my tongue reveled in the rich taste of ice cream, my stomach rebelled at another street treat: kvas. Dilapidated little tanker trucks dispensed this fermented brew in a shared drinking glass. Small queues formed to quaff the beer-like beverage, a low- alcohol drink derived from fermented bread. For decades, these quirky-looking spouted vehicles lived on the streets of Moscow (and elsewhere), until they disappeared in the early 1990s—although the drink itself lived on, available in two-liter plastic bottles.
The shared public drinking glass was not unique to kvas drinking, but also a fixture at public water dispensers. For a couple of kopecks, a person could acquire one glass of bubbly mineral water—as soon as the person in front had finished using the single glass, attached to the machine with a chain. I’ll admit I was too squeamish to indulge in either drink, hardly the most intrepid traveler.
The entrance to the university was almost a mile from the nearest Metro train station. Although there were buses closer to the university gates, they were jammed, and lumbered only slowly to the station. So I found myself walking the uniform paths from Metro to dorm even on the coldest winter days.
Emerging from the Metro train stop at the university after one of my earliest trips downtown, I was drawn to a brightly lit, crowded shop. Called a polufabrikat, it contained an assortment of ready-made, prepared foods: stuffed cabbages; “beef stroganoff”—beef cut up for becoming stroganoff; cheese blini (crepe/pancakes); little pilmeny, like miniature Chinese steamed dumplings, but served with sour cream or vinegar; pancakes or croquets made of potatoes and carrots, or cabbage and potatoes, or cheese—ready to pop onto a pan for heating and eating; breaded meat cutlets; bifstek—or “beefsteak”—meat that didn’t require a lot of stewing; hotdogs of various kinds (like German “wursts”); cold cuts of several kinds (in the bologna/salami family of “wursts”), always heavily laced with white dots of congealed fat; and “salad”—a mix of cooked peas, potatoes, carrot cubes, and mayonnaise. There was also a section for “Danish” pastries of several kinds, all perfumed with vanillin. The shop was warm and inviting. Promising, I thought—at least for a few items.
Autumn in the Soviet era was always marked by the major national holiday, the celebration of the October Revolution of 1917, when the Bolsheviks had toppled the “Provisional Government” that had taken power after the Tsar abdicated. Observed on November 7th (because of the change in the calendar after the Revolution), the holiday sneaked up on us when we were new to Russia in 1965. While days rapidly became shorter and darker in late October, housekeepers and laborers appeared in the dormitory of Moscow State University. They unsealed the doors of the Victorian-style student lounges on each floor; cleaned and polished all surfaces (often with dirty rags); rolled out the red carpet (a cliché come true); and scaled scaffolding to hang enormous red banners and buntings. More lights were lit, illuminating by contrast how very dim and gray normal had become for us.
Because I did not fear arrest for photographing patriotic manifestations (as opposed to numerous other arbitrary but punishable offenses I might commit with my camera), I took many photographs of the university decked out in celebratory gear. At the time, I did not much value these photos, which seemed formalistic and sterile. I do now. Today when Americans consider Soviet history, we spotlight the red banners and buntings, the martial displays, the exhortatory posters, as comforting evidence of an inscrutable but static, structured past. But in their original setting, those images seemed greatly stylized, hackneyed, and uninspired; even irrelevant, which, in part, they were.
Winter came. Our room faced north in a straight line to the Arctic. Icy winds rattled our double windows and leaked in around the edges, freezing the sausages sitting on the inside sill. We stuffed the cracks around our double windows with rags and paper, wedging small pieces into crevices with a knife, then taping the stuffed cracks shut with masking tape we had brought with us. Then we piled all the clothing we were not wearing at the moment on and around the windows’ edges, to stem the drafts, changing supplies daily while we exchanged warmed outfits for chilled ones.
The winter of 1965-1966 was one of the coldest winters in Russian history, a history not lacking in cold. For a long spell, the temperatures dipped down around 40 degrees below zero, rising sometimes only to zero F. When accompanied by cutting winds or frozen fog—air filled with suspended droplets of ice—it seemed even colder.
When I walked the mile walk from the Metro station to the dorm, ice crystals formed on my eyelashes, brows, and the front of my hair peeking out between my hat and the scarf across my nose and mouth. A photo captures me standing among a row of frosted trees, ice drops clinging to my eyelashes, bangs, and eyebrows, the rest of my face, hair, and neck wrapped tightly in hats and scarves. Everything around me glittered as I viewed the world through the diamond dust coating my eyelashes. The handkerchief in my coat pocket froze stiff, crisp as a potato chip.
Indoors, I prepared dinner. Little beef chunks and sliced onions soon sizzled in the electric frying pan in our room. Beef cuts were anonymous: hacked up chunks of muscular cows that could no longer provide milk. It seemed more gracious to cook the beef in our room than to flaunt it in the common kitchen where most Russian students, too poor to buy beef, relied on bread, potatoes, cabbage, sausages and cold cuts, cheese and soup.
The hearty meat smell that filled the room covered layers of stale odors: traces of old garlic and onions; beeswax and oil rubbed into wooden floors; damp woolen coats. It almost felt like Christmas, that icy December of 1965. The Russians were scurrying to buy gifts, gather delicacies, and prepare for the big New Year’s holiday and the visit by Grandfather Frost (Dyed Moroz). Close to 40 degrees below zero outside, and I was warm and content preparing “Beef Magu,” a special, named by our British friends, to play on the Russian acronym for Moscow State University, “M.G.U.” (em-geh-oo). “Beef M.G.U./Beef Magu.” The recipe was always the same— sauté onions, sauté beef chunks, add a little water, salt and pepper and cover pan; add potatoes and carrots at the appropriate time, and cook until the beef became tender enough to chew.
That afternoon in a burst of year-end cleanliness and recognition of limited supplies, I had decided to clean the three dish sponges we had brought with us for the year—and couldn’t, of course, replace. So I set them up—a pink one, a yellow one, and a blue one—to boil in a little pot of water on the stove in the common kitchen, and went back to our room to read for a while. When I returned to retrieve the sponges, a crowd had formed around the pot, sniffing, looking, and questioning one another.
Buzzing, they surrounded me. “Is it sausage?” one man asked. “No,” I said, “it isn’t.”
“Then what is it?” someone else asked.
“Sponges” was a word I had never been taught in Russian. These neighbors tossed a succession of possible Russian words at me to try them out, while I fielded each by shaking my head harder. Even the universal language of mime failed me, in my attempt to demonstrate the use of a sponge. Still looking skeptical and baffled, they left, without understanding, it seemed. These were not exotic bright pink, blue, and yellow sausages, as they thought, or, in fact, edibles at all. But I could almost see them musing, scratching their heads, asking, “Then why cook them?”
The idea of cleaning sponges by boiling them had occurred to me only after seeing the laundry room in the basement of our dorm. I knew that we would have to find some way, beside using our little bathroom basin, to wash clothes. In a city of some seven to eight million people, there was only one laundromat with modern (American) machines. To reach the facility required two buses, followed by standing in line for a few hours. That didn’t inspire me.
Then in the basement I found the “laundry.” For thousands of students, it contained one four-burner gas stove, one huge kettle/pot in which to boil water, a long wooden stick to stir the clothes; and two non-automatic agitator washers (ca. 1942 vintage), each with a hand-turned wringer. (My head was buzzing, time warp, time warp.) Only four items of clothing were allowed in
