinned paper scribbled with the word khui (dick) to Nikita’s rotund back. Mikoyan, ever practical, confessed to bringing extra pants to the dacha: tomatoes on chairs was a cherished dinner table hijink. (The tomatoes, incidentally, were grown on the dacha grounds.) Throughout this Animal House tomfoolery, Stalin sipped, “perhaps waiting for us to untie our tongues,” wrote Mikoyan. These were men who, in their bloody hands, held the summary fate of one sixth of the world.
Ever the meticulous foodie, Mikoyan left us the best recollections of the Vozhd’s dining mores. Apparently Stalin had a fondness for inventing new dishes for his chefs to perfect. One particular favorite was a certain “part soup, part entree…”
Aha, I said to myself.
“In a big pot,” Mikoyan wrote, “they’d mix eggplants, tomatoes, potatoes, black pepper, bay leaf, and pieces of unfatty lamb. It was served hot. They added cilantro… Stalin named it Aragvi.”
No, there could be no doubt: Mikoyan was describing a classic Georgian stew called chankakhi. Stalin must have dubbed it Aragvi after a Georgian river or a favored Moscow Georgian restaurant, or both.
I thought some more about Mikoyan. Seemingly bulletproof for most of his career, by 1953 Stalin’s old cohort, former food commissar, and now deputy chair of the Council of Ministers, had finally fallen into disfavor. The Vozhd trashed him and Molotov at Central Committee plenum; then the pair were left out of the Kuntsevo “lunches.” Mikoyan must have counted his days. His son recalled that he kept a gun in his desk, a quick bullet being preferable to arrest, which would drag his big Armenian family with him. Anastas Ivanovich was a brutally calculating careerist. Yet, sitting at my desk with my brandy, I felt a pang of compassion.
The phone interrupted my ruminations.
“I’ve resolved the chanakhi dilemma!” my mother proudly announced. “Before his death wasn’t Stalin plotting a genocidal purge against Georgia?”
“Well, yes. I believe so,” I conceded, bewildered. This intended purge was less famous than the one against Jews. But indeed, Stalin seemed to have had ethnic cleansing in mind for his own Caucasian kin. More specifically, he was targeting Mingrelians, a subminority of which Beria was a proud son. This could well have been a convoluted move against Beria.
“Well then!” cried Mom. “We can serve chanakhi as a tribute to the oppressed Georgians!”
“To Stalin’s death!” hoots Katya after I’ve poured out the vodka. “Let’s clink!”
Inna is shocked.
“But, Katiush, it’s a bad omen to clink for the dead!”
“Exactly! We must clink so the shit may rot in his grave!”
March 5 has arrived. Outside my mother’s windows in Queens, rain hisses down as we celebrate the snuffing of Stalin’s candle. Katya, Musya, Inna—the octogenarian ladies at Mom’s table pick at the showy crab-salad platter amid fruit cornucopias and bottles of Sovetskoye bubbly. Sveta arrives last—slight, wan of face. Many moons ago, when she was a Moscow belle, the great poet Joseph Brodsky would stay with her on his visits from Leningrad. The thought touches me now.
“I went,” Sveta boasts, grinning, “to Stalin’s funeral!”
“Mishugina,” clucks Katya, making a “crazy” sign with her finger. “People were killed!”
As the monstrous funeral procession swelled and mourners got trampled, Sveta hung on to her school’s flower wreath—all the way to the Hall of Columns.
“The lamb, a little tough, maybe?” says Musya, assessing Mother’s chanakhi tribute to the oppressed Georgians. I pile insult on injury by slyly noting the connection to Stalin’s dacha feasts. Mom flashes me a look. She leaves for the kitchen, shaking her head.