An Empire in Aspic: Popularizing National Cuisines in Late Soviet Russia

Abstract

During the Brezhnev era, the USSR’s food world was preoccupied with the “national cuisines” of the Soviet peoples. This represented the culmination of a major postwar trend expressed in cooking advice literature and public dining, notably through the publication of “national” cookbooks and the establishment of flagship ethnic restaurants in Moscow. Food experts promoting national cuisines sought to tidy up the borders of the USSR’s gastronomic landscape, putting each people in their place and elevating selected aspects of their cultures. This encouraged a collision between a longstanding drive for cultural modernization and a growing popular desire for historical “authenticity.” This collision not only laid bare failures of the Soviet food system, but also established an appealing and durable culinary legacy. Examining the national cuisines paradigm, we can identify productive tensions in late Soviet culture and come to better understand how fluidity across time and space helped define socialist modernity.