Edible Ethnicity How Georgian Cuisine Conquered the Soviet Table

Abstract

The Multiethnic Union from a Culinary Perspective It is little surprise that one of Iosif Stalin's most famous speeches was given in the 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: the representative of our government, I would like to propose a toast to our 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 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 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 ramada (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 ramada lead festivities became a institution, it was increasingly likely that the table was laden with Georgian cheese pies (khachapuri) and spicy Georgian soup (kharcha), 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 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 Union as a markedly multiethnic state. (7) The culinary perspective reveals the extent to which the 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 traditions of the peoples to the realm of high culture, on the other. (8) 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 republics. Unlike curry houses in Britain, restaurants in the 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 diet offered a taste of a bountiful future, served in a multiplicity of forms. In creating a cuisine that would be national in form and socialist in content, the state funded the large-scale domestic production of ingredients and vigorously endorsed recipes. The new 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 beverage, but consumers also drank Georgian wine, Armenian cognac, and eventually liqueurs from Tallinn and Riga. …