[In the following essay, Glants and Toomre provide an overview of the use of food customs as a metaphor for Russian national culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.]

The chronicle of everyday life brings the past closer to us with a social sharpness and vividness. In order to understand Leo Tolstoy or Chekhov more clearly, for instance, we need to know the daily life of their epoch. Even the poetry of Pushkin achieves its full luster only for those who know the everyday life of his era.

—Konstantin Paustovskii¹

Scholars today widely echo these sentiments as they concentrate on simple moments in ordinary life to help illuminate the present while enriching our understanding of the past. In this new view of history, ordinary people sleep, take showers, change clothes, and clean their houses. They buy things and argue, make love and raise their children. But whatever else they do, they must eat. Eating in this sense seems banal but, despite its repetitiveness, subtle changes tie this common act to specific circumstances limited by time and place.

Just as the portrait of someone who lived long ago brings us the aroma of the epoch and gives us a chance almost to “touch” the past, so the vital thread of food habits gives us a better understanding of human psychology, intertwining the material and spiritual. Bread, for instance, is a material object with a distinct weight and shape that when eaten becomes an integral part of the human body. But in a religious context, when a wafer (= bread) is consumed as part of the Christian Eucharist, the wafer's symbolism transcends its caloric value.²

As part of daily life, food easily becomes a metaphor for national customs, whereby the same food can trigger a different reaction depending on its national tradition. The lowly pancake illustrates this point. In pagan times, the pancake symbolized the sun; later it became associated with Christian rituals in the week before Lent, the Great Fast. These rituals, however, have a national flavor. When Russians and English bite into a pancake, they bite into different national traditions. Whereas the English may remember annual pancake races across the village green at Shrovetide, the Russians associate bliny with Butter Week, an annual orgy of eating remarked upon by many and satirized by Chekhov in his short story “The Foolish Frenchman.”

There has been an explosion of interest in culinary history during the last two decades. Works have proliferated as scholars from a variety of disciplines have realized that examining a people's eating habits helps explain the diversity of human life no less than the study of the great historical events and the deeds of famous people.³ This volume, the first to study the role of food in Russian culture, stems from a conference sponsored by the Russian Research Center at Harvard in 1993. Piecing together the cultural and culinary history of a people is like trying to fit together a three-dimensional puzzle where each piece is made from a different material. Food historians begin by questioning what foods were available, how they were served, and how they functioned in the society.

The chapters in this collection provide fresh insights by looking at the availability and consumption of foods at different periods in Russian history and by analyzing Russian attitudes toward food and its attendant symbolism. Each factor in the cultural food equation—production, preparation, consumption, attitude, and symbolism—operates within a well-defined context of time, social class, ethnicity, and political and religious beliefs. Taken together, these factors make up a complex of attitudes and traditions that may be called Russian foodways. Foodways are far from static; they constantly change and evolve, and urbanization and industrialization obviously cannot be ignored. In the Russian case, some centuries-old food customs survive even today in post-Soviet Russia while others terminated with the 1917 Russian Revolution.

To construct their arguments, the authors of these chapters have used chronicles, diaries, letters, police records, poems, novels, folk sayings, paintings, and cookbooks. Although the sources provide a wealth of new data for interpreting Russian culture from the perspective of its foodways, it is important to note that all of these materials were created for purposes other than culinary history. The emerging picture lacks crucial details and has many blank spots. Partly this is due to the newness of the discipline; but also, data from different fields are not necessarily commensurable. For instance, material artifacts and oral sources provide valuable evidence not otherwise obtainable, but they are categorically different from the description of a family picnic written in a personal diary or of a royal banquet inscribed in court records.

Some of the chapters in this volume focus on historical topics, while others emphasize images of food in literature and art. In fact, impervious boundaries between the actual and the symbolic roles of food do not exist. Food functions in both roles simultaneously, just as a word's multiple meanings enrich any single context. In addressing these issues, considerable attention is paid to the moral and spiritual role of food in Russian culture. Additional topics easily could have been included, most notably the role of vodka and alcoholism in Russian culture.⁴ These chapters are intended to initiate a dialogue and promote further research; they are but a first step toward opening a new vista on Russian history and culture.

According to Mikhail Bakhtin, the process of eating, like the process of labor, is a collective social action whereby life vanquishes death. “In the act of eating … the confines between the body and the world are overstepped by the body; it triumphs over the world, over its enemy, celebrates its victory, grows at the world's expense.”⁵ However, not only the food itself but everything related to it, including the process of eating, enjoyed the same power. The images of food, reflecting their significance in peoples' lives, came to symbolize the relation between life and death, struggle and victory. Thanks to their importance and versatility, these images were applied widely in folklore, national traditions, customs, and beliefs, where they took on the force of real things.

Snejana Tempest illuminates these ideas in her chapter, “Stovelore in Russian Folklife,” through her discussion of the multiple roles of the Russian stove in the life of the Slavs. The stoves were mammoth installations, designed primarily for heating and secondarily for cooking. Their bulk dominated peasant homes and determined the basic characteristic of traditional Russian cuisine, with its predominance of baked goods and slowly cooked soups and stews, such as the old Russian dish niania (nanny).⁶ Tempest emphasizes the stove's symbolic role through its ability to fuse nature and culture while transforming the raw to the cooked. In this way the stove acquired its religious and ritual significance along with its traditional roles of heating and cooking. In the mind of the people, not only the stove itself but everything which was cooked there became powerful and acted as a sacred mediator between the “living” and the “other” worlds. For instance, by the ritual baking of a karavai (round loaf) to the accompaniment of special songs, people were asking for a bountiful harvest, a happy marriage, and myriad other favors.⁷ Tempest shows how these beliefs in the special power of the stove were reflected in everyday language and in various Russian fairytales, songs, and festive occasions. Even today, these ideas and this imagery still retain a strong hold over the modern imagination, especially in the aesthetic sphere.

From the mythic we turn to written accounts of food in the Slavic world. Horace G. Lunt's chapter, “Food in the Rus' Primary Chronicle” deals with the earliest written segment of this story by discussing foods that were known in the East Slavic lands during the 250 years from the mid-ninth century to the beginning of the twelfth century. He analyzes the food terms used in the Primary Chronicle, the oldest source of written information about the ancestors of today's Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Russians. Lunt's careful interpretation of archaic terms in this early text and his explanation of their probable derivation is invaluable, because linguistic borrowings indicate the likely path of entry into a given culture.⁸ A millennium later, we find that certain foods mentioned in the Primary Chronicle have become staples of the Russian diet.

Lunt's account of the marauding Pechengegs raises the important theme of food and power. Herodotus pointed out long ago that control of the food supply is a primary source of power for any governing group, and the chapters in this volume show the nature of this recurring problem in the Russian and Soviet context. The distribution of food is rarely a neutral act, whether it is government rationing of scarce foodstuffs or charitable handouts in a soup kitchen. Even the division of a family's Sunday chicken has its physical and symbolic ramifications.

George E. Munro's “Food in Catherinian St. Petersburg” shows how food functions as an instrument of power, not only in governmental and military situations but also in the warfare between classes. He compares the Russian capital with Imperial Rome, noting that both cities were voracious consumers of foodstuffs and that the elite in both capitals combined eating with elements of theatricality. Conspicuous consumption was the order of the day when the wealthy nobles ate off Meissen and Sèvres porcelain and Catherine the Great could order wine-spouting fountains in front of the Winter Palace to celebrate victory over the Turks. The writer Dmitrii Blagovo describes the meals in his well-to-do grandmother's household in the eighteenth century:

Even casual dinners usually had two hot dishes, shchi [cabbage soup] and soup or ukha [fish soup], two cold dishes, four sauces, two stews, and two savory pastries … not to mention formal dinners which began with two hot dishes, ukha and soup. … [These were followed by] four cold dishes, four sauces, two stews, several kinds of savory pastries, and then dessert and candies, because it was a rare household which did not have its own confectioner and there were fresh candies every day. She [my grandmother] loved to eat.⁹

Rather than emphasizing the food habits of the wealthy, however, Munro focuses on the poor, who had to manage with much less. Since the police monitored the capital's market and commerce, Munro uses the records of these officials to deduce the availability of rations, which were supplemented by the produce from urban kitchen gardens, where many city dwellers kept their livestock. Munro enlarges his theme of food as class marker through his discussion of public eating houses in eighteenth-century Russia. Although eating out was not as common then as it is now, the history of Russian public dining developed along class lines, since different types of establishments evolved to serve a particular clientele.¹⁰

Food as a marker of class divisions is continued in Cathy A. Frierson's chapter, “Forced Hunger and Rational Restraint in the Russian Peasant Diet: One Populist's Vision.” Frierson discusses the extreme dietary deprivations of the peasants in Smolensk Province in the 1870s as related in the letters of the well-known chemical agronomist Aleksandr Engelgardt. In these influential eyewitness accounts of rural Russia, Engelgardt used food metaphors extensively to convey his binary vision of Russian society. Engelgardt contrasted the plain healthy diet of the peasants with the rich foods of his gentry neighbors and friends. He carefully describes the dishes served in the upper-class homes at the period but makes it clear that he regarded the prodigal overindulgence of his peers as both physically revolting and morally reprehensible. Moral issues are the main concern of his comparisons and inferences. In addition, Engelgardt supplements our meager knowledge of peasant diet and, more important, indicates peasant attitudes toward their diet. The peasants ranked foods hierarchically, holding that dense black bread provided more sustenance than potatoes when strength and endurance were required for arduous labor in the fields. Given the scarcity of food and grain, peasants not only were reluctant to squander meager foodstuffs by eating more than the task required, but they held it was morally wrong as well. Through Engelgardt's letters, we understand that food and eating served as a pastime for the rich, but the poor regarded food more profoundly—as the foundation of life itself. Working hard for their bread, they showed their appreciation and respect for food through their rational eating habits.

The Russian understanding of food as a moral issue was nurtured through doctrines in the Orthodox Church. When Christianity replaced paganism in Russia, the Orthodox Church adopted and transformed many old customs, some of which incorporated a mystical essence and food symbolism. Leonid Heretz, in “The Practice and Significance of Fasting in Russian Peasant Culture at the Turn of the Century,” concentrates on just one aspect of this phenomenon, the concept of fasting, which he projects against the background of popular life of that era. He shows that since early times the main goal of fasting was more spiritual than physical. In some sense fasting may be seen as a continuation of the fight between the body and the soul. Abstinence was always a way to sustain the purification of the soul. According to the Church, the periodic abstention from certain types of food should be used for contemplation of higher things. Heretz's historical survey of the symbolism of food during fasting suggests how past issues have re-emerged in Russia's contemporary struggle to revive religious and moral virtues. To quote the poet Joseph Brodsky,

Privykai, synok, k pustyne,
kak shchepot' k vetru,
chuvstvuia, chto ty ne tol'ko plot'.
Get used, my son, to the desert,
the same as your hand gets used to the touch of the wind.
It will give you the feeling that you are not flesh alone.(11)

Moral issues increasingly preoccupied Russian intellectuals in the late nineteenth century. All aspects of life, even eating habits, were discussed in moral and philosophical terms. Thanks to these ideas, and reinforced in large part by Lev Tolstoy's writings, vegetarianism gained many new followers at this period. Tolstoy himself was such a moral force in the society that his support gave credence to the moral issues underpinning the movement. Tolstoy became interested in vegetarianism in the 1850s, initially attracted by the notions of health, nonviolence and animal rights associated with the movement. Not until the 1880s did he develop serious philosophical ideas about vegetarianism. Tolstoy's innovation, as Ronald D. LeBlanc writes in “Tolstoy's Way of No Flesh: Abstinence, Vegetarianism, and Christian Physiology,” was his Christian approach to this subject, the understanding of it as a “quest for ascetic discipline and moral self-perfection” through abstinence from meat and sex.

For Tolstoy, vegetarianism was not reducible to a plea for animal rights; nor was it simply a matter of theoretical philosophizing. To use the words of the writer and philosopher Vasilii Rozanov, who visited Tolstoy in 1903 in Yasnaya Polyana, “for Tolstoy, vegetarianism was a ‘method of life,’ a way of living.” Observing Tolstoy surrounded by his family and guests, Rozanov noticed that although he was sitting at the same table, he was effectively isolated from everyone else. This impression was accentuated by Tolstoy's special menu. While the others were eating meat and scrambled eggs, Tolstoy ate kisel' and kasha. More than just a different menu, this peasant food evoked connotations associated with an entirely different way of life. As Rozanov concluded, “food in general either divides or unifies people.”¹²

According to LeBlanc, Tolstoy advocated vegetarianism as a way of surmounting any tendency to overindulge in food and sex. This attitude helps clarify Tolstoy's otherwise cryptic remark that “virtue is incompatible with a beef-steak.” Tolstoy developed his ideas of abstinence further in his novel Resurrection in which the phenomenon of nekhludovshchina, named after the protagonist Nekhludov, came to signify the embodiment of self-indulgence, which leads to licentiousness.

The story of vegetarianism in Russia is picked up and developed further in Darra Goldstein's chapter, “Is Hay Only for Horses? Highlights of Russian Vegetarianism at the Turn of the Century,” in which she emphasizes the movement's social significance. One of the most colorful leaders of the movement was the writer Natalia Borisovna Nordman-Severova, who was also the wife of the Russian painter Ilya Repin. The Repins' vegetarian dinners, which featured hay as one of the main ingredients, achieved a certain notoriety among the many members of the Russian intelligentsia who frequented Penaty, the artist's estate, where the couple lived for years. Although Repin was already a pillar of Russian art at that time, Nordman-Severova attracted almost as much attention through her eccentricity and sensational vegetarian ideas. Some people knew one or the other spouse only by hearsay. The writer Korneii Chukovskii, for instance, recalled overhearing a woman telling her friend about Repin's death: “You know whom I mean, [the husband of] the one who was eating hay.”

Goldstein highlights the role this unusual woman played in intellectual society. She wanted to transform the world by changing people's diet and liberating women from the drudgery of kitchen chores. Nordman's hay diet may have seemed foolish, but not her advocacy of women's liberation through vegetarianism. Despite some of her bizarre notions, Nordman seems to echo Engelgardt (see Frierson's chapter) when she claims that “vegetarianism is necessary for the very rich and the very poor. The poor need it because it is cheap and nourishing. The rich, in order to cleanse all the poisons from the corpses that have accumulated in their overfed organism.”¹³

If both Tolstoy and Nordman-Severova in their moral aspirations represent food as a vehicle for achieving immediate spiritual purification, Fyodor Dostoevsky applied metaphors of food and eating to emphasize the immorality of the human urge for power and the unrelenting struggle to attain it. In “An Appetite for Power: Predators, Carnivores, and Cannibals in Dostoevsky's Fiction,” Ronald D. LeBlanc analyzes how Dostoevsky expresses the human appetite for dominance through predatory images and how the dynamics of power relationships—sociological, sexual, and psychological—operate in his works.

Dostoevsky's fiction is filled with words that characterize the quality and process of eating; but unlike Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gogol, Dostoevsky uses food imagery not as a figure of delight but as a paradigm of power. LeBlanc shows that Dostoevsky's characters do not merely eat but seek to devour, digest, and destroy. Rather than expressing taste, enjoyment, and nourishment, his food metaphors point to violence and aggression, the struggle of wolves to quash sheep. According to LeBlanc, Dostoevsky uses these distinctive metaphors to oppose good and evil and to express his ideas and hopes for a morally better world based on Christian ideals. In The Brothers Karamazov, for instance, when Dostoevsky gives Smerdiakov the occupation of chef while naming him so noxiously (smerdet' means to stink), he effectively unites the idea of food with the odor.¹⁴ But the word smerdet' suggests not a random malodor but the specific stench of a corpse. In this case, Dostoevsky, by joining the smell of a corpse to the idea of food for the living, creates a metaphor for an eternal transition between life and death.

Dostoevsky's concern with the commingling of life and death is picked up again in the twentieth century in the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva. Pamela Chester, in her chapter, “Strawberries and Chocolate: Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, and the Plight of the Hungry Poet,” shows that for Tsvetaeva life continued beyond death, whether physically through an eternal cycle of decay, nourishment, and new fruition or symbolically through poetry. She associates poetry with the juicy colorful strawberries that flourish in the nearby gardens and cemeteries. The berries growing on her grave, like her poems, link her to the hereafter. The future consumers, whether they eat the berries or read the poems, complete the cycle and join the dead with the living. Tsvetaeva compares her desire to write poetry to her desire for strawberries, both of which are equally strong. These metaphors distinguish Tsvetaeva's poetry from that of other poets, such as Mandelstam. Chester explores the tropes of strawberries and chocolate and the longings for these natural or artificial sweets to highlight the poets' contrasting views of life and death.

Just as the reforms of Peter the Great transformed Russia in the eighteenth century, the 1917 victory of the Bolsheviks revolutionized the twentieth. In both cases, all aspects of political, economic, and social life were overturned, even the ordinary details of everyday life. Whereas Peter the Great cut off the boyars' beards and ordered what and how they should eat and drink, the Bolshevik government tried to regulate people's lifestyles and transform their traditions, habits, and tastes with the goal of subordinating them fully to Bolshevik ideals. In this struggle to stamp out prerevolutionary influence, the Soviet leaders wanted to create a new type of Soviet citizen—sovetskii chelovek (Soviet man)—modeled on their philosophy. With this goal in mind, they believed that every aspect of life, from the sublime to the mundane, had an ideological meaning.¹⁵ Not even the preparation and consumption of comestibles was immune from this all-embracing doctrine. Dishes like kulich, paskha, and matsa with religious associations were particularly reviled as part of the Soviet antireligious stance.¹⁶ In this atmosphere, in which certain dishes acquired an ideological character, it became prudent to avoid “bourgeois” foods in order not to arouse unwarranted political suspicions. The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky captured this spirit with his jingle “Esh ananasy, riabchikov zhui. / Den' tvoi poslednii prishel, burzhui. (Eat your pineapple, chew your hazel grouse. Your final day has arrived, bourgeois).”¹⁷

A perennial scarcity of food marked the entire Soviet period. Against this background, which ranged in severity from recurrent famines to periodic, unpredictable shortages of staples, the Soviet propaganda machine extolled the virtues of the utopian state and the arrival of a prosperity that was entirely groundless. Living conditions quickly deteriorated soon after the Bolsheviks came to power, and provisions that previously had been available started to disappear. As the writer Lidia Ivanova indicated,

Hunger descended gradually but inevitably. … One summer catfish appeared on the market, but later there was nothing but dried Caspian roach [vobla]. Butter quickly disappeared, then any kind of vegetable oil. After they had gone, cocoa-butter appeared for a week or two; this was replaced in turn by cod-liver oil and then castor oil which we used to fry potatoes. In 1919 every morning on my way to work I bought a cup of milk from a woman on the street. For lunch I ate a few boiled potatoes that I brought from home. The bread ration was then one-quarter pound for two days. Bread and potatoes were only available on the black market, from peddlers [meshochniki] who sold them from sacks. Risking their lives and sometimes even hiding on the roofs of the trains, these profiteers managed to smuggle bags of flour, potatoes, and other foodstuffs into Moscow.¹⁸

Starvation threatened to engulf the citizenry, particularly in Moscow and Petrograd. “Piter [St. Petersburg] is dying. … The people are passive and do not complain … they stand in lines at the communal kitchens for a bowl of soup.”¹⁹ The new government responded by setting up numerous communal kitchens and relied on them for the next few years as an efficient means for feeding the hungry population.

Mauricio Borrero, in “Communal Dining and State Cafeterias in Moscow and Petrograd, 1917-1921” analyzes the establishment and function of state cafeterias in the capital cites, where hunger verged on starvation. Not all state-run cafeterias were equal, and people with clout managed to secure access to better facilities—or even bypass them altogether. Borrero emphasizes that along with the aim of alleviating the general hunger of the population, these cafeterias took on an ideological function, so that food became an instrument of power. Although the new Soviet society was theoretically classless, privileges associated with status and prestige did not disappear but only metamorphosed. Access to sufficient food became a perquisite of the elite in the new society. Precisely because of the constant shortages, the government quickly evolved a “carrot and stick” policy whereby granting or withholding food rations became a potent tool for imposing its will and manipulating the population.

Early on, the Bolsheviks initiated an effective system of special rations for different groups.²⁰ The authorities arbitrarily decided whom to support and whom to teach a good lesson. Food rations became an easy tool for encouraging the compliant and punishing the recalcitrant. By these means, members of the intelligentsia were quickly brought to heel. Many well-known Russian writers begged for aid from Anatolii Ivanovich Puchkov, the vice-commissar of provisions, citing as a reason their service to the regime. Korneii Chukovskii wrote, “All my talents are devoted to the service of the enlightenment of the masses and I am sure that I have the right to ask the authorities to do me a friendly favor and support my famished … children. I have added a doctor's certificate, in the hope of receiving the greatest possible amount of candies, bread, and, if possible, butter.” Maksim Gorki interceded with the authorities for the writer Andreii Belyi, who, it is reported, received as a result “10 kg of flour, 5 kg of groats, 2 of sausages, 5 of fish, 1 of butter, 1 of candy, and 3 of sugar.”²¹

Living conditions remained difficult for the next two decades. The 1920s were a period of turmoil due mainly to the New Economic Policy (NEP) and introduction of the first Five-Year Plan with its accompanying devastation of the peasantry. Famines and food shortages were rife and continued throughout the 1930s. Government policy exacerbated conditions and steadily eroded the quality of domestic life. Whereas in the 1920s the government acknowledged the shortages, by the 1930s it denied the very existence of such problems; even mentioning them became treasonable. As the bread lines grew longer, the secret police monitored those queuing up, alert for any word of discontent.²² To support the fiction of abundance, Stalin ordered that ration cards be abolished and grain exports increased.²³

Halina and Robert A. Rothstein's analysis of contemporary cookbooks in their chapter “The Beginnings of Soviet Culinary Arts” shows a range of responses for coping with the pervasive food shortages and dislocations of the 1920s and 1930s. Some authors, like ostriches with their heads in the sand, continued to produce old-style recipes as if the tsar had never been deposed, while others urged the consumption of soybeans and seaweed for their nutritional value and advised raising rabbits as a cheap source of protein. Taken as a whole, these books provide a glimpse of daily life during that long period when the authorities were determined to create “a socialist way of life.” They reflect the tangled web of forces trying to reform people's eating habits—covering everything from how food was prepared to where it was consumed—against an opposing array of forces that resisted change. In the 1920s, when women first entered the work force in large numbers, the virtues of state cafeterias were extolled. The narrator of Yuri Olesha's 1927 novel Envy, for instance, dreams of establishing a state kitchen, the Quarter, which

is going to be a gigantic establishment: the largest dining room, the largest kitchen in existence. A two-course dinner will cost a quarter. War has been declared on ordinary kitchens. … Women! … we shall restore to you all those hours that the kitchen has stolen from you—you'll get half your life back. You, young wife, you make soup for your husband. And half your day goes into that miserable puddle of soup! We are going to transform those miserable puddles of soup of yours into glistening seas, borscht into oceans of borscht, heap up kasha in mounds, unleash glaciers of fruit jelly.²⁴

The state cafeterias did not live up to their promises. Not only were the filthy premises and poor quality of food off-putting, but people resisted having to eat at work or at other assigned locations. Despite the hardships and dual burden of working and caring for their families, women reclaimed their kitchens. Food preparation entails more drudgery than glamor, but they understood, perhaps only intuitively, what was at stake and refused to give up the modicum of power (and pleasure) that came from planning and preparing meals for their family and friends.

The vast majority of people endured a hand-to-mouth existence while a select few ate well and flourished thanks to an entrenched system of perquisites and privileges that divided this nominally classless society into haves and have-nots. For instance, the menu at a Crimean sanatorium for “higher-ups” “abounded in tasty dishes, with everything in which Russia is rich. Breakfast at eight, with eggs, ham, cheese, cocoa, tea, and milk. At eleven, yogurt. Then a four-course midday meal: soup, fish, meat, dessert, and fruit. During the afternoon, tea and pastries. In the evening, a two-course supper.”²⁵ By contrast, the artist Pavel Filonov, who was out of favor, wrote in his diary: “August 30, 1935. Ever since the beginning of June I have lived by drinking tea with sugar and eating only one kilogram of bread daily. On the morning of June 29th I made the last pancake from the flour I had saved. Then I began to prepare myself, as I have done many times previously, to live without food for who knows how long.”²⁶

Against a background of expanding political terror and shortage of food-stuffs the authorities mandated an atmosphere of prosperity and optimism throughout the country; all publications, including cookbooks, had to support the official position, which reached its zenith in the midthirties. In 1935 Stalin declared that “life has become more joyous, comrades; life has become gayer” and directed everyone to be merry. The “Song of the Motherland,” with the lines “I do not know of any other country / Where a man can breathe a freer air!” sounded everywhere.²⁷ On this canvas of absolute happiness food became a symbol of power and social achievement. Hosts could emphasize their importance and confirm their status in the hierarchy simply by serving Stalin's favorite wine, Khvanchkara, or other prestigious foods like caviar and expensive sausage.

As conditions in real life worsened, abundance became the hallmark of life in films, music, literature, and painting. In the food world this dichotomy reached its apex with the publication of the Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi pishche [The book about tasty and healthy food] in 1950. This was the height of “victorious Stalinism,” the post-World War II period when the state returned “bourgeois” concepts to official and private life. Bowing to Stalin's demands, a charade began whereby life took on a false grandeur embellished with rituals from the turn of the century. This process started before the war and gathered in intensity after its conclusion. Even Christmas trees were rehabilitated, the first being lit at the Kremlin on New Year's Eve in 1935. During the war, schools were separated by sex as the society became even more regimented thanks to the militaristic uniforms introduced for schoolchildren and many civil servants. In 1944 a new family law was enacted that returned to the prerevolutionary concept of the family as the basic unit of society because that would allow easier control of the people by the state.²⁸

The Kniga appeared in the midst of these changes to lend prominent support to the “big lie” of the leaders. It begins by quoting “the leader of all times and peoples” (vozhd' vsekh vremen i narodov): “The characteristic feature of our revolution is that it gives our people not only freedom, but also material wealth and the possibility of a prosperous and cultured life.” The book's recipes were not intended as mundane instructions for cooking actual dishes such as borshch, shchi, and kotlety but as a striking demonstration of the benefits of living in Stalin's “paradise.” According to the émigré critic Aleksandr Genis, the Kniga “is an encyclopedia of the Soviet way of life, where the process of preparing food became the symbol of a world transformed according to a recipe-plan. Each dish described in the book is a metaphor of the plenitude and variety of socialist life, expressed in a tightly considered menu.”²⁹ If reality did not coincide with the book's illustrations—if the tables in the overcrowded communal apartments and dingy communal kitchens lacked the starched tablecloths and elegant dishes shown in the Kniga—the message was that the people should struggle harder to improve themselves and realize the socialist ideals of the party.

The Kniga also clearly reflects the chauvinism of Soviet national politics in the postwar years, when the Russians were declared “elder brothers” in the Soviet Union or, somewhat jokingly, “the best among the equals.” In a speech shortly after the war, Stalin said, “I drink the health of the Russian people because Russia is the most outstanding nation among all nations of the Soviet Union.”³⁰

Food as a symbol of the relation between the Russian center and the national provinces is addressed by Joyce Toomre in “Food and National Identity in Soviet Armenia.” Toomre presents an overview of traditional Armenian foodways as a prelude to questioning the subsequent Soviet influence on their development. The focus of this chapter is on the small Caucasian republic of Armenia SSR, although it could just as well be Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Estonia, or Moldova. How to ensure the survival of food habits of smaller units within a larger political entity is an issue for any regional cuisine.³¹ The phenomenon is general and worldwide but has particular political relevance in the case of the Soviet Union. Although each of the former republics has its own characteristics and developed somewhat differently, each was also affected by its subordinate position, politically if not culturally. Toomre examines the feasibility of cultural autonomy under the centrally controlled government of the Soviets and questions the actual government attitude toward the national cuisines. Officially, of course, support for the national cuisines was enveloped in the propagandistic slogan “national in form and socialist in content.” Although national dishes were featured at all the republic's pavilions at the successive Exhibitions of the Achievements of the National Economies (VDNKH), the question remains whether Armenian foodways—and those of the other republics—developed naturally according to indigenous customs or whether there is evidence of undue Soviet interference. Toomre finds that definitive answers are elusive, partly because the time frame is too short. Also, food traditions are unusually strong among the Armenians, who have only recently undergone intense industrialization, and any changes they have noticed in their foodways are not considered threatening.

Art critic Penelope Rowlands drew on French gastronome Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin's saying “Animals feed themselves; men eat, but only wise men know the art of eating” to quip that “while the wise may know it, only the artist can show it.”³² F. T. Marinetti and the Russian avant-gardists were capitalizing on the universal power of food tropes when they used them as building blocks in their art. Name your ingredients: spinach, tomatoes, egg whites, and prunes. The artists put them together with color and shape and ideas in mind, not taste.³³ Musya Glants, in her chapter, “Food as Art: Painting in Late Soviet Russia,” shows how powerful and expressive these symbols can be. Through food metaphors, artists reveal to the viewer a vital and sensual impression of life, including its delicate spiritual nuances. Glants examines the period from the fall of Stalinism to the fall of the USSR. In these circumstances food tropes, along with other metaphors, serve either to emphasize or to shield definite ideas or feelings because, as James Yood has written, “food in a painting … [is] a tremendously versatile subject, a playing field of surprisingly comprehensible equity.”³⁴ The meaning assigned to food imagery varies according to the period and artist, but in harsh totalitarian times as well as in the turbulent post-Soviet era food is an effective device for discussing human life. Glants shows that art in Russia became an expressive mouthpiece of the social issues, frustrations, and disappointments of those totalitarian years and a tool to convey the horror, cruelty, and fear of the present transitional era.

This book offers a new view of Russian civilization which emerges from reexamining its history and culture through the lens of food symbolism. The necessity of food in human life creates its universality. Yood writes:

First we cry, then we eat. And eat and eat and eat; from birth until death, this fundamental activity continues. … Just as architecture makes a cultural construct out of our need for shelter, the communal meal provides social as well as physical nourishment. Eating is intertwined with almost every aspect of our existence.”³⁵

The chapters in this book show how these universal themes play out in a distinctly Russian Soviet setting. What we eat and how we do it is, willingly or not, a social act defined by the time, the place, the foods presented, and the manner of serving. In these richly nuanced circumstances, each detail contributes to the whole, whether the occasion is a grand banquet or a solitary meal in the kitchen. The absence or presence of food, as well as its preparation and elaboration, helps us define ourselves and our relation to those around us and the world that we inhabit. These features inevitably turn food into a tool of power in its different manifestations—during times of war and peace, great changes, and turbulent experiences. The giving or withholding of food is perhaps the ultimate weapon of control.

The study of foodways brings together the past and present by shedding new light on former beliefs and customs. Food images in this sense convey meanings beyond their physical representation. For example, reading about the “smart kolobok” (small roll) described in Russian fairy tales illuminates the Weltanschauung of the past through the form of a bit of bread. Then later, it is not surprising that we find a newly baked roll tastier for being seasoned with its history and folklore. Writers and artists have long exploited the complexity of food metaphors in their struggle to express psychological issues and to reach their audiences emotionally.

Food has also served as a repository of national traditions, binding one generation to another. A favorite recipe passed from a grandmother to her granddaughter may carry as much emotional value as the proverbial gold ring. As Dmitrii Blagovo wrote about his grandmother's memoirs,

All the trivial details of everyday life which we disregard at present, considering them unnecessary and tiresome, become precious after a century because they depict vividly the customs and habits of generations long gone and the life which had an absolutely different quality from our own.³⁶

Notes

1. K. Paustovskii, Introduction, in V. A. Giliarovskii, Moskva i moskvichi [Moscow and Moscovians] (Minsk: Vysheishaia shkola, 1980), 7.

2. Iurii M. Lotman, Besedy o russkoi kul'ture: byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstva: XVIII-nachalo XIX veka [Conversations about Russian culture: everyday life and traditions of the Russian gentry from the eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century] (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 1994), 6.

3. R. E. F. Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, ed. Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

4. English readers interested in these issues should begin with Smith and Christian, Bread and Salt, 74-108 and 288-326, or Patricia Herlihy, “‘Joy of the Rus’: Rites and Rituals of Russian Drinking,” Russian Review, vol. 50 (April 1991), 131-147. Much less reliable but still useful is William Pokhlebkin, A History of Vodka, trans. Renfrey Clarke (London: Verso, 1991).

5. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), 282-283. For more on the role of food as a symbolic link between life and death, see James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (London: Macmillan, 1923), esp. chaps. 45, 46, 48, and V. Y. Propp, Istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skazki [Historical roots of fairy tales] (Leningrad: Izd. Leningradskogo universiteta, 1986), 63-69.

6. Fiodor Vasilievich Rostopchin (1763-1826), governor-general of Moscow in 1812, described this old-fashioned dish in loving terms: “Niania combines a calf's head, buckwheat, and fresh butter. Everything is put in a pot, which is sealed with dough. Then the pot is placed in the Russian stove for twenty-four hours. When the dish is ready, it is hard to say which is more tasty, the buckwheat kasha or the meat.” F. V. Rostopchin, Okh. Frantsuzy! [Oh, the French!] (Moscow, “Russkaya kniga,” 1992), 99.

7. In olden times, the Slavs imbued the karavai with special powers associated with God. See V. V. Ivanov and V. N. Toporov, Issledovania v oblasti slavianskikh drevnosteii [Research in the field of Slavic antiquity] (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), 243-259.

8. In the same way, students of French and English medieval culinary history have benefited from the work of linguists who have analyzed “The Treatise of Alexander Neckam,” a culinary text written at the end of the twelfth century chiefly in an Anglo-Norman dialect of French. See A Volume of Vocabularies, ed. Richard Wright (N.p.: privately printed, 1857; 2d ed., 1882).

9. Dmitrii Blagovo, Rasskazy babushki, Iz vospominanii piati pokolenii, Zapisannye i sobrannye ee vnukom D. Blagovo [Grandmother's stories: Reminiscences of five generations, gathered and written by her grandson, D. Blagovo], ed. T. I. Ornatskaia (Leningrad: Nauka, Leningr, otdelenie, 1989), 10.

10. Restaurants in the modern sense did not then exist. Even in France they did not really function until after the French Revolution. See Barbara Wheaton, Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 73-75.

11. Joseph Brodsky, “Lullaby,” Russkaia misl', no. 4055 (1-7 December 1994), 12.

12. E. G. Babaev, “Nravstvennaya tishina: V. V. Rozanov v Yasnoi Poliane” [“Moral quiet: V. V. Rozanov at Yasnaya Polyana”], Druz'ia i gosti Yasnoi Poliany [Friends and guests at Yasnaya Polyana], no. 1 (June 1993), 7.

13. Quoted by Darra Goldstein, chap. 7.

14. L. V. Karasev, “O Simvolakh Dostoevskogo” [“Dostoevsky's symbols”], Voprosy philosophii, no. 10 (1994), 95, 106.

15. See René Fueloep-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism (New York: Harper, 1965), 185.

16. After the Bolsheviks came to power, all religious observances were banned in the Soviet Union and atheism was promoted. Kulich, a yeast bread, and paskha, a dessert made of cheese, eggs, and sugar, were an invariable component of the Russian Easter table. After the deprivations of the long Lenten fast, the richness of these traditional desserts was particularly savored. Matsa was associated with Jewish Passover and, for many years, its production was outlawed in the Soviet Union.

17. Untitled fragment, 1917. See Vladimir Vladimorovich Maiakovskii (1893-1930): Stikhotvoreniia. Stikhi [Vladimir Vladimorovich Maiakovski, 1893-1930: Poems, Verses] (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1973), 72.

18. Lidia Ivanova, Vospominania [Memoirs] (Moscow: PIK Kul'tura, 1992), 77-78. According to Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, “only ‘speculations by bag traders,’ who smuggled foodstuffs past the road-blocks, saved the urban population of the Soviet Republic from death.” See Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, trans. Phyllis B. Carlos (New York: Summit Books, 1986), 61.

19. S. V. Shumikhin, Iz pis'ma S. A. Margolina k S. D. Mstislavskomu, 12 sentiabria 1920 g [From the letters of S. A. Margolin to S. D. Mstisilavskii, 12 September 1920], cited in Literaturnoe novoe obozrenie [New literary review], no. 5 (Moscow, 1993), 162. See also Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 140-144.

20. According to Lidia Ivanova, “For us, starvation stopped with the implementation of the special ‘academic ration’ in 1920.” See Ivanova, 77.

21. A. A. Keda, “It is harmful for me to starve …,” Literaturnoye novoe obozrenie, no. 5, (Moscow, 1993), 160-161.

22. Archival reports of OGPU officials note that lines of 150 persons waiting for bread were common in December 1930 (TsA MBR. F.2. Op. 8. D. 106. L. 122, 126; L. 23-50). Cited in “Ischez chelovek i net ego … Iz konfiskovannogo dnevnika E. N. Nikolayeva” [“A man has disappeared and no longer exists. … From the confiscated diary of E. N. Nikolayev”], Istochnik, no. 4, 1993, 59.

23. Ibid., 51, 60-61; Heller and Nekrich, 238-262.

24. Yuri Olesha, Envy, trans. Clarence Brown, in The Portable Twentieth-Century Reader, ed. Clarence Brown (New York: Penguin). The authors are grateful to Edythe Haber for drawing this passage to their attention.

25. Heller and Nekrich, 238.

26. Cited in Vladimir Gusev, “Gde fal'sh i gde istina” [“What is false and what is true”], in Agitatsia za shchastie, Sovetskoe iskusstvo stalinskoii epokhi [Struggle for happiness: Soviet art in Stalin's epoch] (Dusseldorf-Bremen: Interarteks-Editsion Temmen, 1994), 16.

27. Vasily Lebedev-Kumach and Isaac Dunaevsky, “Song of the Motherland,” 1935; quoted in James von Geldern and Richard Stites, Mass Culture in Soviet Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 271.

28. Heller and Nekrich, 467-468.

29. Aleksandr Genis, “Krasnyi khleb: kulinarnaia istoriia sovetskoi vlasti” [“Red bread: The culinary story of Soviet power”], Panorama, no. 706 (October 1994).

30. I. Stalin, “Vystuplenie na prieme v Kremle v chest' komandujushchikh voiskami Krasnoi Armii” [“Speech at a reception in honor of the wartime commanders of the Red Army, May 24, 1945”], in I. V. Stalin, Works, vol. 2 [XV], ed. Robert H. McNeal (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, 1967), 203.

31. See Arjun Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 30, no. 1 (January 1988), 3-24.

32. Penelope Rowlands, “A Sense of Taste,” ARTnews, 1995, no. 2, 27.

33. Lesley Chamberlain, Introduction, in F. T. Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook, trans. Suzanne Brill, ed. Chamberlain (San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1989), 7-8.

34. James Yood, Feasting: A Celebration of Food in Art (New York: Universe, 1992), 16.

35. Ibid., 7-8.

36. Blagovo, 8.