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SPEAKER_08: Hi, I'm Lasha. And this is Babushka. I'm going to be the first one to tell you.
SPEAKER_10: Trust me, she's about to be your favorite Russian grandma.
SPEAKER_08: 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 of the former Soviet Union, her small apartment is brimming with enough food and supplies to last months. You know, just in case. Babushka's full name is Yelena Shuyer, 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 was born in 1938. In 1941, I started the Second World War.
SPEAKER_06: And we leave Ukraine and go to Kazakhstan like a refugee.
SPEAKER_06: They could only grow one thing in that dry Kazakh soil. Melons.
SPEAKER_08: For a time, melons were Babushka's only source for anything sweet. We don't have nothing. I don't see sugar. It's very bad time. It's very, very bad time.
SPEAKER_06: Babushka doesn't consider herself much of a cook, but she's always sharing her recipes with me aloud.
SPEAKER_08: 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. Or how she makes her farmer's cheese and the honey cake recipe she learned from her mom. In Kazakhstan, we make bread for ourselves.
SPEAKER_06: Over the years, crossing the Bay Bridge to visit Babushka in San Francisco has become a kind of ritual.
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_06: As an adult, Babushka tells me, she moved to Moscow and got married.
SPEAKER_08: 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 Konega, 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? I love that laugh.
SPEAKER_10: No, I don't remember. Okay, so who is that?
SPEAKER_08: Oh, that's Mark. He's translating in the background.
SPEAKER_06: I don't remember how to cook lentils. Lentils appeared one time. I had no idea how to cook them, so I crawled into the book to figure out how to cook them.
SPEAKER_02: You know how to cook them, but I don't.
SPEAKER_08: 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 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.
SPEAKER_10: 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. Hunger.
SPEAKER_08: And the book was at the vanguard of a radical Soviet food experiment that, despite its numerous obstacles, transformed Russian cuisine.
SPEAKER_10: Today, what's usually served in Russian homes and restaurants is Soviet food. Food that's generously dolloped with ingredients like mayonnaise and dill.
SPEAKER_08: But Russian food before the Soviet Union, that was another story.
SPEAKER_11: Well, it depended on where you fit into Russian society. Edward Geist is a historian who studies the Soviet Union.
SPEAKER_11: What people of different classes ate in pre-revolutionary Russia differed enormously.
SPEAKER_10: 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.
SPEAKER_08: Tsarist Russia had both extreme poverty and extreme opulence. Most of the population, though, like 95 percent, was living on the edge on a very basic diet. The basic Russian diet consisted of a lot of fermented foods.
SPEAKER_07: The Russians really loved the taste of sour. Dara Goldstein is a food scholar.
SPEAKER_08: She's been tracing the evolution of Russian food since the 10th century. There were all kinds of mushrooms and berries that they foraged, wonderful dairy products, and cabbage soup.
SPEAKER_07: 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, you know, are fabulously wealthy. It's like enormous quantities of caviar, but there'd be things like we have this borscht.
SPEAKER_11: This borscht that literally has like 30 or 40 different ingredients in it, like seven different kinds of meat.
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_10: During World War I, food riots broke out between merchants and peasants because of high prices and food shortages. These battles, largely over grain and sugar, kept resurfacing.
SPEAKER_08: And then in 1917, revolution swept through Russia, and it gave way to a grand new country, the USSR.
SPEAKER_10: 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.
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_10: 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 or cooking from scratch.
SPEAKER_08: All of that, dear comrades, was a waste of time. The now old-fashioned Russian food was declared ideologically unfit.
SPEAKER_10: 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.
SPEAKER_08: There wasn't some passage in Marx 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.
SPEAKER_10: In the mid-1920s, Lenin died, Stalin came to power, and the Soviet Union was still a starving country.
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_10: He desperately needed to turn things around. Lenin had promised the people the basics, land, peace, and bread.
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_04: 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.
SPEAKER_08: Anya von Bremsen is a food writer who was born in Soviet Russia. It was understood that people needed some kind of relief and reprieve,
SPEAKER_04: 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 give the people symbols of joy.
SPEAKER_08: And so, just a few years after that disastrous famine, Stalin was like, forget bread. People need champagne and chocolate and caviar.
SPEAKER_07: In this campaign to make life more 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.
SPEAKER_08: And in his quest to create this joyous and indulgent Soviet diet, Stalin decided to enlist the help of a guy named Anastas Mikayan.
SPEAKER_11: Anastas Mikayan was one of the most fascinating figures of the Soviet epoch, because he came to power as one of Stalin's guys.
SPEAKER_10: In the mid-thirties, Stalin made Mikayan the people's commissar of the food industry.
SPEAKER_11: So, the Soviet food industry is basically set up according to what Mikayan felt that it should be like.
SPEAKER_08: Mikayan was a mustachioed Armenian. He eventually became one of the most significant statesmen in the Soviet Union. He somehow survived decades of purges, 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.
SPEAKER_10: Figure out how to feed a starving country and keep the food riots at bay. And ultimately, unite the Soviet bloc under a new and happy cuisine.
SPEAKER_08: To Mikayan, the solution was clear. His new cuisine would be cheap, high-calorie, mass-distributed, and pre-packaged. And for that, naturally, he turned to the most un-Soviet place imaginable. A place that caters to the need for instant gratification better than anywhere else in the world.
SPEAKER_10: The U.S. of A.
SPEAKER_11: Well, what do they eat in America? Well, they eat a lot of meat. They eat things like hot dogs and hamburgers. They have processed breakfast cereals. They have all this sort of industrially produced, convenient, sort of calorically dense food.
SPEAKER_08: It turns out American food, and specifically its innovations in mass production at the time, checked a lot of boxes for Mikayan as he looked to make over the Soviet diet.
SPEAKER_10: 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. Mikayan was interested in the factory lines that were feeding the workers in America.
SPEAKER_08: The idea being, it's not capitalism we're interested in. It's modernity. You can import these American products and machines and turn them socialist. It's socialist because it's being made in a state-owned factory.
SPEAKER_11: The fact that it looks exactly like the American original that we copied it from, it's like, well, that just makes it modern.
SPEAKER_08: And so, in 1936, Stalin sent Mikayan 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.
SPEAKER_10: Officially, Mikayan was tasked with buying industrial equipment for the Soviet food industry. But he got a little carried away. Mikayan quickly became fascinated by things like orange juice and frozen fruit. He visited canning factories and slaughterhouses. He studied metal jar lids and corrugated cardboard.
SPEAKER_08: As he toured the country, Mikayan inspected every aspect of the production line. His memoirs are full of awe for the things he ate. Like hamburgers. Mikayan 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.
SPEAKER_10: Mikayan could 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.
SPEAKER_08: Mikayan came back to the Soviet Union and started to build. His hamburger factories were built to churn out two 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.
SPEAKER_11: You know, it's like it's basically the Russian equivalent of Hellman's. But it's like this is classic Soviet thing. Right. Everyone knows the bottles.
SPEAKER_08: Right. And so when Russians are like when they think mayonnaise, well, that's kind of their platonic ideal of mayonnaise that most of them have.
SPEAKER_11: It's this stuff that's actually like a formula that Mikayan supposedly personally approved. Because when he was the 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 recipe for every kind of mass produced food. Through it all, Mikayan was a dogged micromanager.
SPEAKER_08: He taste tested every new product, approved every last label design, and he named a lot of the products after himself. To many Russians, Mikayan was just a brand name for the meat products he developed. He was like some mythical old uncle, a Soviet chef boyardee.
SPEAKER_10: Behind the scenes, though, Mikayan was churning out product after product.
SPEAKER_08: 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 corn flakes 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.
SPEAKER_11: Because it was not the sort of thing that Russians had typically seen before.
SPEAKER_08: As these weird new foods started to spread, Mikayan 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.
SPEAKER_10: 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-to's on eating oranges.
SPEAKER_11: And so, like, they get an orange and they try and just bite into it with the peel on it. And of course it tastes disgusting because they're eating the peel. And they had to be told, and it's like, well, they're supposed to peel it first.
SPEAKER_08: Mikayan 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?
SPEAKER_10: And so, in 1939, he decided to publish a book. The book of tasty and healthy food.
SPEAKER_08: 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 Mikayan,
SPEAKER_10: the book provides nutritional guidelines, advertisements for prepackaged foods, and hundreds of recipes. And the Soviet state cranked out millions and millions of copies.
SPEAKER_08: How many copies of the book do you have? Looking at my shelf, I have one, two, three, four, five.
SPEAKER_11:
SPEAKER_08: In total, the book has over 1,400 recipes spanning 400 pages. It also has descriptions of Mikayan's industrial progress and advice on things like proper food storage and table manners. So the recipes are all in the middle.
SPEAKER_11: And the sidebars 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 Mikayan's products,
SPEAKER_08: like Soviet soy sauce and frozen pelmeni. And in the sidebars 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.
SPEAKER_07: I mean, fantastic in both senses of the word.
SPEAKER_08: 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 tea sets 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,
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_08: Plov from Uzbekistan, borscht from Ukraine, although the origins of these foods were not always disclosed. Mikayan 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.
SPEAKER_10: 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.
SPEAKER_08: 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. Anya von Bremsen has studied a lot of cookbooks that have come out of dictatorships.
SPEAKER_10: From the Francoist regime in Spain to Fascist Italy. She says there is just nothing else like the book.
SPEAKER_04: It was a way of acculturating 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.
SPEAKER_08: With the help of this book, at first gradually, but then faster and faster, Mikhayyan's foods became Russian foods.
SPEAKER_04: But what's interesting is that they were very patriotically packaged. To generations of Russians, this was our food. So for me to read it and to learn this, oh my god, you know, he looked at America, he basically copied America. Or, you know, Frankfurters, Russians love Frankfurters, Sosiski. That was actually a German recipe. So the origins of so many of these patriotic, beloved items are in fact foreign.
SPEAKER_08: Many foods eventually became altered, Russified versions of the American food that inspired it. Like those hamburgers Mikhayyan had encountered with such wonder. They turned into a meat and bread patty called katlyete, 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.
SPEAKER_04: In fact, it was like really good. Wealthy Russian aristocratic types, well, they ate ice cream before the revolution, right?
SPEAKER_11: But not in any sort of great quantity.
SPEAKER_10: 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.
SPEAKER_08: But that changed when Mikhayyan 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 Mikhayyan 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.
SPEAKER_10: Under Mikhayyan's leadership, a completely new culture around ice cream started to form.
SPEAKER_08: 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. In Russia, cold.
SPEAKER_06: It's very, very cold. And people go with ice cream on the street. You can understand this. I can picture it, but it's hard for me to understand.
SPEAKER_08: Nobody can understand it, but in Russia, it's true.
SPEAKER_06: Why? Why do you think so?
SPEAKER_08: I don't know. I don't know.
SPEAKER_06: We like ice cream.
SPEAKER_10: 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.
SPEAKER_08: 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. My mother knew that I always wanted to share everything.
SPEAKER_02: Here's Mark again, translating Babushka's Russian.
SPEAKER_08: Babushka has always had this impulse to feed others, but when she was a child, it was tough for her mom to watch Babushka give away food, because they didn't have much at all. She says when she was little, she'd get sick, her mom would cook her chicken broth, and there were boys just outside in the courtyard of the house or whatever, in the yard, and she would feed them through the window with her spoon.
SPEAKER_02: What?
SPEAKER_08: They would just be standing outside your window with their mouth open? Huh, yes!
SPEAKER_02: She's like little baby seagulls.
SPEAKER_08: These are funny stories now, but that kind of hunger, Babushka says, it's difficult for us kids to imagine.
SPEAKER_06: It's impossible to imagine. I wish for you never to know that, never to see it.
SPEAKER_08: It is hard to imagine, especially as I flip through pages of the book. Because even as Mikayan 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 Mikayan's factories were churning out day after day were rarely ever available for purchase.
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_10: Most of the food, it turned out, had been disappearing into networks of privileged elites, long before it even reached the shelves.
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_04: 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.
SPEAKER_08: Because food supply was unpredictable, Anya told me that any time she left the house, she'd carry a mesh bag crumpled in her pocket. The bag was called a voiska, which means what if. As in, what if I stumble upon a store with food inside it today?
SPEAKER_04: 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.
SPEAKER_04: 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 never never seen it. We don't know what this is. But you know, it's, 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.
SPEAKER_10: 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 typeface on page one. But for many Soviet women, the book often lived on a shelf somewhere out of reach.
SPEAKER_08: Back in Babushka's apartment, I wanted to try cooking something from the book together. I was curious how these recipes held up.
SPEAKER_08: That's good. The first couple are always throwaways.
SPEAKER_08: We were trying to make blin, a thin Russian pancake made with leavened wheat batter.
SPEAKER_06: They're so thin that you can see through them. Yeah, we're not quite there yet.
SPEAKER_08:
SPEAKER_08: 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. As I mix the batter together, Babushka flipped through the book and I peered over her shoulder.
SPEAKER_08: We landed on a couple of 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.
SPEAKER_04: But people sort of, you know, made accommodations with the totalitarian regime by, you know, by personalizing these documents.
SPEAKER_10: 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. And these Soviet food brands endure today. People love them.
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_08: Babushka, Mark and I finally sat down to eat the bline. OK, so Babushka, what do you think of the bline?
SPEAKER_06: I don't know.
SPEAKER_08: Be honest.
SPEAKER_08: Sorry. No, it's not. It's not. It's not been. 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.
SPEAKER_10: 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.
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_10: An intriguing look inside the Soviet communal kitchen with the Kitchen Sisters. Now for this. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world. And the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts, even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks, and if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. Help gives you a place to do that, so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. 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 reimagining the culture of food post-revolution. It is a favorite of mine. Enjoy.
SPEAKER_12: I'm a graduate professor from Brown University. My father was Nikita Khrushchev, the head of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964.
SPEAKER_05: The most important part of kitchen politics in early Soviet time and revolution time was they would like to have houses without kitchen. Because kitchen is something bourgeois. Every family, as long as they have a kitchen, they have some part of their private life and private property. I'm Alexander Genis, Russian writer and radio journalist. The first houses that were built during the revolution, they were without kitchen. Everybody's supposed to eat in huge 500 people, cafeteria, canteens. This is part of the romantic approach of the early post-revolutionary years.
SPEAKER_03: My name is Masha Karp from Leningrad. I worked for the Russian service of the BBC. People forget what an incredible upheaval the 1917 revolution was. There was a huge movement to free the country from the Tsarism, 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 would not cook and wash up. The idea to have cafeterias was the continuation of this wonderful intention.
SPEAKER_12: But it was only in theory because after the revolution began the civil war and they didn't build any cafeterias.
SPEAKER_04: Bolsheviks were not into food. Lenin was not a foodie. They saw it as fuel to feed the workers. The Bolsheviks kind of wanted to eradicate privacy, and private hearth, private stove becomes very politicized. I'm Anya von Bremsen. I'm the author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking.
SPEAKER_14: Food shortages and the famine of the 1920s devastated whatever was left of the Russian kitchen. My name is Grisha Fredin, 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, 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 Politburo level. The kinds of candies that began to be mass-produced was decided on a special meeting with Stalin and Molotov. One of the goals of the new Soviet government was to provide housing to the workers.
SPEAKER_13: I'm Edward Shandrovich, venture investor. I'm also a Russian poet. They started putting people into communal apartments before they were generally occupied by the Russian rich or aristocrats who were driven out by the new government.
SPEAKER_14: I lived in the communal apartment until the age of 16. About 10 families sharing one kitchen. On one side of my room was the man who washed porpoises at the local morgue. There were two rooms where 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 beets, potatoes, buckwheat, roats.
SPEAKER_13: Five different kettles. Boiled chicken. Five different pots that are all marked. When the relations between the neighbors were especially fierce, you could see locks on the cabinets.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_13: Because they were communal kitchens, they were not places where you would bring your friends. I think that was one of the ideas for creating a communal kitchen. There would be a watchful eye of society over every communal apartment. People would report on each other. You would never know who would be reporting.
SPEAKER_14: 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.
SPEAKER_00: Vice President Nixon escorts Soviet Premier Khrushchev on a preview of the United States Fair at Skolniki Park in Moscow.
SPEAKER_14: Khrushchev 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. Stolychny, a 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 Stoly, Stolychny vodka. The kitchen at the American exhibition reflected itself in the conversation between Khrushchev and Nixon, known as the Kitchen Debate. Americans built the model of the American kitchen, and then they go to this kitchen.
SPEAKER_12: Nixon talked about American achievements. My father talked about Soviet achievements. They argue with each other, which system is better. Nixon and Khrushchev talk about food. How people live. How people eat.
SPEAKER_10: communal kitchens was produced by the kitchen sisters with Charles Maynes, Nathan Dalton and Brandy Howe mixed by Jim McKee. It was produced as part of the kitchen sisters hidden kitchens 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 unmissable podcast at kitchen sisters.org 99% invisible was produced this week by Lasha Madon and edited by Christopher Johnson and Joe Rosenberg, mixing tech production by Amita Gennatra music by a director of sound Sean real to Leaning Hall is the executive producer. Kurt Kohl said is the digital director, Liz Boyd at the fact checking Max Krivoshaev help with translation, the rest of the team includes Emmett Fitzgerald Vivian lay Chris brew Bay, Sophia Klatsker and me Roman Mars. Thanks today to Edward Geist Derek Goldstein on a heart to give a novel suit can and Anya von bremsen on his book mastering the art of Soviet cooking is a must read and look out for her forthcoming book on food and nationalism. And finally, a very special thank you to Mark Lipkin Maria look kina, and most of all, to Babushka. We are part of the stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered 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 at me at Roman Mars on the show at 99 pi org on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99 pi at 99 pi.org.
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