Free Sunbathing in Siberia by M. A. Oliver-Semenov

people to trip over. Nataliya Petrovna likes everything put in its proper place and despises dirty things. She also likes to joke around. When Boris telephones from some distant mountain she pretends she is having a great time without him and tells him not to return. After such phone calls, she pines over him and berates herself for having said silly things.
    When she is not looking after her grandson Semka, or playing the piano, she is cooking. Her speciality is golubtsi . This is meat wrapped in cabbage leaves that must be boiled in an inch of water for an hour and thirty minutes. Nataliya Petrovna knows all there is to know about preparing meat dishes. It is her job to cut up all the meat Boris brings home. When he brings back the limbs of deer Nataliya Petrovna spends many of the evenings after cleaning them – chopping bits, mincing bits in her electric mincer, bagging it, sealing it and storing it away in one of the three freezers. They have a normal fridge-freezer in the kitchen. When this freezer is full she then uses the other much larger freezers in the cupboard next to the bathroom. They are rarely short of good cuts of meat. With the mincemeat Nataliya Petrovna usually makes pelmeni and manti (both similar to ravioli). She makes so much pelmeni that she very often gives whole bags of it away to friends.
    After the collapse of the USSR, and the suicides of several of their friends, Boris brought back so much meat that Nataliya Petrovna made enough pelmeni to spread around and keep some of her friends alive. When they were short of something essential Nataliya Petrovna had only to make a call to someone to make a trade in pelmeni . It was their primary bargaining tool at a time when money was worthless. If Boris hadn’t the skills to hunt, I’m not sure what would have happened to everyone. It’s possible Nastya might never have survived. When I sat down with Nastya and her mother and questioned them about the collapse of the Soviet Union, Nataliya Petrovna said: ‘I have never been poor, but neither have I ever been rich. No matter who came into power and regardless of communist or capitalist rule, life went on as normal. Not one president, with all the promises they made ever really changed anything.’
    Even so, I got the sense that both Nastya’s parents missed the earlier part of their lives even though they had lived under Soviet rule. Nataliya Petrovna had been alive no longer than three years when Stalin died, and so grew up under Khrushchev’s thaw. Premier Nikita Khrushchev famously denounced Stalin’s policies, released millions of Soviet political prisoners from the Gulags and attempted to fully reverse repression and censorship by what became later known as de-Stalinisation. Even with the rise of Brezhnev, who set to work on reversing Khrushchev’s reforms, many of the cultural reforms proved irreversible. Khrushchev’s policy changes made it possible for the likes of the Shurik movies to be made. Played by Aleksandr Demyanenko, Shurik, with his bleached-blond hair and thick-rimmed glasses, became a recurrent character in slapstick comedies of the 1960s and early 1970s. His movies, which epitomise the sixties in Russia, are still shown regularly today. In fact, during my first month in Russia, I saw them all, more than once.
    With the sounds of the sixties coming from the TV, and the typical view of Soviet residential blocks from the window I sometimes felt as though we were still living in the Khrushchev period. This sense of being lost in the past was broken every evening by a neighbour, who would pull up at the foot of the building in his souped-up sports car playing Vangelis’ ‘Conquest of Paradise’ as loud as his speakers would allow. Which was quite appropriate as that song was recorded just after the fall of the USSR.

    The Red Army Strikes
    Russian bread was something else I had to get used to. There were few of the factory-made thick,