I wonder if they got the idea of devoting a day of the week to a specific food item from the long and continuing custom of their Nordic neighbours: "Consumption of pea soup in Sweden and Finland dates back to at least the 13th century, and is traditionally served on Thursdays." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup
It was much more likely meant to mock the Christian tradition of eating fish (actually the point is, not eating meat, but then people naturally turned to fish) on Fridays (and for the hardcore ones also on Wednesdays).
This same Christian tradition has become a bit of a joke nowadays since fish is now more of a luxury and is more expensive and less accessible than meat, which is now super common and much cheaper.
What you're describing is the modern post-vatican II Catholic fasting tradition. If one follows specifically the Russian Orthodox fasting rules strictly, you'd be approximately vegan for half of the year (every wednesday and friday, as well as lent, apostle's fast, dormition fast, nativity fast, a few others sprinkled in, etc). On a conventional strict fast day (other than e.g. Clean Monday in lent where you eat nothing at all) you'd eat no meat, dairy, wine, or oil. Some of these fasting days (such as when a feast day happens to align on what would otherwise be a fast day) are loosened to be "fish days" when you are allowed to have fish (but not meat).
So maybe it was intended to mock the Christian tradition of eating fish ... but like... unless the Thursday was during Lent or another major fasting period, if you weren't a monk you could already eat Fish that day? It doesn't seem too much like the Discordian tradition of eating Hot Dogs on Friday, as an attempt to roll up as many possible religious taboos at once (Halal, Kosher, Catholicism, and Bougies who are grossed out by hotdogs)
I doubt it was to mock.
Former east block countries had supply issues with meat.
My experience is from Poland where the Party was not only glad that Catholics don't eat meat on Fridays (and you are allowed to eat Fish, but if you don't have it you won't eat it) but also tried to introduce No Meat Monday.
BTW. In 80ties (don't remember exactly when) each family was receiving paper slips that allowed to buy meat (you had to give also money beside the sleep) and some other high value merchandise. If you had children you were given more such slips for meat (and probably other items).
Yep, food coupons. It wasn't so bad in yugoslavia, but we still had coupons for stuff like gasoline. We also had odd-even days, where you could only drive your car on odd or even days (depending on your licence plate - so every second day).
This odd-even thing always comes up as an example of how things were bad in socialism, yet everyone fails to mention the context of a global oil shortage and that other places had similar policies, like in the US for example.
> Another opinion holds that Thursday was chosen as a poke in the eye to Orthodox believers, since their fasting days are traditionally Wednesday and Friday (official doctrine did all it could to encourage atheism).
> until the death of Stalin, black and red caviar was very inexpensive and accessible. Actively farmed in the Caspian Sea, it was one of the country’s top exports.
What? Why would the death of Stalin impact the price and availability of caviar?
Maybe someone else knows the history here? Perhaps the elites, previously held in check by fear of Stalin, began hoarding for themselves and exporting for hard currency?
> What? Why would the death of Stalin impact the price and availability of caviar?
> Maybe someone else knows the history here? Perhaps the elites, previously held in check by fear of Stalin, began hoarding for themselves and exporting for hard currency?
I think it is a pure coincidence caused by the rise of the population and the overfishing of the sturgeon in the Caspian sea.
Sturgeon, that the black caviar comes from, is a large and long-lived fish that is highly prized for its flesh and has been highly sought after mostly because of that. It also «produces» large amounts of roe (i.e. the black caviar) as a «by-product». A mature sturgeon can easily dispense a bucket full of the black caviar or more. The downside is that the sturgeon takes a very long time to grow and mature. Some species can live for up 70 years.
Now, back in the Russian emperial days, the black caviar was a delicacy for the nobility because they had been taught by French teachers at home, spoke French at home and had live-in French chefs / maids that cooked almost exclusively the French haute cuisine for the family. Traditional Russian food was generally frowned upon as something lowly that only the «unwashed masses» were supposed to eat. So it was the French who have taught the Russian nobility to eat and appreaciate the black caviar. It was a popular snack that was served exclusively with the icily cold vodka, but it was also used as an ingredient for a relatively small number of dishes as well. In other news, the demand for the caviar was rather small, and there was a constant huge oversupply of the black caviar, especially in the Caspian sea area. Sturgeon meat and black caviar were supplied to the nobility and the aspiring gentry, to the emperial court, and the black caviar was exported to European markets as an exotic food that originated somewhere in uncharted lands of the Russian Empire.
Then, Russian peasants (who also happened to be fishermen) did not share the taste for the black caviar with the nobility, and, consequently, they ignored it as a food source. The oversupply of the black caviar was fed to pigs and dogs (ugh, omega-3 rich dogs, anyone?), or it was simply thrown away. Sturgeon flesh was equally prized by everyone, though.
As the population in the post-WWII years started exploding, the sturgeon has become overfished, which has led to a sharp decline in the availability of the black caviar whereas the acquired taste for it on a mass scale started driving the increasing demand resulting the black caviar becoming a cultural cliche and a meme that the Russians are trolled for today.
P.S. the red caviar, on the other hand, is an entirely different story as it comes from the fish that inhabits cold seas that have only become more or less accessible and «industrialised» in last 50-60 years. It was not as easily available back in the emperial days, I would imagine (I am afraid, I do not have much information on the subject here). The overfishing of the arctic fish had not been a problem until fairly recently, therefore large supplies of the red caviar flooded the Soviet market making it a «cheaper» and a more easily accesible substitute for the posh, expensive and hard to procure black caviar.
Is that true? That seems at odds with what the article says.
> What’s more, until the death of Stalin, black and red caviar was very inexpensive and accessible. Actively farmed in the Caspian Sea, it was one of the country’s top exports. But whereas in tsarist times caviar had been willingly consumed, Soviet people didn’t really get it. Some posters even exhorted: "Make yourself eat caviar."
Why would the propagandists push people to eat foods they couldn’t access?
> Why would the propagandists push people to eat foods they couldn’t access?
It this case, the workers probably had access to the foods, but there are a lot of assumptions in that sentence that don't apply to the Soviet Union.
At one point, the Soviets decided that western ads were insidious propaganda that needed to be countered, and decided that every company must spend one percent of it's budget on ads. Don't make anything for consumers? Doesn't matter, still need to spend that one percent advertising to them. Either make ads for things no consumer is interested in, or just invent products that don't exist.
Then once the tv ads were done, the people in charge of tv scheduling didn't care one bit about where the product was actually available. People living in Estonia grew up frequently seeing ads for orange juice that was only available in Ukraine.
In general, when western people look at the USSR they see a state where everyone does exactly what they are ordered to do, and assume that they were following a coherent plan of some sort. Lol no. The guys giving the orders, and the guys giving those guys orders, were all just following the letter of their orders too. The place where the original plans come from were so far removed from facts on the ground they might just as well have been on Mars.
Regardless, a huge portion of the soviet population was constantly exposed to it. For example, all the people living near the borders who could watch foreign tv.
West (Finnish) TV was only visible in Tallinn and, maybe, north/west bits of St. Petersburg/Leningrad. Southern Lithuania and Kaliningrad had access to Polish TV, but that wasn't exactly "foreign". That's a pretty small part of population.
Foreign radio was somewhat better. But even that was accessible mostly in Baltic States and was worse and worse going east towards biggest population centers. Those who listened were mostly listening to political programmes (Radio Free Europe and Voice of America) at night hiding from their neighbours.
The biggest exposure was sailors bringing stuff from West. Plastic bags with West brands were a fashion item. If we count seeing those bags as exposure, then yes, most people would see such bag once in a while.
That worked for some radio, although you either had to be uncomfortably close to the border, or the radio had to transmit to the USSR intentionally, like Radio Free Europe. They used signal jammers to jam most of foreign broadcasts but you can't jam everything everywhere. Anyway, even then if you got caught listening, you could face some consequences for anti-soviet behavior. All it needed was one nosy neighbor snitching on you, and commieblocks had notoriously thin walls.
As to TV, the USSR and its allies used the SECAM D/K standard that was incompatible with most of the Western world, except France. So maybe East Germans could catch something but it's doubtful. The only people who could maybe have a PAL/NTSC TV would be sailors, truckers, airline personnel who could smuggle something in, however, such a TV would have no other purpose on the USSR apart from watching foreign broadcasts and later contraband VHS tapes. So again, if you get caught, anti-soviet behavior, consequences, and your smuggling career and any chances of getting a visa are over.
Depends where and when, in late 80's it was different, at least here in Czechoslovakia. No jamming and color TV's made here had both SECAM and PAL decoders. Probably they wanted to export them. We got one in 1988 and watched austrian TV in vivid PAL colors, it was noticeable difference from czechoslovak SECAM broadcast.
Listening/watching itself was probably okay, but if you carelessly spread the information you would Have Problems.
Finnish TV was easily accessible in Tallinn. Not sure if they broadcasted special SECAM version or if PAL adapters were widely available in black market.
Or put up posters to make it look like it's accessible.
Sort of like making ads for personal cars. You couldn't buy one without a special permit. And queue for a regular citizen was next-to-eternity. But ads still were made.
Overfishing may have been an issue too. Soviets weren't exactly concerned about ecology.
> Collectivization and aggressive food taxes on the peasantry had led to a pig breeding crisis, a reduction in livestock and, ultimately, mass famine in 1930-33.
Ah, the malicious incompetence of Soviet ideology is why they had "fish day."
I remember a joke from visiting Ukraine. "A sausage is the best fish."
Collectivization was about crushing the independent peasantry, which was created about 15 years before, when the Bolsheviks confiscated land from large landowners hand handed it to landless peasants. It created a class which was too pro-capitalist and too economically independent for the later Bolsheviks' taste. So the land was effectively taken back again.
But the aggressive food taxes were not incompetence, but a calculated sacrifice.
Food was one of the very few items the young USSR was able to export. It was paid in gold, because the Bretton Woods system was still in force, and real currencies were backed with gold. Yes, the USSR exported a lot of food right at the time its own citizens were dying from famine.
The USSR then paid that gold for technology, in particular, for buying entire factories from the US. American firms built a number of large car, truck, and tractor factories, and taught the workers the then-current advanced manufacturing technologies. These factories were later converted to produce military trucks and tanks, which played a key role in WWII.
BTW the Soviets were shrewd and bold, and of course cheated: they did not pay the last tranche of the gold once the last factory was completed according to the contract. In a few years, WWII started, and the point became moot for decades.
That's what the urban legend tells. Yes, USSR splashed gold left, and right on fancy things from the West, including the Moscow metro, but it wasn't US factories which played anything in USSR's WW2 preparations, or anything.
USSR wasn't any kind of industrial giant by the time WW2 started. That's a purest propaganda myth. Stalin was terrible in running the economy, probably even more than any subsequent USSR's ruler. Sputnik was possible mostly thanks to post-war short growth spurt resulting from undoing Stalin's biggest economic blunders.
I'm not here to glorify Stalin; he was a pretty bad guy.
But read about Occidental Petroleum, Armand Hammer, and how that guy sold the Ford tractors and built Soviet tractor plants for a nice sum in gold at the time when nobody wanted to touch commerce with USSR with a ten-foot pole. These plants later produced a lot of tanks for WWII.
USSR was not an industrial giant by 1940. Still, without buying Western tech, it would be even less of a giant.
That particular factory stood semi idle for nearly a decade, and stood well in rank to showpiece Union's engineering like Moscow metro. It's nearly certain that the original factory built Albert Kahn only managed to make a few thousand units before accidents, a fire, breakdowns, and complete inadequacy of the fitting necessitated a complete rebuild (at the time, it was said to be "random, wrong, and sometimes completely unneeded equipment")
It was rebuilt, expanded, and retooled multiple times before they can manufacture even a "tin can" (as was called by Union's soldiers) T-26 tank.
And yes, the story of T-34 going to frontlines right from the assembly lines is a gross exaggeration.
No Americans had much of a role in USSR's alleged industrial proves on the eve, and during WW2 aside from Lend-lease, it was the fantastic, enormous resource expenditure which did.
The country remained largely agricultural until mid-late seventies.
I'm sure they sucked and suffered from the typical incentive misalignment of ever other planned economy but the GP's point that the initial soviet industry was done with the help of foriegn specialists setting up domestic production of forign goods is very true.
At first I wondered why bother. If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own? So it seemed unnecessary and superfluous.
But I suppose there's another possible reason. If you can't give people what they want (meat), give them something else (fish) and try to convince them they do want it. If you can actually pull that off, then maybe it makes you look better and/or makes them feel better.
>If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own? So it seemed unnecessary and superfluous.
No, what will happen is some people will get meat for the week in their shop, and some will get none.
Imagine meat is like toilet roll, one day a family turns up late to get their food from the store and there is no meat left for them.
It's better to avoid situations like this by trying to convince households to eat more alternatives, than to leave some households with no meat at all or let meat queues start etc.
If there is a shortage, it doesn't matter if your market is "free" or if your economic planner is Sam Walton or Сталин or Bezos, you better hurry to next shop and hope they still have some, or hope you're rich enough to buy from scalpers, or hope there is enough supply for rationing.
Good point. Did the USSR leaders know about the positive health effects of fish (vitamin D, fatty acids etc.) though, and if they did, why didn't they use that as an argument to convince people?
Come to think of it, they probably didn't.
But a quick online search seems to show that the 70s was around when the world understood Vitamin D a lot more, so could be.
Note that fish day applied mostly to "commercial" kitchens:
> This prompted Mikoyan to issue an order on the “introduction of a fish day at public catering establishments.” It didn't have to be Thursday, but from that moment on, factory and other canteens began to serve fish one day a week
> If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own?
Encouraging weekly fish-eating habits is also a mechanism to ensure that you have a healthy national fish industry, that you can dial up as soon as you need it.
This is something that modern [especially European] nations seem to have institutionally neglected or forgotten.
By importing all necessities and instead focusing on exporting services, you put your nation and people at risk from any such crisis.
> At first I wondered why bother. If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own?
In the early months of the Covid pandemic, most developed countries saw a toilet paper shortage. Not due to supply, but due to consumer behaviour.
If anything, a real or perceived shortage tends to cause consumers to behave less rationally, not more. Markets don’t self-regulate well in these circumstances.
> Collectivization and aggressive food taxes on the peasantry had led to a pig breeding crisis, a reduction in livestock and, ultimately, mass famine in 1930-33.
Mass famine was planed famine with intention to kill "kulaks" class as whole. Kulaks were farmers, which used their own fist ("kulak") instead of pillow, because they were so busy with work in field that they had no time to return to home for sleep. Any food in any quantity was confiscated, even minuscule amounts of partially rotten food, according to the law called as "law about 3 spikelets". Villains were shot by armed guard when they tried to dig rotten potatoes left in the field. Houses of kulaks and sub-kulaks were confiscated or disassembled in winter, to freeze to death their families. Trains were running regularly twice a week to collect corpses and hide them somewhere at territory of Russian Federation. (Location of corpses is still top secret of RF.)
There are several famine events in the history of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian 'Holodomor' is a fascinating case. It appeared to be in the interest of both East and West at the time to deny that there was genocidal intent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Not only this, but "kulaks" had generally been peasants 15 years earlier before the Russian Revolutions. Lenin had attempted collectivization, but it was a massive failure, so instead peasant farmers were given the land. They became fairly successful and increased productivity. But this was one of those intolerable contradictions of Marxism - socialism in the cities, capitalism in the countryside -, so Stalin and the Party orchestrated this murderous rampage you describe. Truly awful.
