Food in the former Soviet Union remains serious political business. In the summer of 2014, in retaliation against Western sanctions imposed in response to the annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin's government decreed an odd brand of ‘self-sanctions’ by forbidding the importation of many foodstuffs from the United States and the European Union. Conservative supporters of President Putin sprang into action, exhorting Russian consumers to embrace the opportunity to develop Russian agriculture while Putin's opponents raised the spectre of late Soviet food shortages.Footnote ¹ Though starvation does not seem like a genuine threat to modern Russia, the fact that these questions are raised at all requires scholars of food to pay attention to Russia and scholars of Russia to view food as an important aspect of the country's history. Serious studies of food in the Soviet Union and under other socialist regimes are particularly worthy of attention since these socio-economic systems, paradoxically, were best known both for proclaiming an end to hunger and for presiding over chronic shortages if not outright famines.

As most of us know but often forget, socialism was not limited to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). By placing the social and cultural history of the Soviet Union in comparative perspective, scholars are better equipped to analyse whether its experiences were a product of a Soviet state, a socialist system or simply the culture of a modern and modernising state. In this vein, this essay raises the question, to slightly misquote the title of Katherine Verdery's seminal book, what was socialist food and what comes next?Footnote ²

Food under socialism – especially in the Soviet Union – has been presented in scholarship as an important tool of state building; it demonstrated the superiority of the socialist way of life.Footnote ³ ‘There is nothing more critical to understanding consumption under communism than food and drink’, argue Bren and Neuburger, because ‘they provided a stark barometer of well-being’, their low prices a ‘legitimizing strategy’ (165). Yet, as Krisztina Fehérváry has argued, in the post-war world of ‘goulash communism’, socialist states set themselves up for consumer complaints through paternalistic policies that insisted that the state was the only legitimate source of all goods. When shortages and price hikes occurred, consumers did not blame private farmers, processors or shopkeepers. Instead they blamed the state and the Party.Footnote ⁴

Two themes emerge in the works under review – the inability of socialist states to adequately provide sustenance for their citizens, whether in times of war or peace, and the power of food – or its absence – to shape identity and memory. As the Russian-American food writer Anya Von Bremzen describes it, the bittersweet mixture of Soviet culinary nostalgia and memories of food absence and longing are a ‘poisoned [Proustian] madeleine’ (5).Footnote ⁵ In his autobiography, the well-known Russian-American novelist, Gary Shteyngart, recalls not only his childhood passion for the elusive Soviet bologna and ham but also how his grandmother paid him in cheese for his first novel, at the rate of a slice per page.Footnote ⁶

Even after starvation was no longer a threat to European socialist regimes, Soviet and post-Soviet fiction remained filled with unsatisfied cravings. Monday Starts on a Saturday, the 1964 science-fiction novel by the Strugatsky brothers features a ‘gastrically unsatisfied’ ‘anthropoid’ model as the experimental subject of a magical research institute.Footnote ⁷ In most of his novels, Shteyngart uses his characters’ obsession with food to explore how post-Soviet citizens became trapped between a Soviet past and a capitalist present. Indeed, the relationship between food and socialism haunts Russia as it tries to recreate a post-Soviet identity. Contemporary socialist and post-socialist countries provide conflicting models of development. To the southeast, China remains nominally socialist and politically repressive while maintaining a robust capitalist economy. To the west, the Baltic States and former members of the Eastern Bloc present both the benefits and the difficulties of liberal capitalism. Russians of different political affiliations see both paths as nightmares. Seeking a third way, since 2012 President Vladimir Putin has been attempting to form a Eurasian Economic Union.Footnote ⁸

For both Russia and China, seeking a new way of development is not new. The concerns about getting it right are understandable, given the disastrously similar ways that these searches impacted Russia, China and the rest of Eurasia in the twentieth century. Wemheuer convincingly argues that the famines experienced in the Soviet Union (1931–33) and in China (1958–61) have enough similarities to be classified as ‘Great Leap Famines’ (13). Both regimes chose to rapidly industrialise at the expense of the countryside and both were willing to sacrifice peasants’ lives in order to maintain the urban food supply. The leadership and the peasantry of both nations felt mutual distrust, which resulted in catastrophic death tolls as authorities presumed that the peasants would always lie and conceal grain from the state authorities. Because of this, relief for the countryside arrived far too late and, in their rush to buy industrial equipment, both governments continued to export food even during starvation.

The cost of the famines was enormous – and not only in the sheer number of dead. Wemheuer contends that neither Stalin nor Mao set out to perpetrate mass deaths, but rather their callousness led to the devastating levels of human loss. By situating famine as a policy of a foreign invader against an entire ethnic group, Tibetan and Ukrainian national movements could erase actual differences in the conditions and treatment of different social groups within their regions and create a memory of national victimhood (216–8). Arguing against such famine theorists as Amartiya Sen, who insists that democracy alone can prevent famine conditions, Wemheuer suggests that socialist governments were able to learn and adopt their policies, finally fulfilling their promise to end famine. In order to re-stabilise their states, the Soviet and Chinese governments were forced to make significant concessions to the peasantry. If the urban and industrial areas lived under a socialist economy, the countryside was progressively allowed to enlarge private holdings and became a major recipient of central funds. Though both the Soviet Union and China began to import grain in increasingly large quantities, China took further steps by instituting stringent birth control policies and, between 1962 and 1979, sending seventeen million young urbanites into the countryside with the specific intention of reducing the number of urban food recipients (232–3).

The understanding of the Soviet and Chinese experience with famine is further nuanced by the policies and experiences of non-socialist dictatorships. As Wemheuer argues, the Soviet state was saved from peasant wrath by the even more extreme policies of Nazi Germany in the occupied Soviet territories (70–1). These policies, dubbed the ‘Hunger Plan’, lie at the heart of E. M. Collingham's account of the role of food during the Second World War. In The Taste of War Collingham presents the harrowing details of the push by Nazi Germany to increase the availability of food and farmland for its ‘racially superior’ population at the expense of Slavic and Jewish Eastern Europeans. When it became clear that the occupied populations were not dying fast enough and the rations of the German population would have to be decreased, the Nazi government pushed its forces to speed up the elimination of Jews as ‘useless eaters’ (7). Collingham agrees with Wemheuer that these openly eliminationist Nazi policies pushed Soviet civilians and armed forces to persevere despite the constant hunger. The ‘Great Leap’ methods, which allowed the Soviet Union to industrialise and collectivise its agriculture, had also allowed it to sustain the war effort, albeit again at the expense of the nation's peasants, who would continue to bear the burden of hunger as they did before the war (263). The relentless deprivation that had accompanied Soviet life since the beginning of the First World War did have one benefit, however – the population was used to operating and surviving in crisis mode (324). The lend-lease foods that were hated by British and American civilians, such as powdered eggs and milk, were the cherished lifeline that sustained Soviet factory workers (340).

The Soviet Army was nevertheless desperate for food. Even with the vast share of the lend-lease food going to the military, Soviet soldiers were expected to consume only 2,954 calories or 3,450 calories in combat, which Collingham compares to the ‘relatively modest’ British ration of 5,300 calories (319). Yet, despite the nutritional hardships soldiers were forced to face, because of the need to win the war at almost any cost, the wartime Soviet government exhibited greater flexibility when it came to ideology. Religion was tolerated if not outright encouraged. The troops trained to fight rather than to repeat ideological mantras.Footnote ⁹ Instead of punishing unregulated, private food production, the state now told the people to grow as much cabbage and potatoes as possible, in every available spot. Soviet leaders encouraged the harvesting and consumption of wild plants and tolerated the operation of essentially ‘black’ farmers’ markets (336–8). Whenever possible, military units were encouraged to set up their own farms and soldiers successfully foraged for food at the front (323, 341).

Expanding the comparative lens further, the history of food in twentieth-century Korea in Katarzyna Cwiertka's Cuisine, Colonialism, and Cold War can also serve as useful comparison to the situation both in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. After it became a colony of Japan in 1910, Korea, along with Manchuria, was to play the role of the imperial breadbasket. Like the Soviet Ukraine, Korea was both subject to paternalistic modernisation projects as well as harsh grain requisitions and famine in the 1940s and 1950s. As in the Ukraine, these experiences have become one of the key components of both post-war Korea's nation-building projects and Cwiertka, like Wemheuer, suggests that the details be treated with some caution (16, 79–80, 86). Perhaps most surprisingly, the story of food in North Korea is a more positive one than that of either 1950s China or the 1930s Soviet Union. The anti-communist policy of the US military government in the South first deregulated the grain market but then was forced to tackle the disastrous food shortages through a revival of grain requisitions. Because of these initial missteps the food situation in North Korea was actually better than that in the South. Despite a colder climate and the need to provision the Soviet military, a successful land reform and a stable policy of food rationing allowed the North to keep its population better fed.

Unlike China or the Soviet Union, North Korea did not experience a ‘Great Leap’ famine. The North Korean government managed to collectivise its peasantry gradually and kept agricultural planning decentralised until the 1970s. It also retained the Japanese wartime rationing system and, again unlike the Soviet Union or China, extended it to the peasantry as well as the urban population. Though Pyongyang, the capital, and the Party and military elites maintained a privileged status, it was largely expressed through slightly larger rations of rice and greater access to meat. The rest of the country received its rations bimonthly at neighbourhood distribution centres. Unlike East Germany, North Korea did not have to worry as much about competition from its southern rival half, which remained neither especially prosperous nor democratic until the 1980s.

In the early 1990s, however, the stability of North Korea's food system was shaken by the collapse of the Soviet Union and, therefore, the end of a ready source of farm equipment and fertiliser on which Northern agriculture relied. Yet even at the height of its famine, North Korean excess mortality remained relatively low and remained largely confined to the cities. Unlike the Soviet or Chinese famines, North Korea distributed rations to farmers first, before removing the remaining grain for urban distribution and encouraged country-dwellers to maintain kitchen gardens. International food aid was directed to the worst-hit areas. As a result, the impact of the famine was somewhat dulled. Cwiertka is realistic, however, and acknowledges that the famine had long-term health effects on the survivors and significantly damaged the system of government, especially as it occurred at precisely the moment when South Korean economy rapidly took off. The lessons that the North Korean government took from the famine were comparatively farther reaching than those of China or the USSR had been in the preceding decades, as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) had embraced the market economy in all but name. Today farmers’ markets and private food shops and stalls proliferate. According to the most recent analysis of Andrey Lan'kov, the Korean studies specialist also cited by Cwiertka, the latest reforms have essentially decollectivised the countryside and minimised the government claim on the food grown. As a result the latest numbers seem to indicate that the country has been able to gather one of its largest harvests in decades.Footnote ¹⁰

Like modern North Korea, the nations of the Eastern Bloc were concerned by the increasing abundance of a capitalist world that was much closer and more visible to its consumers than it was to Soviet ones. As the essays in the ‘Kitchen Talk’ section of Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger's collection, Communism Unwrapped, demonstrate, public confidence in the government may be shaken not only by tragic famines but also by the more mundane food shortages. In a chapter on cookbooks in Yugoslavia, Wendy Bracewell uses the culinary texts as insights into the rise and fall of socialist Yugoslavia. The two major features of socialist Yugoslavia – its greater success at providing consumer goods through a mixed, self-managed economy in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as its difficulties at managing the conflicting nationalisms of its federal members – were reflected in the cookbooks. Books published during the 1960s and 1970s began to resemble those of the Western nations in contrast to the frugal texts of the immediate post-war decade, but those same books began to be viewed with derision as the economy contracted and food shortages again became common in the 1980s. While this trajectory bears resemblance to other socialist European regimes, the second and more ominous difference was that, unlike the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia did not attempt to construct a unified, hybrid cuisine as described by Catriona Kelly (Kelly, 248–9). Outside of a few publications aimed at tourists, most cookbooks were aimed at specific ethnic groups and from the 1970s onwards began to emphasise the loss of authentic culinary heritage to internationalism and factory-processed food (Bracewell, 187–91).

If, in the 1980s, disappointed Yugoslav consumers missed the abundance of the earlier decades, East German consumers’ demand for real coffee in Katherine Pence's chapter was consistently frustrated. Given the proximity of another, wealthier German state and the relative lack of hard currency, the search for coffee affected even East Germany's foreign policy as it sought good relations with Ghana, Guinea and Brazil in order to obtain coffee in exchange for high-quality optics and even polygraph machines (Pence, 207). Legal luxury goods and hard currency shops as well as illegal black market schemes provided better off East Germans with real coffee. Not only does the East German coffee case illustrate the socio-economic class divisions within East German society but also the comparative deprivation across the Warsaw Pact borders. If Soviet consumers complained about the inability of its government to provide white bread in the 1960s and meat in the 1970s and 80s, East Germans, who were reasonably well supplied with basic necessities after the 1953 Berlin uprising, made remarkably similar complaints over the seemingly superfluous luxury of coffee. When a world coffee crisis raised market coffee prices in the late 1970s, the East German government raised retail prices and produced an ersatz Kaffee-Mix that was said to cause impotence, causing a strike in a working-class Berlin neighbourhood (Pence, 217).Footnote ¹¹ The crisis pushed the state to designate coffee as an official staple product, with government contracts set to trade heavy machinery and munitions for raw beans (Pence, 217).

It is perhaps unsurprising that socialism in Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania ended with a violent uprising and a summarily executed leader, unlike in the rest of the Eastern Bloc. In politics and in the provision of food the Romanian case resembles the rest of socialist Europe but differs in the extremes to which both went. In the 1960s Ceausescu strengthened his power by combining nationalism with consumer liberalisation, as Jill Massino's chapter shows. While Romanians were getting used to caviar, chocolate and coffee, Romanian foreign debt grew ever higher. As a result, starting in the 1970s and culminating in the radical autarky of the 1980s, consumer goods disappeared and government repressions increased. After a decade of the ‘good life’, Ceausescu attempted to rule Romania on nationalism alone, with a patriotic ‘scientific nourishment’ programme that aimed to radically reduce food consumption as everything imaginable was sold abroad to finance debt payments and the Leader's cult of personality (Massino, 238). Even gender roles shifted as men took pride in their power-shopping abilities in a society in which obtaining food became a task requiring ‘a great deal of time, energy, and fortitude’ (240).

Whatever the object of gustatory desire, the pride of the successful obtainer of goods is an important thread connecting the Central European and Soviet experiences. Like the Romanians, East Germans felt pride in obtaining real coffee beans (Pence, 219) and the post-war Soviet generations were unified by the shared identity as ‘food procurers’ (Kushkova, 285). But was there anything else that culinarily unified the multi-ethnic Soviet state itself? Writing within the framework of a project dedicated to Russian national identity, Catriona Kelly concludes that while there were many continuities from the pre-Revolutionary period in Soviet culinary literature and practice, successful and lasting introductions of new foods and ideas about food generally have been equally important. The iconic standard Soviet cookbook, the Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, first published in 1939, borrowed heavily from the hybrid Russian-Continental cuisine of its pre-revolutionary equivalent, the Gift to Young Housewives by Yelena Molokhovets. In some ways, the Soviet transfer of the capital to Moscow in 1918 redefined the standard Russian cuisine from the hybrid, cosmopolitan St. Petersburg version to the less westernised cookery of Moscow and then ‘back-projected’ it as the only authentic Russian cuisine from the 1970s onwards (Kelly, 268–70). For everyday Soviet cooks, the simplified preparations and the introduction of the mayonnaise-heavy salads of the Soviet era became the new tradition because their practicality appealed to busy working women. The final distinguishing feature of the cuisine was the proliferation of private recipes, spread through word-of-mouth, since standardised recipes had to be adapted to the unstable supply of even basic ingredients.

Working within the same project on Soviet identity as Catriona Kelly, it is these shortages that Anna Kushkova's work addresses. Based on multiple interviews of former Soviet middle-class consumers, Kushkova's research complicates the story of Soviet shortages. Her contribution is especially valuable since she identifies recurrent themes of shortage (defitsit) stories similar to those told in Communism Unwrapped. There is the ‘horror story’ of endless lines or fights, the common use of military terminology and the claims to heroism for those able to obtain goods, together with the pride of knowing where and when a certain good might be obtained, the extreme seasonality of fruit and vegetables and the ability to preserve them for the winter. With a mixture of embarrassment and pride the informants also tell ‘trickster stories’ in which the interviewee somehow cheated the system, whether by ‘borrowing’ a child to receive an extra share of goods or through outright pilfering from one's own place of work (283). While Kushkova's informants no longer identify as ‘Soviet’, emphasising an individual's ability to overcome the unfortunate situation imposed on them from above, she finds that the experience of shortages was an important factor in identity and class formation during the last Soviet decades. Echoing the views of memoirists and other Soviet interview projects, the middle-class intelligentsia informants were dismissive of the perceived food privileges of the party officials, industrial workers, the pilfering shop clerks and the inordinately well-provisioned capital cities.Footnote ¹² Though neither as deadly nor as dramatic as the great famines, these petty concerns eroded the support that the increasingly powerful Soviet middle classes gave to the Soviet government. Their grumbling about food did not make the Soviet Union collapse, but it certainly made the fall seem much more inevitable once it happened.

The question of Soviet identity is at the forefront of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, Anya von Bremzen's excellently researched memoir. Born in 1963, roughly halfway through the Soviet regime, von Bremzen turns to her mother and to secondary literature in order to present a complete picture of seventy years of Soviet food. Von Bremzen's work illustrates and humanises the experience of Soviet food theorised in the scholarly literature. In her memoir the author and her mother consciously struggle with the question of identity that Kushkova and Kelly try to elucidate. No matter how astute the analysis, encounters with food are highly individualised experiences. Von Bremzen's memoir is especially valuable in trying to understand what the experience of food under socialism felt like. As a professional food writer, who grew up in the Soviet Union, von Bremzen has the language to convey individualised experience to those who do not possess what she calls ‘a special privilege . . . [of] such a rich, weird past’ (213).

Within the memoir, individual foods and experiences acquire greater significance as symbols of all the conflicting ingredients of being a Soviet person, including ethnicity. Gefilte fish, for instance, stands in for the Jewish faith that von Bremzen's maternal ancestors had abandoned. When she encounters it in the kitchen of Jewish-Ukrainian relatives as a child, von Bremzen runs away from its strange smells as well as its Jewish symbolism. In a chapter on the pre-Revolutionary Russian cuisine von Bremzen concludes that her palate has become truly Soviet rather than Russian when an attempt to prepare a multi-layer kulebiaka pie according to a pre-Revolutionary recipe does not recapture the pleasure that she felt when eating a simplified late socialist version in her childhood (25).

The same Soviet past that shaped her tastes is gleefully rejected when von Bremzen and her mother symbolically celebrate Stalin's death day by preparing opulent recipes from the 1952 edition of the Book of Tasty and Healthy food. The practical rejection had come earlier, when von Bremzen's mother left the Soviet Union with her daughter in 1974, rebelling against von Bremzen's hyper-loyalist grandfather, a one-time chief of Soviet naval intelligence. Von Bremzen's father, who remained in the Soviet Union, can be viewed as the embodiment of the Soviet psyche, his irreverence increased by alcoholism and working on preserving the ultimate Soviet relic – Lenin's body. Fittingly, during one of her occasional visits back, von Bremzen greeted the ‘historical hungover dawn’ of the Soviet collapse in December 1991 while suffering from alcohol poisoning (267).

Von Bremzen's mixed feelings about the ‘poisoned madeleine’ of Soviet culinary memory are also a part of the mixture of criticism and nostalgia pervading the Uninvented History of Soviet Cuisine by Ol'ga Siutkina and Pavel Siutkin. While Siutkin is a trained historian, the book is aimed at a non-specialist audience and sets out to be a popular ‘history of Soviet culinary literature’ and an ‘encyclopaedia of Soviet gastronomy’ (8). It is a heavily illustrated, glossy publication, one-third of which consists of recipes. The authors’ views on the trajectory of Soviet cuisine are ambivalent. Given their interest in traditional Russian cuisine – this volume is a sequel to a similar work on pre-revolutionary Russian cooking – the authors mourn the birth of the Soviet Russian cuisine when ‘traditions were ignored, habits destroyed’ and the selection of ingredients and culinary techniques simplified ‘down to the primitive’ (9). Despite this, they also argue that the Soviet cuisine was not always ‘amusing and primitive’ and reached its apotheosis in the 1960s thanks to the availability of private kitchens, a better variety of foods and higher salaries (18). The characteristics the authors ascribe to Soviet cuisine – a simplification of recipes and the increasing domination of processed and non-traditional foods – could also be seen simply as a part of international trends of modernisation (270–1). What makes Siutkin and Siutkina's book truly valuable, however, are their interviews with Soviet culinary professionals and their own recollections of an upper middle-class upbringing. Interspersed throughout the book, the interviews discuss the invention of well-known restaurant dishes, Soviet culinary education and the catering arrangements for the Moscow Olympics. Given the often tragic nature of the history of food and socialism, it is a relief to move away from the grim statistics and to encounter a socialist cuisine with a human face.

The Soviet Union and European socialist regimes may have collapsed almost a quarter of a century ago, but the story of socialist food is far from over. Speaking to Moscow University students in 1999, Vladimir Putin claimed that Russia had finally achieved its seemingly irreconcilable dreams of prosperity and democracy, or, as Putin put it, ‘sausage and freedom’.Footnote ¹³ The days of Soviet shortages and artistic repressions were seemingly gone. Yet at the time this review was submitted for publication, Russian bulldozers were publicly crushing not ‘decadent’, Western art exhibits but illicit Western food imports. These actions were accompanied by a public discussion of whether these symbolic gestures meant that Russia had finally achieved food security or if the next crushed container of smuggled parmesan cheese would become the final ‘let them eat cake’ moment for the regime. The books reviewed here provide a valuable and detailed backdrop to a history of places where sausage stands for abundance and bulldozed parmesan symbolises crushed hopes for freedom.