When the speech was over, the blazing red Soviet banner was lowered for the very last time in history, and a peppy Russian tricolor rose in its place.

A new day in a new state, said the announcer, and the TV reverted to regular programming. A cartoon, I think it was, or maybe a puppet show.

I know you’ll wonder how it felt to wake up next day in a new state. Only I didn’t wake up—not till two whole days later. My brain pounded violently against my temples. My blurred vision registered white-coated people bending over me with expressions of saccharine Soviet concern. “How is our golovka, our little head?” they cooed, waving smelling salts under my nose. Where was I? Ah, yes… the only place in darkened Sukhumi with its own electrical generator. The Sanatorium of the Russian Armed Forces, where we’d been lodged on arrival by the hospitable Abkhazian writers. After the USSR ended on TV there’d been toasts, many toasts—flowery prodigies of Caucasian eloquence laboriously translated from Abkhaz to Russian to English (for the sake of the Derridarian, who was now sprawled beside me, ghostly pale and grunting). Dimly I recalled the ritualistic pouring of homemade Izabella wine onto the roof of our decrepit sardine can around four a.m. The equally ritualistic guzzling down of a farewell kantsi, a horn filled with 1.5 liters of the same such Izabella. Gogua, the elderly writer-in-chief, collapsing softly into the arms of his secretary.

“Golovka, the little head, how is it?” pressed the white-coated people.

The golovka pounded and hammered and throbbed. Passed out from epic alcohol poisoning. That’s how, since you asked, I greeted the dawn of a new historical era. Ah, Izabella.

Ah, dawn; historical hungover dawn…

The Zhiguli’s engine finally expired somewhere near Kiev, and in exchange for a bottle, a GAZ truck towed Yura the Christ-like geologist eight hundred miles to Moscow. John and I took the overnight train with its red-carpeted corridor. Back in Melbourne again, where it was summer, we sat on a green hill leaning on our two massive suitcases, homeless and miserable—the sublet we’d arranged had fallen through. Soon I left my Derridarian in Australia and returned to New York. Our relationship sank under the strain of the USSR’s dying days—though it took us a few more long-distance years (he moved to California) to break up officially. His travel book never came out.

Between 1992 and 1999, Yeltsin’s dermokratiya (crapocracy) sent Russia into free-market shock. Rampaging inflation, pitiful salaries unpaid—the previous hungry years of sauerkraut were remembered as plentiful. Overnight, a giant sleazy fire sale of national resources spawned oligarchs out of former apparatchiks and gangsters. Lesser beings lost everything: identity, pride, savings, Crimean beaches, and the comforting rhetoric of imperialist prestige and power. Not to mention the Soviet state’s social benefits. What’s more, Boris “Champion of Sovereignty” Yeltsin started a war to stop Chechnya from seceding, a conflict with horrors that fester to this day.

In 2000 an obscure midget with a boring KGB past was elected post-Union Russia’s second president and started flexing his muscles. Authoritarian symbols and rhetoric were revived. Among them, the Soviet national anthem—the words “Russia–our sacred power” substituted for “unbreakable Union of Soviet Republics.” Under Putin’s petrodollar kleptocracy, narcissistic consumerism began to bloom and boom. Money and glamour—Russified as glamur—swaggered in as the new state ideology (fretfully decried by the intelligentsia). These days Muscovites still order Georgian kharcho soup and Ukrainian vareniki dumplings at cute “ethnic” restaurants. But mostly they enjoy carpaccio and sushi—at oligarch prices.

Recently, cleaning my office in Queens, I unearthed a box of recipe postcards from the seventies. Fifteen sets, each celebrating a Soviet republic’s cuisine. Arranging them slowly on my dining table, I recalled the rain-washed autumn day four decades before when I scored these defitsit treasures at the big Dom Knigi bookstore and triumphantly carried them home. Poring now over the faded Technicolor close-ups of Moscow-designated “national dishes,” I still twinged at their faintly fragrant Orientalist spell, their enticements to wanderlust. There was “Azerbaijani” sturgeon salad, inexplicably smothered in Slavic sour cream, pictured against socialist oil derricks rising from the blue Caspian Sea. Faux “Kyrgyz” cakes, exotically called “Karagat” though featuring black currants in no way native to arid Kyrgyzstan. Umpteen ethnic variations on salat Olivier and kotleti. National in form, socialist in flavor, exactly as the Party prescribed.

Why was it, then? Why, of all the totalitarian myths, had the gilded fairy tale of the friendship of nations stayed so deeply, so intimately lodged in my psyche?

Fearing the answer might expose my inner Soviet imperialist, I quit speculating. Instead I decided to throw a birthday dinner for Mom featuring the real dishes of our erstwhile republics. As celebration, as semi-expiation.

For a solid week I pulverized walnuts for Georgian chicken satsivi, folded grape leaves around scented Armenian lamb, fried pork crackling for my bonafide Ukrainian borscht. Proudly I set these out on Mom’s birthday table along with Moldovan feta strudels and abysta, that bland Abkhazian corn mush of my farewell to the USSR. For dessert, a dense Lithuanian honey cake. And in tribute to the toasts at the dissolution of the Union Treaty, I even steeped a Byelorussian herbal vodka.

Mom was touched almost to tears by my handiwork. But she just couldn’t help being herself.

“Za druzhbu narodov—To the friendship of nations!” She offered the dog-eared toast with a grin so sarcastic, it practically withered my edible panorama of the republics.

“Imagine!” she exclaimed to her guests. “The daughter I raised on Tolstoy and Beethoven—she went gaga over the stupid gilded fountain at VDNKh!”

I was a little hurt by her words, I have to admit.

That Friendship of Nations fountain, by the way, has been freshly regilded in Moscow. Kids with their grandmas still circle around it. “Babushka, Babushka, tell us what it was like to live in the USSR?” the kids want to know.

“Well, once upon a time…” begin the babushkas.

_{CHAPTER TEN}

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: PUTIN ON THE RITZ

We landed in Moscow on Good Friday, 2011—my mom, Barry, and I.

For the very first time ever, relatives weren’t there to embrace us at the airport. They still loved us, they claimed, but life now was different. Busier. Terrible airport traffic.

Earlier that afternoon we’d been devouring an epic garden lunch under late-April cherry trees in Odessa. The city of my mother’s birth, that gaudy, piratical Soviet port of my childhood seaside vacations, had been transformed into a charming, smiley, semiglobalized city in very foreign Ukraine. We’d stopped over in Odessa to do family research—only to discover that second cousin Gleb, our closest local relative, had a broken nose, a prison past, and complete alcoholic amnesia. So we researched Odessa’s garlicky cooking instead, shopping up a storm at the boisterous Privoz market. Our suitcases bulged with wholesome Ukrainian lard, folkloric garlic-studded kolbasa, and buttery smoked kambala flatfish.