Free Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya Von Bremzen Page A
Authors: Anya Von Bremzen
fellow Zhenotdel missionaries toiled against the
kalym
(bride fee) and underage marriage, against polygamy and female seclusion and segregation. Most dramatically, they battled the most literal form of seclusion: the veil. In public Muslim women had to wear a
paranji
, a long, ponderous robe, and a
chachvan
, a veil. But
veil
sounds so flimsy. Imagine instead a massive, primeval head-to-knee shroud of horsehair, with no openings for eyes or mouth.
“The best revolutionary actions,” Kollontai reportedly once pronounced, “are pure drama.” Anna Alexeevna and the feminists had their coup de théâtre: The veil had to go! Few Soviet revolutionary actions were more sensational than the
hujum
(onslaught), the Central Asian campaign of unveiling.
March 8, 1927: International Women’s Day. In Uzbek cities veiled women go tramping en masse, escorted by police. Bands and native orchestras play. Stages set up on public squares swarm with flowers. There are fiery speeches by Zhenotdelki. Poems. Anna is on Tashkent’s main stage no doubt when the courageous first ones step up, pull off their horsehair mobile prisons, and fling them into bonfires. Thousands are inspired to do the same then and there—ten thousand veils are reportedly cast off on this day. Unveiled women surge through the streets shouting revolutionary slogans. Everyone sings. An astounding moment.
The backlash was wrathful and immediate.
Trapped between Lenin and Allah, Moscow and Mecca, the unveiled became social outcasts. Many redonned the
paranji
. Many others were raped and murdered by traditionalist males or their families, their mutilated bodies displayed in villages. Zhenotdel activists were threatened and killed. The firestorm lasted for years.
By decade’s end the radical theatrics of unveiling were abandoned. And all over the country the Zhenotdeli were being dismantled because Stalin pronounced the “women’s question”
solved
. By the midthirties, traditional family values were back, with divorce discouraged, abortions and homosexuality banned. On propaganda posters the SovietWoman had a new look: maternal, full-figured, and “feminine.” And for the rest of the USSR’s existence, female comrades were expected to carry on their shoulders the infamous “double burden” of wage labor and housework.
And my great-great-grandmother, the New Soviet feminist?
In 1931 Anna Alexeevna moved with the teenage Alla to Moscow, to follow her boss Isaak Zelensky. A longtime Party stalwart, Zelensky was one of the engineers of War Communism’s grain requisitioning; he’d been brought back now to the capital from Central Asia to run the state’s consumer cooperatives. In 1937, in the midst of the purges, Zelensky was arrested. A year later he was in the dock with Bolshevik luminary Nikolai Bukharin at Stalin’s most notorious show trial. As ex-head of cooperative food suppliers, Zelensky breathtakingly “confessed” to sabotage, including the spoiling of fifty trainloads of eggs bound for Moscow, and the ruining of butter shipments by adding nails and glass.
He was promptly shot and deleted from Soviet history.
A year later my great-great-grandmother Anna was arrested as Zelensky’s co-conspirator and also deleted from history. From our
family
history, by my grandma Alla, who destroyed all photographs of her and stopped mentioning her name. Then one day, after the end of World War II, shaking with fear, Alla opened a letter from the gulag, from Kolyma in furthest Siberia. With blood-chilling precision, Anna Alexeevna had detailed the tortures she’d been subjected to and pleaded with the granddaughter she’d adopted and raised to inform Comrade Stalin. Like millions of victims, she was convinced the Supreme Leader knew nothing of the horrors going on in the prison camps. In my dad’s various retellings, Alla immediately burned the letter, flushed it down the communal apartment toilet, or ate it.
Only when drunk, very drunk, and much later,
kalym
(bride fee) and underage marriage, against polygamy and female seclusion and segregation. Most dramatically, they battled the most literal form of seclusion: the veil. In public Muslim women had to wear a
paranji
, a long, ponderous robe, and a
chachvan
, a veil. But
veil
sounds so flimsy. Imagine instead a massive, primeval head-to-knee shroud of horsehair, with no openings for eyes or mouth.
“The best revolutionary actions,” Kollontai reportedly once pronounced, “are pure drama.” Anna Alexeevna and the feminists had their coup de théâtre: The veil had to go! Few Soviet revolutionary actions were more sensational than the
hujum
(onslaught), the Central Asian campaign of unveiling.
March 8, 1927: International Women’s Day. In Uzbek cities veiled women go tramping en masse, escorted by police. Bands and native orchestras play. Stages set up on public squares swarm with flowers. There are fiery speeches by Zhenotdelki. Poems. Anna is on Tashkent’s main stage no doubt when the courageous first ones step up, pull off their horsehair mobile prisons, and fling them into bonfires. Thousands are inspired to do the same then and there—ten thousand veils are reportedly cast off on this day. Unveiled women surge through the streets shouting revolutionary slogans. Everyone sings. An astounding moment.
The backlash was wrathful and immediate.
Trapped between Lenin and Allah, Moscow and Mecca, the unveiled became social outcasts. Many redonned the
paranji
. Many others were raped and murdered by traditionalist males or their families, their mutilated bodies displayed in villages. Zhenotdel activists were threatened and killed. The firestorm lasted for years.
By decade’s end the radical theatrics of unveiling were abandoned. And all over the country the Zhenotdeli were being dismantled because Stalin pronounced the “women’s question”
solved
. By the midthirties, traditional family values were back, with divorce discouraged, abortions and homosexuality banned. On propaganda posters the SovietWoman had a new look: maternal, full-figured, and “feminine.” And for the rest of the USSR’s existence, female comrades were expected to carry on their shoulders the infamous “double burden” of wage labor and housework.
And my great-great-grandmother, the New Soviet feminist?
In 1931 Anna Alexeevna moved with the teenage Alla to Moscow, to follow her boss Isaak Zelensky. A longtime Party stalwart, Zelensky was one of the engineers of War Communism’s grain requisitioning; he’d been brought back now to the capital from Central Asia to run the state’s consumer cooperatives. In 1937, in the midst of the purges, Zelensky was arrested. A year later he was in the dock with Bolshevik luminary Nikolai Bukharin at Stalin’s most notorious show trial. As ex-head of cooperative food suppliers, Zelensky breathtakingly “confessed” to sabotage, including the spoiling of fifty trainloads of eggs bound for Moscow, and the ruining of butter shipments by adding nails and glass.
He was promptly shot and deleted from Soviet history.
A year later my great-great-grandmother Anna was arrested as Zelensky’s co-conspirator and also deleted from history. From our
family
history, by my grandma Alla, who destroyed all photographs of her and stopped mentioning her name. Then one day, after the end of World War II, shaking with fear, Alla opened a letter from the gulag, from Kolyma in furthest Siberia. With blood-chilling precision, Anna Alexeevna had detailed the tortures she’d been subjected to and pleaded with the granddaughter she’d adopted and raised to inform Comrade Stalin. Like millions of victims, she was convinced the Supreme Leader knew nothing of the horrors going on in the prison camps. In my dad’s various retellings, Alla immediately burned the letter, flushed it down the communal apartment toilet, or ate it.
Only when drunk, very drunk, and much later,