In the mornings, more heartache. I didn’t care much for my peers, but there was a blond, straight-nosed boy with expressive blue eyes, Victor, whose dad, also named Victor, was a famous TV personality. I didn’t have the same heroic crush on little Victor as I had (furtively) on Yuri Gagarin. It was more like a sympathy, a bond of hidden mutual sadness. Victor and I barely spoke, but one time when I threw up and everyone teased me, he quickly touched my hair, to buck me up.

Victor had his own unfortunate issue: he wet his bed. In the morning, Zoya Petrovna would yank his blanket off and inspect the sheet, then tug him to his feet, pull down his white underpants, and drag him to the far end of the dormitory. She then lined up the rest of us to march past him. Each kid was instructed to slap the bed wetter’s bare bottom. “I hope you didn’t slap him,” Mom would say, horrified by the story. But what could I do? As my turn approached, my heart pounded. I could neither disobey Zoya Petrovna nor be among Victor’s abusers, as he stood there impassively, eyes glassy, with a strangely absent expression. I still remember my panic and the sight of his pale flesh as I mock raised my arm high, as if for a slap, then gently swiped my hand across his buttocks.

It astounded me how Victor could recover by breakfast and gleefully polish off his farina and tea. Me, I sat gagging at the white puddle of cereal on which squatted a cold yellow square of elite Vologda butter that refused to melt.

It was during mealtimes that my alienation gripped me most profoundly. My struggles worsened with each new politically indigestible, delicious morsel I desperately wanted to eat but knew would horrify Mother. I threw up. I contemplated going on hunger strike, like a Tatar dissident she’d told me about. Then a desperate inspiration came to me. Next to my table was a radiator, an old-fashioned ridged one with enough of a gap to the wall to fit a whole week’s worth of discarded provisions. And so, when no one was looking, I started dumping the Party elite delicacies behind it. First went the veal escalopes sauced with porcini mushrooms picked by our own young hands under fragrant Stalinist pines. Next, the macaroni, which unlike our coarse pasta at home was fine and white and lavished with gooey cheese imported from the glamorous (though occasionally not-so-friendly) homeland of Marshal Tito. Away went the prestigious cod liver pate, away went the wholesome, farm-fresh cottage cheese pudding with lingonberry kissel.

But the sweets served with our afternoon tea—those I couldn’t bring myself to dispose of. In our happy classless society, candies were the most brutally clear signifiers of status. Sticky proletarian toffees called Iris-Kis-Kis and rock-hard rust-hued delights known as Crayfish Tails tormented the fillings of the masses. Of higher status and available only sporadically were chocolates like Little Bears in the North, with a picture of white bears on ice-blue wrappers. Ah, what a romantic candy the northern bear was! It spoke of the Arctic expanses our Soviet explorers were yet to conquer. And then there were Chocolate Rabbits, those big green-foil-wrapped white elephants of the socialist defitsit economy. Priced at nine rubles a kilo (a tenth of the average monthly salary), rabbits were always available, and utterly scorned for being so. Only traffic cops, flush from bribes, famously moronic and devoid of all taste, were enthusiastic consumers of them. “Traffic cops buy their kids Chocolate Rabbits as payoff for forgetting to fetch them at kindergarten,” the saleslady in our local candy store used to say with a sneer.

Our kindergarten sweets were off this scale altogether. Like most Moscow candies, they were manufactured by the Red October Chocolate Factory, Mikoyan’s pet confectionary. Only recently have I learned that Red October produced two versions of the sweets: one for the People, the other for the Party. Nomenklatura chocolates had the same names—Squirrel, Red Poppy, Hail to October—and wrappers that looked the same as those on their proletarian doubles. But they possessed a vastly superior flavor thanks to exalted ingredients. As a kindergartner I had no idea about any of this. I did know that our candies, hefty in weight and wrapped smartly in classy matte paper, exuded power and privilege. Unable to eat—or toss—something so status-laden, let alone imagine sharing it with my friends outside the fence, I stashed the sweets inside my underwear bag.

My food dumping went well until a smell began to rise from behind the radiator. First it was a disagreeable whiff, then a noxious stench that caused everyone to scream foooo and bolt away from the wall. It was Zoya Petrovna who discovered my decomposed pile. Mother was immediately summoned, with me, to the director’s office. A small, sniffling woman, the kindergarten director had mothy hair pulled into a tight bun and the colorless Slavic features of a career apparatchik: in Mother’s mind doubtless a high-ranking KGB informant. She was formidable despite her size. Once she’d attacked a flasher who loitered by our fenced-off playground, pounding him with her sharp-edged handbag. The flasher fled with a genuinely terrified expression.

“Your child, Comrade Frum-kina,” commenced the director, enunciating mother’s Jewish surname with a meaningful curl of her lip, “your child doesn’t really belong to our kollektiv…” Was I being expelled from the Central Committee kindergarten? Was Mother going to lose her job—or worse? In a panic I rushed out to the dormitory and grabbed my precious underwear bag.

Mother brought me home on a sled, yanking it over the snow slopes with uncharacteristic aggression. I felt for her, a woman alone with no childcare. But then again, she had only herself to blame—raising me as a non-friendly kid, alienating me from the kollektiv—traumatizing my appetite with her dissident nonsense! Moodily, I pulled a candy out of my bag. It was called ananas. First I sucked on the crunchy chocolate shell, then slowly licked my way toward the center. The filling was so excruciatingly luscious with the synthetic-exotic flavor of pineapple, I shuddered. To mollify Mother, I decided to offer her the last remaining spectacular centimeter. I expected her to groan and topple into the snow, paralyzed with ecstasy and guilt by the taste. But she just absent-mindedly chewed and kept pulling the sled.

The following Monday I was back among the Georgian’s pines, gagging on caviar behind the tall wire kindergarten fence.

And Khrushchev? In his lonely, depressing retirement, he occupied himself with growing corn at his dacha.

_{CHAPTER SEVEN}

1970s: MAYONNAISE OF MY HOMELAND

“Where does Homeland begin?”

So wondered a popular croonful tune of the seventies performed in that saccharine Mature Socialist tone that instantly infantilized the listener.

“With a picture in your alphabet book?… That birch tree out in the fields?”

Russians of my mother’s age, who spent most of their living hours standing in line, might insist that Rodina (Homeland) began with avoska. From the word avos’—“with any luck”—this expandable mesh bag lay in wait in the pocket of every Russian, a stubborn handful of hope that defitsit Moroccan oranges or Baltic sprats might suddenly appear at some drab corner store. Our luck sack was a triumph of Soviet optimism and industrial strength. Inside the avoska you could practically fit a small tractor, and the sturdy cotton thread resisted even the sharp corners of the triangular milk cartons—yes, the blue and white leaky ones that dripped their accompaniment as you walked.

My generation, children of the Stagnation Era who now tend to dote on their Mature Socialist childhoods, might joke that Rodina began with their first black market jeans, or bootlegged Beatles LP. Or perhaps it began with the Young Pioneer parades where we sang Rodina songs, adding a nearly silent U in front of the R, which transformed the word into urodina: ugly hag.