106
In summer — when temperatures pass 20 degrees Celsius — you have to contend
with rivers swollen with melted snow.
They can take up to half a day to cross, with hours spent drying out clothes and
equipment, Lukas says.
"The coldness of the water is like nothing you've ever felt. We get dressed fast —
our feet are so cold that we do not feel them at all," he says.
Then, there's the insects.
"Mosquitoes and flies are everywhere and there are about a million for each of
us," says Lukas.
"Repellents and smoke from cigarettes work only briefly, but the fire reduces their
quantity to a bearable limit."
At night when temperatures drop, they huddle together and drink vodka for
warmth, then fall asleep listening to Harry Potter audio books praying a bear does not
stumble into the camp.
"My biggest fear staying in the taigas was from bears," says Lukas.
"We did not have a gun — nor time to even find one. We wouldn't be able to shoot
them anyway [they're protected]. Our only defence is to make noise and hope."
The vast distances and specialised equipment means the costs of expeditions can
quickly become exorbitant
The group needs rations and gear for tough conditions, power saws, satellite
phones — not to mention helicopters and snow mobiles at a cost of thousands of dollars
a day for reaching out of the way places in a land where roads do not exist.
"It is expensive," says Stepan.
"The first two expeditions I just paid my money from my own pocket and the
other participants also paid with their own money.
"I suppose it was more like a holiday — but a holiday to a gulag," he says,
laughing.
It is far easier to travel in winter Stepan says, as rivers are frozen, and the ground
is covered with easily traversable snow — provided you have the right set of wheels.
107
"We had to hire a special six wheeled car because there are no normal roads or
even unpaved roads," he says.
"But when rivers and swamps are frozen they have something called 'winter roads'
and it is possible to go hundreds of kilometres through frozen taiga."
Even with all the right gear and preparations things can easily go wrong out in the
taiga.
"On the 2013 expedition our motor boat broke down on the Turukhan River —
we spent four days as castaways floating in the middle of nowhere, 200 kilometres
from the nearest village, until we saw a passing boat," recalls Stepan.
Worse, on another expedition in 2011 the group travelled by plane, boat,
helicopter, and then a gruelling 30-kilometre march through forest to reach what they
believed would be a near perfectly preserved gulag camp.
"When we reached the camp it was gone — just one month before our arrival a
huge taiga fire had swept through — so after spending ten days getting to the place,
untouched for 60 years it was completely destroyed and now no one will ever know its
story," says Stepan.
"It was a very depressing moment."
In 1947 Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin ordered the construction of a railroad
running almost 1,300 kilometres across the remote wilderness of northern Russia using
gulag prisoners; in particular, political dissidents — historians suggest hundreds of
thousands perished.
Stalin wanted a port on the Arctic Ocean as well as a connection between eastern
nickel mines and western Soviet factories.
It came to be known as the Dead Road.
The Dead Road was one of the first stories that initially interested Stepan, and
after using Google Earth to find several of the remaining camps along the railroad, he
was already planning his first gulag trip about 10 years ago.
"It was just like a normal adventure trip to Siberia and I just wanted to reach the
camps, I had no idea whether it would even be possible, so the goal then was just to
reach it," he says.
108
"I tried to find people who would agree to go with me to these places."
After Stalin's death many of the gulags were abandoned and began to fall into
disrepair.
With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the advent of Vladimir Putin's
glorification of Russia's Soviet past, the gulags are being forgotten, says Stepan.
"There is not one single museum in Russia built at a former gulag camp — in
contrast to former Nazi concentration camps which are museums today — however the
remains are still there.
"We decided to go there, document it and put it on the internet, so people at least
could have a look and see the truth."
109
Приложение 5
Jonathan Steele: A new cold war? We’re yet to adjust to the old one ending
There were tears and sweat aplenty in Moscow's Luzhniki stadium on Wednesday,
but barely any blood. English fans kept calm. Russia's police avoided running amok.
The result was that stereotypes of Russia as a harsh forbidding place lost another chunk
of credibility, and its quest to be treated as a "normal" country on the post-cold war
stage advanced a further step.
It has been a bumpy journey since the Soviet Union ended. The western euphoria
of the 1990s, when Russia seemed to have no major disagreements with western policy,
gave way to disappointment when Vladimir Putin took a less compliant international
line - especially in his second term - while also curbing some of his compatriots' new-
found democratic freedoms.
Now we are in a time of unprecedented EU uncertainty over Russia, as arguments
rage over whether to engage more deeply with an increasingly independent and
prosperous neighbour. The EU's 10-year Partnership and Co-operation Agreement with
Russia expired last year, and efforts to renew it have run into serious problems.
One reason is that the EU is bigger than it was in 1997. The entry of new members
who used to be locked into alliance with the Soviet Union or, in the case of the Baltic
states, were Soviet republics, has added a deep vein of historical tension. Last year it
was Poland that was blocking the EU's search for consensus on a negotiating mandate
with Russia. This year it has been Lithuania.
Another reason is that Russia wants a new partnership agreement to have a very
different tone. It felt the last one's language about Russia and the EU sharing "common
European values" was used as a stick. As Professor Margot Light of the London School
of Economics puts it: "Russian officials believe these values are determined
exclusively in the EU and are simply proclaimed by EU officials for Russia to adopt."
Now Russia prefers the concept of sharing interests.
On Monday, the EU's foreign ministers will make a new effort to agree a mandate.
It will be nowhere near as exciting a struggle as the Luzhniki match, or indeed the one
a week earlier, when Russians cheered Zenit St Petersburg in winning the Uefa Cup.
110
But it does matter, since the EU is Russia's biggest trading partner, and Russia is
Europe's major energy supplier.
The issues are well aired in a report published yesterday by the House of
Lords' European Union committee. They took evidence from an array of former British
ambassadors to Moscow as well as EU officials and independent experts. The voice of
political realism rings through the report, a world away from the emotional and
ideological tone of the "new" Europeans from central and eastern Europe as well as of
the Bush administration towards Russia.
EU-Russia relations are said to be going through a "bad-tempered phase" - a point
that could be made even more sharply about Anglo-Russian relations in the wake of
the Litvinenko and Lugovoi affairs. But both sides are advised to see things in a long-
term perspective. Far from being in a "new cold war", neither the EU nor Russia has
yet adjusted to the end of the old one and the past two decades' turmoil of newly
released post-Soviet nationalisms.
In his evidence Sir Roderick Lyne, a former British ambassador, rejected the idea
of "neo-containment" as well as efforts to isolate Russia or kick it out of the G8.
Pleading for patience, he argued that the 1990s aspiration for "strategic partnership"
between the EU and Russia should be put in cold storage: "It's a sensible long-term
objective and its time will come again." Gunnar Wiegand, head of the Russia section
in the European commission, said that dialogue over human rights should not become
a lecture. "We should not forget that the majority of our member states - and this I can
say as a German - are countries that have come out of authoritarianism themselves, be
it of the left or right, and many are very young democracies," he warned.
The House of Lords' report strongly makes the point that the 1990s were a time
of mass impoverishment for Russians, and the imposition of western-style democracy
is associated with that in many Russians' minds. Obliquely but unmistakably, it also
hints at the double standards in European and US policy. Its conclusion is that the EU
should speak out on human rights in Russia "from time to time", but consider every
critical statement carefully before issuing it.
111
Some, particularly in central Europe, will treat the report with disdain. Memories
of Russia are negative and the wounds of history have not yet healed. The EU's need
for unanimity gives any one of its 27 members a right of veto, so the debate over how
to treat Russia only highlights the difficulty of achieving consensus within the EU. The
Russians are no different from the Americans in wanting a strong European voice,
provided it agrees with their own view. If not, they are happy to work with member
states bilaterally. Having an EU president (to be chosen in the autumn) may make it
marginally easier to achieve consensus on difficult issues, but I would not bank on it.
On the Russian side, having a new president will also not change much. The new
set-up of a powerful prime minister Putin and a novice President Medvedev will take
several months to bed down. Kremlinology is back in vogue as analysts pick over the
names, titles and status of Putin's cabinet ministers and Medvedev's advisers; but the
trend of Russian domestic and foreign policy will not alter. Those who see Medvedev
as more "liberal" than Putin will be disappointed.
Could the EU and Russia survive the failure to sign a new partnership agreement?
Absolutely. The old one has been extended for a year, and could be renewed again. Or
it could lapse, unmourned. The two sides have already agreed on a series of "roadmaps"
which outline cooperation in various "common spaces" - on economics, security and
justice, and research and education. It is easy to sneer at this as Eurocratic
gobbledygook and word games, as though giving a lump of issues a label amounts to
actual progress.
But the reality is that interaction between Russia and the EU is bound to develop
in all these areas, however they are labelled. The main need is to lower expectations
and prevent the inevitable short-term crises and disputes from bringing down the house.
112
Приложение 6
The Sickle of Plenty: “Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking”
One of the most misleading phrases in the Russian language is “Ochen’ vkusno!”
which is invariably said any time you sit down to a meal in Russia that a hostess has
gone to some effort to prepare. It means “very tasty;” and it simply never is—that is,
not to those unaccustomed to the flavors of the Slavic palate. Reading Anya von
Bremzen’s one-of-a-kind culinary and sociopolitical memoir, Mastering the Art of
Soviet Cooking, a nostalgically anti-nostalgic tribute to 20th century life and food in
the land once known as the Soviet Union, I thought of that gustatory paradox. Although
I’m American, devoid of any jot of Russian blood, an accident of birth assured that
taste memories of borscht, poppy-seed cake, and the soft, meat-filled buns
called pirozhki romp through my psyche. From my tenderest youth, my slavophile
professor parents threw raucous Russian Club parties at our home for their students,
for which my mother spent hours cranking beef and softened onions through a meat
grinder she’d lugged back from a Moscow study trip. My Cold War childhood was like
an unending session of Soviet show-and-tell. But when my school friends would drop
by our kitchen and catch the whiff of dill, they would flee. Visiting Moscow for the
first time in the 1990s, I belatedly understood my friends’ reaction, when I confronted
unfamiliar Russian treats that made my flesh crawl. I remember in particular a clearish,
jiggling aspic—big and flat as a sheet cake—that contained a pale poached fish the size
of a man’s foot, served to me by an eminent aproned professor in a Moscow high-rise
in 1993. She had spent days scouring the markets for the ingredients. Trying not to
breathe, I swallowed a couple of mouthfuls—I remember an impression of Knox Blox
made of wallpaper paste—smiled faintly, and said as convincingly as I could, “Ochen’
vkusno!”
Luckily, Anya von Bremzen not only is familiar with the full gamut of Slavic
fare, she retains affection from her Soviet childhood for alarming fish entrées
accompanied by “enticing whiffs of wallpaper glue.” More luckily still, through
breathtaking feats of raconteurial skill, she makes you envy the recipes that make her
mouth water, even when you don’t yourself hanker for the mythic meals she conjures—
113
and even when she herself admits that she’d never eaten them, given the
endless defitsits (food shortages) of her native land. In Mastering the Art of Soviet
Cooking, she calls up visions of the “skatert’ samobranka” —the magical self-filling
tablecloth of Russian folklore—which tormented hungry Soviets with dreams of juicy
sausages, herring-under-fur-coat (pickled herring mixed with chopped potatoes and
carrots, topped with shredded beets, slathered in slippery sauce), kulebiaka pastries
stuffed with salmon, dried sturgeon spine and mushrooms; jellied ham rolls, and,
everywhere, glistening garlands of mayonnaise (the Soviet-era “Provensal”
mayonnaise brand, “loose” and “tangy-sharp”) which is to Muscovites what
madeleines were to Proust.
In 1974, when the author was 11, she and her mother, Larisa Naumovna
Frumkina, left the Soviet Union and moved to America, trading Moscow’s empty store
shelves for the sterile cornucopia of a Philadelphia Pathmark. The ease of getting
groceries in America elated the mother, but demoralized the daughter: “What happened
when you replaced the heroic Soviet verb dostat’ (to obtain with difficulty) with the
banal kupit’ (to buy), a term barely used back in the USSR?” von Bremzen asks. In her
opinion, “Shopping at Pathmark was acquisitioning robbed of thrills, drama, ritual.”
But her mother disagreed. Although she was the daughter of a Soviet war hero and the
wife of a man who had the über-Socialist job of monitoring the color of Lenin’s
embalmed body, Frumkina had no love for the lines she left behind. All the same, even
she could not resist bringing one memento to the New World: the lavishly illustrated
Soviet culinary bible The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. This book—the kniga, von
Bremzen calls it, was devised by Stalin’s crafty Armenian food commissar Anastas
Mikoyan (think of him as the Soviet Milo Minderbinder), and went through multiple
permutations over the years, each edition a barometer of the country’s shifting
ideological climate.
In 2011, in a kitchen in Queens, by now a much-lauded food and travel writer,
von Bremzen embarked on the project of creating distinct totemic meals to capture the
mood of each decade of the 20th century in her native land. Kniga in hand, she enlisted
her now septuagenarian mother as sous-chef—so what if neither of them had ever eaten
the food they were about to prepare, much less cooked it? “Neither I nor Mom had a
114
clue how they were meant to taste,” she admits. While whipping up her first chapter
and their first feast—an homage to the dining excesses of the czars—she found herself
pulling an all-nighter during a blazing New York heat wave to make Guriev kasha—a
heavy porridge studded with homemade candied nuts, berries, and multiple layers of
scorched-cream skins called penki. She writes, “Chained to the oven door, drenched in
sweat, I was ready to assault palaces, smash Fabergé eggs. I cursed the Romanovs! I
cheered the Russian Revolution!”
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is not only a magic tablecloth, it’s a magic
carpet that revisits the roads and lanes of the former Soyuz, surveying the tales of
hardship and hardwon joys of von Bremzen’s relatives and the Russian people. A
chapter on the 1930s shows the author’s toddler mother celebrating Election Day in
Leningrad with her family. As champagne corks pop and Communist throngs sing, “O
vast is my country!”, Stalin’s secret police buzz at the door and haul their neighbors
off into the Great Terror. A watchful babushka quickly herds the children onto a
balcony so they don’t miss Great Comrade Stalin’s fireworks: “Green! Red! Blue! –
blooming in the sky like giant, sparkling, jubilant bouquets.” The ’30s saw the rise of
Stalin’s chef, whom he sent to America to hunt down vkusnye recipes for the Soviet
masses. Mikoyan brought back Yankee hamburgers and converted them to
Soviet kotleti—minced patties of meat or vegetable, breaded and “fried up to a wicked
crunch” that were to fill Russian stomachs ever after—at least, in prosperous times.
Von Bremzen gives the recipe for kotleti in her addendum; but she gives no
recipe for the 1940s, the decade that saw the catastrophic Siege of Leningrad, during
which 7-year-old Frumkina once lost a whole month of food-ration cards. When the
little girl piled the coupons on a bakery counter, starving grownups snatched them:
“Fingers swarming the counter like tentacles—gnarled, blackened digits; gaunt fingers
with white anemic nails; red swollen fingers.” By the 50s, though, bread, potatoes, and
Provensal mayo had returned to Soviet shelves, even if everyone had to stand in line
for it. “Your average homo sovieticus spent a third to half of his nonworking time
queuing for something,” von Bremzen writes. By the time of Putin’s accession, in
2000, the lines had thinned: there was now enough food for everybody; that is,
everybody who could afford it.
115
In Moscow in 2011, where she had traveled to shoot a cooking show on newly
hip Soviet cuisine, assisted by an ex-Kremlin chef named Viktor Belyaev, von
Bremzen found herself gawping at an elaborate feast Belyaev had resurrected, “a
Technicolor fantasia out of The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food—Politburo
dreambook edition.’” Chatting with Belyaev during the taping, she learned that, “pre-
Kremlin,” he had been a cook at Praga, the famous restaurant in Moscow’s quaint Arbat
neighborhood where von Bremzen and her family had once lived. Going to Praga to
pick up doughy Brezhnev-era kulebiakas and rich layered cream cakes in white paper
boxes had been a cherished childhood rite. In Putin’s Moscow, she learned, Praga had
gone on the block, “to be converted, no doubt, into a post-bling elite playground.”
Seeing scaffolding surround this monument to her Soviet youth, she writes, “I felt as if
some dear old grandparent had died.” To von Bremzen’s confusion, young Russian TV
producers, eavesdropping on her reminiscences, “lapped up my socialist
misadventures.” She asked them, “But isn’t Moscow full of people who remember the
USSR a lot better than I do? I mean, “I’m from New York!” A crew member explained,
“Here we have mishmash for our memory. But an émigré like you—you remember
things clearly.”
Von Bremzen remembers, but she also researches. After reading her account of
the origins of the fish-in-aspic that had spooked me in Moscow in the ’90s, I longed to
try it again, my appetite whetted by the spice of history. This delicacy, she explains,
was born in the era of the czars, reviled as a damnable bourgeois relic after Lenin’s
rise, then rehabilitated by Stalin as a form of gustatory patriotism. The Soviet dishes
he exalted were not mere sustenance, they were “shining political symbols, furthering
the illusion that czarist indulgences were now accessible to the masses.” Of course,
these indulgences were never widely accessible; not in the age of the czars; not under
Stalin, not under Brezhnev, not under Yeltsin, and not now, under Putin, for the
“shallow-pocketed.” But the struggle to attain them has always been open to all; and
in Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, Anya von Bremzen lets Russians and non-
Russians alike savor the aroma of illusory empire—eternal, indestructible, and in the
imagining, ochen’ vkusno.