Culinary cultures of Europe: Russia 2
The Soviet era
‘I can’t wait for the communism to happen,
the time of limitless possibilities,
I could have a helicopter then
and my relatives could always phone me
if for example butter is on sale
in Rostov or some other USSR town
with my helicopter I just fly there from Moscow
and am on the spot in a jiffy, first in the queue for butter’
- one of the Soviet anecdotes (anonymous jokes) of the 1970-s, a great period for listening to anecdotes, one mostly didn’t get to jail for doing it like it was under Stalin.
After the mishaps of the Revolution and the five-year Civil War that followed the land was lying in ruins, all the festivities and most of the products that were before - a distant memory. Bread, flour and grain of any kind was scarce, meat - non-existent, tea was made of dried carrots, soup of anything one could find including old tea-leaves One of the results was the famine in the Povolzhye region of Russia (that was thoroughly depleted for army stoking purposes) that in 1922 claimed lives of over six million people (twice more than the number of previous Civil War victims). Then the Soviet government introduced the so-called New Economy Policy, a spot of capitalistic possibilities to boost up the frail position of the new state and build up the economy from scratch. In two or three years people began really gaining money, products appeared on the market, something finally began to work. Shortly afterwards Stalin and his government decided that NEP had fulfilled its purpose and there was no need of it any more. The State started unobtrusively suppressing NEP and bringing to prisons and working camps the new wave of citizens - those who were too eagerly capitalistic.
Collectivisation (making private fields, orchards, cattle, poultry etc. communal, in fact belonging to the state) of villages and industrialisation of towns followed. People in towns that held paid jobs dreaming of communism and time of plenty to come ate whatever they could get (at least there were cafeterias set up by the state) and never thought much about cooking (living as most of them did, four-five families to a communal apartment it was no easy feat to perform) - allegedly one of vices of bourgeois society. People in villages, their property confiscated by the state and almost all means for survival gone, began to starve again. New famine befell in 1933-1934 and exterminated over five million people in Ukraine, North Caucasus and Povolzhye.
There had been famines in 19th century Russia (the revolutionaries used to blame the Tsar and the inefficiency of his government for them) but never on such scale before, lost lives were at most counted by hundred thousands, not by millions… After collectivisation and industrialisation more political repressions followed. But on the surface the country was enthusiastically building up the future working round the clock (not surprising as the percentage of workers in camps and prisons was steadily increasing, and even being 20 minutes late for work landed one in the camp for several years of penal servitude together with thieves and murderers, to say nothing of ever growing numbers of political opponents and just people who had the bad luck of being associated with such). The good quality food was still scarce in the shops. Every little thing, such as obtaining 200 g of ham for a holiday dinner or buying ice-cream waffle stamped with one’s name (such ice-cream became history by the early 1950-s) brought one the feeling of happy achievement which was somewhat marred by the constant current of fear underneath and the expectancy to hear unwelcome footsteps at one’s door as friends, neighbors and relatives kept disappearing one by one.
Such was the life of society when the Soviet culinary manifesto ‘The book on tasty and healthy food’ first came out in 1939, quoting in the preface a little bit of Lenin and much more of Stalin - two greatest ‘authorities’ on everything in the USSR, including food. The main body of the book was made of the same recipes that appeared in Russian cookbooks (Molokhovets, Avdeeva, Radetsky etc.) before the revolution although much simplified with all fancy touches such as foreign names and expensive ingredients removed. Recipes of national dishes of some of the Soviet republics had been added, needless to say Georgian cuisine was the one most represented. There were no recipes for bread (only the making of sandwiches), and it was proudly noted that industrial breadmaking had completely prevailed over the home baking. As it was said in a later edition of the same book (preface to the 1952 edition): ‘The population must acquire the habit and taste for the semi-processed products, dry breakfasts (cornflakes etc.), concentrates, tinned products and all the rich and varied assortment of ready-to-eat and convenience factory foods’.
However the World War II interrupted the progress of food industry development. During the Leningrad blockade people trapped inside ate everything they could (my father, then a teenager, had eaten in all about 19 cats before he was finally evacuated in the ultimate state of emaciation) to survive on tiny rations (125 g of bread a day per person) and still died by thousands of starvation. Life in wartime Moscow was ultra-prosperous by comparison, rations were much higher and sometimes when one had connections one could get such luxuries as a 25 kilo-sack of potatoes… First years after the war were still very lean, and a supper at a hard’s working day night often included nothing more than a couple of stone-cold bluish potatoes and perhaps a boiled carrot or onion. Famine ravaged Ukraine and other USSR regions in 1946-1947 again. But by the early 1950-s products of every kind arrived back to the shops and it was possible notwithstanding the expenses to buy 25 g of caviar for a child recovering from a fainting spell or suffering of asthma to give their health a boost, nevertheless for most of the time people could afford only the cheapest food.
To keep people in good spirits after the war the government instituted many colourful festivities and even reintroduced the Christmas tree (it was prohibited in the 1930-s) as the New Year tree and encouraged New Year celebrations. This helped to distract people’s attention from Christmas that due to Russian Orthodox Church’s Julian calendar was unobtrusively celebrated the 7th of January. Believers had to conceal this fact because one could get into serious trouble over it. Maslenitsa (Shrovetide) and Easter were likewise celebrated very quietly in the close family circle. But whereas for Christmas people just baked some modern festive cake, they still made bliny pancakes during Maslenitsa and, for Easter, painted eggs (in consequence it was always difficult to get eggs before Easter), made paskha and baked kulichi as well as they could without good ovens, proper moulds and some of the traditional ingredients (one of my friends knew a very sophisticated woman who instead of missing spices used to put a drop of Chanel #5 in the dough, it worked wonders with the result).
Worldly festivities in the food aspect were no easy matter either. Going out to canteens, cafés and even restaurants for most of the time turned to be a grim experience. The preparation of every dish was codified by the state and the cook had no right to add something or alter an approved recipe even less so invent something different on his own. There were also serious stealing problems, the best ingredients never seemed to reach a simple consumer (the one from the street, who didn’t have any important connections). The result was that the served food was very rarely tasty, mostly it was bland and unappetizing and sometimes downright uneatable. Canteens had an especially bad reputation: thin burnt kasha, soups of grubby beetroot and other vegetables sporting black spots with bits of unidentifiable stringy meat floating about, ever-present kotlety (from French cotelette, once it meant ‘chops’ in Russian but in Soviet times because the name was much more often used with the ‘hashed’ epithet it came to mean meat patties) made with mincemeat that seemed to consist almost entirely of bread. Well ‘bread is the head of everything’ slogan hang in many canteens, and as bread was for free and wasted a lot, no wonder the canteen stuff making mincemeat preferred setting much of the valuable meat aside to themselves and using up lots of stale bread instead. In cafés and restaurants food was better but the service was agonizingly slow and waiters usually smug and rude snubbed the customers.
All this (at least the food quality problem) was due to the period of deficit (from early 1960-s to the end of 1980-s) that followed the improvement of the population’s financial position. As more and more persons could afford buying various foodstuffs the comparative abundance on the shop-shelves of the 1950-s began to disintegrate. It was partly triggered by the extremely bad harvest of 1962, in 1963 all the country was standing in long queues to get bread. After this is difficult to name even a single foodstuff that never vanished from the Soviet shops. It came in waves: months without sugar, months without butter, months without meat, months without rice etc. Some products, such as expensive caviar or cheap buckwheat, traditional Russian staple food, disappeared for years. Moscow being the capital was much better of than the rest of the country, its shops were better supplied so people from other towns came by special buses to get some food making the queues in the shops even longer and bought kilos of sausages to bring back to their families. There were even riddles about it ‘green long thing smells of sausage’ - ‘train from Moscow’, for sometimes they came by train, or ‘it stands slithering, eyes burning’ - ‘a queue after some deficit product’ and so on. Even if some foodstuff was available it was of very poor quality, for instance we never saw the better cuts of meat in the shops: all the best went to the special communist shops (where deficit problems never happened) that were open only to the members of the communist elite, and the good - to the friends and relatives of the butcher. I remember shortly after 1985 when the rules first began to change and the state control to slip walking with my mother in a small kebab shop (there were a lot of them at the time). We ordered two pork kebabs and they were so unusually tender and not difficult to chew at all, that we glanced at each other in dawning horror both sharing the same thought (‘It must be human flesh we are eating!’) and fairly flew out of the establishment abandoning our meal, although now I think it was probably just good pork…
The constant fruit and vegetable shortage (collective farms weren’t working too well) led the government in 1960-s-1970-s to enforce their dacha (country house) program: city people got a 600 square meter plot of land and built their country house and tried to grow their own fruit and vegetables for making preserves on it in their spare time. Sometimes this plot could be as far as a hundred kilometers from their home and they spent four or five hours getting to it (by train, then by bus, then on foot - cars were also deficit in those times). They had to bring their food along and stock as much as they could as almost nothing was available locally in the nearby villages except for some very bad bread, gray macaroni, matches and cakes of rough soap. In season the nearby woods could provide some berries and mushrooms but usually this didn’t last long the undergrowth becoming polluted and trampled out by hordes of eager ‘professional’ mushroom gatherers that came down at dawn with big baskets or pails by train specially instituted for this purpose.
Still as a result many of the Russians came to the end of the Soviet era well-stocked against every eventuality with homemade preserves, canned food, various cereals and legumes, salt and sugar put away in big glass jars etc. That helped a lot during perestroika especially in 1991, when one could find virtually nothing in the shops. After this the government had to let go its control of prices and the shop-shelves everywhere in Russia grew much fuller than they have ever been after the revolution.
‘I can’t wait for the communism to happen,
the time of limitless possibilities,
I could have a helicopter then
and my relatives could always phone me
if for example butter is on sale
in Rostov or some other USSR town
with my helicopter I just fly there from Moscow
and am on the spot in a jiffy, first in the queue for butter’
- one of the Soviet anecdotes (anonymous jokes) of the 1970-s, a great period for listening to anecdotes, one mostly didn’t get to jail for doing it like it was under Stalin.
After the mishaps of the Revolution and the five-year Civil War that followed the land was lying in ruins, all the festivities and most of the products that were before - a distant memory. Bread, flour and grain of any kind was scarce, meat - non-existent, tea was made of dried carrots, soup of anything one could find including old tea-leaves One of the results was the famine in the Povolzhye region of Russia (that was thoroughly depleted for army stoking purposes) that in 1922 claimed lives of over six million people (twice more than the number of previous Civil War victims). Then the Soviet government introduced the so-called New Economy Policy, a spot of capitalistic possibilities to boost up the frail position of the new state and build up the economy from scratch. In two or three years people began really gaining money, products appeared on the market, something finally began to work. Shortly afterwards Stalin and his government decided that NEP had fulfilled its purpose and there was no need of it any more. The State started unobtrusively suppressing NEP and bringing to prisons and working camps the new wave of citizens - those who were too eagerly capitalistic.
Collectivisation (making private fields, orchards, cattle, poultry etc. communal, in fact belonging to the state) of villages and industrialisation of towns followed. People in towns that held paid jobs dreaming of communism and time of plenty to come ate whatever they could get (at least there were cafeterias set up by the state) and never thought much about cooking (living as most of them did, four-five families to a communal apartment it was no easy feat to perform) - allegedly one of vices of bourgeois society. People in villages, their property confiscated by the state and almost all means for survival gone, began to starve again. New famine befell in 1933-1934 and exterminated over five million people in Ukraine, North Caucasus and Povolzhye.
There had been famines in 19th century Russia (the revolutionaries used to blame the Tsar and the inefficiency of his government for them) but never on such scale before, lost lives were at most counted by hundred thousands, not by millions… After collectivisation and industrialisation more political repressions followed. But on the surface the country was enthusiastically building up the future working round the clock (not surprising as the percentage of workers in camps and prisons was steadily increasing, and even being 20 minutes late for work landed one in the camp for several years of penal servitude together with thieves and murderers, to say nothing of ever growing numbers of political opponents and just people who had the bad luck of being associated with such). The good quality food was still scarce in the shops. Every little thing, such as obtaining 200 g of ham for a holiday dinner or buying ice-cream waffle stamped with one’s name (such ice-cream became history by the early 1950-s) brought one the feeling of happy achievement which was somewhat marred by the constant current of fear underneath and the expectancy to hear unwelcome footsteps at one’s door as friends, neighbors and relatives kept disappearing one by one.
Such was the life of society when the Soviet culinary manifesto ‘The book on tasty and healthy food’ first came out in 1939, quoting in the preface a little bit of Lenin and much more of Stalin - two greatest ‘authorities’ on everything in the USSR, including food. The main body of the book was made of the same recipes that appeared in Russian cookbooks (Molokhovets, Avdeeva, Radetsky etc.) before the revolution although much simplified with all fancy touches such as foreign names and expensive ingredients removed. Recipes of national dishes of some of the Soviet republics had been added, needless to say Georgian cuisine was the one most represented. There were no recipes for bread (only the making of sandwiches), and it was proudly noted that industrial breadmaking had completely prevailed over the home baking. As it was said in a later edition of the same book (preface to the 1952 edition): ‘The population must acquire the habit and taste for the semi-processed products, dry breakfasts (cornflakes etc.), concentrates, tinned products and all the rich and varied assortment of ready-to-eat and convenience factory foods’.
However the World War II interrupted the progress of food industry development. During the Leningrad blockade people trapped inside ate everything they could (my father, then a teenager, had eaten in all about 19 cats before he was finally evacuated in the ultimate state of emaciation) to survive on tiny rations (125 g of bread a day per person) and still died by thousands of starvation. Life in wartime Moscow was ultra-prosperous by comparison, rations were much higher and sometimes when one had connections one could get such luxuries as a 25 kilo-sack of potatoes… First years after the war were still very lean, and a supper at a hard’s working day night often included nothing more than a couple of stone-cold bluish potatoes and perhaps a boiled carrot or onion. Famine ravaged Ukraine and other USSR regions in 1946-1947 again. But by the early 1950-s products of every kind arrived back to the shops and it was possible notwithstanding the expenses to buy 25 g of caviar for a child recovering from a fainting spell or suffering of asthma to give their health a boost, nevertheless for most of the time people could afford only the cheapest food.
To keep people in good spirits after the war the government instituted many colourful festivities and even reintroduced the Christmas tree (it was prohibited in the 1930-s) as the New Year tree and encouraged New Year celebrations. This helped to distract people’s attention from Christmas that due to Russian Orthodox Church’s Julian calendar was unobtrusively celebrated the 7th of January. Believers had to conceal this fact because one could get into serious trouble over it. Maslenitsa (Shrovetide) and Easter were likewise celebrated very quietly in the close family circle. But whereas for Christmas people just baked some modern festive cake, they still made bliny pancakes during Maslenitsa and, for Easter, painted eggs (in consequence it was always difficult to get eggs before Easter), made paskha and baked kulichi as well as they could without good ovens, proper moulds and some of the traditional ingredients (one of my friends knew a very sophisticated woman who instead of missing spices used to put a drop of Chanel #5 in the dough, it worked wonders with the result).
Worldly festivities in the food aspect were no easy matter either. Going out to canteens, cafés and even restaurants for most of the time turned to be a grim experience. The preparation of every dish was codified by the state and the cook had no right to add something or alter an approved recipe even less so invent something different on his own. There were also serious stealing problems, the best ingredients never seemed to reach a simple consumer (the one from the street, who didn’t have any important connections). The result was that the served food was very rarely tasty, mostly it was bland and unappetizing and sometimes downright uneatable. Canteens had an especially bad reputation: thin burnt kasha, soups of grubby beetroot and other vegetables sporting black spots with bits of unidentifiable stringy meat floating about, ever-present kotlety (from French cotelette, once it meant ‘chops’ in Russian but in Soviet times because the name was much more often used with the ‘hashed’ epithet it came to mean meat patties) made with mincemeat that seemed to consist almost entirely of bread. Well ‘bread is the head of everything’ slogan hang in many canteens, and as bread was for free and wasted a lot, no wonder the canteen stuff making mincemeat preferred setting much of the valuable meat aside to themselves and using up lots of stale bread instead. In cafés and restaurants food was better but the service was agonizingly slow and waiters usually smug and rude snubbed the customers.
All this (at least the food quality problem) was due to the period of deficit (from early 1960-s to the end of 1980-s) that followed the improvement of the population’s financial position. As more and more persons could afford buying various foodstuffs the comparative abundance on the shop-shelves of the 1950-s began to disintegrate. It was partly triggered by the extremely bad harvest of 1962, in 1963 all the country was standing in long queues to get bread. After this is difficult to name even a single foodstuff that never vanished from the Soviet shops. It came in waves: months without sugar, months without butter, months without meat, months without rice etc. Some products, such as expensive caviar or cheap buckwheat, traditional Russian staple food, disappeared for years. Moscow being the capital was much better of than the rest of the country, its shops were better supplied so people from other towns came by special buses to get some food making the queues in the shops even longer and bought kilos of sausages to bring back to their families. There were even riddles about it ‘green long thing smells of sausage’ - ‘train from Moscow’, for sometimes they came by train, or ‘it stands slithering, eyes burning’ - ‘a queue after some deficit product’ and so on. Even if some foodstuff was available it was of very poor quality, for instance we never saw the better cuts of meat in the shops: all the best went to the special communist shops (where deficit problems never happened) that were open only to the members of the communist elite, and the good - to the friends and relatives of the butcher. I remember shortly after 1985 when the rules first began to change and the state control to slip walking with my mother in a small kebab shop (there were a lot of them at the time). We ordered two pork kebabs and they were so unusually tender and not difficult to chew at all, that we glanced at each other in dawning horror both sharing the same thought (‘It must be human flesh we are eating!’) and fairly flew out of the establishment abandoning our meal, although now I think it was probably just good pork…
The constant fruit and vegetable shortage (collective farms weren’t working too well) led the government in 1960-s-1970-s to enforce their dacha (country house) program: city people got a 600 square meter plot of land and built their country house and tried to grow their own fruit and vegetables for making preserves on it in their spare time. Sometimes this plot could be as far as a hundred kilometers from their home and they spent four or five hours getting to it (by train, then by bus, then on foot - cars were also deficit in those times). They had to bring their food along and stock as much as they could as almost nothing was available locally in the nearby villages except for some very bad bread, gray macaroni, matches and cakes of rough soap. In season the nearby woods could provide some berries and mushrooms but usually this didn’t last long the undergrowth becoming polluted and trampled out by hordes of eager ‘professional’ mushroom gatherers that came down at dawn with big baskets or pails by train specially instituted for this purpose.
Still as a result many of the Russians came to the end of the Soviet era well-stocked against every eventuality with homemade preserves, canned food, various cereals and legumes, salt and sugar put away in big glass jars etc. That helped a lot during perestroika especially in 1991, when one could find virtually nothing in the shops. After this the government had to let go its control of prices and the shop-shelves everywhere in Russia grew much fuller than they have ever been after the revolution.