Lenin, incidentally, transmigrated from this distant, idealized Spirithood into warm and fuzzy dedushka-hood during the Brezhnevian phase of his cult. That’s when the didactic cake stories became popular, along with that silly iconographic cap on his bald head—asserting Ilyich’s modest, friendly, proletarian nature.

The country would by then be wary of God-like personality cults.

^{PART II}

LARISA

_{CHAPTER THREE}

1930s: THANK YOU, COMRADE STALIN, FOR OUR HAPPY CHILDHOOD

Like most Soviet kids of her time, my mother was raised on stories by Arkady Gaidar. Gaidar’s tales are suffused with a patriotic romanticism that doesn’t ring insincere even today. They fairly brim with positive characters—characters who know that the true meaning of happiness is “to live honestly, toil hard, and deeply love and protect that vast fortunate land called The Soviet Country.” Mom was particularly struck by a story titled “The Blue Cup.” After overcoming a spell of conflict, a young family sits under a tree ripe with cherries on a late-summer night (spring and summer, one ironic critic remarked, being the only two seasons permissible in socialist realism). A golden moon glows overhead. A train rumbles past in the distance. The main character sums things up, closing the story: “And life, comrades, was good… entirely good.”

This phrase filled my five-year-old mother with alienation and dread.

To this day she can’t really explain why. Her parents, youthful, striving, and faithful to the State, exemplified Gaidarian virtues and the Stalinist vision of glamour. Liza, her mother, was a champion gymnast, an architect, and a painter of sweet watercolors. Naum, her father, possessed a radiant smile and a high, honest forehead to go along with his spiffy naval caps, which smelled of the foreign cologne he brought back from frequent trips abroad. If Mom and her younger sister, Yulia, were good, Naum would let them pin his shiny badges on their dresses and dance in front of the mirror. On his rare days off he’d take them to the Park of Culture and Relaxation named after Gorky.

Mother had a second father, of course. Like her kindergarten classmates, she began each school day gazing up at a special poster and thanking him for her joyous, glorious childhood. On the poster the youthfully middle-aged Genius of Humanity and Best Friend of All Children was smiling under the black wings of his mustaches. In his arms a beautiful little girl also smiled. With her dark hair cut in a bowl shape, the girl reminded Mom of herself, only with Asiatic features. She was the legendary Gelya (short for Engelsina, from Friedrich Engels) Markizova. Daughter of a commissar from the Buryat-Mongol region, she came to the Kremlin with a delegation and handed a bouquet of flowers to the Supreme Leader, whereupon he lifted her in his arms, warming her with his amused, benevolent gaze. Cameras flashed. After appearing on the front page of Izvestia, the photograph became one of the decade’s iconic images. It was reproduced on millions of posters, in paintings and sculptures. Gelya was the living embodiment of every Soviet child’s dream.

Comrade Stalin kept a watchful eye over Mom and her family, she was sure of that. And yet a pall hung over her. Life, she suspected, was not “entirely good.” In place of big bright Soviet happiness, my mother’s heart often filled with toska, a word for which there is no English equivalent. “At its deepest and most painful,” explains Vladimir Nabokov, “toska is a sensation of great spiritual anguish…. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul.”

When Mom heard cheerful choruses on the radio, she imagined squalid people singing drunkenly around a putrid-smelling barrel of pickles. Sometimes she’d refuse to go out into the street, frightened of the black public loudspeakers broadcasting the glories of the Five-Year Plan. Many things about Moscow made her feel scared and small. At the Revolution Square station of the new metro, she ran as quickly as she could past bronze statues of athletic figures with rifles and pneumatic drills. No use. Night after night she was haunted by nightmares of these statues coming alive and tossing her mother into a blazing furnace, like the one in the mural at the Komsomolskaya station.

Perhaps she had such dreams because the parents of other children were disappearing.

There were many things my mother didn’t know, couldn’t have known, at the time. She didn’t know that Arkady Gaidar, beloved writer for the young, had brutally murdered civilians, including women and children, as a Red commander during the civil war. She didn’t know that one year after that bouquet at the Kremlin, Gelya Markizova’s father was accused of a plot against Stalin and executed—just one of an estimated twelve to twenty million victims of Stalin. Gelya’s mother perished as well. The poster child for a happy Stalinist childhood was deported and raised in an orphanage.

Darkness. The unyielding blackness of Arctic winter in Murmansk is my mother’s earliest memory. She was born in sunny Odessa, a barely alive five-pound preemie bundled in wads of coarse cotton. Her father was then sent to Russia’s extreme northwest to head the intelligence unit of the newly formed Northern Flotilla. The year was the relatively benign 1934. The harvest was decent. Collectivization’s famines and horrors were slowly subsiding. Ration cards were being phased out, first for bread and sugar, then meat.

Myska—childspeak for “little mouse”—was Mother’s very first word, because mice scurried along the exposed wires above her bed in the tiny room she shared with her sister and parents. Thinking back on those days, Mother imagines herself as a mouse, burrowing through some dark, sinister tunnel of early consciousness. She remembers the thunderous crunch of Murmansk’s snow under their horse-drawn sled, the salty taste of blood in her mouth after the icicles she liked to lick stuck to her tongue.

Leningrad, where Naum was transferred in 1937, was a thousand kilometers south but still on the chill sixtieth degree of north latitude. Its darkness was different, though. Russia’s former imperial capital suggested various conjugations of gray: the steely reflection off the Neva River, with its somber granite embankments; the dull aluminum of the grease-filmed kasha bowls at Mother’s nursery school. In place of mice there were rats—the reason Uncle Vasya, their communal apartment neighbor, was missing half his nose. Too bad Mom’s name rhymed with krysa (rat). “Larisa-krysa, Larisa-krysa,” children taunted her in the courtyard. Liza occasionally took the girls to see museums and palaces in the center of town. Their melancholy neoclassical grandeur contrasted starkly with the web of bleak alcoholic alleys near their apartment. Mother was inconsolable when a drunk trampled and ruined her brand-new galoshes, so shiny and black, so red inside.

Bleak too was the mood in the city. Three years earlier, Leningrad’s charismatic Communist boss Sergei Kirov had been shot down in the corridors of the Smolny Institute, local Party headquarters, by a disgruntled ex-Party functionary. His killing signaled the prologue to the years of paranoia, midnight knocks on the door, denunciations, witch hunts for “enemies of the people,” and mass slaughter that would come to be known as the Great Terror of 1937–38. Stalin’s suspected involvement in Kirov’s murder has never been proved. But the Friend of All Children was quick to seize the moment. After planting a sorrowful kiss on Kirov’s brow at his operatic show funeral, Stalin unleashed an opening paroxysm of violence against his own political enemies. The show trials would follow. The charge of conspiracy to kill Kirov was used until 1938; it offered one of the key justifications of terror among the grab bag of crimes against the Soviet State and betrayals thereof. Thousands were arrested without cause and shipped to the gulags or killed. Moscow staged the most notorious trials (including the trial of Zelensky, my great-great-grandmother Anna Alexeevna’s boss), but Leningrad’s suffering was possibly deeper still. By 1937 the former capital had been ravaged by deportations and executions. It was Stalin’s vendetta against the city he hated, the locals whispered. Indeed, after Kirov’s coffin left Leningrad for Moscow, the Great Leader never set foot by the Neva again.