Culinary cultures of Europe: Russia 2 The Soviet era
‘I can’t wait for the communism to happen,
the time of limitless possibilities,
I could have a helicopter then
and my relatives could always phone me
if for example butter is on sale
in Rostov or some other USSR town
with my helicopter I just fly there from Moscow
and am on the spot in a jiffy, first in the queue for butter’
- one of the Soviet anecdotes (anonymous jokes) of the 1970-s, a great period for listening to anecdotes, one mostly didn’t get to jail for doing it like it was under Stalin.
After the mishaps of the Revolution and the five-year Civil War that followed the land was lying in ruins, all the festivities and most of the products that were before — a distant memory. Bread, flour and grain of any kind was scarce, meat — non-existent, tea was made of dried carrots, soup of anything one could find including old tea-leaves
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