Nataliya Petrovna, by contrast, is not so physical. She is short and round and not capable of climbing any mountains let alone fighting bears. Unlike Boris, Nataliya Petrovna is very sociable and likes to dress to impress at one of her many dinner parties. When she has guests over, she always makes an effort to look good, by arranging her hair into curls and by wearing dresses. She is as mild mannered as Boris, but flies into a rage if there are hunting things left around for people to trip over. Nataliya Petrovna likes everything put in its proper place and despises dirty things. She also likes to joke around. When Boris telephones from some distant mountain she pretends she is having a great time without him and tells him not to return. After such phone calls, she pines over him and berates herself for having said silly things.
When she is not looking after her grandson Semka, or playing the piano, she is cooking. Her speciality is golubtsi. This is meat wrapped in cabbage leaves that must be boiled in an inch of water for an hour and thirty minutes. Nataliya Petrovna knows all there is to know about preparing meat dishes. It is her job to cut up all the meat Boris brings home. When he brings back the limbs of deer Nataliya Petrovna spends many of the evenings after cleaning them – chopping bits, mincing bits in her electric mincer, bagging it, sealing it and storing it away in one of the three freezers. They have a normal fridge-freezer in the kitchen. When this freezer is full she then uses the other much larger freezers in the cupboard next to the bathroom. They are rarely short of good cuts of meat. With the mincemeat Nataliya Petrovna usually makes pelmeni and manti (both similar to ravioli). She makes so much pelmeni that she very often gives whole bags of it away to friends.
After the collapse of the USSR, and the suicides of several of their friends, Boris brought back so much meat that Nataliya Petrovna made enough pelmeni to spread around and keep some of her friends alive. When they were short of something essential Nataliya Petrovna had only to make a call to someone to make a trade in pelmeni. It was their primary bargaining tool at a time when money was worthless. If Boris hadn’t the skills to hunt, I’m not sure what would have happened to everyone. It’s possible Nastya might never have survived. When I sat down with Nastya and her mother and questioned them about the collapse of the Soviet Union, Nataliya Petrovna said: ‘I have never been poor, but neither have I ever been rich. No matter who came into power and regardless of communist or capitalist rule, life went on as normal. Not one president, with all the promises they made ever really changed anything.’
Even so, I got the sense that both Nastya’s parents missed the earlier part of their lives even though they had lived under Soviet rule. Nataliya Petrovna had been alive no longer than three years when Stalin died, and so grew up under Khrushchev’s thaw. Premier Nikita Khrushchev famously denounced Stalin’s policies, released millions of Soviet political prisoners from the Gulags and attempted to fully reverse repression and censorship by what became later known as de-Stalinisation. Even with the rise of Brezhnev, who set to work on reversing Khrushchev’s reforms, many of the cultural reforms proved irreversible. Khrushchev’s policy changes made it possible for the likes of the Shurik movies to be made. Played by Aleksandr Demyanenko, Shurik, with his bleached-blond hair and thick-rimmed glasses, became a recurrent character in slapstick comedies of the 1960s and early 1970s. His movies, which epitomise the sixties in Russia, are still shown regularly today. In fact, during my first month in Russia, I saw them all, more than once.
With the sounds of the sixties coming from the TV, and the typical view of Soviet residential blocks from the window I sometimes felt as though we were still living in the Khrushchev period. This sense of being lost in the past was broken every evening by a neighbour, who would pull up at the foot of the building in his souped-up sports car playing Vangelis’ ‘Conquest of Paradise’ as loud as his speakers would allow. Which was quite appropriate as that song was recorded just after the fall of the USSR.
vi. The Red Army Strikes
Russian bread was something else I had to get used to. There were few of the factory-made thick, medium or thin sliced loaves that come in plastic wrappers. Instead loaves of bread come in various irregular shapes; they never last more than three days and always taste very good. The size of the loaf we bought depended on how many people were at home at the time, as waste is sorely frowned on. To play safe Nastya and I normally bought a miniature unsliced loaf every day. During meal times everyone got a slice of bread, even if the meal was meat and potatoes or fish pie. Though they weren’t exactly slices as I had known them, more like one-third-of-a-slice, the same size you would use for egg and soldiers. At first I thought that this was ritual behavior, leftover from times of hardship but in actual fact Russians are just really fond of eating bread with everything. They eat it with chicken, they eat it with rice, with any and every dish you really wouldn’t think of accompanying with bread, they have a slice or two. When I was on the first flight to Russia, there had been a soldier of bread, wrapped in plastic alongside the meal. At first I thought that they were being stingy, but later, when I got settled in the apartment, I understood it was normal practice.
One evening, while eating meatballs and home-made mashed potato with the obligatory slice of bread, Nataliya Petrovna told me the story of her grandfathers. Following the October Revolution of 1917, Nataliya Petrovna’s paternal grandfather, Fyodor Rosov – who was a geologist and a man of means – fled Russia with his brother Ivan. According to her story, neither man had any particular political ideology but as they were both accustomed to a decent standard of living they feared assassination by the Red Army. People from wealthy backgrounds were being slaughtered left right and centre, so the only option for them was to leave. They fled via the Black Sea for Turkey, made their way to Tunisia, and eventually settled in France. I later did some research on this subject and found that their exile from Russia had been documented in one of Moscow’s museums, Marina Tsvetaeva. According to the museum, Ivan, brother to Fyodor Rozov, studied law at Yekaterinburg University and was mobilised into the white army in 1918 where he graduated to Midshipman in the Black Sea Fleet. He later settled in Reims where he worked as a driver and in 1953 became a priest and founded the Church of the Assumption of Oni in 1954.
Little is known about Fyodor. What we do know is that when Fyodor fled for Turkey with his brother, he left behind a pregnant wife, Marina Rosova, Nataliya Petrovna’s grandmother. Apparently Marina (who was pregnant with Nataliya Petrovna’s father at the time, the unborn son of a ‘white deserter’), was so beautiful that the Red Army couldn’t bring themselves to kill her, as was their custom when they came across the wives of ‘traitors of Russia’. She later married Anton Karbovski, a high-ranking Cheka (secret policeman) of the NKVD (The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). He was so in love with Marina that, against regulation, he located all documents that gave evidence of her original marriage and destroyed them, so she would not be exterminated during any of the purges. Marina gave birth to Pyotr Karbovski, who grew up to become loyal to the communist party, and the NKVD. When Pyotr came of age he was contacted by his biological father, through his Aunt in St Petersburg. Pyotr, being a devout communist, reported all of these letters to the NKVD who said that if he never replied to Fyodor, he could continue life exactly as he had already. In those times, when one applied for work, a questionnaire had to be filled out that asked if you had relatives abroad. Pyotr had always stated that he hadn’t and under the advice of the NKVD continued to do so even though his natural father was alive and well in France.