“Nichevo v magazinakh!” she cried. “There’s nothing in the stores! Pustiye prilavki—empty counters!”
The socialist shortage vernacular always reached for hyperbole, so I didn’t take her words literally. Counters might be empty of desiderata—instant coffee, bananas—but in the past you could always count on salt, eggs, buckwheat, coarse brown vermishel. The next day I went to a Davydkovo store. And came face-to-face with IT. Nichevo—nothingness. The glaring existential emptiness of the shelves. No, I lie. The nichevo was framed by castles and pyramids constructed from “sea-cabbage salad”—canned seaweed that made you vomit on contact. Two bored salesgirls sat inside the barren store. One was drawling a joke about “coupons for grade #6 dogmeat.” The joke involved fur, claws, and chopped wooden bits of the doghouse. The other was assembling a mini–Lenin mausoleum ziggurat from the cans.
“A tomb for socialist edibles!”
Her laughter echoed amid the empty counters.
On a TV concert that New Year’s Eve, the big-haired pop diva Alla Pugacheva bellowed a song called “Nyam-nyam” (yum yum). Usually Pugacheva bawled about “a million scarlet roses.” Not now.
Taloni (coupons)—one of many official euphemisms for the dread word kartochki (ration cards). Other evasions included the alarmingly suave “invitation to purchase.” They only rubbed salt in the truth: for the first time since World War II, rationing was being inflicted on Homo sovieticus. What’s more, Gorbachev’s new glasnost meant you could now scream about it out loud. “Glasnost,” explained a Soviet mutt to an American mutt in a popular joke, “is when they loosen your leash, yank away the food bowl, and let you bark all you want.” The barking? You could hear it from space.
As centralized distribution unraveled, food deliveries often de-toured into the twilight zone of barter and shady semifree commerce. Or stuff simply rotted in warehouses. There was something else, too, now: nasty economic un-friendship within our happy Soviet fraternity. Granted increased financial autonomy by Gorbachev, regional politicians and enterprises fought to keep scarce supplies for their own hungry citizenry. Georgia clung to its tangerines, Kazakhstan its vegetables. When Moscow—and scores of other cities—restricted food sales to locals, the neighboring provinces halted dairy and meat deliveries into the capital.
So everyone hoarded.
My dad’s four-hundred-square-foot apartment, besides being overcrowded with me and my six-foot-three Brit, resembled a storeroom. Blissfully unemployed, Dad had all day to forage and hunt. In the torturous food supply game, my old man was a grossmeister. He stalked milk delivery trucks, artfully forged vodka coupons, rushed to beat bread stampedes. He made his own cheese, soft and bland. His ridged radiators resembled a Stakhanovite bread rusk-drying plant. The DIY food movement of late perestroika would awe modern-day San Franciscans. On the rickety balconies of my friends, egg-laying chickens squawked among three-liter jars holding lingonberries pureed with rationed sugar, holding cucumbers pickled with rationed salt—holding anything that could be brined or preserved. 1990: the year of sauerkraut.
To shuffle as John and I did between Moscow and the West in those days was to inhabit a surreal split-screen. Western media gushed about Gorby’s charisma and feted him for the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the cold war. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the dark, frosty air swirled with conspiracies of doom, with intimations of apocalypse. Famine was on its way. Citizens were dropping dead from expired medicine in humanitarian aid packages sold by speculators. (Probably true.) “Bush’s Legs,” the frozen chicken parts sent by Bush père as relief aid had surely been injected with AIDS. The Yanks were poisoning us, trampling our national pride with their diseased drumsticks. Private kiosks sold piss inside whiskey bottles, rat meat inside pirozhki. Ancient babushkas—those kerchiefed Cassandras who’d seen three waves of famines—lurked in stores crowing, “Chernobyl harvest!” at the sight of any misshapen beet.
The histrionics of discontent possessed a carnival edge. A perverse glee, almost. Force-fed cheerful Rodina songs, Soviet society was now whooping up an anti–fairy tale of collapse.
It was during such a time—when deliveries were called off for lack of gasoline and newspapers shrank to four pages because of lack of ink; when the words razval (collapse), raspad (disintegration), and razrukha (devastation) echoed everywhere like a sick song stuck in the collective brain—that the Derridarian and I journeyed around the USSR for his book of Soviet-twilight picaresques.
Picture sardine cans on ice: rickety Zhiguli cars were our means of transport, usually on frozen roads. Lacking official Intourist permits, we couldn’t legally stay at hotels, so we depended on the kindness of strangers—friends of friends of friends who passed us along like relay batons in a Soviet hospitality race. Between summer 1989 (the Caucasus) and December 1991 (the Caucasus again) we must have clocked 10,000 miles, give or take another endless detour. We roamed Central Asia, jounced through obscure Volga regions where some old folk still practiced shamanism and swilled fermented mare’s milk. We rambled the periphery of boundless Ukraine and the charmed mini-kremlins of the Golden Ring around Moscow.
HUNTERS IN THE WINTER! appealed a sign in the gauzy Ukrainian steppe. PLEASE ARRANGE TO FEED THE WILD ANIMALS.
Our first driver was Seryoga, my cousin Dasha’s blond wispy husband, who’d fought in the Afghan war.
“So we’re near Kabul,” went a typical Seryoga road tale. “So this frigging muezzin’s not letting us sleep. So my pal Sashka takes out his Kalashnikov. BAM! Muezzin’s quiet. Forever.”
Seryoga taught me several crucial survival skills of the road. How to spray Mace, for instance, which we practiced on his grandmother’s pig. Also bribery. For this you positioned an American five baks note so that its edge stuck out of a pack of American Marlboros, which you slid across the counter with a wink as you cooed: “I’d be obliged, very obliged.” The bribing of GAI (traffic police) Seryoga handled himself. Not always ably. On one particularly grim stretch of Kazan-Moscow highway we were stopped and fined “tventi baks” exactly twenty-two times. It was the GAI boys’ version of a relay.
The dizzying landscape diversity of our multicultural Rodina celebrated in poem, novel, and song? It was now obliterated by winter, dissolved in exhaust fumes, brown compressed snow, the hopeless flattening light.
Our departures from Dad’s crammed Moscow quarters… Up in the five a.m. blackness to make the most of the scant daylight ahead. My dad in the kitchen in his baggy blue track pants, packing our plastic bags with his radiator-dried rusks. Broth in his Chinese aluminum thermos; a coiled immersion heater for tea. Rationed sugar cubes. Twelve skinny lengths of salami from the hard-currency store to last the trip. We embrace. Sit for exactly one minute in silence—a superstitious Russian departure rite.