Food in the USSR: Mythology and Reality in Khrushchev’s Russia
My parents emigrated from the USSR to the United States in November 1990, right before the collapse of the entire regime in December of 1991. Raised as a daughter of immigrants, I inherited many of my parent’s quirks. Although sometimes difficult, growing up in the middle of their cultural immersion armed me with a unique perspective on American life, largely due to their assimilation process. Many aspects of my childhood were similar to what other third grade girls were doing: ballet lessons, piano, soccer.
But there was one cultural rift that has followed me throughout my life: food. Meat cutlets on a slice of white bread with butter for school lunch instead of PB&J, plum compote replacing Capri-Sun, and buckwheat with sugar and milk in place of Fruit Loops, all served as strange substitutions in my Russian-American life.
Years later, I became more inquisitive about the food I was eating. Yet my desire to discuss Russian cuisine fell on deaf ears, especially within my family. No one seemed interested in this otherworldly cuisine, not how it manifested itself in New Jersey nor its roots in the Soviet Union. It felt as though most of my family’s experiences with food, especially those of my grandparents under Nikita Khrushchev, were negative. Standing in hour-long queues, empty supermarket shelves, an inability to access fresh produce, and eating predominantly bread characterized my grandparents’ relationship with food in the USSR. I wanted to find out why a nation that was considered a political and military force for much of the 20th century fell so short in providing a positive culinary experience to its citizens.
In investigating the Soviet Union’s culinary shortcomings, I chose to focus on the agricultural reforms under Khrushchev’s leadership (1958–1964), and their repercussions. Khrushchev saw alleviating the Soviet food problem as a means of both legitimizing his own power and projecting to both his citizens and the world that communism produces a high standard of living. As a result of his quest to improve Soviet standard of living, and subsequently diet, Khrushchev was notoriously dubbed Kukuruznik, an endearing yet mocking nickname translated as “The Corn Man.”
The Soviet Premier took an aggressive approach to handling the variety of food-related challenges in the USSR, and saw agricultural industrialization and mass-production of wheat and corn as possible solutions. It was his belief that in order to create a varied diet for Soviet citizens, such that they did not have to subsist exclusively on bread, the nation needed to develop a system for mass production of grain. The theory was that in producing enough wheat and corn, there would be an abundance of cattle feed, and subsequently limitless amounts of meat and dairy products. Despite the animosity between the two nations during the Cold War, many of Khrushchev’s plans were inspired by America’s industrial approach farming.
Subsequently, Khrushchev launched the Virgin Lands Campaign in 1953, planting millions of hectares of wheat on previously untouched land in places like Siberia and Kazakhstan. In 1955, Khrushchev pursued a similar plan of attack with corn. He mandated that collective farms, in regions outside Ukraine and Georgia, the two places where corn had traditionally been grown, overrun their farms with the crop.
Ultimately, both the Virgin Lands Campaign and corn crusade failed. Farmers did not know how to properly rotate and care for the wheat crops in the areas that the Virgin Land Campaign had been implemented. The result was destroyed, arid land. Additionally, corn was a difficult crop to superimpose onto colder regions, and required hyper-intensive care and proper fertilizers and pesticides that local farmers were not willing to use. With these two massive agricultural reforms failing, food shortages increased in frequency and complicated the Soviet food situation.
When it came to food, Khrushchev’s Soviet Russia was primarily concerned with poor quality and a lack of variety, and secondarily with inadequate caloric consumption. The narrative of Soviet food history does not really make a distinction between a lack of variety and lack of calories, and subsequently the history of Soviet food is portrayed as a single-dimensional shortage. Under Khrushchev, people were not starving, as they had been under Stalin. However, as my grandmother recalls, much of her meals were composed of grain, indicating poor variety and unavailability of fresh food.
The reality, though, is that that Soviet food history is anything but one-dimensional. Despite the shortages, most accounts from the Khrushchev era portray a multifaceted food landscape. Food in the USSR under Khrushchev was colored by complex webs of interpersonal relationships, hunting and gathering, and resourceful improvisation to salvage and create meals out of questionable ingredients.
Take, for instance, the Soviet government attempt to garner support for canned ocean-dwelling fish during a shortage of freshwater fish. While the tinned fish themselves weren’t high quality, they fit perfectly into popular cookbook recipes, like the mimosa salad. Adding hard-boiled eggs, herbs, onions, and mayonnaise hid the taste of the fish and once combined, ingredients that were spoiled or of low quality fared better in unison.
Unlike American supermarkets, Soviet stores stood more or less empty and thus forced Soviets to adopt techniques to locate ingredients, rather than engaging in a single-stop shopping expedition. Author Pamela Davidson proposes that Soviet shoppers have “much in common with primitive societies, where the business of food was fuelled by the struggle for survival and the excitement of the hunt”.
Foreigners visiting from the U.S. at the time wondered why lines would form outside shops that were throwing away tomatoes. For Soviets, when stores vybrosivili — threw food out — the products were still worth a final scouring, because one would never know when the next time they’d see the product would be. Lyubov Raitman, an interviewee from Moscow, recalled that even during the most severe shortages, refrigerators were not truly empty. Cheese could be found even it was not officially available, either by maintaining close relationships with store owners who may have had some extra, or by looking for goods on the black market.
Soviet shopping required a “keen sense of where the pack was hunting” and an “eternal optimism and readiness to spring into combat.” Vyacheslav Starik, an interviewee from Saratov conducted by Donald Raleigh, memorized which produce was available on which day of the week, and adjusted his shopping accordingly. Information like Starik’s could be accumulated by striking conversations with successful scavengers on metros, discussions with friends after their “hunts,” by forming relationships with shop assistants, and well-trained intuition.
Ultimately, the history of food under Khrushchev is one riddled with complexities, hierarchies, inefficiencies, and failures. Yet the struggle to attain enough food to survive, and even enjoy, life in the USSR created a robust sense of community. While my family has recounted negative memories of food, there certainly were glimmers of positivity: Red October candies, carts on the street with communal glasses for soda water, New Years Eve dinner, and drinking vodka with zakuski (food one eats while drinking). These were distinctly Soviet experiences, and despite their grumblings, my grandparents and parents love reminiscing about these small food treasures. Surely, despite their cynical Soviet attitudes, if I am still eating Russian food to this day, there is a reason for keeping the culinary habits of their old home alive.
Valerie Shklover TC ’18 is a History major.
