Soviet Scoops

Ice Cream with Socialist Characteristics

*This entire article is free, but there is a bonus article for paid subscribers at the end of the footnotes (A Stalinist Cookbook: Eating in a Scientific Way)*

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

The rapid expansion of dry-ice production, a by-product of World War II, became crucial to the development of the ice cream industry. While a few dry-ice factories did exist prior to the war, their production expanded as a practical solution for industrial refrigeration, as municipal freezers and industrial meat lockers were costly, prone to breakdowns, and vulnerable to power outages.

It took until 1955 for planners to fully recognize the potential of dry ice to reduce reliance on unreliable freezers. Previous attempts to use dry-ice-cooled railway cars largely failed because shipping schedules were irregular and factories were far from rail stations. A more effective solution emerged in the form of insulated pushcarts chilled with dry ice. These carts were deployed for the distribution and direct sale of meat, milk, and ice cream, with vendors following strict hygiene rules. By the 1960s, the “pushcart lady,” wearing their iconic lab coats and white head scarves, had become a cherished figure in Soviet cities.²⁷

Before the rise of the ice cream industry, direct sales from producers to consumers were rare in the Soviet Union. Most goods, even staples like bread, passed through multiple links before reaching buyers. The low-tech, yet innovative, dry-ice cooled pushcart method circumvented the infamous food-line, delivering consumer goods directly into the hands of consumers on the street side, the park, or other public areas. Ironically, Khrushchev’s move from communal food consumption to the rehabilitation of private and personal eating wound up re-creating the condition of communal, public ice cream consumption, which became a revered Soviet ritual:

Eating ice cream in the streets and parks of Soviet cities alongside friends, neighbors, and family members became a uniquely Soviet public ritual—one that is remembered today with nostalgia and pride. Ice cream’s status as a social and public commodity transcended its identity as a dessert. Ice cream became more than dessert; it was also a way for Soviet consumers to participate in a pleasurable and socially rewarding public rite. The Soviet Union was not the only place in the world where ice cream became a symbolic centerpiece of centralized food distribution. ²⁸

Soviet refrigeration remained relatively rudimentary until the 1970s; private home freezers were plagued with issues and defects rendering them unreliable and consequently a poor place to store ice cream, which meant the frozen treat was largely consumed outside. However, the middling state of Soviet refrigeration did not mean they were technologically backwards in a more general sense. Their strengths lie elsewhere, revolutionizing ice cream machinery with the 1959 Eskimo-Generator. “Ice cream enjoyed the undivided support of the central authorities and became one of the most popular small delicacies in the Soviet Union,” in large part due to technological innovation which enable mass semiautomated production of ice-cream.²⁹ Smith writes:

The Soviet Union’s home freezer technology may have left something to be desired, but its research and development teams built state-of-the-art industrial ice cream manufacturing equipment … The invention of the Eskimo-Generator in 1959 brought the Soviet Union ice cream industry closer to its ideal of total automation. As its name implies, the Eskimo-Generator made chocolate-covered popsicles, commonly known as Eskimo pies in North America (a trademarked brand name held by Russell Stover until 1999) or as simply Eskimo in the Soviet Union, which did not recognize international trademarks … While the Soviet Union had earlier perfected semiautomated ice cream bars and cones that required only minimal human handling, the Eskimo was the first fully automated ice cream bar, and because of this, as much as because of its appeal or economical manufacture, it became one of the leading products of the Soviet ice cream industry.³⁰

Dreams of total automation and rationalization of society were fixtures of the Bolshevik imagination since before the revolution. The prominent Bolshevik Alexander Bogdanov outlined his utopian vision of a communist Martian society in his 1908 science fiction novel Red Star, which featured fully automated Martian factories, with every aspect of production meticulously managed, using automated systems to monitor and adjust supply, labor assignments, and output with fine-tuned precision.³¹ Such utopian aspirations were not uncommon in Soviet thought, reaching their most radical expression in the work of labour institute theoretician Aleksei Gastev, who envisioned the mechanization of society itself—a world governed by machines, where workers’ rhythms were synchronized with industrial tempos, and “machinism and the force of human consciousness [would] be fused in an unbreakable weld.”³²

An automated ice cream machine was clearly less exciting compared to these ambitions but nonetheless spoke to the same utopian impulse. It is easy to see how the Eskimo became a point of pride for a culture that celebrated mechanized efficiency. While the Soviet economy is infamous for its limited consumer choice, Ice Cream proved to be a notable exception, offering a wide variety of flavours, “such as ‘Springtime,’ flavored with birch sap and honey; ‘Mixed Berry,’ a sorbetlike emulsion of currants, raspberries, and gooseberries (which varied by season); and ‘Northern,’ which featured toasted Siberian pine nuts."³³

Food planners also saw the popularity of ice cream as an opportunity to promote other socially useful habits such as healthy and nutritious living, launching the ill-advised series of vegetable ice creams, boasting flavours like beet, carrot, and tomato. Suffice to say, this venture was not successful and had limited sales.³⁴ However, even blunders like this are revealing of the utilitarian nature of Soviet ideology, which saw even something like a frozen dessert as a means of optimizing the Socialist Citizen. Ice cream itself was seen as a generally healthy treat because its high fat content was considered beneficial in a context where conditions of food scarcity were not uncommon. From here, it did not seem like much of a stretch to enrich food with greater vegetable content to maximize its nutritional benefit. Smith writes:

The fattening qualities that made ice cream a healthy food in an economy of scarcity with limited access to fat and calories were the same features that have turned ice cream into an unhealthy luxury food in countries such as the United States, whose citizens chronically overconsume fat, sugar, dairy products, and other sweets.³⁵

Indeed, the health dimension should not be underestimated. A number of early Soviet food writers embraced a form of “culinary ascetics” by “[neglecting] the aesthetic pleasures of cuisine in favor of the medical and social aspects of food and eating.” ³⁶Mikoyon deliberately promoted ice cream, in part, based on its perceived health benefits. Oushakine notes from the perspective of Soviet planners, “by consuming material and spiritual goods, the worker restores human forces and develops new skills, thereby preparing himself for returning to production.”³⁷ In this instance, consumption took on a moral and pedagogical character, moulding the socialist subject through purposeful engagement with consumer goods. Thus ice cream, and other low-cost, high-end goods, had restorative quality, revitalizing the Soviet citizen for the broader project of socialist construction.

The difference between Soviet and western consumerism was underscored by how advertising was carried out in the respective economies. In the capitalist west, companies competed against one another over the customer pool, both appealing to and shaping consumer desires through deceptively idealized depictions of their products; alternatively, the different Soviet departments did not compete with each other in any meaningful sense. The prices were already set by the central planners, and ice cream was sold for the same everywhere throughout the USSR. Indeed, Soviet advertisements had a primarily factual basis, demonstrating new products and sharing information like pricing, which was accurate “unlike their counterparts in capitalist countries.”³⁸ Smith argues that, for the Soviet food planners, advertisements were not intended to tell what consumers they should buy, but inform citizens what “producers felt were the most useful to produce.”³⁹

These facets of Soviet consumption are usually overlooked in historical commentary, which tends to evaluate the planned economy in very binary terms. Oushakine notes how the hegemonic narrative of Soviet “scarcity” and “shortages,” evoking dire scenes of hungry families standing in lines, has become a powerful cultural trope that has overshadowed the web of processes, practices, and concepts that actually constituted the complex reality of the Soviet economy.⁴⁰ This representation of the Soviet system as pure deprivation is somewhat of a vulgar simplification of a vast and intricate economic system that sustained a nation that, at the time, had undergone the most rapid modernization in history, established a robust welfare state of unprecedented scale, and enabled the Soviets historic military victory against a far more developed enemy nation. In the words of historian Geoffrey Roberts, the Stalinist state “was a regime that had a significant degree of popular support and was capable of evoking great public enthusiasm.”⁴¹ This is not to downplay the very real structural deficiencies of the Soviet economy, but to contrast the politically charged paradigm of unending scarcity with the real ambiguities and tensions of history; it is amidst these contradictions that the real Soviet Union becomes legible in all its messiness.

The Dictatorship Over Need

The philosophical underpinning of the Soviet conception of the consumer economy was perhaps best articulated by the Soviet cultural theorist Boris Arvatov, who argued that under capitalism, consumer items were primarily shaped by the profit imperative of market forces and thus were not linked with the needs of consumers.⁴² The prioritization of surplus value over the “social importance” of the object made the capitalist market fundamentally irrational, producing an incongruence between form and function: the capitalist good was designed to be pleasing on a superficial or aesthetic level in order to drive quick sales and maximize profit margins, but in Arvatov’s view, there was little incentive to create genuinely socially useful goods designed for the betterment of society. In contrast, the socialist economy aimed to reunite form and function in a more rational way, renewing the “organic unity” of the “thing.”⁴³ Put differently, Soviet planners could purposefully design and produce the entirety of available consumer goods along rational lines, excluding the unnecessary, ornamental and gimmicky dimensions of the consumer item that were the norm in the capitalist consumer market. In Arvatov’s account, it was precisely this disjunction between form and function that produced capitalist alienation, severing the relationship between the object and the consumer by distorting the social purpose of the former.

In the USSR, the producer was always right. The Soviet economy was centered around production, as planners decided what to produce based on what they deemed socially necessary and sought to shape consumer demand around this centralized, rationally determined vision of social need. This is not particularly surprising given that the Soviet state conceived itself as a workers’ state and derived its legitimacy from the central role it afforded the proletariat in its national mythos. Soviet planners and economists had a fundamentally productivist view of consumption; producers were “to determine and meet common—universal and rational—needs” rather than having consumption be largely dictated by the whims of consumers themselves.⁴⁴

It is interesting to note how Soviet planners and economists grappled with shortages, which were not viewed as a structural defect of socialism or the Soviet economy:

The language of the period reflected this change pretty well. The popular term defitsit—used to describe the category of commodities that the state routinely failed to deliver—was replaced in official discourse by the clumsy “commodities in a higher demand” (tovary povyshennogo sprosa). The responsibility for shortages, in other words, lay with the consumers’ unpredictable behavior rather than with the state’s inefficient planning system. In a similar way, the limited set of goods actually available was normatively called “a sufficient assortment of commodities.”⁴⁵

In this framing, the unpredictable behaviour of the consumer was at the root of economic dysfunction. Thus correcting course became a moral and political problem. How might the state reshape consumer behaviour to align with its rational, centralized vision? For us in the West, this may appear as an almost counterintuitive way to run an economy, yet it rested on politico-moral foundations that could be read as carrying a certain resonance today—particularly when viewed against contemporary concerns over the social costs of mass consumerism and its ecological repercussions. One leading Soviet statistician had written:

the satisfaction and formation of needs (potrebnosti) are inseparable from the efficient struggle against the fascination with consumption, against hoarding, and against the cult of things. The democratization of consumption, the overcoming of the desire for conspicuous luxury and non-rational consumption habits—all that is the characteristic feature of the socialist mode of life.⁴⁶

For Soviet planners, satiating the desire of every consumer demand was not only logistically challenging but seemed to signify the moral rot that was emblematic of the “American way of life.” Oushakine highlights how prominent Soviet economists outlined an alternative form of consumerism, in which “the rationalization of consumption becomes especially pertinent,” a consumer economy designed to exist within prescribed limits and develop gradually according to a rational plan. This Soviet or socialist way of life was formulated as a concrete concept in the 1970s as a:

a certain system of people’s everyday behavior shaped by the social norms and spiritual values that are characteristic of the developed socialist society.⁴⁷

Our titular example, ice cream, is a strong example of rationalized production for consumption working successfully. It was one of the select foods chosen by planners as a useful and important good that held social, political, and nutritional significance. Its health benefits, associations with Soviet technological prowess, its previous history of being exclusively enjoyed by the imperial elite, and decadent, luxurious qualities all made it an ideal food for the state to make accessible and affordable for all. Ice cream became a treat for the people, curiously embodying the spirit of both the socialist cause and its achievements. That the dry-ice pushcart, which encouraged a new form of consumptive sociality, incidentally, strengthened its merits as the Worker’s Treat. The promotion of ice cream was a prominent example of state-sanctioned, ideologically permissible consumerism that occurred within prescribed limits.

Soviet domestic economic policy had an overarching moral framework and was conceived as a political project that entailed the continual working and re-working of the socialist soul, one that eventually lost steam towards the end of the USSR’s tenure. The Soviets increasingly sought to emulate consumer trends in the West even as they decried the fundamental nature of the economy they sought to learn from, oscillating between mimicry and condemnation. The state struggled to meaningfully uphold its commitment to the "socialist mode of living" against its growing desire to accelerate "socialist commodity production.” As living standards and consumerism became the new frontier of the Cold War in the 1950s, Khrushchev’s promise that socialist abundance would outpace the United States’ consumer market largely backfired.⁴⁸ Soviet “peaceful coexistence,” brokered by Khrushchev, furthered domestic disillusionment, as cultural exchanges allowed more positive depictions of American culture and consumer variety to filter into the USSR. Ultimately, by attempting to combat American capitalism on its own terms, the USSR doomed itself to a battle it could not win, as the very strengths of the Soviet economy were what made it distinct from the consumer-driven West to begin with.

In lieu of expansive consumer options with abundant supply, Soviet citizens benefited from full employment, stable prices, universal healthcare, and the state provision of housing. Extensive social welfare programs ensured that Soviet citizens’ basic needs were met, and broad state control over essential goods reduced dependence on volatile markets, providing a level of baseline security that was absent in the USSR's capitalist counterparts.⁴⁹ These pillars of welfare did not have the lustre and sex appeal of rock ’n’ roll and American jeans, which was to the detriment of the Soviets during the new ideological battlefield of the Cold War. Despite the new era of peaceful coexistence, the longstanding image of the United States as enemy number one could not be easily shed, and the exploding global cultural hegemony of America increasingly put the Soviets on the defensive—reactively censoring and controlling information to limit pro-American influence. While the extent to which consumer choice was a cause of Soviet collapse has been overstated, it was nonetheless a factor in a constellation of variables that brought down the ailing state. But despite eventually buckling under mounting structural crises, the Soviet economy, for a time, offered a real alternative to the oft-criticized excess, inequality, and hyper-consumerism of the capitalist economy. This itself is worth examining.

Today, the urgency of the climate crisis has compelled activists and radicals to call into question the state of our current relation to consumption and production. The ongoing climate crisis raises important questions about how we consume and produce. Much of the problem stems from consumption patterns in the West, which systematically shift the environmental costs of their excesses onto the Third World.⁵⁰ In this light, the Soviet critique of Western consumerism retains a striking relevance, and their defence of a modest “sufficient assortment of commodities” for consumers may be less a hollow ideological self-justification than a substantive appeal to a different form of life, one grounded in the longstanding Marxist and Soviet critique of bourgeois waste. This consumer adaptation to a fixed and regulated array of available commodities or the “socialist mode of living” has some affinities and parallels with contemporary academic discussions around “degrowth” approaches to Marxism. Ecoscocialist writers like Kohei Saito theorize the economic activity of the future post-capitalist system as rationally planned and directed toward social needs while deliberately reducing the material throughput of the economy to remain within planetary boundaries.⁵¹

While some may scoff at the notion of deriving positive environmental implications from the Soviet experience, the perception of the USSR being wholly destructive for the environment is not entirely accurate either. Indeed, the environmental historian Stephen Brain has written a monumental study on Stalin’s herculean forestry policies, which represented “the world’s first explicit attempt to reverse human-induced climate change.”⁵² The Stalinist state aggressively established millions of hectares of forest, consistently prioritising ecological goals even over industrial and economic imperatives. This does not negate the real environmental catastrophes that occurred in the Soviet period, but it complicates a simplistic narrative in a welcome way. These contradictions are highlighted by environmental scholar Andy Bruno, who, in the Monthly Review, summarises Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro’s discussion of the ecosocialist legacy of Actual Existing Socialism.

Not only “were some disastrous environmental impacts of state socialism…neither pervasive nor intrinsic,” but the net effects of socialist states were “environmentally constructive.” The “accomplishments within state-socialist countries” are “practicable examples from which ecosocialist futures can be built.”⁵³

The blueprint for a different kind of a relationship to consumption may be, at least partially, retrieved from the socialist past.

Conclusion

The story of Soviet ice cream outlined in this article clearly has implications that go far beyond ice cream. Material culture, ideology, and everyday practices intersect to shape social life in ways that are often surprising and historically significant. More importantly, these stories hold a mirror to our present. My contention with much of the contemporary scholarship touching on these subjects is the flippant way scholars often write about the Soviets’ utopian aspirations—with condescension and incuriosity, a refusal to engage with the intellectual ideas of their historical subjects in a deep or rigorous way.

The Bolshevik historical mission was rooted in a vision of reshaping society, one that in practice was brutal, bloody, monumental, and world-historical. With cataclysmic lows and soaring highs, the story of Russia’s revolution and its consequences tore history asunder, breaking with existing structures, norms, and expectations in ways that had profound, far-reaching effects. Today, we hurtle toward climate catastrophe with surprising nonchalance, consistently overshooting UN targets for greenhouse gas emissions. Our collective self-destruction has become almost banal. In this context, the Bolshevik impulse to imagine and pursue a radically different future seems not only compelling but politically necessary. The taste of Soviet ice cream endures, in its own small way, as the taste of social possibility.

Bonus Article at the end of footnotes for paid subscribers:

A Stalinist Cookbook: Eating in a Scientific Way ⁵⁴

Read Next:

1. Raspopina, Sasha. “Sweet Nostalgia: Why the Ice Cream Brands of Communist Russia Are Still a Hot Favourite.” New East Digital Archive, October 9, 2015. https://www.new-east-archive.org/features/show/4632/soviet-food-stories-sweet-nostalgia-retro-russian-ice-cream-brands

2. Anastasia Lebedenko, “Make USSR Great Again: Why Are People Nostalgic About the Soviet Union?” Medium, June 30, 2024, https://medium.com/@myukrainness/make-ussr-great-again-why-are-people-nostalgic-about-the-soviet-union-595945622906

3. David Masci, “In Russia, Nostalgia for Soviet Union and Positive Feelings About Stalin,” Pew Research Center, June 29, 2017, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/06/29/in-russia-nostalgia-for-soviet-union-and-positive-feelings-about-stalin/

4. Neli Esipova and Julie Ray, “Former Soviet Countries See More Harm From Breakup,” Gallup, December 19, 2013, https://news.gallup.com/poll/166538/former-soviet-countries-harm-breakup.aspx

5. Kelly McMann, “Central Asians and the State: Nostalgia for the Soviet Era,” National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, February 16, 2005

6. Ibid.

7. E. H. Carr, “The Russian Revolution and the West,” New Left Review I/111 (Sept.–Oct. 1978): 5–41, https://newleftreview.org/issues/i111/articles/e-h-carr-the-russian-revolution-and-the-west.pdf

8. Ibid

9. James Ryan, "Reckoning with the Past: Stalin and Stalinism in Putin's Russia," in Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions, and Controversies, ed. James Ryan and Susan Grant (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 165.

10. Ibid.

11. Edward Geist, “Cooking Bolshevik: Anastas Mikoian and the Making of the Book about Delicious and Healthy Food,” The Russian Review 71, no. 2 (April 2012): 295–313, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41409484

12. Jenny Leigh Smith, “Empire of Ice Cream: How Life Became Sweeter in the Postwar Soviet Union,” in Food Chains: From Farmyard to Shopping Cart, edited by Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz, 142–157. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812204445. 143

13. Deirdre Ruscitti Harshman, “Cooking Up a New Everyday: Communal Kitchens in the Revolutionary Era, 1890–1935,” Revolutionary Russia 29, no. 2 (2016): 211–233, https://doi.org/10.1080/09546545.2016.1243616

14. Smith, “Empire of Ice Cream,” 143.

15. Jukka Gronow, Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 33.

16. Ibid., 35.

17. Smith, “Empire of Ice Cream,” 144.

18. Ibid., 145.

19. Christine Varga-Harris, “Homemaking and the Aesthetic and Moral Perimeters of the Soviet Home during the Khrushchev Era,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 561–589.

20. Smith, “Empire of Ice Cream,” 145.

21. Ibid., 146.

22. Ibid., 147.

23. Ibid., 146.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 148.

27. Ibid., 149.

28. Ibid. 155.

29. Jukka Gronow, Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia, 118.

30. Smith, “Empire of Ice Cream,” 151.

31. Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, ed. Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites, trans. Charles Rougle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984)

32. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

33. Smith, “Empire of Ice Cream,” 152.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid.

36. Edward Geist, “Cooking Bolshevik: Anastas Mikoian and the Making of the Book about Delicious and Healthy Food,” 300.

37. Serguei Alex. Oushakine, “Against the Cult of Things: On Soviet Productivism, Storage Economy, and Commodities with No Destination,” The Russian Review 73, no. 2 (April 2014): 201

38. Smith, “Empire of Ice Cream,” 153

39. Ibid.

40. Serguei Alex. Oushakine, “Against the Cult of Things: On Soviet Productivism, Storage Economy, and Commodities with No Destination,” 201.

41. Jamie Glazov, "Geoffrey Roberts: Interviewed about Joseph Stalin, Warlord," History News Network, February 12, 2007, https://www.hnn.us/article/geoffrey-roberts-interviewed-about-joseph-stalin-w.

42. Serguei Alex. Oushakine, “Against the Cult of Things: On Soviet Productivism, Storage Economy, and Commodities with No Destination.”

43. Ibid., 219.

44. Ibid., 204.

45. Ibid., 236.

46. Ibid., 223.

47. Ibid., 223.

48. Rósa Magnúsdóttir, Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945–1959 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 119.

49. Mark Kramer, "Regional Perspectives on Human Rights: The USSR and Russia, Part One," SPICE Digest, Fall 2012, https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/regional_perspectives_on_human_rights_the_ussr_and_russia_part_one.

50. Alejandro Pedregal and Nemanja Lukić, “Imperialism, Ecological Imperialism, and Green Imperialism: An Overview,” Journal of Labor and Society 27, no. 1 (2024): 106, https://doi.org/10.1163/24714607-bja10149.

51. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (London: Verso, 2023), 55.

52. Stephen Brain, Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism, 1905–1953 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), 140.

53. Andy Bruno, “A New Environmental History of Socialist States,” Monthly Review 74, no. 4 (September 2022).

54. BONUS ARTICLE - A Stalinist Cookbook: Eating in a Scientific Way

As this study has shown, the Soviet leadership treated the systematization and rationalization of elements of everyday life, including cooking and eating, as a serious objective. While the Stalin-era state had promoted public in eating in state-sanctioned institutions, it also took efforts to rationalize eating in the private sphere. The Soviet food provisioning system not only sought to modulate what kind of foods people ate, but how they thought about food and conceptualized their relationship to it. The writing above primarily focused on the production and distribution of food, but Soviet food experts also used print media to present food as a scientific object, transforming eating into a matter of nutrition and regulation aimed at safeguarding the health and well-being of citizens.

This state-led reinvention of the popular understanding of food along scientific principles was launched through a new cookbook. Published in 1939, the Book about Delicious and Healthy Food became staple of Soviet households throughout its vast territories.