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.
My poor dissident mother: in moments of candor she admits to this day that her vision of ideal love is walking arm in arm amid thesplendiferous gardens of the Georgia Pavilion. But what inflamed her imagination the most was the food. If she
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.
My poor dissident mother: in moments of candor she admits to this day that her vision of ideal love is walking arm in arm amid thesplendiferous gardens of the Georgia Pavilion. But what inflamed her imagination the most was the food. If she
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