Citing my illness, and her visceral hatred of Rodina, Mom herself began contemplating the move at the end of 1973.

A vyzov (invitation petition) from a chimerical great-uncle in Israel had been already secured. The paper with its suggestive red seal sat in Mom’s underwear drawer as she pondered our future. Newspapers of the day freshly railed against the “Zionist aggressors” (the Yom Kippur War had just ended). We attended clandestine Hebrew classes and endless farewell open houses for departing friends, their flats stripped down to bare yellow-stained mattresses. People squatted atop packed suitcases. Cried, smoked, guzzled vodka from mismatched borrowed mugs, scooped salat Olivier straight from the bowl. We left these gatherings loaded with practical tips—for example, thoroughly lick the stamps for your exit visa petition—and tantalizing snippets of news of the already departed. Lida’s daughter was loving the kibbutz; Misha in Michigan had bought a used Pontiac, green with only two dents. At home I looked up Tella Veef and Sheekago on my globe as Mom weighed the pros and cons of Israel (honor) versus America (comfort, old friends, a renowned scleroderma expert).

I needed proper medical help. Dad evidently needed us out of his hair. He seemed bored once again with family life. “Da, da,” he’d agree, almost gleeful, whenever Mom brought up zagranitsa. “Go, I might join you later once you are settled.”

And yet Mother kept stalling—torn between the dead-end “here” and a future “there” that she couldn’t even begin to imagine.

Navsegda—forever. Emigrating without the right of return. It would be a kind of dying.

Our country’s tragic shortage of tara was what tipped Mom finally toward the OVIR, the State Office of Visas and Registrations.

A luxurious late-spring day in 1974. The monumentalist capital of our Socialist Rodina was veiled in the yellow-green leafy crochet of its birch trees. But inside our regular grocery store, nuclear winter reigned. Besides the familiar rot, a greenish-white slime adhered to the beets; strange mutant growths sprouted on the potatoes. Normally oblivious to such things, my mother stormed off without her usual makings of soup, holding back tears. At the Three Piglets corner shop, an even grimmer landscape awaited: the counter was bare, save for bloodied hunks of unidentifiable flesh.

“Udder and whalemeat!” barked the button-nosed salesgirl. Her scowl was like frostbite.

With two mouths to feed, Mom swallowed hard and asked for a half kilo of each, trying not to look at the crimson trails left on the scale. “Open your bag,” grunted the girl, shoving the purchase toward Mom. Mom informed her that she’d forgotten her avoska. Humbly, abjectly, she begged for some wrapping paper. “A newspaper, anything—I’ll pay you for it.”

“Citizen!” scolded the girl with her scowl. “You think everything in our country can be bought and sold?”

Whereupon Mom exploded with everything she thought about the udder and whale and the salesgirl’s scowl and our stinking bounteous Rodina. She took the meat anyway, bearing the lumps along home in her naked hands, forensic evidence of the State’s remorseless assault on her dignity.

I was just back from school, practicing “February” from Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, when Mom stormed in. She summoned me to the kitchen.

Her hands were still bloody. The conversation was brief.

She had had it with the USSR, she announced. She was finally ready to apply for an exit visa—but only if that was my earnest desire as well.

“If you want to stay,” she said, “we will stay!”

Called away just like that from my Red October upright piano to pronounce on our entire future, I shrugged. “Okay, Mamulya,” I replied.

Zagranitsa would be an adventure, I added cheerily.

To be honest, I only feigned a chipper nonchalance to appease Mom.

Personally I had no reason to emigrate, and no bitter grievances with our Rodina. Even my sickness wasn’t that much of a drag, since the frightened doctors excused me from going to school whenever I wanted. I was now ten years of age, and my past as a sad-eyed bulimic was behind me. I was, at long last, enjoying a happy Mature Socialist childhood.

A couple of words about Mature Socialism.

My grandparents had idealistically embraced the regime, whereas the urban intelligentsia of my parents’ Thaw generation of the sixties rejected it with equal fervor. We, the kids of zastoi (Stagnation), experienced a different relation with Rodina. As the first Soviet generation to grow up without ruptures and traumas—no purges, no war, no cathartic de-Stalinization, with its idealizing of sincerity—we belonged to an age when even cats on the street recognized the State’s epic utopian project as farce. We, Brezhnev’s grandchildren, played klassiki (Russian hopscotch) on the ruins of idealism.

Happiness? Radiant Future?

In the cynical, consumerist seventies, these were embodied by the holy trinity of kvartira (apartment)-mashina (car)-dacha (country cottage). An imported sheepskin coat figured in too; so did blat, that all-enabling network of connection so scorned by Naum and Larisa. A popular Stagnation-era gag sums up what historians dub the Brezhnevian social contract. Six paradoxes of Mature Socialism: 1) There’s no unemployment, but no one works; 2) no one works, but productivity goes up; 3) productivity goes up, but stores are empty; 4) stores are empty, but fridges are full; 5) fridges are full, but no one is satisfied; 6) no one is satisfied, but everyone votes yes.

In return for the “yes” vote (at pseudoelections), the Kremlin gerontocracy kept commodity prices unchanged and guaranteed nominal social stability—steady employment that “pretended to pay” while comrades “pretended to work.” It also turned a semiblind eye to alternative economic and even cultural practices—as long as these didn’t blatantly violate official norms. As one scholar notes, by socialism’s twilight the only classes that took ideology at face value were professional Party activists and dissidents. They were an overwhelming minority. Everyone else eked out a daily life in the holes and crevices of the creaking machinery of power.

My own transformation from an alienated, shadow-eyed mess in my kindergarten days into a scheming, duplicitous junior Homo sovieticus occurred during Lenin’s jubilee year. In 1970 beloved Vladimir Ilyich was turning an immortal one hundred inside his mausoleum, and Rodina was celebrating with such unrelenting kitsch pomp, all the force-fed rejoicing produced the reverse effect on the popular psyche.

Having just moved to the Arbat, smack in the center of Moscow, we were besieged by a never-ending stream of tea-guzzlers. In the airy, multicornered kitchen that once belonged to my grandparents, people came and went, eating us out of the house—and treating us to a feast of jubilee jokes. The “commemorative Lenin products” series sent me into a paroxysm of private rejoicing. Items in the series:

My glee was so extravagant because my previous relations with Lenin had been so anguished. As Mom fought to exorcise him from my young mind, I furtively adored Ilyich at home, only to gag on him at the kindergarten, where Lenin-mania was crammed down my throat along with black caviar. The situation was tormenting, paralyzing; it had me throwing up almost daily. Until the populist carnival of jubilee humor liberated me from the schizophrenia of Lenin’s conflicting presence. Laughter magically shrank the whole business. Imagining Lenin’s squinty, beardy visage trapped inside a milk chocolate bonbon—instead of a raisin or cashew!—was somehow empowering. And how I delighted in seeing the local drunks slap a Lenin centennial ruble on a filthy liquor store counter, muttering: “My pocket ain’t no mausoleum. You ain’t lying around in there for long.”