99% Invisible - 453- The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food

Episode Date: August 4, 2021

Officially titled The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, it was often known simply as “Kniga” (translated: "book") because it was one of the only cookbooks to exist in the Soviet Union. The volume is peppered with glossy photographs of really lavish spreads and packed with text as well. There are recipes for lentils and crab salad and how to cook buckwheat nine different ways. But this book was meant to do so much more than show people how to make certain dishes — it's a Stalinist document aimed at addressing hunger itself in the USSR. "The book" was at the vanguard of a radical Soviet food experiment that, despite its numerous obstacles, transformed Russian cuisine.The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. And this is 99PI producer, Lasha Madon. Hi, I'm Lasha. And this is Babushka. I bought this from a shop. Trust me, she's about to be your favorite Russian grandma. If there's one thing you need to know about Babushka, it's this. If you exist in her orbit, she will make sure you are fed. Even if you show up at her home unannounced, Babushka will find a way to assemble a table

full of offerings, because like many immigrants at the former Soviet Union, her small apartment is brimming with enough food and supplies to last month, you know, just in case. Babushka's full name is Yelena Shulir, and she is the grandmother of my partner, Mark. At 83, she's got this boisterous laugh, and she's unwavering in her love for bread, though technically it's been years since her doctor has allowed her to eat any. What kind of foods did you grow up eating? Like, what kind of meals do you remember eating? I had born in 1938. In 1941, start second war. Yeah.

And we leave Ukraine, we go to Kazakhstan, like refugee. They could only grow one thing in that dry Kazakh soil. Melans. For a time, melans were published as only source for anything sweet. They don't have nothing. We don't have nothing. I don't see sugar.

It's very bad time. It's very, very bad time. Babushka doesn't consider herself much of a cook, but she's always sharing her recipes with me aloud. While we're in a car, on a walk at the table, she tells me how many hours to boil beef tongue before pulling it off the stove, the answer is three. Her how she makes her farmers cheese, and the honey cake recipe she learned from

her mom. Over the years, crossing the Bay Bridge to visit Babushka in San Francisco has become a kind of ritual, and food is always central, if we weren't meeting over a meal at the very least, we were talking about one. When the pandemic arrived, and we had to put those shared meals on pause, Mark and I wanted to try making Russian food ourselves. So one day, Babushka sent us off with a book, a cookbook, one that she pulled off a shelf where it sat untouched

for years. It was heavy like a textbook, a teal colored hardcover. It was one of the oldest books in her possession, literally falling apart at the seams, but stunning at the same time. As an adult, Babushka tells me, she moved to Moscow and got married. And that's when this book came into her life.

It was a wedding gift. Officially titled, The Book of Tasty and Healthy married. And that's when this book came into her life. It was a wedding gift. Officially titled The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, it was simply known as Kaniga, the book, because it was one of the only cookbooks to exist in the Soviet Union. Babushka, do you remember the last time you opened the book of Tasty and Healthy Food before giving it to us?

Like, had it been years? years? I love that laugh. No, I don't remember. Okay, so who's that? Oh, that's Mark. He's translating in the background. I don't know. One tells a period one time, I had no idea how to cook them, so I crawled into the book to figure out how to cook them.

You know how to cook them, but I don't. In Moscow, Babushka had been a librarian. She'd amassed an enormous quantity of books. And when she finally fled the Soviet Union as a Jewish refugee, she had to leave boxes of those books behind. And yet, here's a book she chose to bring with her, one that she's rarely ever used. The book of tasty and healthy food is peppered with glossy photographs of really lavish-looking spreads, and it's dense with text. There are recipes for lentils and crab salad and had a cookbook eat nine different ways. But this book was meant to do so much more than show

people how to make certain dishes. It turns out this was the cookbook of the Soviet Union. For decades, a Stalinist document that was created to address one of the most fundamental problems of the USSR. Hunter. And the book was at the vanguard of a radical Soviet food experiment that, despite its numerous obstacles, transformed Russian cuisine. Today, what's usually served in Russian homes and restaurants is Soviet food, food that's generously dolloped with ingredients like mayonnaise and dill.

But Russian food before the Soviet Union, that was another story. Well, it's dependent on where you fit into Russian society. Edward Geist is a historian who studies the Soviet Union. What people of different classes ate in pre-revolutionary Russia differed enormously. The Russian diet also varied a ton, because the Russian Empire was so large. You don't expect, you know, people living in the Siberian Arctic to eat the same thing, as you know, as like someone in Odessa or someone in the Caucasus. Zara's Russia had both extreme poverty and extreme opulence. Most of the population though, like 95% was living on the edge, on a very basic diet. The basic Russian diet

consisted of a lot of fermented foods. The Russians really love the taste of sour. Derer Goldstein is a food scholar. She's been tracing the evolution of Russian food since the 10th century. There were all kinds of mushrooms and berries that they faraged wonderful dairy products and cabbage soup. So that's basically what they ate and it was pretty monotonous, but it wasn't horrible in terms of nutritive value. It's just that they often didn't have enough and didn't even have enough bread if the harvest was bad. The aristocracy, on the other hand, are fabulously wealthy.

It's like enormous quantities of caviar, but there'd be things like, we have this borscht, this borscht that literally has like 30 or 40 different ingredients in it, like seven different kinds of meat. And for a couple hundred years, that's how it went. Most Russians were subsisting off the land, and when the crops would fail, which they did with some regularity, things would get dire. In a way, the problem of food superseded all other problems in Russia. During World War I, food riots broke out between merchants and peasants because of high prices and food shortages. These battles largely overgrain and sugar, kept resurfacing.

And then in 1917, revolution swept through Russia, and it gave way to a grand new country. The USSR. Picture a region encompassing 11 time zones, 15 republics, a sixth of the world's landmass. This was the Soviet Union, and in the spirit of uniting all its disparate parts under socialism, its plan was this, we will share one constitution, one national anthem, and one cuisine. New foods, it was decided, were needed to help define the new empire. All ties to aristocracy needed to be broken.

This was a revolution after all. Under Lenin, who was Soviet Russia's first leader, the Bolsheviks were looking for a way to feed everybody, separate themselves from decadence, and embrace the modern era. No more foraging for berries or mushrooms from the forest, no more following grandma's recipes are cooking from scratch. All of that, dear comrades, was a waste of time. The now-old-fashioned Russian food was declared ideologically unfit.

It was clear that something about food needed to change, but there was no blueprint to get there. No one had ever prescribed what a communist revolution should taste like. There wasn't some passage in marks that said Buckwheat is meant to be the food of the socialist future. Lenin had tried setting up state-run canteens, A place where workers could fuel up with the appropriate amount of calories. But the canteens were run by amateur cooks who churned out terrible food. In the mid-1920s, Lenin died. Stalin came to power, and the Soviet Union

was still a starving country. With the chaos of Stalin's forced collectivization policies, he starved the countryside to feed the cities. At times, organized teams of policemen would break into peasant households, taking everything edible. All this led to a major Soviet famine, which killed at least 5 million people, mostly across Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Hungry peasants roamed the countryside, desperately searching for anything to eat.

Corpses piled up along the roads. It became clear that Stalin's policies were pushing the country deeper into crisis. He desperately needed to turn things around. Lenin had promised the people the basics, land, peace, and bread. But Stalin decided bread wasn't enough. People needed to feel like they had a sense of luxury in their lives. They needed a reason to still believe in the Soviet Union. There was a sense that the country was exhausted, that the country made huge sacrifices, and Stalin sort of reintroduced some of the bourgeois values. Ania von Bremzen is a food writer who was born in Soviet Russia. It was understood that people needed some kind of relief and reprieve and that the Soviet

food industry needed to get its shit together and give something to the people. The revolution was still young, the country in crisis, and Stalin was desperate to get the people symbols of joy. And so just a few years after that disastrous famine, Stalin was like, forget bread, people need champagne and chocolate and caviar. In this campaign to make life nor joyous, which is literally what Stalin said in a 1935 speech. He made it allowable to indulge. So part of your responsibility as a good Soviet citizen to build a perfect socialist state was to participate in the good life too.

And in his quest to create this joyous and indulgent Soviet diet, Stalin decided to enlist the help of a guy named Anastas Mikhayan. Anastas Mikhyan is one of the most fascinating figures of the Soviet epic because he came to power as one of Stalin's guys. In the mid-30s, Stalin made Mikhail, the people's commissar of the food industry. So, the Soviet food industry is basically set up according to what Mikhail felt that it should be like. Mikhail was a mustachioid Armenian.

He eventually became one of the most significant statesmen in the Soviet Union. He somehow survived decades of purchase, always managing to stay on the good side of whoever was in power. He was a pragmatist, but also a dreamer. And he loved food. Stalin tasked him with a seemingly insurmountable problem, Figure out how to feed a starving country and keep the food riots at bay. And ultimately, unite the Soviet block under a new and happy cuisine. To Mikhail, the solution was clear. His new cuisine would be cheap, high calorie,

mass distributed, and prepackaged. And for that, naturally, he turned to the most unsoviet place imaginable. A place that caters to the need for instant gratification, better than anywhere else in the world. The US of A. Well, what do they eat in America? They eat a lot of meat. They eat things like, you know, hot dogs and hamburgs. You know, they have a processed breakfast series, like they have all of this sort of industrial produced, convenient sort of core, dense food. It turns out American food, and specifically its innovations in mass production at the time, checked a lot of boxes for Mikoyan as he looked to make over the Soviet diet. At the time, most of Russia's food production was small scale and artisanal.

It wasn't scalable in a way that could feed the whole country. Mikiyawn was interested in the factory lines that were feeding the workers in America. The idea being, it's not capitalism we're interested in. It's modernity. We can import these American products and machines and turn them socialist. It's socialist because it's being made in like a state-owned factory.

The fact that it looks exactly like the American original that we copied it from, it's like, well, that just makes it modern. And so, in 1936, Stalin sent Mikhail to the U.S. He gave his food commissar a mission to scour America for the secrets of capitalist food manufacturing. On an August morning, he and his wife landed in New York, and from there, they toured 12,000 miles across the country. Officially, Mikiyawn was tasked with buying industrial equipment for the Soviet food industry, but he got a little carried away.

Mikiya quickly became fascinated by things like orange juice and frozen fruit. He visited canning factories and slaughterhouses. He studied metal jarlets and corrugated cardboard. As he toured the country, Mikiyaan inspected every aspect of the production line. His memoirs are full of awe for the things he ate, like hamburgers. Mikiyaan wrote, for a he ate, like hamburgers. Mikhail wrote, for a busy man, it is very convenient. In the burger, he saw a cheap and filling snack, great for workers on the go.

Mikhail can picture it all in his head. Here were some of the foundations of what would become Soviet cuisine, a plan to feed the masses, a way to save the USSR from its food crisis. Mikayan came back to the Soviet Union and started to build. His hamburger factories were built to turn out 2 million patties a day. And within a year Mikayan's meat plant, called Mikayanovsky, produced over 100 kinds of sausages. He oversaw the production of canned fish and corn and peas, cheeses and meats, juices and popcorn, corn flakes and champagne.

I could go on. And of course, a high calorie condiment that could go in every salad. Mayonnaise. And it's been made the same way since the 30s. You know, it's like it's basically the Russian equivalent of hell. It's like this is classic, Soviet thing. Right, everyone knows the bottles. Right. And so when Russians are, like,

when they think mayonnaise, well, that's kind of their platonic ideal mayonnaise at most of them have, is this stuff that's actually like a formula that Mickey Gond supposedly personally approved because when he was, like, commissar of the food industry, it's like that was one of the things that he did. He had to sign the, you know,

the official Soviet, you know, recipe for every kind of, uh, of mass produced a food. Through it all, Mikhail was a dogged micromanager. He tasted every new product, approved every last label design, and he named a lot of the products after himself. To many Russians, Mikhail was just a brand name for the meat products he developed. He was like some mythical old uncle, a Soviet chef boy, RD. Behind the scenes though,

Mikhail was turning out product after product. And since the average Russian rarely left the country, it required special permission from the state to leave. A lot of people had never before seen some of the foods he was mass producing. When things like oranges and hard cheeses and cornflakes arrived, some found it weird or just confusing. There were certain cases where people really just didn't know what to do with some of this stuff.

Because it was not the sort of thing that Russians said typically seen before. As these weird new foods started to spread, Mikhail found himself touring villages to give food directives. He urged Soviets to embrace a spicy aromatic condiment that he said every American housewife keeps in her cupboard. Ketchup. He proclaimed tomato juice as the Soviet national drink. He advised people who had never heard of corn flakes

to try putting them in their soup like crackers. He gave how-t's on eating oranges. And so like to get an orange, and they try and just bite into it with a peel on it. Of course, it tastes disgusting because they're eating the peel. And they had to be told that it's like, well, there's supposed to peel it first.

Mikaion realized people needed to know about these foods in order to be willing to eat them. They needed to become cultured Soviet citizens. And despite all his travels telling people what to eat and how, it was impossible for him to educate everyone. He needed a new way to reach the masses. How could he spread a single new food culture to over 150 million people? And so in 1939, he decided to publish a book. The book of Tasty and Healthy Food, the one that landed in my lap by way of Babushka. This book became the official blueprint on how to eat Soviet food.

Written by a team of food scientists and spearheaded by Mikkayan, the book provides nutritional guidelines, advertisements for prepackaged foods, and hundreds of recipes. And the Soviet state cranked out millions and millions of copies. How many copies of the book do you have? Looking at my shelf, I have just one, two, three, four, five. In total, the book has over 1,400 recipes spanning 400 pages. It also has descriptions of Mikaian's industrial progress and advice on things like proper food storage and table manners.

And the side bars will contain all sorts of descriptions, often just descriptions of all these interesting new industrial food products that the Soviet Union is producing. On each page, banners above or below the recipes celebrate Mikaian's products, like Soviet soy sauce and frozen pigmeiny. And in the side bars are descriptions of industrial progress, like the various attempts to grow pineapples in the USSR. The book offers aesthetic tips, too.

Each dish should be delicious and have visual appeal it reads and the images of course are gorgeous. The first thing that struck me were just the photographs which are fantastic. I mean fantastic in both senses of the word. The inside cover shows tables crowded with silver and crystal, platters of bread and fruit, boxes of chocolates and trays of caviar nestled between intricate teacets and slices of cake. A whole suckling pig sits in the center. It represented all the luxury that Stalin had envisioned. They have this vintage look to them, beautiful colors,

and conveying this sense of abundance. That was the primary thing, like endless food, endless variety. The book incorporated dishes from across the Soviet republics, Plough from Uzbekistan, Borsh from Ukraine, although the origins of these foods were not always disclosed. Mikhail was showing that we are all Soviet and hey, any simple worker or teacher or doctor can now buy a bottle of champagne or cook a lobster in white wine sauce as shown on page 144.

Life is good. Over the years, the book kept getting revised and republished to match the Soviet Union's changing ideologies. All specific references to a dish being Jewish or American, for example, eventually disappeared. But throughout all the editions, one thing was constant. The book evoked a peculiar optimism. It took on an almost aggressive cheeriness. And by the 1950s, it became a staple in people's homes. On Yvonne Bremsen has studied a lot of cookbooks that have come out of dictatorships, from the Frankoist regime in Spain to fascist Italy. She says, there is just nothing else like the book.

It was aware of a culture rating people who previously didn't have access to anything, like, you know, let's say peasants or workers, to become cultured Soviet citizens who knew how to use the right fork. It's kind of just this amazing, amazing document. With the help of this book, at first gradually, but then faster and faster, Mikhail's foods became Russian foods. But what's interesting is that they were very patrioticly packaged to generations of Russians this was awful. So for me to read it and to learn this, oh my god, you know, you look at American, you basically copy the American, or you know, Frankfurters, Russian love Frankfurters, Saisiski,

that was actually a German recipe. So the origins of so many of this patriotic and beloved items are in fact foreign. Many foods eventually became altered, specified versions of the American food that inspired it. Like those hamburgers Mikaian had encountered with such wonder, they turned into a meat and bread patty called cutliette, which became a Soviet staple. The book features multiple recipes on how to make it, and it's a dish that's still super popular today. But there was one dish that really took off,

maybe more than any other. It's all the way at the back of the book. You have to flip past the soups and meat dishes until you reach the desserts. Ice cream. It was the ultimate success of the Soviet food project. Our ice cream was the best ice cream. We were always told that.

And in fact, it was like really good. Well, the Russian, the aristocratic types, well, they ate ice cream before the revolution, right? But not in any sort of great quantity. At the time, the idea that any Soviet citizen could buy ice cream from someone off the street for a modest price was unheard of. But that changed when Mikhail started mass-producing ice cream in the way he had observed in the

US. In fact, he lobbied so hard for it that Stalin once joked that Mikaian must have loved ice cream more than communism. The Soviet Union's first ice cream factory reached a total volume of 46,000 tons of ice cream a year. Under Mikaian's leadership, a completely new culture around ice cream started to form. All ice cream vendors wore special uniforms, white caps,

aprons, and overcoats. People would go out in the dead of winter and hang around just eating ice cream in their winter jackets. Here's Babushka again. And the rest are cold. It's Babushka again. In Russia cold. It's very very cold. And people go with this ice cream on the street. You can understand this. I can picture it, but it's hard for me to understand.

Nobody can understand it, but in Russia it's true. Why? Why do you think so? I don't know. I don't know. We like ice cream. The book features a number of different ice cream recipes and details about their nutritional information.

And then it goes, in terms of taste and quality, ice cream made by the food industry always surpasses ice cream that is produced at home. As in, here are a handful of recipes, but don't bother trying them. And maybe that was the whole point. The book was a cookbook, yeah, but having people make its recipes wasn't the goal. More so, it was meant to show you what was worth desiring, and that socialism would get you there eventually.

But the truth was much more grim. In fact, most of Babushka's memories are not of lavish spreads and homemade desserts, but of food scarcity. Here's Mark again, translating Bobushka's Russian. Bobushka has always had this impulse to feed others. But when she was a child, it was tough for her mom to watch Bobushka give away food, because they didn't have much at all. Bobushka? She says when she was little, she gets that Kamal would cook her chicken broth.

And she was really boys, just outside in the courtyard of the house, wherever in the yard. And she would feed them through the window with her spoons. What? They would just be standing outside your window with their mouth open? Yeah! Come go check it. Just like little baby seagulls. These are funny stories now, but that kind of hunger, Babushka says, it's difficult for us kids to imagine. It's impossible to imagine. I wish for you never to know that, never to see it. It is hard to imagine, especially as I flip through pages of the book. Because even as Mikaian was implementing his cuisine and revising this cookbook, and

certain foods were indeed taking off, his successes were papering over a dark underlying reality. That hunger was still the primary struggle. Because it turns out many of the foods that Mikiyaon's factories were turning out day after day were rarely ever available for purchase. Even though everyone knew about these foods, the grocery shelves were mostly empty. For decades, outside of a handful of stores in the big cities, there weren't many places you could just plunk down your rubles and buy this stuff. Most of the food it turned out had been disappearing into networks of privileged elites long before it even reached the shelves. Everyone tried to befriend a butcher. You'd smile extra hard as you walked in the store. You had to, if you had any hope of getting a good piece of meat or any meat at all.

If you had any hope of getting a good piece of meat, or any meat at all. Yeah, I mean, food was the object of, you know, constant longing, desire, anxiety. It was really pretty much the focus of our lives. Like, you know, I literally had a banana maybe like four times in my life. Because food supply was unpredictable, Anya told me that anytime she left the house, she'd carry a mesh bag crumpled in her pocket. The bag was called a voiceca, which means what if? As in, what if I stumble upon a store with food inside it today?

So there was this kind of chase, the unpredictability, oh, you know, you pass a store and there's a long line for something some people just would get into the line without even asking what it was for. Meanwhile, at home, the book offered salivating images of the kind of food you were supposed to be able to eat. So we looked at those pictures,

you know, I think there's one picture of, you know, suckling pig and there's one picture of oysters. And it's kind of like, okay, we've never seen it, we don't know what this is, but it was advertised. Every cookbook sells a fantasy, of course, but it's the discrepancy between the abundance on the pages and the absence in the shops

that makes the book so jarring. The book suggested everyone adopt a four-course lunch, but much of the population would batch cook for the week with whatever few ingredients they had on hand. It's clear who the book was written for. To the Soviet housewife, it reads, in bold-type face on page one. But for many Soviet women, the book often lived on a shelf, somewhere out of reach. lived on a shelf, somewhere out of reach. I can tell you, I don't think I can use it. Maybe it's a good one.

Back in Babish goes apartment. I wanted to try cooking something from the book together. I was curious how these recipes held up. It's a package. It's good. Yeah, it's really good. First couple are always through the list. Yeah, it's good.

Yeah, it's good. First couple are always through the list. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, it's delicious. It's delicious. It's delicious. It's delicious. It's delicious. It's delicious. It's delicious. It's delicious. It's delicious. It's delicious.

It's delicious. It's delicious. It's delicious. It's delicious. It's delicious. I do consider myself a good cook, but the truth is I was skeptical of how this would turn out. The book's recipes have incredibly vague instructions, instructions like put meat in oven until cooked, then serve. There are no meal preparation times, no serving sizes. The most frequent instruction in the book is to open a tin can of some kind. most frequent instruction in the book is to open a tin can of some kind. As I mixed the batter together, Babushka flipped through the book and I peered over her shoulder. We landed on a couple recipes that caused her to chuckle. Recipes she thinks no one would have followed.

Meals that called for real crab meat or fresh figs or game birds. It all made me think that this cookbook was useless, but Anya told me the book, despite its flaws, did have its uses. Anya remembers noticing how the copies of the book she saw in other people's homes would be heavily annotated. People would write over the recipes or write in the margins. It became a way of taking the kitchen back, taking something that was produced by the Soviet Union and making it your own. It was almost like this repository of this private knowledge because the book is like very much represents the Soviet state, but people sort of made accommodations with a totalitarian regime by, you know, by personalizing these documents.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 91, there was a lot of hunger and anger again. A lot of people lost everything. To many, these foods conjure up nostalgia from that terrible time. In these Soviet food brands endure today, people love them. And perhaps if you knew how to use it, the book was actually useful. Maybe not always in its recipes per se, but it did offer practical guidance in making the most of whatever was at hand. With advice like adding mayonnaise to your food is a great digestive aid, and advice on

how to portion out meals so it looks like there's a lot on your plate. It did help cooks adapt to the occasional lack of even the most basic produce. [♪ Music playing in background, playing in background, Babushka, Mark and I finally sat down to eat the Bliné. Okay, so Babushka, what do you think of the bline? I don't know. Be honest. Yeah.

Sorry, no. Sorry, no, it's not, it's not a bline. It's a little embarrassing. The bline is far too thick and yeasty, but we eat it anyway with sour cream and smoked salmon and dill. At the table, Babushka looks at the spread and says, you know, the book also tells you

how to properly set a table. Oh yeah, I say, are we doing it right? She shakes her head. Any cookbook has the potential to shape a person's diet or habits or sit on a shelf unused. And the same can be said about this one. But one thing is clear, whether you loved it or hated it or just let it sit on your shelf, over time, the book became uniquely and authentically Russian. Or at least Russian enough, that despite all its flaws when Babushka finally left the Soviet Union, she loved it with her, this thing that was produced by the state she was fleeing.

And when she got to San Francisco, she unpacked her boxes, pulled this book out, and stood it up on a shelf. Years later, she dusted it off, and handed it to me. An intriguing look inside the Soviet communal kitchen with the kitchen sisters. Now for this. Lasha's exploration of the official Soviet cookbook reminded me of an amazing piece by the kitchen sisters from 2014 about the communal kitchens that were also part of Stalin's plans for re-imagining the culture of food post-revolution. It is a favorite of mine. Enjoy.

revolution. The Stalin time, the theoretical idea of the communism declared that all people have to be equal, and the women have to be freed from slavery work in the kitchen. It mustn't be kitchen in the apartment, it will go and eat in the cafeteria. I am Sergei Khrushchev, retired professor from Brown University. My father was Nikita Khrushchev, retired professor from Brown University. My father was Nikita Khrushchev, the head of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964. The most important part of kitchen politics in the early Soviet time and revolution time was they would like to have houses without kitchen. який має бути візовки кичин. Бо зі кичин є бурджуа. У цьому феміляє, якщо був кичин, був бурджуа,

і був бурджуа. Я елік Сандр Дженіс, Рашен Райтер, і Редюджурналіст. Зі відео відео, що був бурджуа. Бо зі кичин. journalists. The first houses that we built during the revolution, they were without kitchen. Everybody supposed to eat huge 500 people. Cafeteria contains. This is part of the romantic approach of the early post-revolutionary years. My name is Marsha Karab from Leningrad. I worked for the Russian Service of the BBC. People forget what an incredible abheaval the 1917 revolution was.

There was a huge movement to free the country from the Zaris. Bring happiness to poorer classes. People thought maybe it's a good idea to relieve a housewife from her daily chores so that she could develop as a personality she would go and play the piano, write poetry and she wouldn't cook and wash up. The idea to have cafeterias was the continuation of this wonderful intention. on the full intention. But it was only in theory because after the revolution began the civil war and they didn't build any cafeterias. Bolsheviks were not in the food.

Lenin was not a foodie. They saw it, it was fuel to feed the workers. Bolsheviks kind of wanted to eradicate privacy and private hearts, private stove, becomes very politicized. I'm Ania von Bremsen. I'm the author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. Food shortages and the famine of the 1920s devastated whatever was left with the Russian

kitchen. My name is Grisha Freyden, professor of Russian literature at Stanford University. Stalin's industrialization program included the industrialization of food, completely new food appeared, mass produced the whole of the Soviet Union in all 120 different ethnic groups, were suddenly being fed exactly the same stuff. Choices for this or that food, the tastings, took place at the plebeburo level. The kinds of candies that began to be mass produced was decided on a special meeting with Stalin, Molotov.

One of the goals of the new Soviet government was to provide housing to the workers. I'm Edward Chandravich, venture investor. I'm also Russian poet. They started putting people into communal apartments before they were generally occupied by a Russian rich or aristocrats who were driven out by the new government. I lived in the communal apartment till the age of 16 about 10 families sharing one kitchen. On one side of my room was the man who washed corpses

at the local morgue. There were two rooms where a mother and father served in the KGB. Then there was a woman whose husband was serving a sentence for stealing bread from the bread factory where he worked. There were two four burner stoves. Everybody cooked their own.

Cabbage soup, washed with meats, potatoes, buckwheat, roots, five different cats. Well, chicken, five different pots that are all marked when the relations between the neighbors were especially fierce. You could see locks on the cabinets. People cooked in the kitchen, but they practically never ate there. They would go with their pots along the corridor to their rooms and eat there. Because there were communal kitchens, they were not places where you would bring your friends. I think that was one of the ideas for creating communal kitchen. It would be in watchful eye of society over every communal apartment.

People would report in each other. You would never know who would be reporting. So even though you lived in a communal apartment in a horrible hovel and had very little to eat, there were moments when you could glimpse the future. After Stalin's death, the goal of the Soviet Union was to catch up and overtake the United States. Vice President Nixon escorts Soviet Premier Kuschev on a preview of the United States fair as Skolniky Park in Moscow. Kuschev decided to have an exchange of exhibitions with the United States, in order to compete with the West, you had to know what it was. This was 1959. I was 13 years old.

Every visitor would pass the counter where Pepsi Cola was given out in disposable paper cups that I had never seen before. They were the first American company, even before McDonald's, to get their foot in the door. Stalin's Russian vodka. Part of the deal between Pepsi Cola and the Soviet Union was that the Pepsi Cola would be given the distribution rights for Stoli, Stolichna vodka. The kitchen at the American exhibition reflected itself on the conversation between Khrushchev and Nixon, known as the Kitchen Debate.

American built the model of the American Kitchen. And then they go to this kitchen. Nixon talked about American achievement. My father talked about Soviet achievement. They argue with each other which system is better. Nixon, a crosshove, talked about food. How people live. How people leave. How people eat. Communal kitchens was produced by the kitchen sisters with Charles Maid's, Nathan Dalton and Brandy Howe, mixed by Jim McKee.

It was produced as part of the kitchen sisters' hidden kitchen series heard on NPR, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. There are Russian recipes from old communal kitchens to be found and a link to their amazing unmeasible podcast at kitchensisters.org. 99% of visible was produced this week by La Shima Dawn and edited by Christopher Johnson and Joe Rosenberg, mixed in tech production by Amida Ganatra, music by a director of sound Sean Rial. Delaney Hall is the executive producer Kurt Colstady is the digital director, Liz Boyd

at the fact-checking Max Kri-Scheyev help with translation. Thrust the team includes Emmet Fitzgerald, Vivian Leigh, Chris Barubey, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Thanks today to Edward Geist, Dara Goldstein, Anna Harzeyevna, Pavel Sudkin, and Anya von Bremsen. Anya's book, mastering the art of Soviet cooking, is a must read and look out for her forthcoming book on food and nationalism. Lastly, a very special thank you to Mark Lipkin, Maria LeKinna, and most of all, to Babushka. We are a part of the Stitcher and Serious

XM Podcast family. Now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. In beautiful, quartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. In beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars on the show at 99pi work or on Instagram and read it too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99po.org. Doot stitcher. Doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot do