Текст книги "Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking"

Автор книги: Anya von Bremzen

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“DEATH!! DEATH???” Liza’s screams broke Mom’s contemplation.

Liza pulled at Mom’s braid, brandishing the notebook she’d just found on the table. “We beat the Germans! Your father fought for your happiness! How dare you have such bad, silly thoughts. Death!” Liza ripped up the notebook and stormed back into the house. Mom lay on the grass looking at the shreds of paper around her. She felt too hollow even to cry. Her parents and the voices on the black public loudspeakers, she suddenly realized—they were one and the same. Her innermost thoughts were somehow all wrong and unclean, she was being told, and in her entire life she had never felt more alone.

_{CHAPTER FIVE}

1950s: TASTY AND HEALTHY

In the prework hours of March 4, 1953, a time of year when mornings are still disagreeably dim and the icicles on roofs begin their thawing and refreezing act, classical music aficionados in Moscow woke up to a pleasant surprise. From early morning that day, instead of the usual Sovietica cheer, the radio was serving up a veritable banquet of symphonic and chamber delights in sad minor keys. Grieg, Borodin, Alexander Glazunov’s most elegiac string quartet. It was when the radio’s “physical culture” lesson was replaced with yet another somber classical piece that people began to have thoughts.

“Someone in the Politburo kicked the bucket?”

The shocking announcement came around nine a.m.

“Comrade Stalin has suffered a brain hemorrhage… loss of consciousness. Paralysis of right arm and leg… loss of speech.”

Throughout that day a familiar baritone boomed on the airways. Declaiming medical bulletins of the beloved leader’s declining condition, Yuri Levitan was back in combat mode. Pulse. Breathing rate. Urinalyses. The Voice infused such clinical details with the same melodrama with which it announced the retaking of Orel and Kursk from the Nazis, or the drops in prices immediately after the war.

“Over last night Comrade Stalin’s condition has seriously de-te-rio-ra-ted!” announced Levitan next day, March 5. “Despite medical and oxygen treatments, the Leader began Cheyne-Stokes res-pi-ra-ti-on!”

“Chain what?” citizens wondered.

Only doctors understood the fatal significance of this clinical term. And if said doctors had “Jewish” as Entry 5 (their ethnicity) on their passports? Well, they must have felt their own death sentences lifting with Stalin’s last, comatose breath. In his paranoid, sclerotic final years, the Generalissimo was outdoing himself with an utterly fantastical anti-Semitic purge known as the Doctors’ Plot. Being a Jewish medic—Jewish anything, really—in those days signified all but certain doom. But now Pravda abruptly suspended its venomous news reports of the Doctors’ Plot trial. And in the Lubyanka cellars where “murderers in white coats” were being worked over, some torturers changed their line of questioning.

“What’s Cheyne-Stokes?” they now demanded of their physician-victims.

By the time the media announced Stalin’s condition on March 4, the Supreme Leader had been unconscious for several days. It had all begun late on the morning of March 1 when he didn’t ask for his tea. Alarmed at the silence of motion detectors in his quarters, the staff at his Kuntsevo dacha proceeded to do exactly… nothing. Hours went by. Finally someone dared enter. The seventy-three-year-old Vozhd was found on the floor, his pajama pants soaked in urine. Comrade Lavrenty Beria’s black ZIS sedan rolled up long after midnight. The secret police chief exhibited touching devotion to his beloved boss. “Leave him alone, he’s sleeping,” the pince-nezed executioner and rapist instructed, and left without calling an ambulance.

Medical types were finally allowed in the following morning. Shaking from fear, they diagnosed massive stroke. Suspecting he might have been Stalin’s next victim, Comrade Beria had reasons for keeping assistance away. Ditto other Politburo intimates, including a sly, piglike secretary of the Moscow Party organization named Nikita Khrushchev. Whatever the Kremlin machinations, the pockmarked shoemaker’s son né Iosif Dzhugashvili died around 9:50 p.m. on March 5, 1953.

He was gone.

The country was fatherless. Father of Nations–less.

Also Generalissimo–, Mountain Eagle–, Transformer of Nature–, Genius of Humanity–, Coryphaeus of Science–, Great Strategist of the Revolution–, Standard-bearer of Communism–, Grand Master of Bold Revolutionary Solutions and Decisive Turns–less.

The Best Friend of All Children, Pensioners, Nursing Mothers, Kolkhoz Workers, Hunters, Chess Players, Milkmaids, and Long-Distance Runners was no more.

He was gone.

The nation was Stalin-less.

In the sleety early March days right before Stalin’s death, Larisa, dressed in perpetually leaking boots and a scratchy orange turtleneck under a gray pinafore dress, was navigating the cavernous bowels of INYAZ. This was the Moscow state institute of foreign languages, home to Kafka-esque corridors and an underheated canteen with that eternal reek of stewed cabbage. Home to elderly multilingual professors: prime targets of Stalin’s vicious campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans.”

Closed vowels, open vowels. In her phonetics class my mother was sighing. Land—Lend. Man—Men. A Russian ear is deaf to such subtleties. Anyway, how to concentrate on vowels and the like when Comrade Stalin lay dying?

Irrespective of the Vozhd’s condition, an English major at INYAZ didn’t figure into Mom’s idea of any Radiant Future. It was a dull, respectable career compromise, as her fervent dreams of the stage kept crashing. “I probably lacked the talent,” Mom admits nowadays. “And the looks.” Back then it seemed more, well, dramatic to blame her crushed hopes on a “history of drama” exam at the fashionable GITIS theater academy. At her entrance orals, having memorized the official texts, Mom delivered the requisite critique of rootless cosmopolitanism to a pair of stately professors. Did they really grimace at her declaiming how art belongs to narod, the people? Why did they give her a troika, a C, for her faultless textbook recitation? Only much later Mom realized, with great shame, that those two erudite connoisseurs of Renaissance drama were themselves being hounded and harassed for their “unbridled, evil-minded cosmopolitanism.”

On March 6, as word of Stalin’s passing spread, the INYAZ corridors echoed with sobs. Classes were canceled. Janitorial babushkas leaned on their mops, wailing over their buckets like pagan Slavs at a funeral. Mom’s own eyes were dry but her teeth rattled and her limbs felt leaden under the historic weight of the news. On the tram home, commuters hunched on wooden seats in tense silence. Through the windows Mother watched funerary banners slowly rise across buildings. Workmen were plastering over the cheerful billboards advertising her favorite plays. She closed her eyes and saw blackness, a gaping void instead of a future.

Three days later, my mother, Liza, and Yulia set off for the funeral, but seeing the mobs on the streets, they turned back. My teenage dad persevered. Sergei, then sixteen and a bit of a street urchin, managed to hop forward on rooftops, thread through the epic bottleneck in Moscow’s center, crawl under a barrier of official black Studebakers, squeeze past policemen atop panicked horses, and sneak into the neo-classic pomp of the Hall of Columns where Iosif Vissarionovich lay in state, gold buttons aglint on his gray Generalissimo uniform. Sergei’s best friend, Platosha, wasn’t so lucky, however: his skull was cracked in the infamous funeral stampede into Trubnaya Square. Nobody’s sure of the exact number of fatalities, but at least several hundred mourners were trampled to death on March 9 in the monstrous surge to see Stalin’s body. Even in his coffin, Stalin claimed victims.

Weeks after the funeral, Mom was still shaken. There were two things she just couldn’t get over. The first was galoshes. Images of black galoshes strewn all over Moscow in the wake of the funeral, along with hats, mittens, scarves, fragments of coats. The second was unreality—the utter unreality of Levitan’s health bulletins during Stalin’s final days.

Urine. The Great Leader had urine? Pulse? Respiration? Blood? Weren’t those words she heard at the shabby neighborhood polyclinic?

Mom tried to imagine Stalin squatting on a toilet or having his blood drawn by someone with sweat stains under his arms from fear. But it didn’t seem possible! And in the end how could Stalin do something as mundane, as mundanely human, as die?

When Stalin’s passing finally began to sink in, Mom’s bewilderment gave way to a different feeling: bitter and angry disappointment. He had left them—left her. He would never come to see her triumph in a play. Whether rehearsing for auditions, Mom realized, or picturing herself on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater in some socially meaningful Gorky production—she yearned for his approbation, his presence, his all-wise, discriminating blessing.

After Mom confided all this to me recently, I couldn’t sleep. Larisa Naumovna Frumkina. The dissident heart who had always shielded me from Soviet contamination…

She wanted to be an actress for Stalin?

So here it was, then: the raw emotional grip of a totalitarian personality cult; that deep bond, hypnotic and intimate, between Stalin and his citizenry. Until now, I’d found this notion abstract. The State of my childhood had been a creaking geriatric machine run by a cartoonish Politburo that inspired nothing but vicious political humor. With the fossilized lump of Brezhnev as Leader, it was, at times, rather fun. But Mom’s response to Stalin’s death suddenly illuminated for me the power of his cult. Its insidious duality. On the one hand the Great Leader was a divinity unflawed by the banalities of human life. A historical force, transcendental, mysterious, and somehow existing outside and above the wretched regime he’d created. At the same time, he was father figure to all—a kind, even cozily homely paterfamilias to the whole Soviet nation, a man who hugged kids on posters and attracted propaganda epithets like prostoy (simple), blizky (intimate), and rodnoy, an endearment reserved for the closest of kin, with the same etymology as the equally resonant rodina (homeland).

By the time Stalin died, Mother was no longer an alienated child; but neither was she a bumpkin or a brainwashed Komsomol (Communist Youth) hack. She was a hyperliterary nineteen-year-old, a worshipper of dissident cultural heroes like Shostakovich and Pasternak, appalled by their harassment—and all the while spouting anti-cosmopolitan vitriol. In short, she suffered from a full-blown case of that peculiar Stalinist split-consciousness.

“Look,” Mom explained, “I was anti-Soviet from the time I was born—in my gut, in my heart. But in my head psychologically somehow… I guess I was a young Stalinist. But then after he died,” she concluded, “my head became clear.”

In certain dissident-leaning USSR circles there arose a tradition of celebrating March 5. Although de-Stalinization didn’t take place overnight, for many, Stalin’s deathday came to mark a watershed both historic and private; a symbolic moment when the blindfolds came off and one attained a new consciousness.

It so happened that March rolled along just as I was writing this chapter. In the spirit of these old dissident get-togethers, Mom decided that we should host our own deathday gathering. Again we turned to the cookbook my mother had fallen in love with at the age of five.

One sixth of the measured world, eleven time zones, fifteen ethnic republics. A population of nearly 300 million by the empire’s end. This was the USSR. And in the best spirit of socialist communality, our polyglot behemoth Rodina shared one constitution, one social bureaucracy, one second-grade math curriculum—and one kitchen bible for all: The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. Begotten in 1939, Kniga (The Book) was an encyclopedic cooking manual, sure. But with its didactic commentaries, ideological sermonizing, neo-Enlightenment scientific excursions, and lustrous photo spreads of Soviet production plants and domestic feasts, it offered more—a compete blueprint of joyous, abundant, cultured socialist living. I couldn’t wait to revisit this socialist (un)realist landmark.

As a young woman, my mother learned to cook from the 1952 version. This was the iconic edition: bigger, better, happier, more politically virulent, with the monumental heft of those Stalinist neo-Gothic skyscrapers of the late forties and the somber-brown hard cover of a social science treatise. The appearance was meaningful. Cooking, it suggested, was no frivolous matter. No! Cooking, dear comrades, represented a collective utopian project: Self-Improvement and Acculturation Through Kitchen Labor.

You could also neatly follow post-war policy shifts by comparing the 1939 and 1952 editions of The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food.

In the late thirties, a Bolshevik internationalist rhetoric still held sway. This was the internationalism celebrated, for example, by the hit 1936 musical comedy film Circus of “O Vast Is My Country” song fame. Circus trumpets the tale of Marion, a white American trapeze artist chased out of Kansas with her illegitimate mulatto baby. Marion winds up in Moscow. In the Land of the Soviets, she’s not in Kansas anymore! Here she finds an entire nation eager to cuddle her kid, plus a hunky acrobat boyfriend. In a famous scene of the internationalist idyll, the renowned Yiddish actor Shloyme Mikhoels sings a lullaby to the African-American child.

That scene was later deleted. So was Mikhoels—assassinated in 1948 on Stalin’s orders amid general anti-Semitic hysteria. America? Our former semifriendly (albeit racist) competitor was now fully demonized as an imperialist cold war foe. Consequently, xenophobia reigns in the 1952 Kniga. Gone is the 1939’s Jewish teiglach recipe; vanished Kalmyk tea (Kalmyks being a Mongolic minority deported en masse for supposed Nazi collaboration). Canapés, croutons, consommés—the 1952 volume is purged of such “rootless cosmopolitan” froufrou. Ditto sendvichi, kornfleks, and ketchup, those American delicacies snatched up by Mikoyan during his thirties trip to America.

In the next reprint, released in August 1953… surprise! All quotations from Stalin have disappeared. In 1954, no Lavrenty Beria (he was executed in December 1953)—and so no more my favorite 1952 photo, of a pork factory in Azerbaijan named after him. A pork factory in a Muslim republic, named after “Stalin’s butcher.”

Kremlin winds shifted, commissars vanished, but the official Soviet myth of plenty persisted, and people clung to the magic tablecloth fairy tale. Who could resist the utopia of the socialist good life promoted so graphically in Kniga? Just look at the opening photo spread! Here are craggy oysters—oysters!—piled on a silver platter between bottles of Crimean and Georgian wines. Long-stemmed cut-crystal goblets tower over a glistening platter of fish in aspic. Sovetskoye brand bubbly chills in a bucket, its neck angling toward a majestic suckling pig. Meanwhile, the intro informs us, “Capitalist states condemn working citizens to constant under-eating… and often to hungry death.”

The wrenching discrepancy between the abundance on the pages and its absence in shops made Kniga’s myth of plenty especially poignant. Long-suffering Homo sovieticus gobbled down the deception; long-suffering H. sovieticus had after all been weaned on socialist realism, an artistic doctrine that insisted on depicting reality “in its revolutionary development”—past and present swallowed up by a triumphant projection of a Radiant Future. In socialist realist visions, kolkhoz maidens danced around cornucopic sheaves of wheat, mindless of famines; laboring weavers morphed into Party princesses through happy Stakhanovite toil. Socialist realism encircled like an enchanted mirror: the exhausted and hunger-gnawed in real life peered in and saw only their rosy future-transformed reflections.

Recently, I shared these musings with Mom. “Huh?” she replied. Then she proceeded to tell me her own Kniga story.

December 1953, she said, was as frigid as any in Russia. The political climate, however, was warming. Gulag prisoners had already begun their return; Beria had just been executed. And Moscow’s culturati were in an uproar over a piece in the literary magazine Novy mir. “On Sincerity in Literature” the essay was called, by one Vladimir Pomerantsev, a legal investigator. It dared to bash socialist realism.

Larisa recalls that she was cooking her way through The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food when Yulia handed her the Novy mir conspiratorially wrapped in an issue of Pravda. In those days Mom cooked like a maniac. Her childhood suspicions of life not being “entirely good” and the future not radiant had strengthened by now into a dull, aching conviction. Cooking relieved the ache somewhat. Into the meals she whipped up from scant edibles, she channeled all her disappointed theatrical yearnings. Her parent’s multicornered, balconied kitchen offered a stage for a consoling illusion, that somehow she might cook her way out of the bleak Soviet grind.

The Novy mir sat on the white kitchen table as Mom assembled her favorite dish. It was a defrosted cod with potatoes in a fried mushroom sauce, all baked with a cap of mayo and cheapo processed cheese. The cod was Mom’s realist-realist riff on a Kniga recipe. The scents of cheese, fish, and mushrooms had just started mingling when Mom, scanning the “sincerity” article, came to the part about food. Overall, Pomerantsev was condemning socialist realist literature for its hypocritical “varnishing of reality”—a phrase that would be much deployed in liberal attacks on cultural Stalinism. Pomerantsev singled out among the clichés the (fake) smell of delicious pelmeni (meat dumplings). He complained that even those writers who didn’t set the table with phony roast goose and suckling pigs still removed “the black bread” from the scene, airbrushing out foul factory canteens and dorms.

Mom leafed through her Kniga and suddenly laughed. Oysters? Champagne buckets? Fruit cornucopias spilling out of cut-crystal bowls? They positively glared with their hypocrisy now. “Lies, lies, lies,” Mom said, stabbing her finger into the photo of the suckling pig. She slammed shut The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food and pulled her cod out of the oven. It was her dish, her creation stripped of the communal abundance myth—liberated from the Stalinist happiness project.

She never opened the Kniga again until I pushed it on her in New York.

Prepping for our Stalin’s Deathday dinner, Mom phoned constantly for my menu approval.

Her overarching concept, as usual, was maddeningly archival: to nail the cultural pastiche of late Stalinism. One dish had to capture the era’s officious festive pomposity. We settled finally on a crab salad with its Stalinist-baroque decoration of chimerical anchovy strips (never seen in Moscow), coral crab legs, and parsley bouquets. Pompous and pastiche-y both.

As a nod to the pauperist intelligentsia youth of the emerging Thaw generation, Mom also planned on ultra-frugal pirozhki. The eggless pastry of flour, water, and one stick of margarin enjoyed a kind of viral popularity at the time.

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.

“Here we are, girls,” Inna muses. “Arrests, repressions, denunciations… Been through all that… and still managed to keep our decency.”

Mom reappears with her intelligentsia-frugal pirozhki. “So enough with Stalin already,” she implores. “Can we move on to ottepel?”

Less than a year after Stalin’s death, Ilya Ehrenburg, a suave literary éminence grise, published a mediocre novella critiquing a socialist realist hack artist and a philistine Soviet factory boss. Or something like that; nobody now remembers the plot. But the title stuck, going on to define the era of liberalization and hope under Khrushchev.

Ottepel. Thaw.

By 1955, after an intense power struggle—Stalin hadn’t designated any heir—Khrushchev was assuming full leadership of our Socialist Rodina. Except that nobody called the potbellied gap-toothed former metal worker Mountain Eagle or Genius of Humanity. Father of All Nations? You must be kidding. Politely, they called him Nikita Sergeevich, or simply Nikita, a folkloric Slavic name that contrasted starkly with Stalin’s aloof exotic Georgian otherness. But mostly comrades on the street called the new leader Khrushch (beetle), or Lisiy (the bald); later, Kukuruznik (Corn Man) for his ultimately self-destructive penchant for corn.

Referring to our leader with such familiar terms—that in itself was a tectonic shift.

“My elation was unforgettable, the early Thaw times—as intense as the fear during Stalin!” Inna leads off. She was working in those heady days at Moscow’s Institute of Philosophy. “Nobody worked or ate, we just talked and talked, smoked and smoked, to the point of passing out. What had happened to our country? How had we allowed it to happen? Would the new cult of sincerity change us?”

“The Festival!” Katya and Sveta squeal in unison. The memory has them leaping out of their seats.

If there was a main cultural jolt that launched the Thaw, it was “the Festival.” In February 1956 Khrushchev made his epochal “secret speech” denouncing Stalin. Seventeen months later, to show the world the miraculous transformation of Soviet society, Komsomol bosses with the Bald One’s encouragement staged the Sixth International Youth Festival in the freshly de-Stalinized Russian capital.

For Muscovites that sweltering fortnight in July and August of 1957 was a consciousness-bending event.

“Festival? Nyet… skazka (a fairy tale)!” Sveta croons, her pallid face suddenly flushed.

Skazka indeed. A culture where a few years earlier the word inostranets (foreigner) meant “spy” or “enemy” had suddenly yanked open the Iron Curtain for a brief moment, letting in a flood tide of jeans, boogie-woogie, abstract art, and electric guitars. Never—never!—had Moscow seen such a spectacle. Two million giddy locals cheered the thirty thousand delegates from more than one hundred countries in the opening parade stretching along twelve miles. Buildings were painted, drunks disciplined, city squares and parks transformed into dance halls. Concerts, theater, art shows, the street as an orgy of spontaneous contact. That internationalist summer is credited with everything from spawning the dissident movement to fostering Jewish identity. (Jews flocked from all over the USSR to meet the Israeli delegation.) More than anything else perhaps was this: the first real spark of the all-powerful myth of zagranitsa—a loaded word meaning “beyond the border” that would inflame, taunt, and titillate Soviet minds until the fall of the USSR.