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Приложение 7
Beyond borscht: a food tour of Russia
There’s much more to Russian cuisine than sour cream, beetroot and dill, as this
culinary journey from St Petersburg to Moscow proves
At Taste to Eat, a contemporary restaurant with a distinctly SEO-unfriendly name in
St Petersburg, I am about to plunge into a chicken kiev, its heart bursting with garlic.
Over the past five days I have eaten hot pyshki doughnuts covered in sugar, scarfed
down herring under fur coats, and gobbled barley porridge with blood sausage. I have
looked askance at beef wobbling in grey-brown aspic. I’ve tasted mead and pickled
mushrooms where you can practically taste the mud on the fingernails of the people
who made them. I have had borscht (exceptional) and borscht (execrable) and borscht
(middling). In tearing the pizza-like crust of a katchapuri and dipping it in its central
egg and molten cheese vat, I have learned the joys of Georgian cuisine. Despite all this,
I worry I am no closer to answering the question I set out to answer: what’s Russian
food actually like?
This is a culinary immersion into Russia organised by Intrepid, a travel company
that likes its visitors to get under the skin of the destination. Clearly it is not without a
sense of irony. After all, a Russian culinary tour sounds about as paradoxical as an
English weather tour or, I suppose, an English culinary tour.
“Part of the inspiration for this trip was knowing that Russia had so much more
to offer,” says Neil Coletta, a trained food anthropologist who oversees Intrepid’s food
tours. “But home cooking is so important here and it can be difficult to discover if you
don’t know where to look.” In many countries, what and how people eat is changing
quickly, but Russian food finds itself in the grip of recent specific political
circumstances, as is made clear when a man offers me a cheese sample under the domed
concrete roof of Moscow’s Danilovsky Market, near the Moskva river.
This used to be one of the city’s busiest farmers’ markets, where Muscovites
would come for their weekly shop. Like so many across Europe it has evolved into
something more hipster. There are craft ales, smoothies, sushi and plenty of other
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concessions that would not feel out of place in Lisbon or London, but others are more
specific to the region: meats from Dagestan; cloudberry and dogwood jams from
Karelia, on the border with Finland; dried apricots and nuts from Tajikistan; Armenian
stuffed vine leaves; chafing dishes piled high with Uzbek plov, rice cooked with carrot,
onion, raisin and tender chunks of mutton.
“What is it?” I ask the cheesemonger.
“Gorgonzola,” he replies, with a grin. I eat it and raise an eyebrow. There’s a bluishness
to it, but it has none of gorgonzola’s creaminess or texture.
“Not gorgonzola,” I say.
“Yes, gorgonzola.”
Our guide, Xsenia, steps in to explain. “The EU embargo was a positive kick for
our farmers to do something different,” she says. “Before 2014, we would import
cheeses, but now local providers and ordinary people are doing their own.” In other
words, Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea has been an unexpected boon for
Russia’s artisan food producers. Russian authorities are said to have destroyed 20,000
tonnes of banned produce, so the locals are making do. There aren’t any naming
restrictions, either, when you have nothing more to fear from EU regulation. Those
planning to make their own Brexit brie may find this heartening.
There’s more to life than sour cream, beetroot and dill, in other words, which is not the
same as saying those things don’t feature at all. As wonderfully haute as cuisine
Russe can be, much of what we eat is obviously informed by Russia’s size, its climate
and its history of economic hardship.
The trip involves several definitions of “home cooking”, and dill, the spindly
green monster of a national herb, is never far away. The first night in Moscow we visit
Mari Vanna, a smart restaurant done up like a babushka’s living room, a haven of purest
chintz, with doilies, floral wallpaper and a snoozing cat. Waiters bring out pickles and
potato-and-mayo-based Olivier salad, herring ”under a fur coat” with its
Instagrammable rainbow layers of grated beetroot, onion and mayonnaise, and various
sorts of pelmeni dumping. The meal is jolly right up to the moment I discover there is
a branch in Knightsbridge.
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Next morning we head out to Suzdal, a holy town a short train ride from
Moscow, in the Golden Ring of similar sites that surrounds the capital. Its remoteness
saved it during the Soviet industrialisation, as nobody could be bothered to knock the
churches down, and now its many bell towers endure as a lure to tourists. A couple of
bored-looking men were selling mushrooms and pine-cone jam in irregular jars. A
different kind of attraction is the house of Helen Polezhaeva, a charismatic former chef
who now offers at-home classes to Intrepid’s visitors. She teaches us the secrets of
borscht, which she prepares using ingredients from her sprawling kitchen garden,
where the bearded irises are in flower between the rows of vegetables. “Women must
learn to cook borscht before they get married,” she explains. For some borscht is
shorthand for dodgy former Soviet-bloc cooking, dour purple gruel. In Helen’s hands
it becomes something else entirely, rich and sour and sweet and perfectly balanced,
which is lucky, as she gives the impression she, and many others, still eat a lot of it.
While Moscow might have the more dynamic restaurant culture, it is in St Petersburg
that the clashing forces in Russian cuisine are clearest. On opposite sides of Nevsky
Prospect, the city’s most famous road, which has more than 140 restaurants, are two
types of canteen. Stolovaya No 1 Kopeika is a traditional Soviet-era spot, where anyone
can come for a cheap lunch of average soups and dumplings. If you picture “Soviet
canteen”, you’re right. Down the street is Marketplace, an international version of the
same concept, where for three times the prices you can eat blackened cod and sushi
and pasta and drink flat whites and international beers.
Back at Taste to Eat, as I consider the kiev, I wonder if there’s a lesson to be
drawn from the contradictions of Russian cooking. How it is fiercely protective of its
traditions, but open to certain kinds of innovation; how it is susceptible to the forces of
globalisation even as embargos make trade impossible; how its politicians project a
froideur at odds with the hospitality of its people. About how genuinely weird its
attachment to dill is. But then I am offered another toast, the same as last night’s: to
new friends, and so I drink up.
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Приложение 8
A problem much bigger than Putin
More than 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the attempt to build
a democracy in its place, Russia has once again become an authoritarian state. The
same inability to build democratic institutions plagued the leaders of the February
Revolution of 1917, which led to the Bolsheviks gaining power later that year.
Russian authoritarianism has profound consequences not just for Russian citizens, but
also for neighboring countries and the rest of the world. Still burdened by a “besieged
fortress” mentality, the Kremlin pursues a foreign policy aimed at achieving a “balance
of forces” between Moscow and the West.
This outdated strategy creates a hysteria for military adventurism that threatens
the entire planet. Pro-Kremlin propagandists such as Dmitry Kiselyov, a well-known
state TV host, have even suggested that “aggressive behavior” from the United States
could prompt a nuclear response from Russia.
It is not surprising that the Kremlin is using disinformation and other dirty
tricks to sow confusion in Western countries and undermine faith in democratic
systems. Russia’s leaders are convinced that Western democracy is a threat to the
authoritarian order in a country they have cowed into submission.
For Moscow, this is a zero-sum game: Any weakening or discrediting of
democracy can benefit only the Kremlin’s system of rule. But this is shortsighted. The
rupture of the Western alliance could create serious instability throughout the world,
exposing Russia to dangers it would likely be unable to manage.
To find an alternative system of government, Russian democrats like myself
need to make sense of our country’s unfortunate history. Doing so raises the inevitable
question: Do Russia’s size, political culture and distrust of the Western world make it
unsuitable for democracy?
Absolutely not.
I reject the fallacy that Russians are somehow incapable of building democratic
institutions. People said the same thing about the Germans. How wrong they were.
Countries and their citizens do change, usually in response to their own failures.
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The majority of Russians have never experienced democratic institutions and
don’t understand how they function. But Russians who have moved to the West have
adapted quickly and easily to democratic conditions. They see how democracy protects
individual rights and property, and allows societies to flourish.
Despite an insufficient understanding of democratic practices, Russia today has
tens of thousands of civic organizations defending civil rights. A 2012 survey from the
Pew Research Center showed that a majority of Russians support honest elections and
a fair judiciary. The Russian people want their voices heard and their leaders held
accountable: They want a different political system.
To avoid the mistakes of the past, we need to determine why Russia’s two
attempts to establish democracy in the 20th century led to new authoritarian regimes.
In both cases, having overthrown one tyrant — the czar in 1917 and communism in
1991 — Russia ended up handing over power to another.
How did this happen?
At the beginning of the 20th century, conservatives and liberals were unable to
find a common language to discuss a democratic foundation for Russia. As a result, the
most reactionary faction within the governing elite came to dominate after the
revolution of 1905, stymieing the development of democratic reforms.
After the overthrow of the czar in 1917, democracy once again lost out. The
Bolsheviks were in essence just as autocratic as the reactionaries who came before
them, only with the opposite “ideological polarity.” They may have managed to swap
the minus and plus signs in a few places, but the Bolsheviks were never able to break
free of the magnetic field of Russian authoritarianism.
History repeated itself with the rise of Boris Yeltsin, even though he was
Russia’s first popularly elected leader. In the early 1990s, the new president was
granted extraordinary constitutional powers, with victorious liberals referring to Mr.
Yeltsin as “czar.” When Vladimir V. Putin was first elected president in 2000, the
former K.G.B. lieutenant colonel inherited a system perfectly designed to sustain
Russia’s authoritarian traditions.
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A significant part of the Russian opposition today, unlike opposition movements
in the West, sees democratic rights as emanating not from balanced political
representation, but from the appointment of a “good czar.”
This tendency to pursue a magnanimous ruler instead of democratic institutions
forces ambitious political leaders to seek public support by relying on the force of their
own personality rather than on a clear political program. To win, politicians need to
create an image of a “strong leader.”
The challenge facing democratically minded Russians therefore isn’t simply to
remove Mr. Putin from power; it’s to replace the authoritarian system he personifies.
The events of 1917 and 1991 teach us that the Kremlin cannot establish democracy by
decree, and that democratic institutions will not spring up across the whole of Russia’s
territory at once.
The process must begin with the political transformation of European-oriented
Russia and its cities: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk, among
others.
These urban centers can demonstrate to the rest of the country how a majority of
the voters can respect the minority, and vice versa, by bringing decision-making closer
to the people and by holding officials genuinely accountable.
When Russian society becomes aware of its own power, its people will find the will to
develop a dynamic local democratic culture and the institutions required to support it.
The most important task is to create a justice system based on the rule of law rather
than on arbitrary power.
