Edible Ethnicity How Georgian Cuisine Conquered the Soviet Table

The Multiethnic Soviet Union from a Culinary Perspective

It is little surprise that one of Iosif Stalin's most famous speeches was given in the form of a toast. On 24 May 1945, the leaders of the victorious Red Army were received in the Kremlin's expansive Georgievskii Hall and seated at heavily laden tables beneath sparkling chandeliers.¹ Thirty-one toasts were drunk that evening, but the last was the most memorable. Stalin stood up from his chair at the center of the main table and asked permission to say the final toast, drawing frenzied applause from the assembled officers. Raising his glass, he began predictably: "As the representative of our Soviet government, I would like to propose a toast to our Soviet people." Then, unexpectedly, he added, "and, in the first place, the Russian people." The crowd began to wildly cheer "hurrah!" Stalin thanked the Russian people for their unfailing "trust" and drank to their health, amid applause that, according to the transcript of the event, was loud and prolonged.² The toast was reprinted the next day on the front page of the newspaper Pravda for all Soviet citizens to read.³ Its assertion of Russian primacy has earned it a central place in historiography charting the rise of state-sponsored Russian nationalism.

Although historians have combed the speech's content for meaning, they have generally neglected its form.⁴ The form of a toast allowed Stalin to combine confessional candor with the spirit of jubilation required for the occasion.⁵ As a Georgian, Stalin was likely seen by the guests as a natural tamada (toastmaster), a Georgian term that had become an official part of the Russian vocabulary a few years earlier.⁶ As the Georgian practice of having a tamada lead festivities became a Soviet institution, it was increasingly likely that the Soviet table was laden with Georgian cheese pies (khachapuri) and spicy Georgian soup (kharcho), accompanied by Georgian wines and the Georgian mineral water Borjomi. Although Stalin raised his glass to the Russian people, the fact that he gave his speech as a Georgian-style toast shows that Soviet culture continued to be constructed in no small part by the contributions of non-Russians. Accordingly, the history of food and drink offers a new lens through which to view the Soviet Union as a markedly multiethnic state.⁷

The culinary perspective reveals the extent to which the Soviet state promoted a peculiar brand of domestic internationalism in the everyday lives of its citizens. Beginning in the 1930s, this effort entailed the creation of a "Soviet kitsch" consumer culture based on the domestic production of cheaper copies of foreign luxury goods, on the one hand, and the state's elevation of domestic national traditions of the Soviet peoples to the realm of high culture, on the other.⁸ Soviet planners not only began to produce their own "Soviet champagne"; they also sought to create a multiethnic cuisine that privileged the culinary practices of the non-Russian national republics. Unlike curry houses in Britain, national restaurants in the Soviet Union were tirelessly promoted by the state itself.⁹ As in Mussolini's Italy, the state sought to reach into the home and transform the everyday habits of its citizens through food and drink.¹⁰ Whereas the Fascists emphasized an austere diet to engender lean and healthy bodies, however, the new Soviet diet offered a taste of a bountiful socialist future, served in a multiplicity of national forms.

In creating a cuisine that would be "national in form" and "socialist in content," the Soviet state funded the large-scale domestic production of national ingredients and vigorously endorsed national recipes. The new Soviet diet included not only Russian cabbage soup but also Ukrainian borshch, Uzbek plov, melons from Central Asia, and oranges from the Caucasus. Vodka arguably remained Russia's national beverage, but Soviet consumers also drank Georgian wine, Armenian cognac, and eventually liqueurs from Tallinn and Riga. Far from being simply an administrative category, ethnicity itself became edible, and Sovietness something one could consume around the table.

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