Soviet Scoops

Ice Cream with Socialist Characteristics

Soviet ice cream was beloved for its rich, creamy flavour and simple, high quality ingredients, becoming a symbol of everyday joy under socialism. Now, decades after the USSR’s collapse, the mass appeal of Soviet ice cream has long outlived the socialist state, as people throughout the former Soviet Union continue to enjoy these nostalgia-laced frozen treats. Today, “ice cream stands in Moscow’s trendy Gorky Park sell traditional stakanchiks packaged in Soviet-style paper for 80 roubles,” evoking the sweet comfort and familiarity of a time long past, even as the Soviet wrappings conceal the stark capitalist reality of their production.¹ “Soviet” ice cream is no longer manufactured and distributed by a colossal socialist welfare state but by corporate entities, such as 48 Kopeyek, a subsidiary of the Nestlé global food conglomerate. The USSR’s much reviled bourgeois have brought the taste of socialism to the post-Soviet market, profiting immensely off the nostalgia of a Soviet past. This is a turn of events that would no doubt make the father of Soviet ice cream, Anastas Mikoyan, roll in his grave.

Soviet ice cream’s enduring popularity has proven to be a somewhat contentious topic for some, though not because of the contradiction outlined above. Certain commentators have derided its post-Soviet cult status as a troubling trend that is emblematic of a broader sympathy with what they perceived to have been an oppressive totalitarian system. One blogger, addressing the sentimentality around Soviet ice cream, compares Soviet nostalgia as akin to Trump’s slogan of “Make America Great Again,” a nationalist whitewashing of a dark, unequal history that is better left in the past.² However, the reflexive dismissal of Soviet nostalgia as naïve romanticism at best, or as a thinly veiled yearning for authoritarianism at worst, fails to grasp the nuances of memory, identity, and the realities of everyday Soviet life.

Polling across the former Soviet states generally indicates that large segments of the post-Soviet population have a positive evaluation of the Soviet experience.³⁴ This is not limited to Russians, but to varying extents, is pervasive throughout the former Soviet sphere, including groups on the periphery of the former Soviet Union who are often characterized as having been colonized victims of the USSR.⁵ While one would be hard pressed to find many Algerians nostalgic for French colonial rule, the citizens of the Muslim majority Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, for example, have largely positive recollections of the Soviet state in comparison to their current one, citing superior state responsiveness to citizen needs as well as greater safeguards for minority rights.⁶ Although the history of the Soviet Union is marked by episodes of severe violence and repression, it is striking that many who lived through it recall a far more nuanced reality than the one portrayed by Western observers, whose perspectives cannot be separated from the way in which the USSR has been constructed in the Cold Warrior’s orientalist imagination as little more than a site of unending terror and persecution. Indeed, in 1978, the great historian E.H. Carr had warned that a singular focus on the Revolution’s “cost in human suffering, over the crimes committed in its name,” could lead us “to forget altogether, and to pass over in silence, its immense achievements.”⁷ It seems this is precisely what has happened. For Carr, the Soviet transformation of society could not be so easily swept aside:

Who before 1917 could have predicted or imagined this? But, far more than this, the transformation since 1917 in the lives of ordinary people: the transformation of Russia from a country more than eighty percent of whose population consisted of illiterate or semi-literate peasants into a country with a population more than sixty per cent urban, which is totally literate and is rapidly acquiring the elements of urban culture. Most of the members of this new society are grand-children of peasants; some of them are great-grand-children of serfs. They cannot help being conscious of what the Revolution has done for them.⁸

In one sense, Soviet nostalgia represents the opposite of “Make America Great Again.” For those former Soviet citizens of Central Asia, Soviet nostalgia is a longing for a more egalitarian society in which the state actively intervenes in the lives of citizens to ensure their needs are met. In an era of soaring inequality and austerity, governments throughout the world have increasingly ceded their civic responsibilities to market actors primarily motivated by economic self-interest. Nostalgia can take interesting forms. Many erroneously conflate Stalin nostalgia with Putinist politics and imperial fantasies of Greater Russia. Historian James Ryan has brought attention to how, in recent years, Stalin nostalgia often functions as a critique of Putin, who is seen as embodying the corruption and cronyism of capitalist Russia, in contrast to the Soviet state’s welfarist socialism, personified in the paternal figure of Stalin.⁹ In the dire political landscape of contemporary Russia, Stalin endures as a kind of “protest symbol” for economic justice.¹⁰ While one can debate the merits of this hagiographic representation of Stalin, it is undeniable that the Soviet welfare state was far more robust and all-encompassing than what came after.

The history of Soviet ice cream is exemplary of the Soviet Union’s struggle to prove the promise of socialism through its production and distribution of consumer goods. Mikoyan, the minister of all things food in the USSR, was a personal patron of ice cream, overseeing its mass production and promotion as a symbol of socialist abundance and technological progress:

As [Mikoian] declared in a January 1936 speech: “I am a great supporter of the production of ice cream. Certain comrades believe to this day that ice cream is merely a children’s treat, and is of no use to grown-ups.” … The production of ice cream needs to be expanded as much as possible. I am lobbying for ice cream, because it is a very delicious and nourishing food.” Mikoian allocated resources to the construction of mechanized ice cream plants and began the mass distribution of ice cream throughout the USSR. Soviet factory production of ice cream expanded from a mere 20 tons in 1932 to over 46,000 tons in 1938.¹¹

They believed that the socialist centrally planned economy could provide a joyous life for all citizens, and this, in part, entailed eating well. For a time, the Soviets sought to construct an alternate consumer modernity grounded in its socialist egalitarian ethos. Today, Soviet style ice cream is not merely a treat, but a remembrance of the socialist past.

Socialist Food Culture

It might be fair to say that the Soviet state had a near obsession with ice cream. Their commitment to this particular consumer good was prioritized over other ostensibly more important items, including food staples like grains and root crops. The leadership was committed to proving to its population that it could provide high quality decadent treats to all its citizens. The rationale for this is deeply rooted in the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary tradition. Agricultural historian Jenny Leigh Smith writes:

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 masses¹²

The democratization of access to ice cream served a legitimizing function for the nascent Soviet state, setting it apart from the previous regime, which could be portrayed as both unwilling and technologically incapable of providing high-quality desserts for all. In the Bolshevik imagination, the promise of socialist progress necessarily entailed creating an economy that served the needs of everyday people. While frozen sweet treats might seem like a trivial focus against the backdrop of rapid economic transformation and perceived existential geopolitical threats, it is, ultimately, inseparable from these broader global phenomena. An ostensibly radically new social order that did not actually change daily lifestyle practices, including consumption patterns, would have risked appearing hollow to the very citizens whose allegiance it sought to secure. From the perspective of the common worker, if the capitalist states could satiate citizens’ needs better than their socialist alternative, what was the point of socialism? The everyday realities of consumption became a tangible measure of socialism’s credibility for those tasked with constructing it, and, perhaps more than that, a small reprieve for a population that had endured unimaginable suffering amidst a brutal civil war and revolution. It only made sense that the newfound industrial might of the USSR be used to produce goods that elevated the spirit of the Soviet people.

However, the production and distribution of ice cream faced serious hurdles, including contradictions within the Soviet conception of socialist dining and food consumption. In the early revolutionary and Stalinist period, the Soviets condemned the private kitchen as a hallmark of the bourgeois household and presented collective dining arrangements, such as cafeterias and communal kitchens, as a properly socialist alternative. This stance was primarily grounded in a labour-centric vision of social progress for women as well as the broader utopian impulse for societal transformation inherent to Bolshevik politics. Soviet activists emphasized how the bourgeois kitchen relegated women to “kitchen slavery” and dependence on their husbands. Harshman writes:

These activists proposed a solution to the kitchen aspect of the ‘woman’s question’ reducing the burden of domestic work on women, in terms of both time and isolation, through planned communalisation. By communalising the kitchens, they argued they could end the isolation of those women who supposedly knew no other life outside of the kitchen.’ Some aimed to go even further through the professionalisation of food preparation, turning the labour into a waged position. Under these professionalisation plans, women would essentially be hired to perform labour they were already doing. Where capitalism had devalued domestic labour, Kollontai argued, professionalisation would reverse this course and provide importance to women’s labour. ‘There will be no domestic“slavery” of working women!’ wrote Kollontai. ‘‘Women under a communist state will be dependent not on their husbands, but on the strength of their own labour.’¹³

The USSR actively cultivated a new culture of food centred around public consumption and eating in professionalized spaces. This ideological framing proved to be an obstacle that initially limited the success of the ice cream industry, as the state had “ideological objections to so-called ‘personal’ ice cream,” which included the sale of individually packaged bars and cones, preferring that the treat be distributed in communal settings.¹⁴

Despite the Stalinist state’s resistance to so-called “personal” food consumption, it nonetheless took important steps in laying the groundwork for the rise of the ice cream industry. As the Soviet state began to stabilize in the post-NEP Stalin era, a growing market for consumer goods began to emerge. Typically, one associates food distribution in the USSR with endless lines for meagre amounts of food. While the Soviet food system was indeed plagued with long lines and shortages, what is lesser known is that the state also exerted its industrial capacities to ensure consumer goods associated with the former ruling class were now available at affordable prices for its workers. Eager to prove the merits of the burgeoning socialist economy, the infamous Soviet queue offered a range of luxury products that would have been unthinkable just a decade earlier. The state experimented with affordable ingredients to recreate mass-produced versions of delicacies previously accessible only to the societal elite. Historian Jukka Gronow describes the nature of this luxury consumer good market:

The message that these goods carried was clear: now the ordinary Soviet worker had access to a standard of living that was earlier restricted to members of the nobility or rich bourgeoisie … Common luxuries – or one might even speak of plebeian luxuries – were meant to be an essential part of the every-day life of the Soviet people. Such luxuries played a part in numerous public and personal feasts and celebrations, including the carnivals later described in this chapter, that were typical of Soviet life. Champagne, cognac, caviar, chocolate and perfume were all part of this new luxury culture. All these goods have a certain sensual pleasure, meant to be enjoyed by drinking, eating or smelling ¹⁵

What is particularly striking is that “many wageworkers living in highly developed capitalist societies of the 1930s could ill afford the treats that their Soviet counterparts could.”¹⁶ Because of its lines, shortages, and inefficiencies—all very real—the Soviet economy is often characterized as categorically inferior to the American one, even despite the latter’s contemporaneous struggles, including the harrowing deprivation of the Great Depression. Yet, as Gronow notes, the USSR nonetheless achieved things that its American counterpart could not, bringing a form of populist luxury to its masses. The Soviet state sought to, and for a time succeeded in, fashioning a new kind of social order, complete with a distinctive economic model and cultural ethos.

Making Soviet Ice Cream

While cognac and caviar could be enjoyed by Soviet citizens in the 1930s when available, ice cream did not yet have the same reach. This was not only because of the ideological objections to “personal” individually wrapped treats, but hard technological limitations, such as inadequate freezing methods and lack of packaging material. Visions of socialist luxury were further derailed by the onset of WW2, which ravaged the economy and depleted resources, especially disrupting the dairy industry.¹⁷ Much of the most productive farmland and livestock was occupied by German forces, and millions of cattle perished under the chaotic wartime conditions, causing milk yields to plummet. Just as we saw in the wake of the revolution, the post-WW2 era saw the Soviet state again appeal to consumer demand in order to improve the morale of its populace. The old ideology of communal and public dining outlets was now seen as a limiting factor in the development of Soviet consumerism, as the post-Stalinist leadership saw the American consumer market as not merely a bastion of Western excess and bourgeois decadence, but a model that could be cautiously learned from, and adapted to, the socialist context.¹⁸

It now became conceivable for the Soviet family to have their own kitchens with private appliances, furniture, and various personal goods. Socialist consumption, once expressed through collective indulgence in public spaces, came to be defined instead by equal and affordable access to the comforts of private domestic life, with the home kitchen standing as a symbol of material progress and the state’s commitment to raising living standards. Despite the transition away from a more utopian, and arguably more socialist, conception of consumption, the Soviet leadership firmly believed that it was the very strength of the centrally planned economy that could provide equal and accessible goods for every individual dwelling. As the Western capitalist states saw advances in consumer abundance and technological development, the cramped, overcrowded communal spaces must have seemed starkly backward in comparison. Khrushchev famously spearheaded what was “perhaps the most ambitious governmental housing program in human history,” aiming to provide millions of Soviet families with standardized, low-cost apartments equipped with private living spaces and kitchens.¹⁹ The project was a remarkable achievement and a testament to the strengths of the Soviet planned economy. While its primary purpose was to address the housing crisis in the wake of the war’s devastation, it also had the secondary effect of reshaping domestic norms and rehabilitating the “private.”

The normalization of private consumerism was one key ingredient in the rise of Soviet ice cream, though the state still had to overcome organizational, resource, and technological barriers. Producing and distributing this temperature-sensitive treat across the vast country initially proved to be a formidable challenge within an economic system already constrained by limited resources and logistical complications. Smith explains:

sugar, milk, and cream were all in short supply well into the 1950s. How did the state make ice cream available to its citizens if these basic ingredients were not? The first answer to this question requires an understanding of how socialist food collection networks differed from their capitalist counterparts. While it was difficult for private consumers to access scarce food, it was much easier for the state to do so. A second part of the answer lies in the realm of food distribution and processing technologies. Many processed foods (although initially not ice cream) had advantages of distribution over fresh products because they were more shelf-stable and could stand up better to the abuses of shipping and the uncertainties of socialist boom-bust production cycles. It was both easier and ideologically more desirable for the Soviet food industry to create processed foods than it was to distribute high-quality fresh ingredients. ²⁰

Central planners championed processed food as a pivotal innovation in food sciences, exemplifying the technocratic zeal of the Soviet modernization project. This successful application of scientific principles to the organization of food systems also advanced the state’s broader political ambitions to rationalize aspects of everyday life. In the case of dairy, food planners relied on dehydrated and condensed milk, which could be used year-round. In a system with long and unreliable supply chains, the limited shelf life of perishable items often led to shortages, and this scarcity became a self-perpetuating problem that encouraged consumer hoarding. Thus, the boom-bust cycles often typical to socialist production were avoided through the processing of food.²¹ These developments in food science also proved invaluable because the USSR did not possess consistently reliable refrigeration technology until the 1970s, and “cows gave most of their milk in the summer, when it most needed cooling”²² The stable shelf life of dehydrated, condensed, and powdered milk products was a key ingredient in sustaining the eventual abundance of Soviet ice cream in the consumer market.

The provision of sugar also proved to be an intractable problem. Distributing agents initially attempted to provide sugar year-round, but this proved taxing, as the state did not have access to sugar in the same way countries like the UK and US did, both of whom maintained sugar-producing colonies or territories.²³ Since sugarcane was not grown in the USSR due to the region’s climate, the Soviets had to either trade with distant allies to procure the ingredient or invest in the production of beet sugar, which “yielded a less-sweet product that was more costly to refine.”²⁴ Given these constraints, Soviet food planners opted to forgo everyday access to raw sugar for individual consumer purchase and utilized the state’s industrial capacity to mass-produce sweetened processed goods, as the central economy could then better exert direct control over the usage and supply of sugar. The processing of food, alongside new technological innovations in food production and storage, changed the culinary landscape of the USSR.²⁵

Soviet Power Plus Refrigeration

Soviet technology was infamous for simply reverse-engineering American and Western inventions, but Smith notes that refrigeration technology was a notable exception in which “Soviet Union’s research and development into cold technology displayed an impressive range of creativity and adaptability.”²⁶