Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya Von Bremzen
“This is a work of non-fiction, woven from family anecdotes and historical facts spanning ten decades”, the author’s note begins. Von Bremzen’s family was diverse, including Muslims and Jews, a Turkistan feminist, a preservationist at Lenin’s tomb, a dissident, and a spy.
The Soviet Union was also wildly diverse, a group of nations and ethnicities forced together: “Such was the bomb of diversity that began to explode in the [1990s].”
Von Bremzen’s mother brought her to the U.S. at the age of 11, long before the fall of the Soviet state. They arrived in 1974 thanks to American-Jewish sponsors. Today she is a travel and cookbook writer who visits Russia and other former Soviet republics regularly. Von Bremzen decided to cook a meal to represent each decade of the Soviet Union and this forms a framework for her book. She heard family tales from her mother as they cooked together. Recipes for each decade are included in the back of the book, except for the 1940s, which is represented only by a war-time ration card.
Mother and daughter begin their cooking with the final decade of the czarist era. The main course is a fish dish: a rich, multi-layered pie of fish liver, sturgeon, onions, eggs, giblets, mushrooms, and dilled rice, all dripping with butter. Von Bremzen compares it to the Soviet version she remembered as a child in Moscow: a loaf of bread with a thin layer of ground meat or cabbage inside. This is typical of the book. Although organized by decade, Von Bremzen uses an informal, personal style and moves backwards and forwards through her own memories, family stories, and Soviet history.
The black market was ubiquitous in Soviet history and continued through Von Bremzen’s life. In elementary school, she sold class mates a chance to touch her Coca Cola bottle. (The bottle was a present from a friend who traveled abroad.) Living in a nightmarish communal apartment, her family was happy to eat the left-overs a black marketeer neighbor was about to throw out.
In her grandparents’ generation, the family moved often. They followed her grandfather’s postings in the intelligence service from bleak arctic cities to Moscow. He left for long periods without any word, but brought back gifts: From the Russo-Finnish war, Finnish butter cookies; from the occupation of Estonia, bright yellow scarves; from spy missions to Stockholm, sky-blue coats.
Von Bremzen describes a hundred years of Soviet history starting with Lenin. Lenin wanted to change human nature and transform Russians into hyper-rational, utopian supermen. His vision sounds absurd to me, and could only have gained traction because czarist Russia was so oppressive. Peasants and industrial workers had effectively been slaves. Bread riots had sparked the overthrow of the czar. Revolution was necessary, Von Bremzen says. “Why did it go so wrong?”
Under Lenin, home kitchens were replaced with “ghastly” communal dining halls. Food was a tool for political and social control: “knut i prianik” or “whip and gingerbread”. State approved menus led to scurvy. In a few years Lenin relented and legalized small-scale private food trade.
When Stalin came to power, he abandoned Lenin’s pragmatic policy. Famines ensued and peasants resisted “collectivization” as a “second serfdom”. Stalin was at least as bad as the czars. Then, suddenly, Stalin abandoned the Bolshevik asceticism and issued directives for happiness and abundance.
Stalin sent an emissary to America in the 1930s, when the U.S. was viewed as a quasi-friend and an “efficient industrialized society for Stalinist Russia to emulate.” He brought back hamburger grills, mass-produced ice cream, and “kornfleks”. This could have been a turning point in Soviet history. But the thirst for power, vengeance, and obsessive micromanagement continued. None of Stalin’s successors reigned as long as he did, but each was just as much a dictator.
I’ve tried to understand why Soviet citizens were loyal to their dreadful government, despite their open cynicism and the brutal swings of policy. The situation is full of “collective schizophrenia” and horror next to happiness. Government control of information and entertainment was combined with successful propaganda. School children were taught that their leaders were fathers to all the people. Von Bremzen was very taken with the official Soviet commitment to ethnic equality: “As a kid I lapped it all up.” If individuals occasionally got a little something more than their neighbors, they seemed willing to accept the national poverty. Even today, there are some feelings of nostalgia.
Von Bremzen presents an accessible history seen through one family’s eyes. This book is a fine way to learn about the Soviet Union, its brutality, and its contradictions. It may offer insights into dictatorships that still exist in the world.