Soviet

I spent Friday night at the American Center of the Latvian National Library running a book discussion group. This event is part of monthly book group called "Books are Still Cool," which they are, of course, and is sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Riga. The events are spearheaded by Nils Students, an American-born Latvian citizen who has lived here since the '90s and who works for the U.S. Embassy.

I suggested Anya von Bremzen's Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing, which I had read when my local library, the Lithgow Library in Augusta, Maine, acquired it. I loved it. A survey of the history of the Soviet Union through the prism of food, the book is both a macro- and micro-history. First, it surveys the Soviet Union and its Communist Party's complicated food policy, exploring how it tried to engineer a new, more highly evolved human in its purported "socialist paradise" by every means possible, including food production, delivery, and consumption. It's also a multi-generational history of Bremzen's Russian family, from her grandparents at the turn of the Russian Revolution to her dissident mother, her emigration to the United States with her mother, and their return to Russia before and after the fall of communism. Bremzen herself is a highly honored food writer with three James Beard awards to her credit. The book is fascinating. It is sometimes surprisingly funny. It is sometimes horrific; the story of the Leningrad blockade in which the Nazis essentially starved that Russian city to death will appall you. And it is always wistful for Russian and, yes, Soviet food. Plus there are Russian recipes. (Bremzen's first cookbook, Please to the Table, explores Russian cuisine from every part of that great country, and it won her her first Beard award.)

Bremzen's great virtue as a chronicler of her family's history is that she doesn't settle for easy, pat, black and white responses to the Soviet insistence on intruding on virtually every aspect of a citizen's life. Her mother despised the Soviet system, finally leaving it once and for all -- and at the time, with no right of return, ever. But her military grandfather benefited highly from the system, and as a child, Bremzen accommodated it in all sorts of ways. And that's really what her family story is about: how people accommodated a system that did its darnedest to control virtually every aspect of private life in order to create greater-good-for-all-comrades Communists.

I thought that this book would sell well in Latvia, given its own Soviet history. Readers would have the opportunity to talk about how their own families dealt with Soviet history and, not coincidentally, food. And that in fact is what happened, which pleased me greatly. Some readers noted that the assumption among Latvians was that Moscovites had it better than anybody, and they were pleased to discover that in Bremzen's Moscow family, this was not the case. (As a matter of fact, the best of the Baltics was sent to Russia and especially Moscow, most likely to be consumed the Communist Party bigwigs who got the best of everything.) Others spoke of the endless shortages of literally everything and living on a food budget of one ruble a day. None of them were pleased about this hardship, but significantly nobody gave me the impression that it was impossible to manage under this cock-eyed food system, either. And we talked about favorite foods, from childhood, from Soviet times, from Latvian cuisine, from Russian cuisine. 

I did find out, though, that according to Nils at least one international Latvian-born reader chimed in on social media when the book was announced about how inappropriate this was, for a couple of reasons: 1) there is no such thing as Soviet cooking and 2) how dare some uppity American suggest that Latvians read something with "Soviet" in the title. He did not come to the group, as he lives overseas -- in Australia, I think. But he was highly offended by my book choice.

Obviously, this man did not read the description of the book carefully, thinking it was a cookbook rather than a memoir. His second point really struck me, though. I have always been of the mind that no idea is so scary or dangerous that we can't talk about it, but obviously the word "Soviet" struck a raw nerve. In suggesting this book, I didn't mean to say that Latvians should want to relive or glorify the Soviet period. And in fact, the book does no such thing; it is highly critical of the Soviet Union, and rightfully so. As I have said elsewhere in this blog, the Soviet Union did the Baltics no favors. Environmentally, the Soviet Union was one long, unmitigated disaster, the legacy of which we are still living with. (This was a country that made an entire sea disappear.) Politically, it was a brutal, cynical nightmare. One of the most beautiful Art Nouveau buildings in Rīga is the museum of the Soviet occupation, the place where the KGB (Soviet secret police) tortured, killed, and "morally humiliated" dissidents, as its sign says. On a lesser note, everybody knew that there were two systems in operation: one for the hacks who cooperated with the Communist Party and who got the best of everything, and one for everybody else who got the crumbs on the table. When there were crumbs. So much for equality, comrade.

I do mean to say, though, that here many citizens' relationship to the Soviet period is extremely complicated. As Bremzen's book makes very clear, she is very nostalgic for her Soviet childhood because she figured out ways to make the system work for her, as many people did. Her mother's endless pushing against the system meant that she and mother focused on each other, and their private bond, where the State could not intrude, drives much of the narrative. She is cynical about the worn Soviet platitude, "Thank you, Dedushka [Grandfather] Lenin, for our happy socialist childhood," while acknowledging that her childhood in fact was happy. She is nostalgic for the very proletarian kotleti, or meat patties, that were the staple of every Soviet household -- and mind you, this is a food writer who eats in the best restaurants on the planet. I have a feeling that most people just got on with their lives, the same ways my parents did growing up in the Depression. When everybody's poor, who notices that everybody's poor? I don't want to say more about the book than this in order to encourage you to read it yourself. But I do think that the idea that Soviet times were unspeakably grim isn't the whole story. It's worth noting that in Latvia, pushing against the Soviet Union was in part pushing for Latvia, or at least the idea of Latvia, so there may be real differences that play out here. But Bremzen's book is an excellent reminder that one can have complex, love-hate relationships with things that one is supposed to love. Or hate.