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Chapter 10 Empire of Ice Cream: How Life Became Sweeter in the Postwar Soviet Union Jenny Leigh Smith The Ice Cream Line Standing in line in the Soviet Union was often a draining experience. Long queues were a fact of life for purchasing almost every Soviet good or service imaginable. Since much of the Soviet economy was based on a general rule of scarcity where demand was expected to outstrip supply as a matter of course, lines meant competition, sacrifice, and endurance for prospective consumers. By regularly waiting in queues for everyday necessities citizens surrendered time out of their private lives and publicly demonstrated their dependence on a state authority that meted out “just enough” and no more of staple items.1 Even so, in the postwar period lines for a few products transcended this sacri- ficial limbo of socialist consumerism. These were the queues for newly available everyday luxuries such as ice cream, chocolate bars, and cognac: indulgences to which Soviet citizens became entitled in the postwar era by mandate of the same regime that forced them to stand in line for staples such as bread, milk, eggs, and sugar. These small treats were meant to nourish the spirit as well as the body. In the words of one dairy-industry specialist in 1961, “ice cream is beloved by all, and because of this it should become a massproduced food product, included in the menus at breakfast, lunch and dinner.”2 Soviet food technologists, not necessarily famous for having their finger on the pulse of popular cultural trends, may have been close to the truth when they posited that ice cream was a food “beloved by all.” While the queuing of consumers in ice cream lines still demonstrated civilian reliance on the government as a provisioning authority, supplying a luxury good such as ice cream held a different social and political significance for consumers than furnishing essential staples did. The particular social and technological history of ice cream’s production, distribution, and consumption sheds light on the contribution of modernist foodways to a uniquely socialist form of twentieth-century public culture. It is not unexpected that ice cream, with associations of summer, childhood, dessert, and public recreation, should be a happy memory for citizens of the former Soviet Union. What is surprising is that ice cream was not just a beloved commodity but also a plentiful one during the Cold War, an era better known for food shortages and bread queues than abundant dessert. Technical problems as well as nutritional priorities prevented the Soviet Union from provisioning ice cream to every citizen at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but as early as the 1950s ice cream, once a rare province of the aristocracy, had become a ubiquitous and affordable product in every major city across the Soviet Union.3 In a country that never succeeded in producing a reliable, year-round supply of fresh dairy products and where refined sugar was available only sporadically , high-quality ice cream made of precisely these ingredients became a cheap and consistently available treat soon after the end of World War II. How did ice cream attain such an important place in the planning agendas of Soviet food distributors? Why did an ephemeral luxury product such as ice cream take precedence over staples such as sugar and milk in the Soviet Union’s push to rationally distribute food to its citizens? Even more remarkable, Soviet ice cream was a high-tech and high-quality product in a country where many experiments with new domestic technologies are stories of plagiarization, deficiency , and fiasco. What made the ice cream line, stretching not just from vendor to consumer but also back to producers, food industry planners, packers , and transportation authorities, succeed so brilliantly? The Kitchen Convergence A part of the answer to the question Why ice cream? begins with the year 1932, when Moscow’s Municipal Cooler #2 installed an ice cream plant and processed its first twenty tons of ice cream. While ice creams and fruit sorbets were popular summer treats among Russian upper classes during imperial times, the newly empowered Soviet regime that led the country after the 1917 Russian Revolution introduced ice cream to the masses. The rapidly expanding Moscow plant manufactured seventeen thousand tons of ice cream per annum by the end of 1936.4 While popular in the country’s new capital city, ice cream’s distribution was initially limited by a lack of freezers and refrigerated transportation...

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