Mom beamed, glowing, ever the “heroine.” Her chef sidekick, on the other hand—middle-aged, painfully shy Alexander Vasilievich—seemed to want the floor to open and swallow him up.

I left them and headed to a retro-Soviet candy shop across the street. I had in mind an experiment. Under thick glass were arrayed sweets by the Red October Chocolate Factory—the pet confectionary of the food commissar Anastas Mikoyan, still in operation though now owned by a German concern. Earlier, among the nostalgic Little Squirrel and Mishka the Clumsy Bear chocolates, I’d spotted the ananas—object of my dread, shame, torment, and triumph in kindergarten. Now I bought myself a candy and sucked on the crunchy chocolate shell, slowly licking toward the center, exactly as I had four decades before. I was trying, I confess, to manufacture a madeleine-esque moment. But the filling, so excruciatingly luscious to me once with its synthetic-exotic flavor of pineapple, now tasted simply… synthetic. Something feebly tried to stir in me, then faded. With a sigh, I went tramping back to the khi-rize as Moscow scowled at my flip-flops.

That night, I reluctantly changed into semi-stilettos—for dinner with oligarchs. Russia’s nouveau riche are not the smug-faced gangsters in maroon velvet jackets they used to be. Now entering their post-bling stage, they send their kids to Oxford, donate to the arts, sometimes even forsake ritzy Petrus for old, noble Barolos.

And who of all people had become the biggest fan and friend of the oligarchs? My pauperist, antiestablishment mom! For some time, rich Russians had been falling madly in love with her when she squired them around the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She responded with affection. “They’ve become cultured,” she claimed. Occasionally she even entertained oligarchs at her cramped immigrant quarters in Queens. “A hundred million dollars?” repeated one very nice oil man to my question about what constituted wealth in Russia. He chuckled good-naturedly, full of Mom’s borscht. “A hundred million’s not even money.”

Now, in Moscow, our hosts were a charming fiftyish couple, veterans of my mother’s tours of the Met. They had a family bank. We dined at a panoramic Italian restaurant at the newly renovated Hotel Ukraine; it was visible through binoculars from our khi-rize. From our roof terrace table we could almost touch the mammoth stone Stalinist stars and hammer-and-sickles at the base of the hotel’s refurbished spire. Mr. Banker wore a Pucci-esque shirt; Mrs. Banker, flat shoes. She laughed heartily at my flip-flop adventures.

“No onions,” Mr. Banker told the waiter. “No garlic or hot peppers.”

“You’re… Buddhist?” I gasped.

“Da, da,” he acknowledged, ever so modest. “We converted during the 2008 financial crisis. The stress.”

“Twenty years,” murmured Mrs. Banker into her forty-dollar garlic-free pizza. “Twenty years since the USSR. How we’ve changed.”

Barry joked about all the Land Rovers and Bentleys in Moscow. Everyone laughed.

“Actually we have a Range Rover,” confessed Mr. Banker.

“And also a Bentley,” confessed his wife.

“What’s a Bentley?” asked Mom.

With Mom’s TV shoot done and mine yet to come, we went for a family reunion out in Davydkovo. My cousin Masha lived there now, in our former khrushcheba apartment. Exiting the metro, I suggested a quick pre-reunion stroll in the woods. The Davydkovo pine woods, where Stalin’s dacha still lay. Brooding, mysterious.

Him again.

The Father of All Nations had at least a dozen government dachas. But the one behind the thirteen-foot green fence in Davydkovo by my ex–Central Committee kindergarten was his actual home for more than two decades. From the Kremlin to here was a twelve-minute trip in the Leader’s armored black Packard. Hence the dacha’s nickname, Blizhnyaya, the “nearest one.”

A few years earlier, photos of the inaccessible Blizhnyaya started popping up on the Internet. I pored over the images of the neo-modernist green country house—all straight-lined functionality denounced by Stalinist ideologues but apparently privately favored by the Boss. Weirdly disturbing, his personal coat hanger; his dark, monastic bathrobes with the shortened sleeve for his withered left arm.

The Blizhnyaya, initially modest in size, had been built in 1934 by the architect Miron Merzhanov (arrested in 1943, released after his client’s death) and surrounded with thick, trucked-in trees. The nature-loving Generalissimo took special interest in the planting of beliye (porcini) mushroom patches; in our harsh northern climate the heroic dacha gardeners even raised watermelons, which were sometimes sold to unsuspecting shoppers at the opulent Yeliseevsky food emporium on Gorky Street.

Churchill, Mao, and Tito all slept on the second floor added in 1943. Their ever-paranoid host, though, hardly ever used a bedroom. He’d doze off on one of the hard Turkish couches scattered about; on one such, on March 1, 1953, he suffered his fatal stroke.

A few years earlier, too, journalists were given an unprecedented tour of the secret green house. There were hints the dacha was being declassified; in Moscow now I hoped to pull some journalistic strings and at last penetrate that tall fence in the forest, behind which lay the presence that haunted my most impressionable childhood. With Barry and Mom along, I intended a little reconnaissance.

The pine trees seemed less majestic than I remembered. Along muddy paths, yummy mommies in skinny jeans and stilettos pushed strollers; vigorous pensioners speed-walked by, arm in arm. There it loomed at last: the dacha’s fence. Two blond young guards in uniform stood by a side entrance, smoking. Unsmiling.

“The dacha… um… er… Stalin?” I mumbled.

“Classified object,” I was informed. “No questions permitted.”

As if drawn by an inner force, I led us away to another, much lower fence. Beyond it, through evergreens, I could make out a low pale-brick building—my old kindergarten, where I gagged on nomenklatura caviar and sucked in ecstasy on the ananas candy. The sight of my former prison catapulted me back to my sad-eyed bulimic past with such violence that I clutched onto a sticky pine trunk, desperately gulping the resinous air. The madeleine had attacked.

I pulled myself together and we left the woods. A deluxe apartment complex towered ahead, gleaming and shiplike. STALIN’S DACHA announced the sign on the inevitable fence. APARTMENTS FOR SALE BY INVESTORS.

“People don’t mind living in a building named after Stalin?” I asked an Uzbek guard, a fresh ripple of nausea stirring.

“Why?” He grinned. “I’m sure they’re proud.”

“How about a Molotov tennis court?” Barry asked, after we translated. “Or a Beria swimming pool?”

“Beria?” puzzled the guard, catching the name. He looked confused.

We hurried off, late now to Masha’s, and promptly got lost among Davydkovo’s identical five-story sixties-era apartment blocks. The cracked concrete walls and laundry flapping from rickety balconies were depressing and slumlike, all too familiar. But no, this was Moscow 2011: Barry had to stop, several times, to fasten his tourist lens on a Maserati parked by a rusted fence or an overflowing hulk of graffiti-scrawled garbage bins.

We recovered a little around Masha’s table. After dinner she took me into the bedroom and began pulling out small cardboard boxes from drawers and closets. I reached into one box and felt the cold metal heft of my grandfather’s medals. Masha and I tipped the whole treasure onto the bed. Order of Lenin, of Victory, of the Red Banner. Just as we had decades ago, we pinned the medals to our chests and danced a little in front of the mirror. Then we sat on the bed, holding hands.