> 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?
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.
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.