Текст книги "Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking"

Автор книги: Anya von Bremzen

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^{PART II}
LARISA

^{The Frumkin family: Yulia, Liza, Sashka, Naum, Larisa, and Lisa’s father, Dedushka Yankel, in 1943}

_{CHAPTER THREE}

1930s: THANK YOU, COMRADE STALIN, FOR OUR HAPPY CHILDHOOD

Like most Soviet kids of her time, my mother was raised on stories by Arkady Gaidar. Gaidar’s tales are suffused with a patriotic romanticism that doesn’t ring insincere even today. They fairly brim with positive characters—characters who know that the true meaning of happiness is “to live honestly, toil hard, and deeply love and protect that vast fortunate land called The Soviet Country.” Mom was particularly struck by a story titled “The Blue Cup.” After overcoming a spell of conflict, a young family sits under a tree ripe with cherries on a late-summer night (spring and summer, one ironic critic remarked, being the only two seasons permissible in socialist realism). A golden moon glows overhead. A train rumbles past in the distance. The main character sums things up, closing the story: “And life, comrades, was good… entirely good.”

This phrase filled my five-year-old mother with alienation and dread.

To this day she can’t really explain why. Her parents, youthful, striving, and faithful to the State, exemplified Gaidarian virtues and the Stalinist vision of glamour. Liza, her mother, was a champion gymnast, an architect, and a painter of sweet watercolors. Naum, her father, possessed a radiant smile and a high, honest forehead to go along with his spiffy naval caps, which smelled of the foreign cologne he brought back from frequent trips abroad. If Mom and her younger sister, Yulia, were good, Naum would let them pin his shiny badges on their dresses and dance in front of the mirror. On his rare days off he’d take them to the Park of Culture and Relaxation named after Gorky.

Mother had a second father, of course. Like her kindergarten classmates, she began each school day gazing up at a special poster and thanking him for her joyous, glorious childhood. On the poster the youthfully middle-aged Genius of Humanity and Best Friend of All Children was smiling under the black wings of his mustaches. In his arms a beautiful little girl also smiled. With her dark hair cut in a bowl shape, the girl reminded Mom of herself, only with Asiatic features. She was the legendary Gelya (short for Engelsina, from Friedrich Engels) Markizova. Daughter of a commissar from the Buryat-Mongol region, she came to the Kremlin with a delegation and handed a bouquet of flowers to the Supreme Leader, whereupon he lifted her in his arms, warming her with his amused, benevolent gaze. Cameras flashed. After appearing on the front page of Izvestia, the photograph became one of the decade’s iconic images. It was reproduced on millions of posters, in paintings and sculptures. Gelya was the living embodiment of every Soviet child’s dream.

Comrade Stalin kept a watchful eye over Mom and her family, she was sure of that. And yet a pall hung over her. Life, she suspected, was not “entirely good.” In place of big bright Soviet happiness, my mother’s heart often filled with toska, a word for which there is no English equivalent. “At its deepest and most painful,” explains Vladimir Nabokov, “toska is a sensation of great spiritual anguish…. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul.”

When Mom heard cheerful choruses on the radio, she imagined squalid people singing drunkenly around a putrid-smelling barrel of pickles. Sometimes she’d refuse to go out into the street, frightened of the black public loudspeakers broadcasting the glories of the Five-Year Plan. Many things about Moscow made her feel scared and small. At the Revolution Square station of the new metro, she ran as quickly as she could past bronze statues of athletic figures with rifles and pneumatic drills. No use. Night after night she was haunted by nightmares of these statues coming alive and tossing her mother into a blazing furnace, like the one in the mural at the Komsomolskaya station.

Perhaps she had such dreams because the parents of other children were disappearing.

There were many things my mother didn’t know, couldn’t have known, at the time. She didn’t know that Arkady Gaidar, beloved writer for the young, had brutally murdered civilians, including women and children, as a Red commander during the civil war. She didn’t know that one year after that bouquet at the Kremlin, Gelya Markizova’s father was accused of a plot against Stalin and executed—just one of an estimated twelve to twenty million victims of Stalin. Gelya’s mother perished as well. The poster child for a happy Stalinist childhood was deported and raised in an orphanage.

Darkness. The unyielding blackness of Arctic winter in Murmansk is my mother’s earliest memory. She was born in sunny Odessa, a barely alive five-pound preemie bundled in wads of coarse cotton. Her father was then sent to Russia’s extreme northwest to head the intelligence unit of the newly formed Northern Flotilla. The year was the relatively benign 1934. The harvest was decent. Collectivization’s famines and horrors were slowly subsiding. Ration cards were being phased out, first for bread and sugar, then meat.

Myska—childspeak for “little mouse”—was Mother’s very first word, because mice scurried along the exposed wires above her bed in the tiny room she shared with her sister and parents. Thinking back on those days, Mother imagines herself as a mouse, burrowing through some dark, sinister tunnel of early consciousness. She remembers the thunderous crunch of Murmansk’s snow under their horse-drawn sled, the salty taste of blood in her mouth after the icicles she liked to lick stuck to her tongue.

Leningrad, where Naum was transferred in 1937, was a thousand kilometers south but still on the chill sixtieth degree of north latitude. Its darkness was different, though. Russia’s former imperial capital suggested various conjugations of gray: the steely reflection off the Neva River, with its somber granite embankments; the dull aluminum of the grease-filmed kasha bowls at Mother’s nursery school. In place of mice there were rats—the reason Uncle Vasya, their communal apartment neighbor, was missing half his nose. Too bad Mom’s name rhymed with krysa (rat). “Larisa-krysa, Larisa-krysa,” children taunted her in the courtyard. Liza occasionally took the girls to see museums and palaces in the center of town. Their melancholy neoclassical grandeur contrasted starkly with the web of bleak alcoholic alleys near their apartment. Mother was inconsolable when a drunk trampled and ruined her brand-new galoshes, so shiny and black, so red inside.

Bleak too was the mood in the city. Three years earlier, Leningrad’s charismatic Communist boss Sergei Kirov had been shot down in the corridors of the Smolny Institute, local Party headquarters, by a disgruntled ex-Party functionary. His killing signaled the prologue to the years of paranoia, midnight knocks on the door, denunciations, witch hunts for “enemies of the people,” and mass slaughter that would come to be known as the Great Terror of 1937–38. Stalin’s suspected involvement in Kirov’s murder has never been proved. But the Friend of All Children was quick to seize the moment. After planting a sorrowful kiss on Kirov’s brow at his operatic show funeral, Stalin unleashed an opening paroxysm of violence against his own political enemies. The show trials would follow. The charge of conspiracy to kill Kirov was used until 1938; it offered one of the key justifications of terror among the grab bag of crimes against the Soviet State and betrayals thereof. Thousands were arrested without cause and shipped to the gulags or killed. Moscow staged the most notorious trials (including the trial of Zelensky, my great-great-grandmother Anna Alexeevna’s boss), but Leningrad’s suffering was possibly deeper still. By 1937 the former capital had been ravaged by deportations and executions. It was Stalin’s vendetta against the city he hated, the locals whispered. Indeed, after Kirov’s coffin left Leningrad for Moscow, the Great Leader never set foot by the Neva again.

I look at a picture of my mother from that time. She has an upturned nose, a bob of black hair, wary, defiant eyes. She’s laughing, but in her laughter there seems to lurk a shadow. In constructing the narrative of her childhood, Mother likes to portray herself as Dissident-Born, a young prodigy of distress, instinctively at odds with the land of happy children of Stalin. A thousand times I’ve heard her tales of constantly running away from summer camps and health sanatoria. Of how she finally escaped to America as an adult and at last stopped running.

But to when and what, exactly, does she trace the origins of her childhood toska? I’ve always wanted to know. And now I learn about one particular wintry day.

It’s still pitch-black outside when Liza yanks Larisa from her blanket cocoon. “Hurry hurry, we have to get there by six for the start,” she urges, blowing furiously on Mom’s farina to cool it. On the sled ride wet snow cakes Mother’s face; the tubercular Baltic chill pierces right through her limbs still heavy with slumber. Despite the early hour she hears marching songs in the distance, sees people hurrying somewhere. Why is this? Her stomach tightens with alarm and foreboding. A sick worm of fear comes alive; it keeps gnawing at her intestines as she finally reaches a thronged hall inside a building decked out with life-size posters of Great Comrade Stalin. Her parents push through the crowds toward officials bellowing greetings on loudspeakers behind a long table covered with kumach, the crimson calico of the Soviet flag. The march music turns deafening. Her parents fill out some papers and momentarily she loses them in the commotion. “They’re voting!” a woman in the crowd cries, handing Mom a red baby-size flag—on this day, December 12, 1937. Voting. It’s a new word. It stems from golos, or “voice.” Could her parents be screaming for her? She starts to scream too, but her shrieks are drowned out by song.

“Shiroka strana moya rodnaya” (“O vast is my country!”), the people are singing. “There’s no other country where a man breathes more freely.” Swept up in the collective elation, Mom inhales as deep as she can, filling her lungs with what she will always describe as “that smell”—the Soviet institutional odor of dusty folders, karbolka cleaner, woolen coats, and feet stewing in rubber galoshes, which will haunt her all her adult life in the USSR, at offices, schools, political meetings, at work. Her parents find her at last. They are beaming with pride, laugh at her anguish.

By evening Mom is happy again. On the family’s afternoon stroll, Leningrad’s vast squares look dazzling, decked out in red slogans and posters. Tiny lights outline the buildings in the early dusk. And now on their way to Uncle Dima’s house Naum is promising that they will see the salut from his balcony. What’s salut? Why on the balcony? “Just wait, you’ll see!” says Naum.

Mom’s excited to be visiting Uncle Dima Babkin. He isn’t really her uncle; he’s her dad’s tall, bald naval boss. In his high-ceilinged apartment, he has a rosy-cheeked baby and twin girls a little older than Mom, and, always, a never-ending supply of sugary podushechki candies. When they arrive, the family is celebrating full-throttle. Bottles burst open with a loud popping of corks; toasts are drunk to Russia’s historic election and to the arrival of Uncle Dima’s elderly father from Moscow. “Vast is my country,” sing the children, dancing around the baby’s crib, which Uncle Dima’s wife has filled with sweet raisin rusks. Any minute Aunt Rita, Dima’s sister, will arrive with her famous cake called Napoleon.

Uncle Dima’s whole building is, in fact, celebrating Election Day; neighbors stream in and out, borrowing chairs, carrying treats.

“Aunt Rita? Napoleon?” scream the children constantly darting up to the door.

There is a short, harsh buzz of the doorbell—but instead of cake Mom sees three men in long coats by the entrance. How come they don’t bring tangerines or pirozhki, she wonders? Why haven’t they shaken the snow off their felt valenki boots before entering—as every polite Russian must do?

“We’re looking for Babkin!” barks one of the men.

“Which Babkin?” Uncle Dima’s wife asks with an uncertain smile. “Father or son?”

The men look confused for a moment. “Well… both—sure, why not?” they say, and they shrug. “Both.” They almost giggle.

The silence that follows, and the smile that’s turned strangely petrified on Uncle Dima’s wife’s face, reawakens the worm in Mom’s stomach. As if in slow motion, she watches Uncle Dima and his old father go off with the men. To her relief, the family’s babushka orders the children onto the balcony to see the salut. Outside, the black night erupts in glitter. Fiery thrills shoot through Mom’s body with each new soaring, thundering explosion of fireworks. Green! Red! Blue!—blooming in the sky like giant, sparkling, jubilant bouquets. But when she goes back inside she is startled to see Uncle Dima’s wife splayed out on the couch, panting. And the house is filled with the sweet-rotten odor of valerian drops. And silence—that dead, scary silence.

Arrests to the popping of corks, horror in the next room from happiness, fear emblazoned with fireworks and pageantry—this was the split reality, the collective schizophrenia of the 1930s. Venom-spitting news accounts of the show trials of “fascist dogs of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite gang” ran beside editorials gushing over crepe de chine dresses at “model department stores” and the “blizzards of confetti” at park carnivals.

People sang. Sometimes they sang on their way to the firing squad, chanting “O Vast Is My Country,” a tune used as a station signal for Radio Moscow even during my youth. Featured in Circus, a Hollywood-style musical comedy, “O Vast Is My Country” was composed to celebrate Stalin’s new 1936 constitution, heralded as “the world’s most democratic.” On paper it even restored voting rights to the formerly disenfranchised classes (kulaks, children of priests). Except now arrests were not so much class-based as guided by regional quotas affecting every stratum of the society.

Chronicles of Stalin’s terror have naturally shaped the narrative of the era. They dominate so completely, one can forgive Westerners for imagining the Soviet thirties as one vast gray prison camp, its numbed inhabitants cogs in the machinery of the State that promoted itself solely through murder, torture, and denunciation. This vision, however, doesn’t convey the totalizing scope of the Stalinist civilization. A hypnotic popular culture, the State’s buoyant consumer goods drive, and a never-ending barrage of public celebrations—all stoked a mesmerizing sense of building a Radiant Future en masse.

Those who didn’t perish or disappear into the gulags were often swallowed up in the spectacle of totalitarian joy. Milan Kundera describes it as “collective lyrical delirium.” Visiting Russia in 1936, André Gide couldn’t stop marveling at the children he saw, “radiant with health and happiness,” and the “joyous ardor” of park-goers.

When I think of the Stalinist State, which I knew only as a banished ghost, these are the images that come to my mind: Nadezhda Mandelstam’s description of her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, being led away to the sounds of a Hawaiian guitar in a neighbor’s apartment. Anna Akhmatova’s unbearably tragic poem “Requiem” (dedicated to the victims of purges) juxtaposed with the indomitable cheer of Volga-Volga, an infectiously kitsch celluloid musical comedy of the time. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of the voronki (black Mariahs), prison transports disguised as brightly painted comestibles trucks, their sides eventually featuring ads for Sovetskoye brand champagne with a laughing girl.

The frenzy of industrialization of the first Five-Year Plan (1928–32) had bulldozed and gang-marched a rural society into something resembling modernity—even as officials suppressed details of the millions of deaths from famines brought on by collectivization. In 1931, more than four million peasant refugees flooded the overwhelmed cities. The state needed something to show for all the upheavals. And so in 1935 Stalin uttered one of his most famous pronouncements.

“Life has gotten better, comrades, life has gotten more cheerful,” he declared at the first conference of Stakhanovites, those celebrated over-fulfillers of socialist labor quotas, whose new movement emulated the uberminer Alexei Stakhanov, famed for hewing 102 tons of coal in one workshift. “And when life is happier, work is more effective,” Stalin added.

After the speech, reported one participant, the Leader of Progressive Mankind joined all in a song from the wildly popular screen farce Jolly Fellows, released weeks after Kirov’s murder. The Genius of Humanity liked music, and occasionally even edited song lyrics himself. He had personally instigated Soviet movie musical comedy by expounding to director Grigory Alexandrov—former assistant to Sergei Eisenstein in Hollywood—on the need for fun and cheer in the arts. The melodies and mirth that exploded onto Soviet screens in the late thirties were the socialist realist answer to Hollywood’s dream factory. Instead of Astaire and Rogers, dashing shepherds burst into song and gutsy girl weavers achieved fairy-tale Stakhanovite apotheoses. “Better than a month’s vacation,” pronounced Stalin after seeing Jolly Fellows, which was Alexandrov’s jazzy, madcap debut. The Leader saw the director’s 1938 musical Volga-Volga more than a hundred times. Never mind that the main cameraman had been arrested during filming and executed, and the screenwriter had written the lines in exile.

Quoted on posters and in the press and, of course, set to music, Stalin’s “life is happier” mantra established the tonality for the second half of the decade. It was more than just talk. In a fairly drastic redrawing of Bolshevik values, the State ditched the utopian asceticism of the twenties and encouraged a communist version of bourgeois life. The Radiant Future was arriving, citizens were told. Material rewards—offered for outstanding productivity and political loyalty—were the palpable proof. Promises of prosperity and abundance invaded public discourse so thoroughly, they shimmered like magical incantations in the collective psyche. Stakhanovite superworkers boasted in the pages of Pravda and Izvestia about how many rubles they earned. They stood beaming beside their new furniture sets and gramophones—rewards for “joyous socialist labor.” Anything capitalism could do for hardworking folk, went the message, socialism could do better—and happier.

The masses even got to pop a cork on occasion. Scant years after the paroxysms of the first Five-Year Plan, Stalin turned his thoughts to reviving Russia’s fledgling, pre-revolutionary champagne industry, centered by the Black Sea near the Crimea. Sovetskoye Shampanskoye became a frothy emblem of Stalin’s directive, in his words “an important sign… of the good life.” Garbo’s Ninotchka may have cooed about only knowing bubbly from newsreels. But by the thirties’ end Soviet fizzy, mass-produced in pressurized reservoir vats, would be embraced by the Soviet common man. It could even be found on tap in stores.

Alongside abundance and prosperity, the third pillar of Stalin’s new cultural edifice was kulturnost’ (culturedness). Hence, Soviet citizens—many of them formerly illiterate—were exhorted to civilize themselves. From table manners to tangos, from perfume to Pushkin, from tasseled lampshades to Swan Lake, the activities and mores reviled by the earlier Bolsheviks as bourgeois contamination were embraced as part of the new Homo sovieticus. If a member of the nomenklatura (Communist political elite) showed up at a meeting in his trophy silk pajamas and carrying a chocolate bar, it just went to show that socialism was doing swell. The teetotaler Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet premier, took tango lessons. His imperious wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, delivered perfume to the masses in her role as chairman of the cosmetics trust. The food supply commissariat established and codified a Soviet cuisine canon.

Russia’s annus horribilus of 1937, which closed with the carnival-esque December election festivities, was launched with a lavish New Year’s Day yolka (fir tree) party for kids at the Kremlin. The tubby comedian Mikhail Garkavi played Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost), the Russian answer to Santa. Banned by the Bolsheviks for ten years as religious obscurantism, New Year’s fetes—and fir trees—had just returned from the political cold with the Great Leader’s approval, at the initiative of one Pavel Postyshev. This man whom Soviet children could thank for their new winter gaiety was also one of the chief engineers of the Ukrainian famine; he himself would be shot a year later. Still wearing his long, flowing Ded Moroz robe and white beard, Garkavi appeared later that New Year’s Day at a Stakhanovite ball attended by Stalin. “All are strictly cautioned to leave their sadness outside,” joshed a placard inside the ballroom. Garkavi popped a cork of Sovetskoye Shampanskoye. The tradition is still going strong to this day, even if the brand is being eclipsed by Dom Perignon.

When Mom was five and Yulia was four they moved to Moscow. It was 1939. The country was celebrating Stalin’s sixtieth birthday, and Naum his promotion—to the “Capital of the New World,” to Headquarters.

Mom still had her bouts of toska, but life did get a bit better in Moscow. A little jollier, you could say.

For one thing, Moscow wasn’t dark. Their ninth-floor apartment boasted an airy panorama of shingled old city roofs from the window. It was still a communal apartment, to be shared with shrill, dumpling-like Dora and her henpecked husband. But it had new plywood furniture, and it had gas—gas!—in place of their Leningrad burzhuika (bourgeois) coal-burning stove, which always ran out of fuel by morning, leaving a veil of frost on the walls.

Best of all was the building itself. Constructed the year before in the fashionable Stalinist Empire style—a bulky mash-up of deco and neoclassical—it resembled an organ, or perhaps musical staves, its vertical lines zooming up from an imposing ground-floor loggia. The musical reference was not accidental. Neither were the extra-thick walls (such a boon in this era of eavesdropping). The house was created as a co-op for the Union of Soviet Composers, with a small quota of apartments for the military. Songs poured out of the open windows the summer Mother moved in.

I always get goose bumps thinking of my five-year-old mom living among the George Gershwins and Irving Berlins of the socialist order. They were the people whose buoyant, jubilant marches I still sing in the shower. Along with generations of Russians, I’ve got them under my skin—which of course was the plan. “Mass song” was a vital tool in molding the new Soviet consciousness. Song set the romantic-heroic tone of the era. Song fused individual with kollektiv, comrade with State. It carried the spirit of sunny, victorious optimism into every choking communal apartment, glorifying labor, entrenching ideology—all in catchy tunes you couldn’t stop humming.

Mom didn’t actually share the collective zest for mass song. But there was no escaping the iron grip of Ninka, her new best chum in the building. Daughter of a Jewish symphonist and an Armenian pianist, brash and imperious Ninka had raven-black eyebrows and fingertips callused from violin lessons. She appointed herself Mom’s musical instructor.

“We’re eternally warmed… by the sun-ny Stalinist glor-y! C’mon, haven’t you memorized the words yet?” she’d demand.

“Reason gave us steel wings for arms,” she’d continue, trying another popular tune, wincing at Mom’s off-key attempts to keep up. “And a fiery motor instead of a heart.”

“People had mechanical parts in their bodies?” asked Mom.

“The song celebrates Stalin’s Falcons!”

“What are Stalin’s Falcons?”

“Our Soviet Aviators—clueless dimwit!”

In good weather Ninka conducted her tutorials on the building fire escape. “Ooh… the brothers Pokrass!” she’d swoon, pointing at two men passing below, one lanky, the other plump and short, both with big frizzy hair that sat like hats on their heads. Didn’t Mom know their song “The Three Tankmen”? From the film Tractor Drivers? Mom couldn’t admit to Ninka she hadn’t yet seen real kino. With perfect pitch (she did truly have a golden ear), Ninka chanted another “very important” Pokrass work. “Bustling! Mighty! Invincible! My country. My Moscow. You are my true beloved!” In my own childhood this was the song Mom always turned off when it played on the radio. The radio played it a lot.

Ninka’s musical bullying was tiresome. But at least now Mom could sing along at the parades Naum zealously attended whenever he returned to Moscow from his mysterious, vaguely explained absences. The parades… well, they were deafening, overwhelming. And what of all those small kids perched on their dads’ shoulders, shouting, “Look, papochka, what a scary mustache!” when they saw Comrade Stalin? Eyes stark with fear, papa would clap a big, unclean hand over his kid’s mouth. Naum never had to muzzle Larisa or Yulia. He was dashing and funny, his squarish nails were immaculate, and he had a privileged view of the Leadership’s podium from his special Red Square parade bench. “Comrade—are you Stalin’s Falcon?” Mom would ask in a small, polite voice whenever an aviator she’d recognize from newspaper photos shook Naum’s hand.

And so it went. May Day. Constitution Day. Revolution Day. Thunderous welcomes for aviators and polar explorers. Citizens marched; their children sucked sticky ruby-red Kremlin Star lollipops. Meanwhile, just outside the city, on one busy day alone in 1938, 562 “enemies of the people” were shot and dumped in trenches by the NKVD, the secret police, at its Butovo firing range. There were many thousands more. The German historian Karl Schlögel sums up the atmosphere of the times in his description of Red Square. “Everything converges: a ticker-tape parade and a plebiscite on killing, the atmosphere of a folk festival and the thirst for revenge, a rollicking carnival and orgies of hate. Red Square… at once fairground and gallows.”

I was born in Moscow. The seventies capital of my childhood seemed as familiar and comforting to me as a pair of old slippers. Mother’s anti-Soviet zeal assured I never trooped in a single parade in my life, never once peered at Lenin’s cosmeticized corpse at his Red Square mausoleum.

But often I lie awake nights imagining Mom, a tiny, reluctantly choral protagonist in the mythology of high Stalinist Moscow. The city of her childhood was engulfed in newcomers—from the upwardly mobile nomenklatura like Naum to dispossessed victims of collectivization fleeing the countryside. Pharaonic construction works boomed nonstop. Avenues became behemoths ten lanes wide, historic churches were turned to rubble, from vast pits rose socialist public magnificences. “Bustling. Mighty. Invincible.” How overwhelming the “Heart of the Socialist Homeland” must have seemed to an alienated, sad child.

Sometimes I picture Mom clutching Liza’s hand on the escalator sinking 130 feet below ground into the electrified blaze of the palatial, newly built Moscow Metro. What did Larisa make of the lofty stained glass and acres of steel and colored granite—of more marble than had been used by all the czars? Did her neck hurt from gazing up at the Mayakovskaya station’s soaring subterranean cupolas, with their mosaics of parachutists and gymnasts and Red Army planes pirouetting against baroque blue skies? Were they really so nightmarish, those eighty-two life-size bronze statues half crouching under the rhythmic arches of the Revolution Square station? Didn’t they produce in Mom the stunned awe of a medieval child at Chartres?

Looking back, ever-dissident Mom wavers about the metro, one minute gushing, the next bashing it as vile propaganda.

But about the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition she is unequivocal.

“In September 1939, at six years of age,” she says, “I saw earthly paradise!”

On a crisp autumn morning in the northern part of Moscow, young Larisa and her family strolled into Eden through monumental entry arches crowned by Vera Mukhina’s triumphant sculpture The Worker and the Kolkhoz Woman. They passed into a wide alley of dancing fountains and on toward an eighty-foot statue of Stalin. Stakhanovite growers told them tales of their achievements in the Sugarbeet Pavilion. At the marbled courtyard of the star-shaped Uzbekistan Pavilion, dark, round-faced women with myriad braids flowing from their embroidered skullcaps dispensed green tea and puffy round breads. Uzbeks, Tajiks, Tatars! Never had Mother suspected that such a riot of physiognomies and ethnic costumes existed.

Designed as a microcosm of the Soviet Empire’s glories, the Exhibition’s sprawling six hundred acres showcased exotic USSR republics and feats in practically every agricultural realm from dairy farming to rabbit breeding. The republics’ pavilions were fabulously decorated in “native” styles—“national in form, socialist in content,” as Stalin, Father of All Nations, prescribed. Inside Armenia’s pink limestone edifice Mom rushed over to a giant aquarium where mountain trout nosed and flitted. At Georgia’s Orientalist headquarters, she and Yulia brazenly grabbed at tangerines on a low branch in a subtropical garden where persimmon trees flowered and palms swayed. Soon it all became one dazzling blur. Model socialist hen eggs. Pink prizewinning pigs. Everything more beautiful, more “real” than life. The mini-fields sprouted perfect rye, wheat, and barley. Mom recalled her bullying pal Ninka’s favorite song: “We were born to turn fairy tale into reality.” A very true song, thought Mom, tonguing the chocolate shell off her Eskimo pie as they toured the mini-kolkhoz replete with a culture club and a maternity ward.