It was deeply distressing.

A mid all this ideological ghoulism and ahistorical mishmash the khi-rize became my refuge, the haven of my own pre-post-Soviet innocence. What a perfect comfort it was, easily idealized and yet so authentic. I got a lump in my throat every time I entered the woody, cozily modernist lobby. I loved the achingly familiar USSR reek of cat spray and acrid cleaning detergent. Loved the coarse blue oil-paint trim and the rotating gallery of very Soviet concierge babushkas.

Inna Valentinovna, my favorite babushka, was one of the khi-rize’s original residents. She had scored her prestige apartment during the late sixties for her scientific achievements and now whiled away her bustling, bossy retirement by concierging part-time. As May 9 drew nigh, she transformed our lobby into a maelstrom of veteran-related activity.

“How our veterani love this!” she enthused, showing me the forlorn state gift packages of buckwheat groats, second-rate sprats, and emphatically non-elite chocolates.

“Dusty buckwheat,” groused Mom. “Putin’s thank-you to those who defended his Rodina.”

Among our khi-rize VOV vets, I was particularly eager to meet a woman named Asya Vasilievna. She’d just completed a memoir, so Inna informed me, about her mentor and friend Anna Akhmatova, the great Russian poet of our sorrows after whom I was named. “Wait,” Inna kept admonishing me in her lobby stronghold. “Wait for her here!” But elderly Asya Vasilievna never appeared.

Victory Day dawned.

We watched the Red Square parade on TV. The Kremlin midgetry, Medvedev and Putin, commemorated the world’s largest catastrophe (a.k.a. VOV) wearing vaguely fascistic black overcoats. Vigorous octogenarians shingled in medals surrounded them on the podium. “Arise, Our Vast Country,” the solemn 1940s VOV anthem, blared as elite guards began the old Soviet-imperial goose step—dressed in weirdly czarist-looking uniforms thick with blingy gold braid.

“PPP,” scoffed my mom. “Putin’s Patriotic Pastiche.”

In the afternoon Inna Valentinovna shepherded us to a neighborhood parade on Arbat Street. The local vets looked much frailer than the heroes on Putin’s podium. Some could barely walk under the weight of their medals; others wheezed and coughed in the wind. Muscovites watched the shuffling throng of veterans with indifference, whereas Ayzeri men in black leather jackets whistled and clapped with great feeling.

Inna Valentinovna pushed me toward one tall, sloped-shouldered, medal-hung nonagenarian. He had fought in the Baltic navy at the same time as my granddad. His gaze remained serene and absent even as schoolkids shoved big thorny roses into his leathery hands.

“I’m from New York,” I stammered, feeling suddenly shy. “Perhaps you knew my grandfather—chief of Baltic naval intelligence Naum Solomonovich Frumkin.”

After an uncertain pause, a glimmer animated his pale, ghostly features.

“New York,” he quavered. “Not even the Nazis matched the enemy we faced after the war. New York! Vile imperialist America!”

And with great dignity he walked away from me.

The reception was warmer in the bitterly cold shadows by Arbat’s hulking Vakhtangov Theater, where Inna Valentinovna beckoned us over to a cordoned-off vets’ VIP area of outdoor tables. A mock field kitchen was dispensing convincingly unappetizing wartime kasha from a fake cauldron and weak tea from a fake kettle. But the breaths around our wobbly plastic table reeked with reassuring eighty-proof authenticity. Our Styrofoam cups of tea were emptied and filled with vodka. A pickle materialized. Despite the droning, officious speeches, despite the sad spectacle of impoverished vets paraded around like stuffed dolls instead of receiving long-overdue benefits, a glow blossomed inside me. How precious, co-bottling in the cold with this crowd. How little time with them we had left.

I soggily proposed a toast to my granddad. Tears of remorse ran down my cheeks as I recalled how Mom and Yulia threw out his Sorge memorabilia, how Cousin Masha and I giggled when, for the umpteenth time, he reminisced about debriefing Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials. Now there were only fraying cardboard boxes of his medals and a yellowed German magazine cover on which Dedushka’s high forehead and ironic eyes hovered over the puffy-faced Hermann Goering.

Next morning in the lobby I finally encountered the elusive Asya Vasilyevna.

The memoirist friend of Anna Akhmatova had dark, quick, intelligent eyes and sported a smart vest. Overwhelmed, I kept holding and stroking her ancient hand.

Asya Vasilievna met Akhmatova during their VOV evacuation in Tashkent.

Vets got to make free phone calls on May 9, and Asya had spent hers talking to the granddaughter of Nikolai Punin, Akhmatova’s lover in the twenties and thirties. Punin brought Akhmatova into the Fountain House in St. Petersburg. There, in a dismal communal apartment carved out of a wing of that former palace, Akhmatova resided for almost three decades.

I once visited Akhmatova’s movingly curated museum at the Fountain House. A copy of Modigliani’s sketch of her hung on the wall of the monastically sparse room she once occupied. In this room Akhmatova had her epic all-night encounter with a young Isaiah Berlin from England, for which she was denounced by the state, her son sent back to the gulag. It was her bronze ashtray that brought me to tears. Knowing the apartment was bugged, Akhmatova and her friend and biographer, Lydia Chukovskaya, would utter loud trivialities—“Autumn is so early this year”—while the poet scribbled a new poem in pencil and Chukovskaya memorized the lines. Then they’d burn the page in the ashtray.

“Hands, matches, an ashtray,” wrote Chukovskaya. “A ritual beautiful and bitter.”

Now in our khi-rize lobby, unbidden, Asya Vasilievna launched into Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem,” dedicated to the victims of purges. She began with the blood-curdling preface: In the dreadful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison lines in Leningrad…

She spoke as if in a trance, mimicking the low, slow, mournful recitation I knew from Akhmatova’s recordings.

“Let’s go sit so you’re more comfortable,” interrupted Inna Valentinovna, ushering us into a special vets’ room—a tiny pink-walled cubbyhole off the lobby, plastered with photos of VOV heroes.

My gaze drifted across the gallery on the wall as Asya declaimed on. Marshal Zhukov. Voroshilov. Dashing Rokossovsky. And presiding over all, squinting his yellowish feline eyes…

HIM? AGAIN?

In Germany you’d be arrested for displaying the visage of Hitler, I thought. Here? Here a woman recited a searing dirge to those crushed in the purges—right beneath the executioner’s portrait!

Something in me snapped. I wanted to howl, bang my head against the shiny Soviet-style table, flee from this insane asylum where history has been dismantled and Photoshopped into a pastiche of victims and murderers, dictators and dissidents, all rubbing sentimental shoulders together.

I did howl after Asya finished.

“Ladies!” I burst out. “Have you lost your marbles? Akhmatova’s testament to suffering… here under STALIN’s mustaches?”

I finished, mortified at my outburst. How could I be haranguing these frail survivors of a terrible era? What right did I have to wag my finger at women who’d endured and outlived the Soviet century? My lips were shaking. I wanted to cry.