Thursday was fish day in the USSR
rbth.com
rbth.com
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)
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).
> 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).
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?
Because it wasn't free economy, but a centrally regulated one. So if Stalin wanted caviar to be cheap for whatever reason, he'd make that happen.
> 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?
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.
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.
There was no Western advertising in the Soviet Union at all.
> 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.
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."
They had a lot of wonderful sausages too...
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.
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.
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's a plainest myth every moderately educated schoolchild in Russia knows.
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.
Under a capitalist system with similar paranoia about the defence of their exposed western border they probably would have faced something similar.
Ireland's 1850 famine was another example of a grain exporting region being milked into famine during a bad harvest by an absent ruler.
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.
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.
A-hem. Command economies and central planning are interesting like that.
Maybe, just maybe, I am really going out on a limb here, the USSR did not have prices for things that reflected the relative scarcity of items.
We live far north in Norway, sunlight is relatively scarce through the year, which means Vitamin D deficiency is a concern.
But what is also a good source of Vitamin D? Fish!
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.
> 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
(emphasis mine)
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.
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.)
It was not a famine, it was a genocide.