were about sixteen American graduate students, with four spouses, all wives; a few more came for the second semester. These, with a few others in Leningrad, were the only American students in the USSR. We also came to know two North Vietnamese men through an incident in the kitchen; four Mongol students, also male; and an assortment of other foreign students—a male and female student from Great Britain; a man from Nigeria; and many Soviet citizens of various nationalities and from various republics, including the mysterious “Charlie,” who found us one day in that kitchen, and was to reappear in our lives during our later stays in Moscow. But the majority of students were Russian.
We left the kitchen as our hosts led us to the student cafeteria for lunch. On the stairs down to the basement, I felt my stomach flip from the smells of heavy cooking overlaid on layers of old food odors drifting up toward us from the meal hall. Torn between my good-girl training to be polite to our hosts, who were so effusive in their efforts to please us, and my gut instinct to skip lunch, I tried to act more gracious than I felt. But in my head I pictured the graduate dorms at Indiana University, even before the days of tempting food courts with a range of options that grace the campus today. Lunch might then have been a grilled cheese sandwich, or tuna fish salad, with an apple or banana, chilled milk, a cookie… suddenly, the food we grumbled about there seemed very tempting and familiar—and very far away. I heard behind me one fellow-American student in our group regaling another with stories of intestinal ailments that befell our forebears who ate here…while a little voice in my head whispered: “Naomi, what are you doing here?”
I let others slide their trays before mine in the food line. I was glad not to be first as the babushkas — literally, grandmothers, but used generically for older women—dishing out the food barked impatiently at us while various mystery-foods landed splat on our plates. My mind hadn’t yet switched to Russian, so I was unsure what they were saying, but imagined that we seemed to them very slow and ungrateful people. We helped ourselves to forks—there were no knives—and a three-inch sheer tissue-paper triangle that was intended to serve as a napkin. I grabbed a recognizable slice of bread and a scoop of raw grated cabbage, both generously offered free for all students, so even the poorest didn’t go hungry. The rest of the meal cost a nominal sum for us, but was too dear for many Russian students. I stabbed the gray, gristly stew, and decided we would have to check out other options—the “professors’ dining room,” the food stands in the halls, and home cooking in the common kitchen.
The rest of our first day resembled that at any large institution. I told my diary:
“We ran around all day for cards, forms, passes, identification cards, foreign office registration—the usual bureaucratic disease is rampant here, too.
And now I must sleep.”
The next day, I realized I would have to shop. I had heard so much about queues, I thought I understood why they formed: A desirable but scarce product showed up; people lined up to buy it. There was hardly a day when U.S. newspapers hadn’t shown pictures of Russians standing in line, as if standing in line were part of who Russians were, the People of the Queue, victims of the failure of Communist rule. But although the reasons did include the failures of central state planning, they also turned out to be more structural and strange.
The first store I entered had separate counters for cheeses, sausages and cold cuts, and hacked up parts of cows, pigs, and lambs. Without refrigeration, these foods emitted pungent sour smells.
First, I went to the cheese counter, waiting my turn, while others elbowed their way in front of me, sometimes screaming at me in the process. At my turn, I managed to request, in careful Russian, and converting to metric system at the same time, “a half-kilo of Gollandsky—i.e., Dutch or Edam—cheese” (about one pound). A sturdy woman in a dirty apron cut, weighed, and wrapped my piece of cheese in a newspaper page, called out the price, “79 kopecks,” and gave me a slip to take to the cashier. I then waited in the cashier’s line, gave her the slip, which she impaled on a spike took my money and gave me a new slip, with which I returned to the cheese line to claim my cheese. Three lines, one half-kilo of cheese. I shuddered to picture gathering the rest of the groceries. While I stood feeling sorry for myself (the voice in my head now querulous: “What are you doing here?”), I realized that I’d have to re-think my shopping. I would have to rove from line to line first, and order each of my purchases—250 grams of cold cuts, two half-liter bottles of soured milk, a bag of rice. Then go to the cashier with all the slips, pay the total, get new slips, and reverse my steps back to the line at each counter to collect my small purchases, hoping to remember which slip belonged to which purchase for pickup. The counter ladies became inflamed when handed the wrong receipt, and I hated being the object of their screaming wrath. I’d also have to remember not to leave home without my net bags — avoski, “just in case” bags—for toting things home, since there were no bags of any kind in the stores. Nor egg cartons. Eggs, when available, would be counted out and placed into a piece of newspaper twisted into a cone. “Not putting all your eggs in one basket” suddenly made sense, even though there weren’t any baskets.
Then I walked into Produce Store #83, which proclaimed “Fruits” on one smudged plate-glass window, and “Vegetables” on the other. It had thigh-high open wooden bins, each containing vegetables: onions, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, beets, parsnips. The produce looked old and worn, covered with the earth that sprouted each; the carrots were lumpy and wooden; the small onions and potatoes, rot-spotted; and the cabbages mottled. (“Cooking and disguising these, that will be the trick,” a bright voice in my head interjected.) The uniformity of the stores and their fare didn’t promise any exciting finds.
Another store supplied dairy products, cardboard triangular containers of milk, sour from lack of refrigeration; and bottles of milk products designed to be sour—kefir, liquid yoghurt, soured/buttermilk products. With some sugar sprinkled on top, we soon learned, these drinks could become a staple of daily life. Meanwhile, although a variety of cheese-names filled each cheese case, it was hard to distinguish among them by taste. The hard cheeses, designated “Edam,” “Swiss,” and such, survived fairly well without refrigeration. The soft white curd cheese, like a farmer cheese or pressed cottage cheese, worked well with sour cream. Sour cream, I discovered, was as thick and rich as ice cream. It was popular served straight, with a little sugar on top, as a first course in restaurants, or as snacks in bufyets (buffets). Jim consumed it often, long before anti-cholesterol advocacy had begun. Because there was almost no refrigeration in stores—even for meat, chicken, eggs, milk, or cheese—or in people’s apartments (or in our dorm), it wasn’t possible to stock a supply of perishables, but useful to have a few lasting products, some bread and hard cheese.
It seemed the perpetual Russian queues could be as much about plenty as scarcity: they were about systemic inefficiency and systematic control of consumer demand. And they worked. People’s expectations for variety and freshness were not high; nor did they normally seek to buy great quantities. The possibility of stocking up with a loaded shopping cart at a self-service grocery was completely unimagined and about thirty years into the future. Actual scarcity, real or created through hoarding, added tension and mystery to the already difficult process of acquiring daily fare. Staples were the bellwethers: if bread, salt, or matches seemed in short supply, panic buying could then trigger a true shortage.
Happily, we found one secret to easier survival: small portable food kiosks and carts sprinkled randomly along downtown sidewalks sold ready-to-eat snacks. Before fast food became common in the States, Russians grabbed from little carts hot buns (pirozhki) stuffed with ground meat and onions, or cheese or cabbage, and ate them on the run, counting them breakfast, lunch, or snack. Walking outdoors in the cold, we found these savory pastries very appealing, and also surprised ourselves by delighting in solidly frozen ice cream cones in mid-winter. Rich vanilla ice cream, packed to fill the inside of each cone—with an unexpected pink icing flower flourish on the flat top of each—came to be another staple for us, as for the Russians. We learned only during later stays in Russia that ice cream would also prove to be a source of cream for cooking, since there was
