Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

“The separation of marriage from kitchen,” preached Kollontai, “is a reform no less important than the separation of church and state.”

In our family, we had our own Kollontai.

As Russian families go, mine represented a rich sampling of the pre-Soviet national pot. Mom’s people came from the Ukrainian shtetl. Dad’s paternal ancestors were Germanic aristocracy who married Caspian merchants’ daughters. And Dad’s mom, my extravagant and extravagantly beloved grandmother Alla, was raised by a fiery agitator for women’s rights in remote Central Asia.

When I was little, Alla cooked very infrequently, but when she bothered, she produced minor masterpieces. I particularly remember the stew my mom inherited from her and cooks to this day. It’s an Uzbek stew. A stew of burnished-brown lamb and potatoes enlivened with an angry dusting of paprika, crushed coriander seeds, and the faintly medicinal funk of zira, the Uzbek wild cumin. “From my childhood in Ferghana!” Alla would blurt over the dish, then add, “From a person very dear to me…” And then the subject was closed. But I knew whom she meant.

Alla Nikolaevna Aksentovich, my grandmother, was born a month before the October Revolution in what was still called Turkestan, as czarist maps labeled Central Asia. She was an out-of-wedlock baby, orphaned early and adopted by her maternal grandmother, A

Turkestan. Muslim, scorchingly hot, vaster than modern India, much of it desert. One of the czars’ last colonial conquests, it was subjugated only in the 1860s. A decade later, A

There was much agitating to be done.

The civil war thereabouts had dragged on for extra years, Reds pitched against the basmachi (Muslim insurgents). With victory came—as elsewhere—staggering challenges. Unlike the Jews, Uzbeks weren’t easy converts to the Bolshevik cause. If Russia itself lacked the strict Marxian preconditions for communism—namely, advanced capitalism—agrarian former Turkestan, with its religious and clan structures, was downright feudal. How does one build socialism without a proletariat? The answer was women. Subjugated by husbands, clergy, and ruling chiefs, the women of Central Asia were “the most oppressed of the oppressed and the most enslaved of the enslaved,” as Lenin put it.

So the Soviets switched their rallying cry from class struggle and ethno-nationalism to gender. In the “women of the Orient” they found their “surrogate proletariat,” their battering ram for social and cultural change.

A

“The best revolutionary actions,” Kollontai reportedly once pronounced, “are pure drama.” A

March 8, 1927: International Women’s Day. In Uzbek cities veiled women go tramping en masse, escorted by police. Bands and native orchestras play. Stages set up on public squares swarm with flowers. There are fiery speeches by Zhenotdelki. Poems. A

The backlash was wrathful and immediate.

Trapped between Lenin and Allah, Moscow and Mecca, the unveiled became social outcasts. Many redo

By decade’s end the radical theatrics of unveiling were abandoned. And all over the country the Zhenotdeli were being dismantled because Stalin pronounced the “women’s question” solved. By the midthirties, traditional family values were back, with divorce discouraged, abortions and homosexuality ba

And my great-great-grandmother, the New Soviet feminist?

In 1931 A

He was promptly shot and deleted from Soviet history.

A year later my great-great-grandmother A

Only when drunk, very drunk, and much later, when I was a child, would Alla chase her shot glass of vodka with herring and crocodile tears and bellow how her grandma A