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.