Seasoned Socialism: Gender & Food in Late Soviet Everyday Life

By Angela Brintlinger

This essay anthology explores the intersection of gender, food and culture in post-1960s Soviet life from personal cookbooks to gulag survival.

Seasoned Socialism considers the relationship between gender and food in late Soviet daily life, specifically between 1964 and 1985. Political and economic conditions heavily influenced Soviet life and foodways during this period and an exploration of Soviet women’s central role in the daily sustenance for their families as well as the obstacles they faced on this quest offers new insights into intergenerational and inter-gender power dynamics of that time.

Seasoned Socialism considers gender construction and performance across a wide array of primary sources, including poetry, fiction, film, women’s journals, oral histories, and interviews. This collection provides fresh insight into how the Soviet government sought to influence both what citizens ate and how they thought about food.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9780253040985

Book preview

SEASONED SOCIALISM

SEASONED SOCIALISM

Gender and Food in Late Soviet Everyday Life

Edited by

Anastasia Lakhtikova, Angela Brintlinger, and Irina Glushchenko

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

© 2019 by Indiana University Press

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-253-04095-4 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-253-04096-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-253-04099-2 (ebook)

1  2  3  4  5     24  23  22  21  20  19

To the women—and men—for whom

late Socialism was more than just a period.

After all, it was also a life.

CONTENTS

Foreword / Darra Goldstein

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Food, Gender, and the Everyday through the Looking Glass of Socialist Experience / Anastasia Lakhtikova and Angela Brintlinger

IWomen in the Soviet Kitchen: Cooking Paradoxes in Family and Society

1Love, Marry, Cook: Gendering the Home Kitchen in Late Soviet Russia / Adrianne K. Jacobs

2I Hate Cooking!: Emancipation and Patriarchy in Late Soviet Film / Irina Glushchenko, translated by Anastasia Lakhtikova and Angela Brintlinger

3Professional Women Cooking: Soviet Manuscript Cookbooks, Social Networks, and Identity Building / Anastasia Lakhtikova

IIProducers, Providers, and Consumers: Resistance and Compliance, Soviet-Style

4Cake, Cabbage, and the Morality of Consumption in Iurii Trifonov’s House on the Embankment / Benjamin Sutcliffe

5Sated People: Gendered Modes of Acquiring and Consuming Prestigious Soviet Foods / Olena Stiazhkina, translated by Anastasia Lakhtikova and Angela Brintlinger

6Dacha Labors: Preserving Everyday Soviet Life / Melissa L. Caldwell

7Vodka en Plein Air: Authoritative Discourse, Alcohol, and Gendered Spaces in Gray Mouse by Vil Lipatov / Lidia Levkovitch

IIISoviet Signifiers: The Semiotics of Everyday Scarcity and Ritual Uses of Food

8Cold Veal and a Stale Bread Roll: Zofia Wędrowska’s Taste for Scarcity / Ksenia Gusarova

9Our Only Hope Was in These Plants: Irina Ratushinskaya and the Manipulation of Foodways in a Late Soviet Labor Camp / Ona Renner-Fahey

10Shchi da kasha, but Mostly Shchi: Cabbage as Gendered and Genre’d in the Late Soviet Period / Angela Brintlinger

11Still Life with Leftovers: Nonna Slepakova’s Poetics of Time / Amelia Glaser

Afterword: Cultures of Food in the Era of Developed Socialism / Diane P. Koenker

Bibliography

Index

FOREWORD

IN 1993 I PARTICIPATED IN A GROUNDBREAKING CONFERENCE on Food in Russian History and Culture at Harvard’s Russian Research Center. Boris Yeltsin was president of the Russian Federation. The Soviet Union had only recently ceased to exist. It was a heady, anxious time—in that regard not unlike the present moment, when Russia is once again in the daily news and we contemplate the oddness of American-led sanctions inspiring an artisanal food movement in a country that for decades relied on the worst forms of industrial agriculture. Our conference papers ranged widely in their concerns, beginning with a look at food in the Primary Chronicle and ending with an exploration of late Soviet painting. I spoke on vegetarianism at the turn of the twentieth century and Natalya Nordman’s wacky promotion of hay as the solution to Russia’s endemic hunger. One of the conference organizers, Joyce Toomre, discussed the still-relevant topic of food and national identity in Armenia. Joyce had helped found the Culinary Historians of Boston, America’s first culinary history group and a lifeline for me when I moved to western Massachusetts in 1983. Each month I religiously drove six hours round-trip to Boston to attend a lecture—the beginning of my formal education in the study of food.

The Culinary Historians had a profound effect on others, too, inspiring the formation of similar groups throughout the country. Explorations of food as a tool to understand culture and society—now recast as food studies—burgeoned, moving from the margins and the realm of avocation to become an established discipline in academia. And yet in the field of Slavic Studies, critical thinking about food has been slow to gain acceptance. This volume, then, is all the more welcome as evidence that Slavicists are now taking seriously the ways in which the study of food—its procurement, preparation, and consumption—can illuminate deeply held cultural and societal values.

Because so little work has been done in Slavic food studies, the possibilities for investigating the meanings and uses of food are nearly endless. Rather than presenting a mishmash of subjects, the editors of this volume have wisely chosen to limit its scope by focusing on food in relation to gender in the late Soviet period. As the essays reveal, many of the era’s anxieties were expressed through various aspects of food and commensality. I would like to single out three of them here: the continual problem of scarcity (shortages and the famous deficit items); the desire for foods deemed luxurious and the prestige that accrued to obtaining them; and the creativity with which Soviet citizens approached provisioning and cooking.

What strikes me in reading these essays is that although they are expressly concerned with the period between 1964 and 1985, they in fact reveal long-standing societal problems and responses relating to food in Russia. As Adrianne Jacobs notes in the opening essay of this book, numerous Soviet-era cookbooks echoed (without irony) the title of Russia’s most famous nineteenth-century cookbook, Elena Molokhovets’s A Gift to Young Housewives, which espoused the wife’s importance in safeguarding the home by nourishing the family both physically and spiritually. Despite revolution, government edicts, and experiments meant to liberate women from kitchen labor, this patriarchal notion of a woman’s role in the household persisted throughout the Soviet period. In theorizing the relation between women and food, the feminist sociologist Marjorie DeVault has argued that food preparation is, in fact, the work that defines family; through feeding, women quite literally produce family life from day to day.¹ Here the difference between Western and Soviet life becomes apparent: while DeVault considers foodwork to be largely invisible as work, the Soviet woman’s laborious efforts to get food on the table were highly visible, whether through the public act of standing in the ubiquitous queues for foodstuffs or in the preparations that took place in communal kitchens.

Scarcity

Due to Russia’s geographic extremes and historically conservative agricultural practices, hunger and famine have defined Russian history from its beginnings. In the twentieth century, early Soviet political tactics coincided with natural disasters to produce some of the most horrific famines of all time, but the risk of hunger had always haunted Russian life. The Russian Orthodox Church’s imposition of a strict regimen of feasting and fasting can be seen at least partly as a strategy for dealing with the cyclical patterns of hunger that the majority of Russians experienced in the course of the agricultural year. Fast days, on which the intake of meats and dairy products was restricted, marked up to half the year and were generally tied to the harvest. Thus, the highly stringent fasts preceding Easter (forty days of Great Lent plus Passion Week) overlaid the period of greatest hunger before the new crop of grain could be sown or the first shoots of wild greens appeared in spring. The less severe six-week Filippov Fast began on November 14, after the harvest had been taken in.²

It is important to keep the condition of near-constant hunger in mind when reflecting on the Soviet years. In reaction to the dearth of produce and the grimness of everyday life, many of us tend to rhapsodize about the glories of pre-Revolutionary Russian haute cuisine. I confess that my first cookbook, À la Russe, played up this dichotomy.³ I wrote nostalgically about the abundance and refinement of aristocratic tables, taking my cue from Soviet friends who would offer apology for a scant dinner by ostensibly quoting from Molokhovets, transforming what they imagined as Gogolian excess into distinctively Soviet humor: If unexpected guests should arrive, descend to the larder and fetch from there a cold leg of veal. No punch line was needed. Everyone laughed heartily at the absurdity of having veal at hand, or even a larder, in the Soviet era.

What we sometimes fail to remember is that Molokhovets and her readers represented only a tiny, elite portion of the Russian populace. The reality for peasants was unremittingly bleak. Alexander Engel’gardt, the chemist and former rector of St. Petersburg Agricultural Institute, was exiled in 1871 to his estate in Smolensk Province. In his letters From the Country, written for the journal Notes of the Fatherland, he describes the terrible hunger the peasants regularly endured and their practice of begging for crusts: they would travel from village to village asking for bread that they would then dry in their ovens for minimal sustenance until the new crop of grain could be harvested.⁴ These crusts, made from winnowed rye, were preferable to the chaff bread they all too frequently resorted to during hard times. Engel’gardt vividly communicates to his affluent urban readers the real face of rural hunger: If I knew how to paint, I would paint a ‘reaper,’ but not the kind they usually paint. There would be the most narrow field, scraggly rye, the sun would burn a baba in only a shift, wet with sweat, with a groggy face gone dark from hunger, with dried-up blood on her lips, mowing, beginning to reap the first sheaf—but she will not even have any grain tomorrow, because she won’t have time to grind it.⁵

Habitual hunger contributed to the peasants’ sense of fatalism. It took on darker undertones when political turmoil or poor governmental planning exacerbated existing scarcity or crop failure, as happened increasingly in the twentieth century. Here is the great Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov writing in 1921 about hunger in the aftermath of the Civil War:

Women and children wander the woods,

gathering leaves from the birch trees

for soup: birch-borscht, birch-bouillon.

The tender tips of fir branches, the silvery moss—

Food from the forest.

They’ll start getting teeth like the elk

from eating the trees.⁶

Shortages were not a uniquely Soviet phenomenon, although the State’s misguided agricultural policies and corrupt handling of resources led to its inability to feed the population. Mismanagement on multiple levels led to the legendary queues of the late Soviet era, a grueling and often cruel waste of people’s time. And yet, from a certain critical perspective, the queue offered the sharing of knowledge and a kind of societal communion. Standing in line enabled the true collective. Writing after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the writer Vladimir Sorokin mused on the emotion with which the late Soviet queue was imbued:

An era can be judged by street conversations . . .

No, it was not only for butter and nails that people stood in endless lines. The queue was a quasi surrogate for church. Through the act of standing up, standing up for, through, and in and on lines regularly for several hours, people participated in a sort of ritual, after which, instead of the Eucharist and absolution of their sins, they received foodstuffs and manufactured goods . . .

The collapse of the line was much more painful for the collective Soviet body than the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the loss of the queue the people lost an important therapeutic ritual of self-acknowledgment which had been honed and polished over the course of decades and had become a daily necessity, like drugs for an addict. Then, suddenly, there were no drugs.⁷

The literary critic Lydia Ginzburg, in her brilliant study of the Siege of Leningrad, reflects even more deeply on the meaning of the queue and the way in which it facilitated the exchange of ideas. The queue broke down class differences between intellectuals, who had never bothered to think seriously about food, and peasants, who were able to share folk wisdom about extracting nutrients from unlikely sources—making soup from an axe—based on their historical experience of hunger. Though the genuine desperation of the Siege queues distinguishes them from those of the later Soviet period, the lines nevertheless share common gender differences that arise from the economy of scarcity referenced several times in this volume. Ginzburg identifies gendered attitudes concerning the value of food talk: men, who initially dismissed food as an insignificant topic of conversation, not only came around but turned into what we would today call mansplainers, insisting, for instance, on the best way to cook millet.⁸ Women were better able to endure the long hours of standing on line, she explains, because for women, It’s always we; a man in a queue feels like a stray individual, a woman is the representative of a collective. Ginzburg goes on to say: Men cope particularly badly with queues, since they are used to the idea that their time is valuable . . . Working women have inherited from their grandmothers and mothers time which is not taken into account.⁹ This statement would support DeVault’s idea of foodwork as invisible—that one would stand in line to obtain food is taken for granted—were it not for the highly visible presence of each person waiting his or her turn.

Desire

By late Soviet times, most people no longer needed to stand in line for basic necessities, only for nonessentials. Thus the queue came to embody desire. Lines formed for luxury items: oranges and bananas or special candies like Bird’s Milk or Daydream, their very names suggesting the improbability of their materiality. Imported goods were especially prized, and not always because they tasted good; their shiny packaging was sometimes the primary allure.

In Lara Vapnyar’s short story Puffed Rice and Meatballs, imported American puffed rice in crunchy silver-and-yellow bags stands for everything the young protagonist, Katya, desires in her budding sexuality: The people looked shabby and crumpled, but the bags shone winningly in the orange rays of the sun.¹⁰ She associates the acquisition of puffed rice with her breasts, which are suddenly, and thrillingly, apparent in the soft, German-made sweater her aunt has brought back from a rare business trip. If Katya can have a bag of puffed rice, she will have a future; she will be as desirable as the foreign products she wears and consumes. Her dreams are dashed by reality of Soviet life when an imperious saleswoman decides to close the store before everyone in the queue has a chance to buy the puffed rice. The crowd turns violent, and Katya ends up being used as a battering ram to force people out of the store. Not only has she failed in her quest but her very desires have been sullied. Back at her apartment, in a symbolic act, she shoves the sweater into the garbage pail between an empty sour cream container and a long string of potato peel. Vapnyar has her narrator, Katya, make the connection explicit. Katya states: And I remember thinking that I wasn’t beautiful and never would be.¹¹ Having lost faith in the future, she has cast off the desired foreign object, leaving it to molder among the quintessential detritus of the Soviet table—sour cream and potatoes. Only after it is too late does she regret her action.

Creativity

Hardship in any form begets creativity. Thus the late Soviet period was distinguished by inventive ways to circumvent and subvert the dysfunctional system. Still, in many cases solutions were both practical and simple. Lacking a Molokhovets-style larder, people stored food on the broad exterior windowsills or narrow balconies of their apartments. In wintertime, dumplings (pel’meni) were made by the hundreds, then transferred to string bags (aptly named avos’ki, just in cases) and hung outside on a nail hammered into the window frame. The bag could easily be pulled inside to retrieve the desired number of dumplings to boil. The space under the couch-cum-bed of the standard one-room apartment proved to be the perfect cool, dark place for storing preserves that had been put up over the summer.

Even if personal actions didn’t yield tangible benefits, they provided a degree of emotional satisfaction. In the kitchen, Soviet women playfully turned mundane foods into objects of delight, molding liver pâté into the shape of little hedgehogs and dusting a mass of cookie crumbs, butter, and evaporated milk with cocoa to become sweet little potatoes. To avoid standing in endless lines, people engaged in strategic bartering, a Soviet version of you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours, as each person offered whatever she had access to in exchange for the otherwise unobtainable from someone else.

There was, though, one arena of Soviet life where no amount of creativity could overcome the potential for dehumanization, and that was the communal kitchen. Upending the notion of the kitchen as the physical and emotional heart of the home (the word focus is a direct borrowing from the Latin for hearth), the communal kitchen brought many of the simmering problems of Soviet society to the surface. The artist Ilya Kabakov captured the essential features of this space in his 1991 installation In the Communal Kitchen, which speaks to the overarching role of women in communal life.¹² Without doubt it is the matriarch who rules the communal apartment. Men in the communal house feel slightly out of place and hardly ever go into the kitchen where the female world is in control, and they seldom look out into the corridor. All contacts between neighbors are as a rule between the women; they create the atmosphere of mutual-assistance—endless favors, hospitality, confidences, and advice.¹³

A strict and specific understanding of morality applied to many aspects of collective life: how to behave in a shared kitchen, how to conduct oneself in a queue, how to raise one’s own and other people’s children. All public behavior was open to scrutiny and comment. More than once as a young woman visiting Moscow, I was chided for sitting on a concrete wall without having first slipped a newspaper in between the cold surface and my bottom. Do you want to make yourself sterile?, older women would demand. No matter that it was the middle of summer—sitting unprotected on concrete could make me barren. A widely accepted code of conduct prevailed during the late Soviet period. This public morality sought to rein in the anger and frustration generated by the cramped living conditions, the endless shortages, and the impossibility of free expression. And it was largely the women who were the keepers of this code, who regulated and enforced it.

*   *   *

Several of the essays in this volume reference Anya von Bremzen’s Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing. The book’s subtitle signals the importance of nostalgia in recollections of the late Soviet era. Von Bremzen’s evocative descriptions of dishes like kulebiaka and roast suckling pig largely enthralled American critics. Yet in Russia, a leading public intellectual, Alexei Tsvetkov, took issue with her subjective portrayal, reminding readers instead that within the Soviet hierarchy, the privileged Moscow of von Bremzen’s childhood was worlds apart from the industrial Zaporozhe region he grew up in, where food was genuinely scarce.¹⁴

Despite the brutal conditions of Soviet life, nostalgia for those years is prevalent. I too unwittingly succumb to it from time to time as I recall the late-night conversations in cramped kitchens, windows steamed over from the kettle boiling on the stove, the air filled with smoke but also with a kind of electricity as we told jokes, discussed poetry, philosophized about life—having made sure that the telephone had been placed outside the kitchen and covered with a pillow to muffle our words. For the Soviet intelligentsia, kitchen conversations were a late-twentieth-century equivalent of the literary and intellectual salon. Of course, this kind of kitchen dissidence could occur only in noncommunal apartments, where the inhabitants had control over their living space.

It is difficult to be fully objective when discussing Soviet life. Sentiments run high toward both the positive and negative, as evidenced by the oral histories collected in Nobel Prize–winning author Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. For many of those who share their memories of the past, the kitchen serves as both backdrop and enabler. It is the primary site for food preparation and consumption, to be sure, but it is never a neutral space; it is always vested with emotion. Alexievich’s work has been described as a history of emotions, a phrase that underscores the conflicted feelings associated with the late Soviet years, when each meal was fraught with an awareness of uncertainty, of the disconnect between the public rhetoric of abundance—the scrolling images of fields of ripe grain shown nightly on television, the endplates and illustrations in The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, the restaurant menus offering voluminous choices when in reality only one or two dishes were ever available—and the actual scarcity of produce in the shops. Whenever possible, these meals cooked under socialism communicated desire, the procurement of luxury foods serving as the primary exception to a life defined by frugality. But with or without luxury foods, a meal pulled together from jars kept on the windowsill or stashed under the bed represented an undeniable triumph of creativity, innovation inspired by adversity. The important collection of essays that follows opens us up to the many ways in which food was not just consumed but performed in Soviet spaces, revealing the emotionally fraught, often shifting, and even contradictory meanings that foodwork yields.¹⁵

Notes

1. Marjorie DeVault, Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 13.

2. For more on fasting in Russian Orthodoxy, see Leonid Heretz, The Practice and Significance of Fasting in Russian Peasant Culture at the Turn of the Century, in Food in Russian History and Culture, ed. Musya Glants and Joyce Toomre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 67–80.

3. Darra Goldstein, À la Russe: A Cookbook of Russian Hospitality (New York: Random House, 1983). The book was updated for its thirtieth anniversary as A Taste of Russia (Montpelier, VT: Edward and Dee, 2013).

4. A. N. Engel’gardt, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Engelgardt’s Letters from the Country, 1872–1887, trans. and ed. Cathy A. Frierson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). On the practice of begging for crusts, see 29–31.

5. Ibid., 77.

6. Velimir Khlebnikov, Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, vol. III, Selected Poems, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Ronald Vroon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 104.

7. Vladimir Sorokin, Farewell to the Queue, trans. Jamey Gambrell, last modified September 2008, accessed July 3, 2017, https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/farewell-to-the-queue/.

8. Lidiya Ginzburg, Blockade Diary, trans. Alan Meyers (London: Harvill, 1995), 43.

9. Ibid., 39.

10. Lara Vapnyar, Puffed Rice and Meatballs, in Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), 63–64.

11. Ibid., 68.

12. For Kabakov’s own description of the installation, see In the Communal Kitchen, Fine Art Biblio, accessed July 3, 2017, https://fineartbiblio.com/artworks/ilya-and-emilia-kabakov/821/in-the-communal-kitchen.

13. Ilya Kabakov, What Is a Communal Apartment?, in Ten Characters (New York: ICA with Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, 1989), 52.

14. Aleksei Tsvetkov, Sup iz topora, InLiberty, accessed July 5, 2017, https://www.inliberty.ru/blog/999-sup-iz-toshypora-.

15. For recent scholarship on the performance of food, see especially Kate Cairns and Josée Johnston, Food and Femininity (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

DARRA GOLDSTEIN is the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, Emerita, at Williams College. Her books include A Taste of Russia: A Cookbook of Russian Hospitality and The Georgian Feast: The Vibrant Culture and Savory Food of the Republic of Georgia.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROJECTS SUCH AS THESE ARE USUALLY COOKED UP at a conference, with scholars bringing their own contributions and then arranging the courses, adding some spices and complementary flavoring as they consider how the parts will become a whole. In contrast, ours was born in a conference hotel room. And although the collaboration was mostly virtual and electronic, that circumstance did not detract from its richness.

We would like to express gratitude to each of our authors, who honed and adapted and rewrote their pieces to fit the changing volume. Particular appreciation goes to Darra Goldstein and Diane P. Koenker, who graciously agreed to help frame our essays even before they read the contents, trusting that the invitation would be worth their while. That trust meant a lot to us. We thank our editors at Indiana University Press and especially the anonymous reviewers, who helped us shape our materials into what we hope you will find to be a delectable intellectual feast.

We are also grateful to those who helped us to illustrate this volume. Special appreciation should be extended to the contemporary Russian artist Nikolai Reznichenko, who kindly permitted us to use his works gratis, and to Marjorie W. Johnson, whose painting graces the cover of this book. This original painting, entitled Russian Hospitality, illustrates a hostess at her dacha. Proud of the spread she has prepared, she may very well be thinking of her other job at an institute or office back in the city.

Production has been facilitated by generous grants from the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, and the Center for Slavic and East European Studies.

Anastasia Lakhtikova,

Angela Brintlinger, and

Irina Glushchenko

March 2018

SEASONED SOCIALISM

INTRODUCTION: FOOD, GENDER, AND THE EVERYDAY THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS OF SOCIALIST EXPERIENCE

Anastasia Lakhtikova and Angela Brintlinger

Gender and Food in the Experimental Soviet Kitchen

The Soviet experiment began a century ago, and in the years after 1917, it became clear that in truth the experiment was a complex of many simultaneous efforts. The communist government staged experiments with the economy and society in general and with the food industry and gender in particular.¹ Throughout the Soviet era, in response to periods of war and deprivation and food shortages but also due to a belief in the possibility of rationalizing and organizing nutrition, repeated attempts to engineer food and taste made Soviet citizens into the often unwilling subjects of experimentation.² Changes in the food industry were dictated in great part by the need for a well-fed and available labor force as industrialization efforts expanded across economic sectors. Both industrialization and the ensuing transformation of the national food industry aimed to free women from their traditional gender roles of caretaker and homemaker. The state needed a workforce; freeing women from their domestic chores was supposed to and did allow them to take on full-time jobs in all industries.

However, from its early years, the state would not be able to fulfill its side of the bargain, and after World War II, as women continued working full time, a major propaganda campaign about a woman’s role as a mother, homemaker, and wife began in popular culture and in specialized publications.³ The essentialist notions of women as natural homemakers thereby received official endorsement and reinforcement. While some social programs existed to support women and childcare, they were not equally available to all women, and the food industry and public catering failed miserably in supporting working mothers and disengaging them from their domestic cooking duties. The cult of the Soviet woman as a homemaker and a mother completely disengaged the state from its promise and responsibility to free women from domestic chores.

Even though the failure of many Soviet social and industrial experiments has been well documented, the failure to feed Soviet citizens adequately and to free women from their traditional domestic duties is made shockingly evident in the sheer gap between the official discourse describing advances in this area and the reality of everyday life in the early and late Soviet eras. The communist regime was not one to freely admit its own mistakes and failures. Consequently, the consolidation of power over the population proceeded along numerous paths, both in theory and in practice. Two theoretical paths consisted of officially approved food and gender discourses.

The Soviet dominant discourse as explored in detail by Alexei Yurchak provides a totalitarian variation to Michel Foucault’s understanding of power as a network of discourses.⁴ In a totalitarian society, the network of discourses is obliterated by the dominant discourse applied to (or inflicted on) all aspects of life, including that of food production and consumption as well as the engineering of gender roles. Thus Soviet nutritionists, food provisioning experts, and the state system that employed them, along with its many bureaucrats, strove to influence and control what Soviet citizens ate and how they thought about food. This was achieved not only via the centralized food production and distribution system but also through a well-defined nutrition-oriented scientific discourse that emerged in the early 1930s, with initial publication of The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food (1939), the first official culinary publication in the USSR. This discourse dominated Soviet food culture from that moment onward. Its purpose was not so much to describe then current trends and developments in food industry and Soviet foodways; rather, it served to provide a definitive discourse based on a correct understanding of Soviet nutrition as an alternative to a free market food discourse based on preferences in taste and free choice. An even greater purpose of this discourse was to (mis)inform the Soviet citizens about ongoing advances in the food industry and food science. Empirical reality set aside, the country had to develop according to the matrix provided by Marxist theory and the philosophy of dialectical materialism. Scientifically based forward motion was inevitable in a Marxist state and had to be proven time and again by advances in food and other industries and in all other domains of Soviet life.

In the realm of theory and the dominant discourse, discussions on nutrition and the importance of variety for the Soviet consumer were published in official professional publications and presented at professional conferences, while in the meantime actual people were starving—and had been intentionally subjected to starvation only five years prior to publication of The Book.⁵ In this manner, the absence of free choice in food preferences and simply insufficient food supply could be veiled by general theoretical discussions on nutrition that remained largely unchallenged throughout the Soviet period.⁶

Because of their failure to reflect reality adequately, Soviet food and gender discourses were hypocritical, even cruel. For if not cruel, what is talk about nutritional balance and the importance of variety with hungry people who have little access to food—to say nothing of its variety—or discussion of the virtues of motherhood with a woman who has to take her one-year-old child to a full-day nursery in order that she might spend her own day at work? To use a Foucauldian term again, the unproductiveness (read failure) of Soviet power and its experimentation in the food industry and in social engineering manifested itself in the fact that food discourse marginalized the majority of the country’s population—and gender discourse preached the virtues of domesticity to fully employed women, without whose income their families could not manage.⁷

No wonder it is cabbage and potatoes—the humblest and cheapest of foods—that stand as the exalted symbols of true Russianness and the Russian condition in late Soviet fiction, culinary writing, and conversation among late Soviet and post-Soviet citizens.⁸ Cabbage and potato, the staples of the Slavic peasant diet, as much as the return to traditional gender roles, represent the economic failure of the Soviet food industry and a symbolic return to a prerevolutionary, preindustrial peasant reality. Even in the late Soviet period, it is cabbage and potato that take center stage in the home kitchen.

One of the very few parallel discourses that contradicted the dominant one, and therefore surreptitiously challenged it, appears to be the food advice given to women in the major women’s journals Rabotnitsa and Krest’ianka. The same, however, cannot be said about the gender discourse in these publications. Food advice slipped from under the control of the dominant discourse by focusing its attentions not on the ideals of proper nutrition (theory) but on existing private practices, an unimportant aspect of Socialist reality. Unrealistic recipes rarely appeared on the pages of these journals, and the columns entitled "Ostatki sladki (Sweet Are the Leftovers"), together with large numbers of vegetarian and meat-substituting dishes, won the affections and faithful patronage of great numbers of women, who could certainly tell from these publications that they were not alone in their struggles to cook root vegetables and brassica in yet another, new way. As in American magazines of the same era, such as Good Housekeeping or Better Homes and Gardens, the idea that careful, prudent use of food resources was also virtuous made women readers feel proud and justified in their attempts to make do with what they could afford.

However, the existence and popularity of these women’s journals also tell us about the turn in official gender politics. In the face of a demographic crisis, official gender discourse in the late Soviet era centered on traditional gender roles and the beauties of motherhood. This discourse on gender and family, as much as the culinary discourse discussed above, in our view, was full of magical thinking, in the sense that it encouraged a woman to assume the traditional feminine role of taking care of everyone around her while at the same time she clearly had to maintain her role as a provider, contributing to the family budget, and to the socialist economy writ large as a full-fledged worker.⁹ Simply wishing in official publications that it should be so did not make such an arrangement entirely possible. Something had to give.

Further, this shift in gender politics was lopsided, as it neither encouraged men nor gave them the opportunity to assume traditional male roles.¹⁰ Women’s multifaceted functions—as described by scholars, political commentators, and other figures in popular culture, in media, and particularly in women’s publications—perpetually explained the correct way to be a woman, a wife, or a mother, parallel to the correct ways of being a good worker and a good Soviet citizen.¹¹ As in all aspects of social and political life in the post–World War II Soviet period, the discourse on gender roles trundled along party lines and met virtually no resistance, urging working women to take care of their home, family, husband, and elderly parents virtually single-handedly—and also to take delight in those practices.¹²

Over time, adherence to the dominant discourse, which did not at all correspond to the real experience of everyday Soviet citizens, resulted in a homogeneity of culture, including homogeneity of popular culture, across the vast reaches of Soviet space. Thus cultural, literary, and media texts, in particular the language of Soviet ideological discourse, reiterated and supported the state political agenda. The significance of this specific Soviet-style formation of cultural habits and the resulting unparalleled homogeneity of popular culture can hardly be overstated for all aspects of Soviet life and particularly for gender norms. The Soviet government used all available media and information channels (popular women’s journals, newspapers, educational literature, and even film) to restore the traditional binary gender paradigms: he is manly; she is the homemaker. The latter dichotomy is certainly not well balanced and radiates in its skewed form a sense of irony—it is a joke, in fact. This is the case because for men, the idea of manliness was presented in purely outward, physical terms, as most men still could not fulfill their traditional role of a provider. In the absence of a social and economic context that could support traditional gender roles, Soviet popular culture (as will become clear to the reader of this volume) became an ideological education tool wielded by the political elite.¹³

Indeed, the films discussed in this volume side with the official gender discourse and come across as reactionary—that is, propagating traditional female roles despite challenging economic conditions. The censorship and the gender limitations placed on women in the fields of literature and cinema, both of which were overwhelmingly male, did not allow women to speak up on their own behalf or deviate from the official discourse on gender. Meanwhile, the state and its media representatives recruited women scientists and journalists to broadcast and reinforce correct ways of being. The criticism of gender relations that emerged through the medium of film predominantly came from male producers working in traditional paradigms of gendered labor distribution, and the result was mild criticism, if not chiding, of the current state of affairs where women made careers and were too busy to maintain their caretaker roles. Other gender-related subjects, such as, for example, a woman’s right to self-determination in living a happy, single life, were never breached.¹⁴

Food and Soviet Identities: Marrying Gender and Food

By the sheer scope of topics and variety of possible angles, both food and gender studies indicate their overarching importance for human life. After all, life is predicated on the need to sustain itself and on just how one sustains it, which in turn depends on how gender roles and social classes are cast in a given society. Engagement with food—perhaps the most basic and most present because of its daily recurrence—exposes social, economic, cultural, and gender differences to their fullest. In case of the USSR, engagement with food also exposes the major failures of the system and the foundational differences between the market and the centralized economies. Where physical need meets a social construct—and the satisfaction of this need manifests itself in all aspects of human life and in all domains of every given society—food politics and gender systems become intimately intertwined.¹⁵

In the West, the juncture of gender and food has proven to be fertile ground for gender scholars and food scholars, feminists and food activists. As cultural historian Katharina Vester observes, Discussions of food in print and media, images of food in film, painting and fiction¹⁶ create food narratives. The notion of identity is inherent in this domain. The study of food narratives and gender allows scholars to track how gender is being constructed in a specific society, what status gendered subjects have in the society, and where their social power comes from.¹⁷ The study of Soviet food culture, too, will inevitably shed light on Soviet gendered identities. However, in the Soviet context, the sources listed above by Vester prove to be compromised because of the highly controlled nature of their selection and publication in a totalitarian state. At most, the researcher will discover not the condition of Soviet women and men but the Soviet gendered ideal rendered through these sources.

Indeed, if one studies only the dominant discourse through official (censored) documents of the era, the historical picture of Soviet food culture and food industry and, consequently, the quality of life reconstructed from it emerges as extremely distorted, if not false. 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.¹⁸ Scholarship of the Soviet food industry and food culture, as well as studies of cookbooks, industry publications, and food-related magazines, describe in significant detail the necessary adjustments to their existing (rather than represented) reality that Soviet citizens had to make.¹⁹ But scarcity was not the only factor that had an impact on citizens’ relationship to food. The fact that this relationship was different for men and women tells us that other aspects of Soviet everyday life and Soviet cultural and social politics, such as the systematic cultivation of traditional gender roles mentioned above, were participating factors as well.

Historian, anthropologist, and food activist Carole Counihan suggests an alternative food-related source of information about gendered identities. She writes, I have found that food provides a rich voice especially for women to talk about their experiences, their cultures, and their beliefs, making available to the public lives that would otherwise go unnoticed—the lives of ordinary women.²⁰ Unfortunately, Soviet culture supplies us with very few of these types of sources precisely because from the point of view of communist ideology, they are utterly insignificant. Ordinary Soviet women did not have much of a voice in society, and in many cases it did not occur to them that this situation might be abnormal. One exception consisted of public sharing of recipes on the pages of women’s journals, but even that was controlled by editors. Further, female writers (some of whom are analyzed in this volume) who attempted to write about women’s everyday lives were frequently prevented from publishing, or when they were published, the emphasis in their work on the everyday served to trivialize it and minimize its impact.²¹ Beyond fiction, the voices of numerous professional female writers, such as sociologists, historians, and educators, as mentioned above, had to align with the dominant ideological discourse that did not value the individual, the private, or the everyday. As a result, even food culture proves to be a rather weak conduit for ordinary women’s voices in the late Soviet period.

At the same time, this underrepresentation of ordinary women’s voices in public discourse does not mean that ordinary women were not fully engaged with food culture. One can trace their activities through private written sources and stories about private practices, such as memoirs, contemporary interviews, personal manuscript cookbooks, recipe exchanges, scrapbooking, food and plant sharing, and oral advice (including cooking, general domestic, mothering, and gardening advice). All these practices uncannily replicate the few roles allotted to women in more traditional societies, such as nineteenth-century Russia, for example. They come down to those of homemaker and hostess.

What do we mean by ordinary when speaking about women in an allegedly classless society? For the Soviet context, it would be someone outside of the spotlight of the Soviet authorities’ attention but who has realized her potential as a productive member of society—in late Soviet period, it would be a woman with a professional college education, a job, and a family with children.²² These women are also ordinary in the sense that they did not actively engage with Soviet mainstream high culture, they were not intellectuals, and they mostly did not leave any traces except in private family archives. Their impact on Soviet culture is largely invisible.

There were other ordinary women, of course, women without college or vocational education, or full-time jobs, or families. Without a college degree or a family (i.e., a second breadwinner in the household) or a full-time job, this category of women would be at a great, very palpable disadvantage. This is where class distinction comes into play, but it does not entirely depend on the amount of income the household produces; it largely depends on how well her job is positioned in relation to centers of food and services distribution. This latter aspect of Soviet economy and society scrambles the societal hierarchy based on income as we know it in the West.

Thus a study of Soviet social classes will not be based on the distinction of taste but on the distinction in proximity to food and services distribution centers.²³ At the same time, the notions of distinct Soviet cuisine will not be the product of double orality, taste and talk, as wittily summed up by Sierra Clark Burnett and Krishnendu Ray.²⁴ It will be the product of simply talk, the dominant discourse discussed above, and it will be handed down from above to everyone in equal measure through official publications and popular culture. Hence, while Western sociologists ask questions about the political implications of personal choice, [personal] [d]ecisions about whom we eat with, in what manner, and what kinds of food,²⁵ scholars of the late Soviet period ask more urgent gender-related questions that emerge from the economy of scarcity—the foundation that sustains the class structure based on the proximity to centers of goods and services distribution. They ask: how does the proximity to the center define and redefine the available, officially sanctioned gender roles of former Soviet men and women; how do Soviet individuals adapt to and circumvent the established hierarchies; and whose responsibility is it to find food and cook the meal in a family of two breadwinners?

The currently palpable reluctance about Western-style feminist engagement with food culture in the Soviet context has its explanation precisely in the nonmarket economy of scarcity. Particularly pertinent for the Soviet context is gender engagement with the above-mentioned access to food and the laborious ever-present responsibility for food processing that can consume all one’s time and energy. Both have been well-researched by Western scholars; however, the question of female emancipation and labor distribution on the domestic front, rich in implications for Western feminism, proves to be difficult and paradoxical when examined in the Soviet context.

Here, the burden to care for and feed the family is on a fully employed (and therefore seemingly emancipated) woman; however, access to food is not as straightforward as in capitalist society because it does not depend on income level. This economic situation literally reverses any effects of emancipation and renders established Western feminist approaches inapplicable to the Soviet case.

That is why despite the fact that quite a bit has been written by Western scholars and Slavicists alike on the dominant position of women in