19 September 2010

Cooking With Lenin


(Lenin Plate. Artist unknown. Photo Socotra)

We won’t get to all the crap we need to before it is all over, I know that. But I did get around to one thing this weekend that the pool closes and life as I have known this summer ends abruptly. Soon it will be Oktoberfest and simmering stews and sauces.
I was contemplating a concoction in the frying pan and glanced at the decoration to the right of the stove. I bought the plate from a merry artist at the Vernisage flea market at Ismailovo Park in Moscow in 1998. The Kenyan Doctor will remember the day. We were stuck in the Russian capital due to some political shit-storm between the governments; we were supposed to be in Saint Petersburg and some closed city in Siberia, but since we were a DoD group, we were hostage to the bureaucrats.

What had been intended to be an intensive course of immersion in Russian space launch capabilities turned into a sort of government-funded vacation.

We loved it. We were ensconced in the four-star new Marriot hotel and had the weekend to go to the gigantic outdoor shopping market, full of all sorts of Russian souvenirs, crafts and military surplus that washed up in the wreckage after the end of Lenin’s great and horrifying experiment.

It was May, as the season changed from Spring, and bracing in the cool sharp air. If you go, don’t forget to bargain hard and look for the shashlik (kebabs) with flat bread. They are easy to find. Follow your nose to the savory smoke from the grills. At the time, anything in Russia could be purchased there, up to, and probably including, suitcase nuclear devices.

The area is easily accessible by Metro, which is the great difference between the capital of the Free World and the former capital of the one that wasn’t. They had working public transportation.

We traipsed down to the station that serves the "dark blue" line and took it to the Partizanskaya station, where we exited and followed the crowds for a couple hundred yards until we reached the Vernisage entrance.

Saturdays and Sundays are the only days when the Vernisage is really much of an attraction, and I was boggled to see a Russian in the full fatigue dress of an American Air Force Senior Master Sergeant near the gate. We spent the day filling up duffel bags of crazy stuff to keep and give away. Old Soviet Army caps festooned with commemorative badges; nested dolls with Yeltsin and Putin in the middle, icons, and of course The Lenin Plate.

In the course of this wild decade, the Plate, with Lenin looking down at his pocket watch with the wild lettering around him, wound up on the wall of Tunnel Eight next to the gas stove.

I look at him with each meal I prepare. Oh, I should mention this now, the indoor cooking season will commence next week and I have a most triumphant recipe for peanut soup that we will try this week, so stand by. I was contemplating that when I actually looked at Lenin.

He, or at least his image on the plate, had settled into the landscape. I saw him suddenly as what he was- the transformative figure who personally made our world lurch on its axis.

I am an American, and illiterate in any language but my own. I can puzzle out Cyrillic letters only because we were forced to learn the Greek alphabet in order to survive hell-week at the Fraternity. But as I scooped sauerkraut into the skillet to simmer with the last of the smoked kielbasa I brought back from Michigan yesterday, I realized I had a source who could tell me what the hen-scratches around the paunchy little Lenin meant.

Svetlana is a lovely dark-eyed woman who appeared one day two years ago as my Subcontracts Manager. In that position, she was responsible for keeping the books in order for several dozens of millions of dollars worth of work, and incidentally keeping me out of jail in the process.

We worked in different locations, and her rich savory Russian-accented English on the telephone was the first thing I noticed about her. She is highly intelligent, a rocket scientist by training, with time at the famed Kurchatov Institute. The physics institution was coincidentally one of the places we visited on the trip that produced the plate.

Life is strange, indeed. Sveltlana was originally from Yalta, and had a good daughter and a bad marriage in Moscow and came to America to make her fortune on her own. She is a very impressive woman of great determination and dramatic dark Slavic eyes.
I took the picture of the Lenin Plate with the camera function of my cell phone and e-mailed it to her, with the plea to help with a translation. Despite it being the weekend, she promptly responded.

“Around the rim,” she texted me back, “there are two slogans: "Damn the Bourgeoisie is the first, and the second is "Go to hell capital."

Fair enough, I thought, and I have an inclination to agree based on what has happened to us in the last couple years. I read on.
“Behind Lenin's image is the text of the first declaration issued on 26 October 1917 by the Revolutionary Government - " Decree on Peace " to stop war with Germans. See details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_on_Peace <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_on_Peace> ,” she wrote briskly.

“Across Lenin's belly in red letters is his citation: "Time works for peace, for communism".

Svetlana provided the context, too. “The entire text is in old Russian alphabet. Lenin's Government had changed that too. Alphabet was modernized. They also updated calendar to catch-up with the rest of the civilized world. Thus the Revolution happened on 25 October 1917, which almost immediately became November 7th.

"FYI," she added efficiently, "In the early hours of October 26, 1917 ("morning after"  - Svetlana comment) the Second Congress of the Soviets adopted a proclamation drafted by Lenin which declared the Provisional Government overthrown and laid out the new soviet government's program: an immediate armistice "on all fronts," transfer of land to peasant committees, workers' control over production, the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, bread to the cities, and the right of self-determination to all nations inhabiting Russia.”

“That very evening,” she continued, “the Congress met for a second time and took three actions: decrees on peace and land, and the formation of a new government.”

“Are you impressed?”

"Regards, Svetlana.”

Of course I was impressed. On so many levels. Of the artist, of the translator, and of the whole failed experiment in attempting to chang the way humans work with one another.

Pity that so many millions had to die about it.

I will certainly not cook the same way with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin looking on again.


(The man who changed his world. Photo Archives of USSR).

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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