It's tusovka time!

Take it from those of us who lived in the former Soviet Union: the best way to survive fascism is to find your тусовка (likeminded pals) and hang out with them на кухне (in a cramped kitchen.)

Moscow, August, 1991. The sign says, “No fascism.” ©Deborah Copaken

Now that Putin has once again succeeded in dividing our nation and placing his puppet government in place—heck, even our mutual enemy the Taliban are psyched!—I’d like to call your attention to the Russian word tusovka. (тусовка¹)

Tusovka most likely comes from the Russian verb тасовать, meaning to shuffle, as in cards, as in getting together with friends to play cards, but that’s not really it. In fact, the word tusovka is difficult to translate into any language, let alone English, plus we didn’t really need to until now.

Roughly speaking, a tusovka—at least back in the early nineties, when I lived and worked in Moscow, and you could get arrested for criticizing the government or speaking with a foreigner like me without a minder present—was a group of likeminded and trusted individuals who would gather in each other’s cramped kitchens² to chat and speak their unfiltered minds with each other and with us foreigners. Not just about about the Orwellian indignities of living under the lies, hypocrisies, and terrors of a dictatorship, but about everything: the latest gossip, breakups, scandals; where to get bread when the bread stores were all empty; which government officials could be bribed with a meal at Pizza Hut and which preferred a bottle of Jack Daniels or a carton of Marlboros; the markets to avoid if you didn’t want to ingest radiation from Chernobyl with your tomatoes; or, related, where to buy a geiger counter.

Moscow, 1990. That’s baby me, age 24, second from left, with my tusovka.

Look, I know many of you are here just for the women’s health content. I get it. And I have plenty of stories about our bodies, their neglect, the war against them, and how to best deal with all of this in the pipeline. But when I scan the news and read that vaccine-denier RFK, Jr. plans to dismantle our healthcare system; or that a former Fox & Friends host will be running our military; or that Elon and Vivek will be in charge of some new and illegally-formed government agency in charge of “efficiency” and named for a cryptocurrency, this causes a severe and understandable spike in my own personal cortisol levels.

And—just a hunch—I imagine some of you might be dealing with the same.

High levels of cortisol, as we all know, are terrible for every single one of the internal systems keeping our bodies alive. And all I could think, when I read this morning’s headlines, is thank god I’ll be spending time with trusted friends tonight. Hence my advice for counterbalancing the next four years of internal dysregulation and stress: find your tusovka. Cook them a nice meal. Soak yourself in the health-giving, cortisol-fighting benefits of their laughter, stories, and love. Sit around your kitchen table, talking about how you’re feeling, what you’re planning to do to fight back against this nightmare, and how you plan to endure.

Moscow, August 20, 1991, mid-coup. A Russian couple standing on the barricades.

Tusovka is obviously not the solution to every one of our problems. God knows we have so much work to do right now to protect women’s bodily autonomy, the environment, our immigrant neighbors, the ACA, trans kids, our LGBTQ friends, the economy, foreign relations, the strength of our unions, the idea of truth, the guardrails of our judiciary, independent journalism, and a dizzying array of other issues, including American democracy itself. But there is grace and strength, I believe, in gathering in a kitchen; in sharing a hug or a joke or a good cry with a friend; in standing together by sitting together and sharing our thoughts and food and fears.

Back in 1991, it even led to a toppling of a superpower. And—at least until Putin took over as the next strongman in a long line of them—to the hope of a better, more equitable future.

The August 20, 1991 cover of USA Today. I didn’t climb on the tank to argue with its driver or to become the symbol of that day. I am short, I couldn’t see, a coup had just begun, and I needed a perch on which to do my job.

Addendum: I just got an email from my friend Alissa Quart, Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, after she read this missive. On Sunday, she penned similar thoughts in her organization’s newsletter! (When right wing extremists posted online for women to “get back in the kitchen,” I’m sure they weren’t thinking that we would hatch our plan to overthrow them therein.) EHRP, by the way, which was founded by the late Barbara Ehrenreich, funds and co-publishes journalism about economic inequality in the United States: a critical mandate, now more than ever.

1. Cyrillic lesson for тусовка: the у is an “oo” sound. The c is an s sound. The в is a v sound.

2. Because Moscow had a massive housing shortage, families were often made to double or even triple up in communal apartments originally built for one family. So the kitchen became the de facto gathering space.