The motherland’s tight embrace

At nursery school, along with her warm milk, little Lena Gorokhova imbibed the essence of survival in the post-war Soviet Union. It consisted of a game called vranyo — pretence:

My parents play it at work, and my older sister Marina plays it at school. We all pretend to do something, and those that watch us pretend they are seriously watching us and don’t know that we are only pretending.

The school teachers pretended that their pupils’ 100 per cent attendance at Young Pioneer meetings was unconnected with the padlocked door of the meeting hall. The women standing in line pretended they saw no contradiction between reports of record harvests and empty shops, or glittering construction projects and shoddy, just-built university dorms. As Lena becomes a teenager, vranyo smothers all her adolescent enquiries with a blanket of Soviet prudishness and hypocrisy. A Mountain of Crumbs is written above all with an almost painful tenderness that brought a lump to my throat more than once. Yet its vivid portrait of life during Brezhnev’s ‘stagnation years’ is also suffused with anger — the anger of a deceived generation.

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Woke was invented by angry schoolgirls

These days many Russians look back with nostalgia on the peace and relative plenty of the Brezhnev era, for which conformity seemed a reasonable price to pay. The fear running beneath the surface — like the subterranean garbageman who terrifies Gorokhova at nursery — was bearable compared to the horrors of the previous decades. Soviet society was split, however, between the generation who had survived famine, terror and war, and their children, born in milder times, who could not understand why such blind faith in the regime was necessary. Bright, questioning Lena directs her battles not so much against the regime as against her own mother, a woman of iron will who devoted her energies to keeping her family safe.