cauldron replacing the household pot, in the phrase of one Central Committee economist. Such communal catering not only allowed the state to manage scarce resources, but also turned eating into a politically engaged process. “The
stolovaya
[public canteen] is the forge,” declared the head of the union in charge of public dining, “where Soviet
byt
and society will be … created.” Communal cafeterias, agreed Lenin, were invaluable “shoots” of communism, living examples of its practice.
By 1921 thousands of Soviet citizens were dining in public. By all accounts these
stolovayas
were ghastly affairs—scarier even than those of my Mature Socialist childhood with their piercing reek of stewed cabbage and some Aunt Klava flailing a filthy cleaning rag under my nose as I gagged on the three-course set lunch, with its inevitable ending of desolate-brown dried fruit compote or a starchy liquid jelly called
kissel
.
Kissel
would have appeared ambrosial back in the twenties. Workers were fed soup with rotten sauerkraut, unidentifiable meat (horse?), gluey millet, and endless
vobla
, the petrified dried Caspian roach fish. And yet … thanks to the didactic ambitions of
novy byt
, many canteens offered reading rooms, chess, and lectures on the merits of hand-washing, thorough chewing, and proletarian hygiene. A fewmodel
stolovayas
even had musical accompaniment and fresh flowers on white tablecloths.
Mostly though, the New Soviet slogans and schemes brought rats, scurvy, and filth.
There were rats and scurvy inside the Kremlin as well.
Following Lenin’s self-abnegating example, the Bolshevik elite overworked and under-ate. At meetings of the Council of People’s Commissars, comrades fainted from illness and hunger. As the flames of civil war guttered, the victorious socialist state came staggering into the century’s third decade “never so exhausted, so worn out,” to quote Lenin. An overwhelming roster of crises demanded solution. War Communism and its “food dictatorship” had proved catastrophic. Grain production was down; in February of 1921, a drastic cut in food rations in Petrograd set off major strikes. At the end of that month, the sailors at Kronstadt Fortress—whose guns had helped to launch the October Revolution—rose against Bolshevik authoritarianism. The mutiny was savagely suppressed, but it reverberated all over the country. In a countryside still seething from the violent forced grain requisition, peasants revolted in every corner.
What was to be done?
Lenin’s pragmatic shock remedy was NEP—the New Economic Policy. Beginning in mid-1921, grain requisition was replaced by tax in kind. And then the bombshell: small-scale private trade was permitted alongside the state’s control of the economy’s “looming heights.” It was a radical leap backward from the Party ideal, a desperate tack to nourish frail socialism through petty capitalism. And it was done even as the utopian New Soviet Man program pushed ahead in contradictory, competitive parallel.
Such were the Soviet twenties.
Despite the policy turnabout, famine struck southeastern Russia in late 1921. Five million people were dead before the horrors subsided the next year. But between this famine and the one that would follow under Stalin, the NEP’s seven years lit up a frenzied, carnal entr’acte,a Russian version of Germany’s sulfurous Weimar. Conveniently, the
nepachi
(NEPmen) made a perfect ideological enemy for the ascetic Bolsheviks. Instantly—and enduringly—they were demonized as fat, homegrown bourgeois bandits, feasting on weakened, virtuous socialist flesh.
And yet for all its bad rap, NEP helped tremendously. A reviving peasant economy began feeding the cities; in 1923 practically all Russia’s bread was supplied by private sources. Petrograd papers were gleefully reporting oranges—oranges!—to be had around town.
For a few years the country more or less
ate
.
Images of gluttonous conmen aside,
stolovaya
[public canteen] is the forge,” declared the head of the union in charge of public dining, “where Soviet
byt
and society will be … created.” Communal cafeterias, agreed Lenin, were invaluable “shoots” of communism, living examples of its practice.
By 1921 thousands of Soviet citizens were dining in public. By all accounts these
stolovayas
were ghastly affairs—scarier even than those of my Mature Socialist childhood with their piercing reek of stewed cabbage and some Aunt Klava flailing a filthy cleaning rag under my nose as I gagged on the three-course set lunch, with its inevitable ending of desolate-brown dried fruit compote or a starchy liquid jelly called
kissel
.
Kissel
would have appeared ambrosial back in the twenties. Workers were fed soup with rotten sauerkraut, unidentifiable meat (horse?), gluey millet, and endless
vobla
, the petrified dried Caspian roach fish. And yet … thanks to the didactic ambitions of
novy byt
, many canteens offered reading rooms, chess, and lectures on the merits of hand-washing, thorough chewing, and proletarian hygiene. A fewmodel
stolovayas
even had musical accompaniment and fresh flowers on white tablecloths.
Mostly though, the New Soviet slogans and schemes brought rats, scurvy, and filth.
There were rats and scurvy inside the Kremlin as well.
Following Lenin’s self-abnegating example, the Bolshevik elite overworked and under-ate. At meetings of the Council of People’s Commissars, comrades fainted from illness and hunger. As the flames of civil war guttered, the victorious socialist state came staggering into the century’s third decade “never so exhausted, so worn out,” to quote Lenin. An overwhelming roster of crises demanded solution. War Communism and its “food dictatorship” had proved catastrophic. Grain production was down; in February of 1921, a drastic cut in food rations in Petrograd set off major strikes. At the end of that month, the sailors at Kronstadt Fortress—whose guns had helped to launch the October Revolution—rose against Bolshevik authoritarianism. The mutiny was savagely suppressed, but it reverberated all over the country. In a countryside still seething from the violent forced grain requisition, peasants revolted in every corner.
What was to be done?
Lenin’s pragmatic shock remedy was NEP—the New Economic Policy. Beginning in mid-1921, grain requisition was replaced by tax in kind. And then the bombshell: small-scale private trade was permitted alongside the state’s control of the economy’s “looming heights.” It was a radical leap backward from the Party ideal, a desperate tack to nourish frail socialism through petty capitalism. And it was done even as the utopian New Soviet Man program pushed ahead in contradictory, competitive parallel.
Such were the Soviet twenties.
Despite the policy turnabout, famine struck southeastern Russia in late 1921. Five million people were dead before the horrors subsided the next year. But between this famine and the one that would follow under Stalin, the NEP’s seven years lit up a frenzied, carnal entr’acte,a Russian version of Germany’s sulfurous Weimar. Conveniently, the
nepachi
(NEPmen) made a perfect ideological enemy for the ascetic Bolsheviks. Instantly—and enduringly—they were demonized as fat, homegrown bourgeois bandits, feasting on weakened, virtuous socialist flesh.
And yet for all its bad rap, NEP helped tremendously. A reviving peasant economy began feeding the cities; in 1923 practically all Russia’s bread was supplied by private sources. Petrograd papers were gleefully reporting oranges—oranges!—to be had around town.
For a few years the country more or less
ate
.
Images of gluttonous conmen aside,
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