The Last Hero

Thinking about the Soviet Union in the 1980s may not bring to mind images of a vibrant rock-n-roll culture, but it should. The 2008 musical film Stilyagi directed by Valery Todorovsky shed light on a forgotten sub-culture of soviet youth in the 1950s and 60s. In the years following Stalin's death the public was breathing easier and groups of hip young people who loved anything American, especially jazz and flamboyant clothing, suddenly added risqué splashes of color to an otherwise tired and frightened social landscape. But the plot of the film is complimented by songs and music from the the legends 80s Russian rock. The result? A reminder that the Union was not quite as gray, lifeless, and repressed as western media propaganda and grandparents' war memories would have you believe.

While the characters of Todorovsky's film idolize American jazz culture and fashion, by the 80s people like my parents had some home-grown heroes to emulate. The Russian rock scene was born and raised in underground recording studios and the legendary Rock Club of Leningrad. Among the dozens of bands who got their start at the Club and eventually became astronomically popular throughout the Soviet Union, the undisputed kings of the era were Kino and their charismatic lead singer Viktor Tsoi.

Kino was not the first rock group to spawn at a time when the decrepit choke-hold of the aging and ailing Soviet leaders over society was loosening to a livable cuddle. In fact, the groups first studio album, 45, was recorded and produced only due to the help of the already established and well-connected Boris Grebenshchikov of Akvarium. Nevertheless, Tsoi's unique sound, unbridled energy, mostly apolitical lyrics, and constant allusions to the type of existence experienced by most young people at the time earned him a wildly enthusiastic cult following - KinoMania.

So how were they living? Tsoi's personal story and lyrics prove just as insightful as my parents' photographs and their friends' memories. The singer was born in 1962 into a regular family: his mother was a teacher and his father (half-Koren) was an engineer. After flunking out of art school as a teenager, Tsoi was trained as a woodcutter at a vocational school in Leningrad and also worked nights at a heat-only boiler station. By 1981, restless and bored of the uniform, providential existence shared by Soviet citizens, Tsoi started playing in Leningrad rock bands and soon founded his own with a friend.

The lyrics of 45 speak of the mundane things familiar to any young person living in Leningrad at the time: There is time but no money/ and there's no one to visit; You found out that somewhere they're drinking wine/and somewhere else one hears music/ you're called to where they are drinking; I'm crushed by winter, I'm sick and I sleep/and sometimes I'm sure that winter is forever; Everyone says I must become someone/but I would like to just remain myself; There is a pan on the floor, the gas is on/a snap, and the gas is off/ it's time to sleep - to bed/Get up. I have to get up tomorrow.

The explicit simplicity of the subject matter is at times combined with more implicit references to familiar elements of life. In the song "Elektrichka" Tsoi alludes to having to go see the doctor instead of taking the train to where he doesn't want to go anyway (school or work). In order to avoid completing mandatory army service in the Soviet Union, many young men, including Tsoi, checked into a psychiatric hospital for some time thereby receiving permission not to participate in the army.

The song "Alluminevie Ogurzi" (Aluminum Cucumbers) was inspired by and references mandatory agricultural work at collective farms in which all students were require to participate during the summer and fall. Meanwhile, Vosmiklassniza (8th Grade Girl) talks about the way Tsoi courts a young girl from his vocational school. The girl is dressed in clothes and cosmetics borrowed from her sister and mother; elsewhere, Tsoi mentions having outgrown clothes that were sown for him. The unavailability of original and interesting clothing in the Union, combined with the youth's intense desire to have better clothing than that offered by the state retailers made tailoring, hand-making, hand-me-downs, exchange, and various black markets an indispensable part of life.

One of the most salient topics in 45 and on Kino's subsequent albums is partying, drinking, and sitting in the kitchen all of which, combined with very long, dreary, and dark winters in the city, were inextricable to the atmosphere of the period. Of course, these things don't sound like particularities of Soviet, Russian, or 80s life, but the way they are mentioned repeatedly and Tsoi's wistful tone à propos underlines and immortalizes the kind of parties that went on, what people were drinking, why they were sitting in kitchens, and the grey background of the unfriendly climate.

Tsoi and probably most of his friends, just like my parents and their friends lived in small apartments with their parents and in some cases a sibling built throughout the 60s outside of the ares of Leningrad's pre-revolutionary and Stalinist construction most of which had been converted to large, cramped communal apartments. These single-family one, two, three, or four-room apartments, though a significant improvement from communal living, usually ended up just as cramped and uncomfortable. People married early but it was next to impossible for young people to obtain separate apartments so most continued to live with their families.

The only place for friends to gather, drink, eat, and socialize at night were people's kitchens. Life happened in the kitchen. My own memories of childhood birthday parties and new year's celebrations would not be complete without tiny kitchens full of parents, cigarette smoke, and various adult food and beverages. By the early 90s of course, the choice of alcohol had slightly diversified.

Tsoi's "Moi Druz'ya" (My Friends) is a perfect summation of this atmosphere:

I came home and as usual

I'm alone again, my house is empty

But suddenly my phone w ill ring

And they will knock on the door

And yell from the street

That that's enough sleeping

And a drunk voice will say -

Give me something to eat

...

My house was empty,

Now it's full of people

As usual, my friends

Are drinking wine there

And someone has occupied the toilet

Having broken the windo w long ago

And I admit that I don't really care

...

And I laugh, even though

I don't always find things funny

And I get really mad when they tell me,

That I can't live like this, like I am now,

But why, I'm living aren't I,

No one has an answer to that.

Why did Tsoi become such a hero, inspiring armies of "idlers"" clad in black? Why, after his tragic death in a car accident in 1990, did thousands of young people run away form home to camp out at his grave? Why did some commit suicide?

He simply stood for everything that generation stood for. And for many disenchanted by Soviet life and empty state propaganda, his was the only trustworthy voice. In those years no one really had to worry about things like paying for college or getting a job afterwards. All the big decisions in life were basically made for you already. What was left then, was a certain existential malaise which people tried to express through attempts at non-conformity in clothing, or drug use, or playing in a rock band. Tsoi didn't care about school and worked at a boiler station, that made him cool. He talked about how everyone was living at the time and despite the simplicity, it became glamorous. His lyrics and his persona created a sort of anti-hero everyone aspired to be, an antithesis to the successful university students and correct citizens most parents wanted their children to become. His tragic death was the symbolic death of the voice of a generation and it punctuated the end of an era.

The 80s in the U.S.S.R. were a time of tremendous energy, restlessness, and hope. "Everyone thought that we were about to really start living," a friend of my mom's once described it. Only this didn't happen. Instead came the 90s and a year after Tsoi's death Russian rock, along with everything and everyone else lost it's innocent and youthful aspirations. The country fell apart and musicians, just like everybody, had to face the realities of crude, corrupt, uncontrolled capitalism and a completely dysfunctional state. Dreams of

non-conformity and and the desires for change suddenly seemed moot and childish. Everyone had to start making money, Tsoi was dead, and the rest of the Leningrad rock scene moved into an era of great lyrical skepticism and aggression against the system that betrayed them.

Special thanks to Maxim Miroshnikov and for photographs 2&5

A Russian in Paris

A few days after arriving in Paris, I decided to check out the old stomping grounds of the White Army Immigrants. Located in the western section of the city, about a five minute’s walk from the Arc de Triomphe, I found Rue de la Néva, Rue Pierre le Grand, and the Aleksandr Nevsky Cathedral.

It was a Saturday morning, and this wealthy residential quarter was empty and quiet. As I walked up Rue Pierre le Grand towards the Byzantyno-Muscovite style Cathedral I started noticing little papers inconspicuously glued to drain pipes "Serious young woman looking for work." "Nanny looking for work, serious young woman." "Serious young student looking for work." they all read like eerie carbon copies of each other. The bottom parts of each little announcement was cut into fringes with phone numbers. Most of the flapping little fingers on all of them were still intact.

At the corner of Rue Pierre le Grand and Rue Daru I saw a giant kitschy Russian restaurant called Petrograd. The facade was made to look like a a village log cabin, painted in red, and carved with various russo-slavic insignia and imperial symbols. I wondered inside despite the initial repulsion at seeing the cheapest thing on their menu: espresso for 8 euros ($10). The interior was just as successfully living up to every Russian stereotype. EVERYTHING was red, the place settings were Khokhloma-decorated wooden bowls, spoons, and napkins. The walls were almost entirely covered by pictures of various members of the Romanov family, Shishkin and Repin reproductions, and wood carvings of churches and villages. The only person inside was the proprietor. Middle-aged and bald, he was lazily talking to someone on a cellphone and asking what he was expected to do to "him", "perform a trepanation of the skull?"

Finding that much Russian-ness revolting even to me, I left, crossed the street and entered into the garden surrounding the Cathedral decorated by Sorokin, Bogoliubovm, and Benois, which housed the first marriage of Picasso to Olga Khokhlova and the wakes of Turgenev and Tarkovsky.

I walked to the priest's house in the corner of the garden to which were attached two large announcement boards. These two were completely covered by announcement of people looking for work. Not a single one proposed jobs. The frilled papers ruffled int the breeze and stared glumly at me, chanting the same words mostly in french and sometimes in Russian: young, serious, woman, nanny, cleaning, ironing...

As I turned back toward the Cathedral I saw four women sitting on the steps. I wondered over and struck up a conversation. They too had attached their little frilled ads to the hundreds of others already wallpapering the announcement boards. Two of the women were from Moldova and two from Ternopil, Ukraine. None of them spoke any French and they had all been there for three months with no luck in the job market.

For a while we talked about the different ways of finding jobs in the city and then I asked them if they planned on returning to the Ukraine. "Yes!" one woman replied without hesitation. "But you see, I can't return empty-handed, so I need to make some money here before i go back."

She went on, "I have a child back home, so I'm working and trying as hard as I can for him. I don't need any of this! I don't need Paris! But I need money for my family, and over there everything is just a mess! With the crisis and the elections life is not getting better. I don't even want to talk about it!"

She paused but continued after a moment, "the people in the government just don't have a good head on their shoulders! We need someone who's not of our nationality to take over. We need someone like a German to come in there and set things straight!"

I wondered then what they thought about France in general, and if they liked it here. The same woman replied, "I haven't thought about it yet, whether I like it here or not, I need to make some money, that's all I care about right now. If things get better in our country I can go back, if not, I guess I'll keep trying elsewhere."

Her friend chimed in after a moment. "The French aren't our kind of people, they don't talk to each other very much, our neighbors don't acknowledge us, even my little son understood that. At first he came here with me, but the he went back. He missed the Ukraine very much. We would go to parks here and try to see things, but he just didn't feel free, he knew it wasn't his country. When he got back he said to his grandmother 'I'm free here in the Ukraine!' And he's only five years old!"

"There is so much money here, and things work, but everyone is so isolated from other people," the first woman continued, "No one here will ever help you for nothing. It's every one for himself. I suppose you can find good people anywhere, but it's so hard to get our bearings. Here you are no one even if you had a good education in Ukraine! I mean, we all had educations and all worked, but no one got paid. And then we get here, and our educations don't mean a thing, all we want is to get paid, but now there's no work."

After a while they had to get going since the afternoon was drawing to a close and no one had come to the church looking for maids or nannies. "At the end of the day, we're all walking under God's eye," the first woman said decisively, almost to herself, "the entire Earth is under Him. And no matter what you say, things don't depend on you, they don't depend on the person, everything depends on God. Things will be as they will be. A person may try to control his fate, say 'I want this, I want that,' but really everything depends on Him. I'm a believer and that's what I think."

We said good bye to each other and I walked past the beckoning announcement boards back into Paris.

Blokada

For as long as I can remember the word blokada has been said and talked about around me.

Blokada, or blockade, a word as inherent to my place of birth as White Nights and granite-bordered canals. The 900-day siege of Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) by the German forces between 1941 and 1944 has so deeply shaped the conscience of the city's life, culture, and collective memory that the thought of it is almost inescapable in personal and public life.

The word is almost as ubiquitous in my childhood memories as my grandmother's pies, trips to the Black Sea, and sound of boots crunching on snow. It was simply in everything. I remember knowing the word before I knew what it meant, like being familiar with milk before you know what it is.

I had a vague idea that it was something scary and bad, because whenever people said blokada their faces would get somber and a sort of respectful silence grew around the speaker. Yet there was nothing out of the ordinary about it, it wasn't a kind of hush that occurs at the mention of a taboo. It was like a big, black, fuzzy ball which would float through the streets of the city, and through people's homes, and through the museums, and sometimes floated by you and reminded everyone around of it's perpetual existence.

Blo-ka-da. Something black. Damp. Cold. When people remembered, they talked of rationing, and death, and the unbelievably cold winter. The siege continued through summer as well, but most stories never mention summer. The blackness and hunger consumed summer I think. No warmth was felt from the Sun's rays in those years, and no joy taken from bloom.

Many, many, many people died. As I got older I tuned in more to the details of Blokada, the painful exhaustion of the meager food supply after the city's supply lines were cut and warehouses bombed. There were cases of cannibalism in some homes, and other cases of whole families dying together, one by one. Someone once told me of the diary of Tania Savicheva, an eleven-year-old girl who survived but kept a diary, the following is its entire contents:

Zhenya died on Dec. 28th at 12:30 A.M. 1941

Grandma died on Jan. 25th 3:00 P.M. 1942

Leka died on March 5th at 5:00 A.M. 1942

Uncle Vasya died on Apr. 13th at 2:00 after midnight 1942

Uncle Lesha on May 10th at 4:00 P.M. 1942

Mother on May 13th at 7:30 A.M. 1942

Savichevs died.

Everyone died.

Only Tanya is left.

I'd like to also share two small personal stories. In a way, the reason I am able to write these words today is due to two unrelated animals: a shark and a cat.

My father's mother was four years old at the start of the siege. Her father had been arrested and killed by the NKVD in the 30s for being an "enemy of the people". Of course he was only a middle class, educated man from a bourgeois family with a wife descendant from German nobility. Since they were considered to be the family of an enemy of the people, my great-grandmother and grandmother were not allowed to evacuate with other people throughout most of the siege, and my grandmother once read to me the tearful letters her mother wrote to her older daughter who had been fortunate enough to be evacuated with her school. These letters were full of horrific descriptions of the bombing of the city, the pleading of her little daughter for food, and courageous statements of faith in the strength of the city.

However, at some point my great-grandmother found the spinal chord of a shark in some closet in her apartment, which had been brought back as a souvenir from distant travels by a relative or friend before the revolution. She made soup from the nutritious bone marrow which sustained her and my grandmother better than the 200 grams of barely edible bread they received each day. This, along with a couple of other lucky gastronomical breaks throughout the siege assured my own eventual existence after they were finally evacuated in 1942.

Meanwhile, my maternal grandfather's survival hinged on a cat. He was fifteen at the time and his friend and him were able to arrange to evacuate over the Road of Life. This was the name of the frozen-over lake Ladoga on the north-eastern side of the city, which was used to evacuate troops and civilians out of the city. They were taken up to walk ahead of an armed convoy of soldiers to test the ice. However, they had no food to take with them. The crossing would have likely proved fatal if the boys hadn't found a stray cat which my great-grandmother friend and packed for them. My grandfather lived to the age of sixty-nine thanks to that cat, but both of his older brothers died at the front. His father starved to death in the blockade.

But, even though that black, fuzzy, damp ball of memory still floats through the parks and kitchens of my city, the most important emotion left in its wake is courage. The undying memory of the courage of the citizens, and the belief that pretty much anything can be overcome.

Ole Ole Ole!!!

There is a phenomenon which transcends all political and cultural boundaries, all races, creeds, colors, genders, and ages. It can be found in any country in any part of the world and it has infiltrated every level of modern society, with the exception of middle America perhaps. I speak of soccer fandom of course.

On the trip back to Saint Petersburg from Saransk, our train had the honor of hosting a small but exceptionally rowdy group of soccer fans from Samara. They were traveling to the World Cup qualifying game between Russia and Finland being held in Helsinki on June 10 (for those interested, Russia won 3-0). These three middle aged men added a welcomed note of color and vulgarity to the otherwise sleepy and tired crowd filling the cars. At every stop the convoy made, they got out their colorful banners, scarves, and shirts, purchased lots of cold beer and dried fish from the old women, and made people take pictures with them and their fan club's flags.

On about the fifth stop, I finally decided to go talk to them after the train left the station and found the group in an open-compartment car full of rather exasperated passengers from Samara. It was evening and I was not surprised to find them all fairly intoxicated, loud, and incoherent. They did not tell me very much about themselves and one man was even uncomfortable having his picture taken, because, he said "I'm not supposed to be out of work on vacation until next Monday!"

Nevertheless, Evgeny, Yuri, and Aleksandr ended up explaining that they see 10 to 15 games live every year and take two or three big trips such as this one, which always include stops for photo ops with unsuspecting fellow passengers.

At one point, Yuri intercepted a pretty young train attendant and made me take a picture of her with him. "Come on, Lena!" he said, "It's for an independent newspaper called Tallinn 2000!" That this blog is actually a newspaper called Tallinn 2000 was news to me as well.

In their intoxicated exuberance, the men would break out into song every time one of them said something which reminded someone else of a song lyric. This would occur every couple of minutes. In my half hour or so with them, the only thing I was able to discern, aside from their destination, was that the coat of arms of the city of Samara features a goat. But alas,they could not explain the meaning of that symbol.

Before I left them, they did give me all of their numbers and email addresses, urging me to contact them at any time. I also got the official card of the "Volga Bastion", the Samara region's soccer fan club!

Whispered Secrets of the Erzia Museum

On our last day in Saransk, we decided to visit the Musum of sculptor Stepan Erzia. Erzia was of Mordovian origins but lived in Europe and Argentina for most of his life. Sculpting in a various materials from marble to concrete, he has come to be famous mostly for his work in the Amazonian quebracho wood.

The museum was a large, airy building dating to the 1970s with 90 sculptures occupying the top floor. As we wondered about the large open spaces of sculptures, it was a wonder to see how accurately Erzia captured emotions in the faces of his subjects. From terror to mirth, all human sentiments were captured with unique precision in the dark knots of the quebracho wood, or the white sparkling marble, or the perforated greyness of reinforced concrete.

After an uninspiring guided tour from a bleak middle-aged woman, I struck up a conversation with a museum worker who sat close by several sculptures of wildly dancing and swirling figures. To my astonishment, Ludmila Gregorievna was not only eager to talk about herself and ask me everything about my life, but also to reveal some fascinating secrets hidden in the works of Erzia themselves!

"I'm actually from Latvia, from a town 40 km away from Riga," she said, "my husband was in the military, he was transferred to Saransk to serve in 1992, and I've worked in the museum for the past nine years. I didn't know anything about Erzia before, being that I'm from Lativa, but since working here I've read plenty of books, and have listened to plenty of tours! A few years ago a woman from Yaroslavl even took an interview from me! She said she was going to write an article about me in her city."

I informed her that I had the same idea, and asked her about her favorite work. "This one," she pointed, "it's called 'The Dance'. But you know, it's not really a dance at all. It's the Fall of Man! 'The Dance' is just what the sculptor called it so that it wouldn't be destroyed when he came back from Argentina to the Soviet Union in 1950."

At this point she lowered her voice and continued in a hurried whisper: "When he came back religion was banned here, so he called it 'The Dance'. But over there you can see Adam, and Eve is coming out of his rib, on the other side. And over here, with the head bowed, that's a sad angel! It had big, big wings before but they were broken in the transportation. And all of them are falling, falling, falling down to the sinful earth! The real title of this sculpture is the 'Fall of Man'.

"And this other sculpture over here," Ludmila Gregorievna indicated, "called 'The Ballerina's Dance', that's no ballerina! It's a witch's dance! Look! She has hooves! I read a book where it was written that the real title was 'Witch's Dance'. See? You can see her wild, matted hair and she's naked!" she said excitedly. "Our tour guides around here say it's the 'Ballerina's Dance', but that's not true!"

"I like the 'Fall of Man'," she said thoughtfully, "I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm a superstitious person. I don't know. But I feel some kind of longing for God in my soul, I mean I'm not saying I'm an avid believer or anything! There's so much I don't know! But still, this sculpture agrees with me the most. All the young women that come around here taking pictures, I lead them all to that sculpture. I tell them 'Girls, take a picture next to Eve, so that you have success in marriage, and have kids, our human line started with Eve after all.' And they all leave very happy!"

We had to pay 100 rubles ($3) to photograph in the museum, and technically we weren't allowed to take pictures of the sculptures by themselves. But Ludmila Gregorievna whispered to my mother and I, "Listen, go pay, and then you can take your picture, just stand to the side a little bit but point the camera right at it. You don't necessarily have to get the person in the picture."

But the most fascinating exhibit at the the museum turned out to be the head of Vladimir Lenin which Erzia had carved upon his return to the Soviet Union. Unlike the flowing, naturalistic sculptures from the Argentine period, it was perfectly worked over so that no natural elements of the wood remained unaltered. This unassuming foot-tall replica of the Revolutionary leader's head was in fact the very thing that killed Stepan Erzia!

"He was old when he died. He tripped on that sculpture of Lenin, and hit his temple squarely on its nose, " Ludmila Gregorievna whispered again, "you can see his blood on the nose still! See the dark spots? He lay there for 3 days before they found him, the rats had started to eat him!"

But girls, you have to be quiet about this," she continued "don't tell anyone I told you! They didn't talk about it on Moscow's orders in former days, and they still don't like to speak of it now. I only found out after seven years or working here! There was a Finnish tour here, and their guide was the head of the Artists' Guild of Mordovia, and he was the one who said this. I watched really carefully when he was telling the story. You should have seen them! I thought those Finns were going to take that Lenin's head and carry it off they were so excited! I had to get in there and keep them away from it!

I marveled at her story, and wondered why our tour guide did not say anything about it. "You know, none of the other tour guides have ever mentioned anything!" she said, sharing in my bewilderment, "I don't know why! Go look at the nose! But by yourself, I'll stay over here. They don't' like me to talk about it."

"When he came back to the USSR, the soviet sculptors criticized him a lot," she said at length, "because they thought that nature did more to make his art than he did. See, some of these works are just pieces of wood and he made but a few carved lines! But this is true talent! To be able to see and reveal the hidden natures of these wood pieces. See, this is Socrates, and in the back it's just warped wood! Those who don't have talent, don't see the image. In Moscow, they made him make Social Realism, which was the norm at the time. But there he proved himself worthy as well. He worked on these later pieces until there was nothing natural left, there are eyes, and details of clothing, the hair, everything! But my favorite are the Argentine sculptures."

Before long I was surprised to find myself talking about intimate details of my life with Ludmila Gregorievna. We talked about my family and she asked all about how we ended up in America. I did the same.

She admitted that moving to Mordovia from Latvia was a difficult transition for her. "We have so much culture over there!" she said, "but here, all the women drink, and all the men drink, and they all curse in the buses and all over the place! The Moksha and Shoksha people are pretty crude. They can say mean things and even push you! At first I'd go to the market and wouldn't be able to get back, because I kept being pushed out of the way and couldn't get on the trolley! In Latvia, the men let the women in first, and the women let the children pass. Here everything is backwards. The men are the first to push you out of the way! But with time, I got used to it," she laughed, "and started to push as well!"

After a fascinating and enlightening half hour, I left Ludmila Gregorievna just as I had found her and she warmly wished me well. Passing Lenin's head and the swirling figures of Adam and Eve, I wondered at the life with which the sculptor had endowed them. I thought of the years he spent carving at one of the hardest woods in the world, and revealing in it the depth of human emotions and tragedies. And the irony of Stepan Erzia's story was that just as surely as he had made the wood, or stone, or cast come alive with the power of his art, so too was he killed at the hand (or more precisely at the nose) of his own creation.

Aunt Luba

The first thing my grandmother's sister Luba said to me was "Well! You're not nearly as fat as you looked on your pictures!" The first thing my grandmother said to her was "Luba! Aren't you wearing a bra?!" After affirming that she was, Aunt Luba pushed us all into the largest room of her Penza apartment and started accosting my grandmother.

"I know you're older than me Valia," she said "but I couldn't believe it when I heard that you were visiting our people in Saransk and you weren't even planning to come see me!" This was true. Although the city of Penza is just a two-hour drive away, my grandmother had not originally planned to see her sister whom she hadn't visited since 2003.

"You know my heart isn't as healthy as yours!" she continued, "So as long as you're able to, you've got to make the effort Valia!" The entire scene was made more humorous by the uncanny, twin-like resemblance of the two sisters. My grandmother accepted her younger sister's scolding meekly and then waved her hand and proposed to move on to a different subject.

Aunt Luba and her husband Uncle Petia live in a small, Kruschev-era apartment in the center of Penza. There were carpets all over the walls and plants cramped everywhere throughout the rooms. Aunt Luba loves homeopathic medicine. From gigantic cacti to extensive Basket Plant colonies, she knows the methods of cultivation, extraction, and consumption of all of her plants and was eager to share her knowledge on how to cure just about any ailment.

The other thing she loves to do is hassle her husband, who has gotten used to it after decades of conjugal life and throughout most of our visit sat at the head of the table, cracking witty jokes and laughing at Aunt Luba's beseeching.

Before retiring Uncle Petia was a highly prized worker at a factory in Pneza. He was even decorated by the Order of Lenin, the highest award given to Soviet civilians for outstanding service to the state. Large photographic portraits of him with his medals can be seen throughout the apartment.

Aunt Luba's health has been deteriorating with age (despite her consumption of homeopathic remedies), and she often calls emergency medical services to her apartment. But in the room where she receives the doctors, a portrait of herself has been conspicuously superimposed on the portrait of Uncle Petia. "They told me I'd get killed for that Order of Lenin," she explained, "if anyone I have coming in here saw that photograph. So I covered the medals with a picture of myself!"

At dinner we were joined by Aunt Luba's oldest daughter and her daughter, as well as the cousins from Saransk. We ate family staples such as potato salad, meatballs, and aspic and listened to stories of Uncle Petia's forgetfulness.

"A couple of weeks ago, he went to get his pension and after coming back home, he put the money and his passport somewhere and couldn't find it!" Aunt Luba exclaimed.

"Why do you bring your passport with you?" my Mom inquired.

"Well, I needed to get the pension and they won't give it to me without my passport," he explained.

Their daughter Lena also chimed in, explaining that she even came over from work and helped her father look for the passport all over the house. "We dug all over the house! He even went to the police to put in a report, just in case it was stolen or something. Then, at 11:30pm he calls me up and says 'I found it!'"

"Uncle Petia! You should just put it in the same place every time so you don't forget," my Mom advised.

"He knows perfectly well where we keep this stuff!" Aund Luba said, "In the kitchen, in a plastic bag, behind the butter in the refrigerator!"

It wasn't really made clear by anyone why she keeps her important documents back there. The cacophonous discussion of the sisters' money-storing habits, as well as the careless attitudes of the other family members towards them continued for some time. In the end Uncle Petia was the odd one out, as usual.

"You know, I looked it up in the encyclopedia, and I know what his problem is." Aunt Luba concluded, "He's got a bad head, that's what they call 'dementia'!"

The clearly lucid Uncle Petia only shrugged his shoulders.

Before leaving Aunt Luba initiated us into the methods of making Basket Plant extract which, as she said, "cures everything, and boosts the immune system."

Basket Plant - (Callisia fragrans). Also known as золотой ус, or "golden whisker" in Russian - Extract

Take an odd number of runner segments (15 or 17) and soak them in 1/2 liter of Vodka, in a dark place for 2 weeks. Then strain and drink one teaspoon of extract before every meal!

Map of my Travels this Summer

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