“Just imagine,” waxed Viktor. “The colorful lights at Georgievsky Hall in the Grand Palace are finally lit, the Soviet anthem starts up, everyone’s awestruck by all that glimmering china and glittering crystal…”
Putin’s protocol guys dustbinned the glitter and glimmer.
I suppose in a city with the world’s thickest swarm of billionaires—where a Pilates studio is never far away and sashimi is flown in daily from Tokyo—there wasn’t much call for gastronomic Potemkin villages anymore. So the staged fairy tales of abundance had finally been retired—along with all that crystal and nonsustainable caviar. Instead of fifteen zakuski, Kremlin banquets now featured bite-size pirozhki, and small bowls of berries sat where receptacles piled with glowing fruit once towered triumphant.
Fairly recently Putin added a wrinkle: USSR nostalgia. “Herring under fur coat,” meat brawn—current Kremlin chefs now served communal-apartment dishes in dainty individual portions alongside foie gras and carpaccio. Which struck me as a perfect expression of the New Russian pastiche.
Today’s streamlined service made sense, Viktor conceded as he poured us a rare Masandra Port from Crimea. But he missed those days of yore, I could tell. Who wouldn’t miss actually living inside a socialist fantasy? Me? Misty-eyed, I told Viktor that his table was the closest I’d ever come to the skatert’ samobranka, the magic tablecloth of Russian folklore.
Viktor left the Kremlin after his heart attack and now ran a catering company and a restaurant. He headed the association of Russian restaurateurs, trying to promote native cuisine. That battle was lost, though, he thought.
“Young Russian chefs can do pizzas—but who remembers how to cook our kasha?” And he sighed a heartfelt sigh. He who had presided over the gleam of Kremlin walls carved out of red ice.
Back at the khi-rize I was reviewing my notes—Gorbachev, per Viktor: Ate little. Drank even less. Left banquets after forty minutes. Yeltsin: Loved lamb chops. Lousy dancer—when my email pinged. It was a message from another world, from El Bulli near Barcelona.
The world’s most magical and important restaurant was about to close forever, and Ferran (the chef) and Juli (co-owner) wanted me to attend a farewell dinner. I’d known the two of them since 1996. Their Catalan temple of avant-garde cooking was an intimate part of my professional history. My first visit fifteen years before had transformed everything I thought and wrote about food. “You’re family,” Ferran always told me. And now here I was, stuck in mean, alien Moscow, ungrounded in past or present, fumbling with madeleines. My visa was single-entrance, so I couldn’t even slip out to say a hurried farewell.
I slumped in my chair, stung by loss from my real life. Queridos Amigos! I started to type, Estoy en Moscu cruel, muy lamentablemente no puedo… A strange rumbling from below interrupted my Spanish. There was something world-devouring and cataclysmic to it, as if a tsunami were approaching. My desk began to vibrate.
We all ran to the windows. Way down below us tanks slowly rolled through the rainy night along deserted Novy Arbat. Missile launchers came prowling after them, then troop carriers, artillery.
The phone rang. “Watching Victory Day rehearsal?” my dad chortled almost merrily. “The tekhnika (hardware) should be passing you now—right under the big billboard for that movie Malchishnik Dva (Hangover 2)!”
“Tanki i banki, tanks and banks,” grumbled my mom. “Welcome to Putinland.”
The great celebrations of Victory Day—May 9—drew closer. Putinland’s officious militaristic patriotism went into overdrive. To judge from the hype, the lollapalooza promised to out-wow even anything we’d seen under Brezhnev.
The airwaves overflowed now with the Great Patriotic War (VOV in abbreviated Russian). Forties black-and-white films, close-ups of blokada bread, piercing footage of a little girl playing piano with frozen hands in besieged Leningrad—suddenly there was no escaping them. On buses old people and migrant workers hummed along to war songs piped over the sound systems. Helpful ads enticed cell phone users to dial 1–9–4–5 and get a free VOV tune as a ringtone.
In Brezhnev’s time the State had co-opted the mythic traumas and triumph of the Great Patriotic War to reinfuse ideology into a cynical young generation. Russians had grown a lot more cynical since. In today’s society, one so desperately lacking an anchoring national narrative, the Kremlin was once again exploiting the cult of VOV to mobilize what was left of national patriotism, to bring generations together in a tightly scripted rite of remembering. “My narod pobeditel” (We, nation victorious)—I now heard it ad nauseam, just as I had in my childhood. Unheard: the catastrophic official blunders costing millions of lives, the brutal post-war deportations of ethnic minorities. In case anyone misremembered? A “Commission for Countering Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of the Interests of Russia” had been established in 2009.
And who was it that had led Russia to its May 9 Victory?
Perhaps I’d finally slid into obsessional fantasy. The run-up to Victory Day appeared to my inflamed mind as a veritable Springtime for Stalin.
Men with rotten teeth and sour breath hawked sundry Staliniana at street stalls on cheesily pedestrianized Arbat Street, and even respectable bookstores did a brisk business in Stalin fridge magnets. The Kremlin had been careful about an open endorsement. Vernacular opinion, however, told a different story. Nearly half of all Russians polled saw Stalin in a positive light. A notorious 2008 TV survey had the Generalissimo rated third for “most important Russian in history”—barely edged by Prince Alexander Nevsky of Eisenstein film fame, and Pyotr Stolypin, a reformist early-twentieth-century prime minister noisily admired by Putin. But everyone believed the results had been cooked to suppress the controversial truth.
I noticed that in the popular imagination his figure seemed split. The bad Stalin was the orchestrator of the gulags. The good Stalin was an ur-Russian brand projecting power and victory.
It was deeply distressing.
A mid all this ideological ghoulism and ahistorical mishmash the khi-rize became my refuge, the haven of my own pre-post-Soviet innocence. What a perfect comfort it was, easily idealized and yet so authentic. I got a lump in my throat every time I entered the woody, cozily modernist lobby. I loved the achingly familiar USSR reek of cat spray and acrid cleaning detergent. Loved the coarse blue oil-paint trim and the rotating gallery of very Soviet concierge babushkas.
Inna Valentinovna, my favorite babushka, was one of the khi-rize’s original residents. She had scored her prestige apartment during the late sixties for her scientific achievements and now whiled away her bustling, bossy retirement by concierging part-time. As May 9 drew nigh, she transformed our lobby into a maelstrom of veteran-related activity.