The primary question is how efficient pizza is, as a food. Given it can be scaled at point of consumption and uses a large heatmass continuously, It probably is quite efficient use of flour, water, yeast, tomato paste and optional toppings most of which can be preserved passively in a cooler climate. The thermal storage of brickwork means for the investment in heating, a large number of Pizza can be cooked and during its cooling phase other dishes can use slow cooking effectively so it's doubly efficient given other potential uses: This is much the same as a bakery and traditionally Jewish bakers have used their embedded heat investment to provide slow cooking for the community on the sabbath.
So on basic economic/efficiency terms, Pizza was a good fit for a planned economy and should have been widely available. It's even moderately efficient to offer varieties, which means a degree of individual choice can be preserved and there are options to price efficiently which means rationing can be enforced sensibly.
A significant problem is that with unreliable energy supply, Pizza cannot be made but luckily, we are adaptable (homo sovieticus!) and so a large variety of things can be burned to make a pizza oven operate. Some of them do not produce good flavours and CCA treated timber should not be used for wood fired ovens routinely.
Arguably, a calzone is just a pirogi anyway. So, "yes" Lawful-neutral, Pizza was invented in Russia.
Cartesian product of bread and everything else is still bigger, but this is not a cardinality of sets competition. This is practicality and deliciousness of sets competition and pineapples did not grow in Soviet Union.
Ешь ананасы, рябчиков жуй,
день твой последний приходит, буржуй.
Too bad Mayakovsky's been metabolically challenged for nearly a century, otherwise we could tell him that after he accidentally prints a binary file and his poetry starts looking like this:
either an "stty onlcr" or a "tset reset" will probably work wonders.
[EDIT: (if anything is voka or tea) suggests that anything may include tea with vodka? (locally a "finished" coffee includes schnapps) Or was that an `xor`?]
Not unnecessary, but an unattainable luxury. Industrially produced and available ingredients in Soviet union were a world away from mozzarella, good tomato sauce and bay leaves you may want for the simplest pizza. If you wanted to get your hands on horrible Soviet salami you had to travel to Moscow, and pepperoni was a luxury few world even know about. Forget about olives, anchovies, even pineapples — it's just something that didn't exist for a regular person.
To indulge my lawful travelling companions: pizza was developed in the Byzantine Empire (quite planned for the time -- they could recreate the silk industry wholesale by imperial fiat)
(for instance, here burritos are rare [and chimichangas rare^2], but for almost all the instances one would have eaten a burrito in the Old Country, here a döner serves)
Time to watch a few movies with restaurant scenes to see what the students eat, I guess.
Makes sense; many take-away pizzerias here also sell the turkish variant (pide) of khachapuri.
(Come to think of it, what about street food? I know kvass wagons were popular in summer, and there's a great drink machine scene in « Наваждение », but [apart from bologna(?) sandwiches at 90s discos] I'm blanking on food — maybe I should check train station scenes for aunties?)
[No luck at the club scene in Courier (1986); IIUC the club only serves drinks and desserts like vermicelles? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvdlAgreRug&t=2585s (EDIT4: no, not marroni, Мороженое. My bad)]
EDIT: I think I need to move my YT bubble back over to runet; atm it's refusing to give me the original clip for Желтые тюльпаны (which I recall had various slice-of-life scenes: going to the bank, making a phone call, etc.) and insists on delivering only the Pesnya-90 performance.
EDIT2: there's a tablecloth-covered table in the background at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eXc8A6MbYY&t=252s so in principle (when the kitchen is open?) that cabaret serves food, but unfortunately nothing else in the clip indicates that 1991 russians survived on more than tobacco and alcohol...
EDIT3: think I found the kind of food that the previous establishment would've served: see the table at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI8T1h0ohcQ&t=29s ... but in this case the bread and meats are served separately; no clue as to any cheese. Note the Pepsi-Cola! (also: some kind of street food at 1:30?)
EDIT: I see Pugacheva has vocal credits for "The Irony of Fate"; that means the Pugachevous period spans from the Brezhnevian through the Putinian epochs...
Did anyone ever take ABP up on her suggestion they should brand her as a foreign agent?
(Но что такое рыцарь без любви / И что такое рыцарь без удачи?)
Пора пора порадуемся на своем веку
Красавице и кубку счастливому клинку
[is it just me, or do GEYK's Musketeers sound fairly close to advocating "Be excellent to each other and party on"?]
Indeed. It was widespread by the "cooperative" movement and the first fast food was shashlyki (even before the fall) and khachapuri. South Caucasus people were the first who started with food and flower markets. So the cuisine.
Good point. I guess I was implicitly thinking Moscow-area, but if you know what the answer might be for the Lietuvos Tarybų Socialistinė Respublika, now I'm curious about that, too...
I was born in 1982 so it is like 7 years of Soviet Union of which majority I don’t remember. I think your question can be looked in two ways:
* what cheap food people made instead of pizza? I think in Lithuania it is anything with meat and potato. In some occasions meat and dough (kibin might be more interesting case). My mother did pizza actually but it is not pizza in traditional sense as it was done with carrots and green peas.
* what cheap street food was eaten instead of pizza. I don’t have idea here as I don’t remember street food at all. I remember we bought kvass in the street.
I grew up under soviet occupation - only ever saw pizza on TV in old B/W movies (censorship would not let new movies thru). Supposedly there were pizza serving bars since seventies located in Baltic vacation resorts. Everything changed after 1989. Entrepreneurs flooded Poland with new small businesses, pizza parlors among them. Then following 1992 McD entry Pizza Hut showed up in 1993 beginning the era of phone pizza delivery.
I totally forgot the why part: Meat! There was very little food available in Poland, Meat was a luxury good. September 1980 strikes (catalyst for movement that broke Iron Block) were about food and living conditions. Bread queues, empty shops with no meat at all.
>>The Security Service sent alarming reports. "There are still shortages of cold cuts from group IV, shortages of high-quality meat, there is no lard on the market, there are total shortages of: canned fish and imported fish, and the quantities of salted herring are limited (lack of supplies). There is a shortage of full-fat milk, full-fat cheese , fatty cottage cheese, bryndza cheese. There are limited quantities of hard cheeses. Moreover, there are shortages of semi-durable bread (including gryam [sic!], breadcrumbs, there is no real honey, cubes and liquid spices, and there are full restrictions on delicatessen products. ..."
Rumours about "Train full of meat on its way to Soviet Union welded to the rails by Railway workers" at the time of moscow Olympics didnt help.
>>The official reasons for imposing martial law were the deteriorating economic situation of the country, the manifestations of which included, among others, lack of supplies in stores (including food), rationing (from April to October 1981, many important goods were again covered by the so-called food card system, e.g. meat, butter, fats, flour, rice, baby milk, etc.)
Soviets tried to quench the unrest by sending meat from military reserves ... in coal wagons. Rumours quickly spread about coal wagons full of rotten dirty meat from moscow.
TLDR: No Pizza because no meat, thats why we ate toasted mushroom sandwiches.
You only need bread, tomato sauce, and cheese to make the most basic of pizza. If you had some semi-soft cheese you could put it on the mushroom sandwich and maybe call it Pizza. Don’t tell the Italians tho.
However I think NY Pizza from American movies is probably what everyone is thinking about. As a teenager I went to London in 2001 and was amazed that Pizza Hut was a sit down white table cloth restaurant.
For good pizza you need high quality but basic ingredients. Theoretically you could grow your own tomatoes and basil and bake something reasonable at home (although the store bought cheese was shit and making your own is hard).
In practice I haven't enjoyed good pizza until fairly late after the iron curtain fell.
And arguably a high temperature oven. One of the reasons pizza is financially successful as fast food is that one of the hard parts is having the right oven. You can fake it at home to some degree even without much special equipment but making a good pizza (whatever that means to you) at home is more work than most people are going to put in.
I guess it depends on what level of finesse you are aiming for. My mom makes a pretty good pizza (better than many commercials joints) in regular home gas oven. But the work is there: you need to knead the dough properly and let it rest for a day.
Of course, an Italian might scoff at the result.
I've had exceptional results with the frying pan stovetop/broiler method.
Assemble the pie in a frying pan. Cook ~5 minutes (until the edge of the crust just starts to brown) on the stovetop, then duck it inside a pre-heated oven (as hot as it will go), under the broiler, for about 3--4 minutes (it will bake fast, pull it out before it's burnt, though some crisping is fine).
I do this with homemade sourdough crust and mostly hand-prepped ingredients (I'll usually go with a store-bought sauce, video below shows how to hand-make fresh from tomatoes). It beats the pants off any store-bought and most restaurant pizzas.
Headline comment: "There is more drama in this video than in the entire Transformers franchise."
Watching this again for the first time in a year or two ... I've made some changes (dough, prep, toppings), but the key is the cast-iron pan, stovetop, and broiler, and results are delish.
(The YT channel is also great for baking, and is where I learned much of my own sourdough game.)
Yeah I grew up in this broader region as well and my blood boils when I read tankies on Reddit claiming how much life was better than nowadays or in the west.
There's only one life aspect I might concede. Ugly "commie blocks" of prefab concrete were built plentifully. Right now we have a ludicrous housing crisis where even those old apartments that were planned to be obsolete nowadays are so expensive that purchase is out of reach for average young person.
Well, I'm not sure "plentifully" is really the right word. Sure rent was dirt cheap if you could get an apartment, but many young married couples lived with their parents in the USSR and other Eastern Bloc countries because there was a housing shortage right up to the end.
No, it didn’t. Not for economic reasons — after the fall of USSR, many families started to make “homemade pizzas” of various quality.
The reason was that nobody actually knew what is a pizza. USSR was a totalitarian state. All information flows from abroad were tightly controlled. There was no internet, and only a limited set of curated Western movies and books, none of which even mentioned pizza.
It didn't exist because pizza cheese didn't exist in it.
Recipes aren't movies, or books, nobody's was going to go to prison for sharing one, and they have no problem spreading virally. But when core pizza ingredients aren't available, you bake a pirog.
It wasn't exactly unavailable, but there wasn't an abundance of it.
And much of it was consumed in the form of kefir or sour cream, or butter, or cottage cheese...
Sure, you can turn a bottle of milk and a bag of flour into a pizza, but when the steps for doing so start including 'making your own cheese at home', is it any surprise that people would turn those ingredients into other, simpler-to-prepare/more-culturally-familiar foods?
I remember a cuban buddy I worked with told me about how you had to be careful with pizza in Cuba cause sometimes they used molten condoms mixed in to save on cheese
Probably an urban legend but thats the level of shortages you get in these regimes. Similar things happened to us in Venezuela. There was a scandal in my town because people were mixing in cardboard with a typical shredded fish dish. In Maracaibo, women we're being assaulted in the streets to cut off their hair and sell it to make hair extensions.
I grew up in Poland in the 00's, so long after the transformation and I would already know actual pizza ("actual" meaning that my favorite pizza was ground meat with garlic sauce and caraway in a pizzeria that was likely one of the first ones that opened in my hometown), but I do recall recipes that were remnants of the older time. My mom got a "pizza" recipe from an elderly friend, and this "pizza" was basically a sauerkraut quiche with cheese and ketchup on top. I think that everyone there has a family recipe that was named after some foreign food, but is in fact only vaguely similar to the original - for example one friend of mine brought "Saigon rolls" to a party, and these were just crepes stuffed with mushroom filling typical to our cuisine.
> My mom got a "pizza" recipe from an elderly friend, and this "pizza" was basically a sauerkraut quiche with cheese and ketchup on top
Of course. Polish pizza has to have cabbage.
We made it in a rectangular tray in the oven and it used pita-like spongy dough. My mom got a better recipe using dough mixed with cheese made from maturated farmers' sheep's cheese that is found in the Balkans, at farmers' markets. There's a dry or a creamy version and looks like this:
The dryer version is minced and kneaded like dough to obtain the cheese that you mix in the dough.
One would pre bake the dough and then put ground meat mixed with ground tomatoes or tomato slices or thick tomato stock, mushrooms and maybe some spinach for something green. Then you'd bake the whole thing.
Actually pizza was originally shepards' pie, but the Italians also put tomato sauce on it, their cheese was mozarella and spiced it with basil, of course. They took it with them to the US and the Americans loved it. So contemporary pizza is an Italian American food, because it got really popular in the US. Just like spaghetti alla carbonara, where the US soldiers stationed in Sicily during WW2 would eat their ham and eggs mixed with pasta for breakfast, then went along their business bombing Axis countries using the B17 Flying Fortress.
This raises many questions for me, having only a superficial understanding of the Soviet Union. A restaurant seems inherently entrepreneurial. Were they created by individual initiative or committee? Who did they serve? How did they weather shortages? Etc..
Private companies existed, although there were less. IFAIR restaurants as you may know were less common. Usually in hotels, next to train stations, in gov buildings, tourist shelters and so on. Often run by gov-owned networks. You required a nice place to drink vodka while discussing how to screw others, right? If you had dollars you could buy some western goods in state owned stores.
There were some bistros-like places, where menu was simplified and there were no waiters. We call them Milk Bars, you know, pierogi and soup. It's actually sad there is a shortage of such cheap places nowadays.
Larger work places often had their own cafeterias with basic food for employees. Schools often as well. You didn't really go to a restaurant just to eat. There had to be a reason.
They handled shortages by connections, cheating and poor quality.
Can't really tell who used restaurants as I was too young, but recall official events like wedding parties were a thing. Party members, politicians, priests and crooks had to drink somewhere as well. I recall it was customary to do business using vodka as well, more than modern sales dinners - get shitfaces and yell at each other before shaking hands. It was a thing also after communism, but less so. If you had a deal to make, it was almost expected to discuss that with way too much vodka. Normalization of alcoholism is a stench that we still try to wash off.
I don't miss those times, I still can smell those cheap cigarettes that everyone smoked EVERYWHERE. No-one cared if children were there. Not having money was less of a problem, empty stores were. If you didn't knew a lot of people, you had nothing. You had disgusting green bathroom with tiles like a hospital, for 30 years. Yet you were happy, at least they delivered tiles that one time and your friend told you quickly.
I'm not great in that field at all, but in Poland private companies existed. At first (after 1945) they hoped to survive until regime will be gone "in a few years". Then the regime tried to kill those one by one. Private owner was an oppressed enemy, fined, bullyragged, threatened.
Small businesses existed the whole time, but it was not an easy life.
As one born in the USSR and economist, I can give some brief description.
The economy was like 20-40 ministries, formed like Korean chaebols -- with many in-house services to compensate for their poor public counterparts. Like kindergartens. Or own housing -- to get an apartment (for rent) from the municipal authorities, you'd be in a long queue with some people more equal than others, and corruption, and normally you'd get one by retirement. So enterprises built it for their workers, in some exchange with the construction enterprises (idk which ministry they'd belong, probably dispersed among many entities).
You probably can imagine a huge Google -- where departments can't trade on a free market with each other -- but with a lot looser control and more corruption, which created some black market.
For example, I suppose, restaurants must have belonged to the retail ministry. Under the minister himself, there was the republican department with its manager, the regional, and the municipal one, and only down there was a "Restaurant #5 <<Sunflower>>" (#5 in the retail department of city X), and its director. This made him like CEO, but in reality it was like small group manager in a big hierarchy.
Just as in any big capitalist corporation, such a manager is risk averse, because failures lead to being fired, but sudden big profits go in the corporation pockets, not manager's.
But if you add some corruption, you could be an entrepreneur in a way: make good services (expensive) => be popular among the elites => have some high-profile friends to protect in case of turf wars (e.g. city's Communist party 1st secretary (president) is your friend => city's retail department can't fire you) => exchange some services/goods/commodities beyond the counter (as it was said "from the back door of the shop"). (Black market prices were high, so you could easily sell something elsewhere and put the nominal amount of cash in the box.)
Regarding the shortages issue, they existed for the buyers at the front door of public retail. Retail & restaurants managers exchanged the stuff (they were supposed to sell to the public) between them to fill the gaps.
>Polish cafeteria which during the Communist era provided government-subsidized traditional Polish cuisine at low cost. The name comes from cheese cutlets, which were often sold when meat was rare.
Haha. I lived in Simferopol, Crimea and fondly remember the pizzeria there. It was hugely popular; the queue would often spill over into the street outside. The pizzas were different from classic Italian pizza; they would bake them in an electric oven on trays of twenty or so. Still, they tasted very good.
The pizzeria opened in the early 80s, it wasn't a cooperative. Even before perestroika started, there were plenty of state-owned restaurants. I think that pizzeria was the same, just a state-owned restaurant with a twist.
I think it would have been around 1991 that my city in England got its first pizza outlet. Not long after it got its first McDonald's. Probably around the time the Turtles were appearing in the media. Of course, in England they were officially Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles as "ninja" was a naughty word.
It wasn't like we were lacking in Italian food. Pasta was a major staple at our home.
My only memory of pizza prior to that was a trip to Boston, MA, 1988 (?) where I accidentally ordered an entire "small" pizza from one of those places that I noticed (in hindsight) everyone was ordering by the slice. The staff all looked at me funny and double-checked I really wanted a "small" pizza. I thought they meant it was going to be too tiny for a husky chap like me. This pizza when it arrived was enough to feed a small British family for a week :D
Does proper pizza even exist there today? I've had my fair share in Moscow and Kiev a decade ago or so. It was usually thick, soft, gooey dough with a ton of toppings. For me it was almost inedible.
The last slice I tried was in a pizzeria in Kiev. It looked like a normal pizza place from the outside. I paid for my slice and I guess I was so hungry I didn't even notice there were no pizza ovens. They just straight up took a frozen pizza and microwaved it. I took one bite and immediately tossed it in the bin in front of them. I'm sure they thought I was some crazy American, but the the thought of serving a frozen pizza in a dedicated pizza restaurant just seemed so ridiculous to me.
Interestingly I'm in Shanghai as I'm typing this and the pizza here is very similar to Russian pizza. We ordered from a few places, including Pizza Hut which is popular here, and they're all the thick doughy style. Usually when all else fails my kids will eat pizza. But they even refused the Pizza Hut slices. I wish I could see if they had the classic Pizza Hut I ate as a kid, but nearly all restaurants here require you to have one of the chinese mobile apps just to view the dang menus which is a whole separate topic.
In Moscow 10 years ago you could get any kind of pizza. Classic Italian thin pizza, american thick, deep dish Chicago style, super thin and crunchy New York style, Roman square pizza.
At least in communist Poland it existed. In 1985 or 1986 I was on vacation with my parents in Augustow and some lady mispronounced the name while ordering it in a state owned resort we stayed at, which my mother corrected immediately. This maybe highlights the point that it wasn't very common thing yet.
After 1989, in only a few years, at least in Warsaw, it became commonplace with pizza networks or Italians opening their restaurants everywhere.
Pizza Hut opened in the Soviet Union in 1990 prior to collapse the following year.
Although many might contest Pizza Hut qualifying as real pizza. :)
It’s a shame authentic pizza didn’t grab hold earlier, especially with the origins of pizza being egalitarian peasant food.
Two early post-Soviet pizza events, both involving Pizza Hut, are somewhat relevant here.
Not so much about the introduction of Pizza, but the Pizza Hut proxy introduction of capitalism(western success) and dissolution of communism(Soviet failure).
Gorbachev Pizza Hut commercial(post Soviet collapse and during Russian Financial Crisis):
Pizza Hut also paid the Russian space program(in deep financial distress at the time) a considerable sum to have cosmonauts eat Pizza Hut in space, delivered on a Soviet-era Proton rocket carrying a 50ft Pizza Hut logo.
So pizza certainly existed in the waning days of the Soviet Union, but a deeper question might be what role did pizza(Pizza Hut specifically) play in influencing, exemplifying, or merely footnoting the troubled geopolitics between Russia and the pizza eating west?
The reasons were the chronic lack of wheat, especially hard varieties, lack of milk and cheese producing culture and technologies, lack of fresh vegetables and culture and storage and logistic technologies, lack of meat, lack of customers, lack of common sense etc.
Who needs pizza when you can stand in line for six hours and buy a blue chicken carcass consisting of bones and bones?
It's not the answer to the question that's interesting, but the questioner himself.
84 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadSo on basic economic/efficiency terms, Pizza was a good fit for a planned economy and should have been widely available. It's even moderately efficient to offer varieties, which means a degree of individual choice can be preserved and there are options to price efficiently which means rationing can be enforced sensibly.
A significant problem is that with unreliable energy supply, Pizza cannot be made but luckily, we are adaptable (homo sovieticus!) and so a large variety of things can be burned to make a pizza oven operate. Some of them do not produce good flavours and CCA treated timber should not be used for wood fired ovens routinely.
Arguably, a calzone is just a pirogi anyway. So, "yes" Lawful-neutral, Pizza was invented in Russia.
A variety of classic Soviet recipes was designed for use of local ingredients and industrial scale production, making pizza unnecessary.
> Arguably, a calzone is just a pirogi anyway
And why would you need pizza when the world of pirogi is arguably bigger?..
https://old.reddit.com/r/shittyfoodporn/comments/1c90btb/per...
[One might still have hoped for world peace under the olive, alas
https://www.oeaw.ac.at/sice/sice-blog/tsarist-extra-virgin-i...
https://www.dpublication.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/39-4... ]
As for pineapples etc, there was a poem in Soviet Russia:
https://youtube.com/shorts/BSzmabM7J7M
And maybe a pun on ananas
Of course, I got the custom from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ugivNRYfjc&t=322s — because Shnur et.al. are my guide to things "our people love":
[Speaking of Comrade Mukhina, in better times we had had: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi-SXOBbTjo&t=175s ]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Mayakovsky#/media/Fil...
either an "stty onlcr" or a "tset reset" will probably work wonders.
[EDIT: (if anything is voka or tea) suggests that anything may include tea with vodka? (locally a "finished" coffee includes schnapps) Or was that an `xor`?]
https://youtu.be/0ozWAbuJtCs https://youtu.be/YAWM_QpAL7c
Sorry, that was the wrong metaphor, it should have been:
but what do we mind a year of слова-сырца, depreciated from a century ago, yet still paying out annually its единого слова ради ?https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B8%D1%86%D1%86%D0%B0
(for instance, here burritos are rare [and chimichangas rare^2], but for almost all the instances one would have eaten a burrito in the Old Country, here a döner serves)
Time to watch a few movies with restaurant scenes to see what the students eat, I guess.
It's alluded to in the answers, but Khachapuri comes closest imho
(Come to think of it, what about street food? I know kvass wagons were popular in summer, and there's a great drink machine scene in « Наваждение », but [apart from bologna(?) sandwiches at 90s discos] I'm blanking on food — maybe I should check train station scenes for aunties?)
[No luck at the club scene in Courier (1986); IIUC the club only serves drinks and desserts like vermicelles? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvdlAgreRug&t=2585s (EDIT4: no, not marroni, Мороженое. My bad)]
EDIT: I think I need to move my YT bubble back over to runet; atm it's refusing to give me the original clip for Желтые тюльпаны (which I recall had various slice-of-life scenes: going to the bank, making a phone call, etc.) and insists on delivering only the Pesnya-90 performance.
EDIT2: there's a tablecloth-covered table in the background at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eXc8A6MbYY&t=252s so in principle (when the kitchen is open?) that cabaret serves food, but unfortunately nothing else in the clip indicates that 1991 russians survived on more than tobacco and alcohol...
EDIT3: think I found the kind of food that the previous establishment would've served: see the table at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI8T1h0ohcQ&t=29s ... but in this case the bread and meats are served separately; no clue as to any cheese. Note the Pepsi-Cola! (also: some kind of street food at 1:30?)
https://youtu.be/M0T1kxj5kjg?t=22s
It turns out the oh-so-slavic фастфуд is a productive key word, which along with в СССР turns up all sorts of stuff, eg https://dzen.ru/a/ZMUdmvvciD8Z75RH , http://lozhka-povarezhka.ru/vsyo-o-ede/5-ulichnyh-fastfudov-... , and even https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9W5NJddmfM (25 min worth?)
[and TIL those roosters were lollipops; what d'y'know... One of these days maybe I'll learn what one could buy with the 3 kopeck coins?]
>http://lozhka-povarezhka.ru/vsyo-o-ede/5-ulichnyh-fastfudov-...
The algorithm there flashed me a macD clip of the Gorbachevian and it hit me like a flag pole why Pepsi was emblematic of the Yeltsinian.
https://youtu.be/ckbfS99N6jY?t=2m14s
EDIT: > https://youtu.be/N1jhynHVMSw
The street fishmonger at 3:20 explains Gazmanov's « ... тебя как рыбу к пиву подают. »
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-CnWwbeetE
EDIT: I see Pugacheva has vocal credits for "The Irony of Fate"; that means the Pugachevous period spans from the Brezhnevian through the Putinian epochs...
An old Soviet joke said future encyclopedias will define Brezhnev as "a minor politician active during the Alla Pugacheva epoch".
* what cheap food people made instead of pizza? I think in Lithuania it is anything with meat and potato. In some occasions meat and dough (kibin might be more interesting case). My mother did pizza actually but it is not pizza in traditional sense as it was done with carrots and green peas.
* what cheap street food was eaten instead of pizza. I don’t have idea here as I don’t remember street food at all. I remember we bought kvass in the street.
Of course we had our own not so junk food before hamburgers and pizza - Zapiekanki. Open-face toasted mushroom sandwiches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapiekanka https://www.polishyourkitchen.com/polish-zapiekanki/
https://ciekawostkihistoryczne.pl/2022/01/14/mieso-a-sprawa-... https://dziennikpolski24.pl/lubelska-zaraza/ar/2799170
>>The Security Service sent alarming reports. "There are still shortages of cold cuts from group IV, shortages of high-quality meat, there is no lard on the market, there are total shortages of: canned fish and imported fish, and the quantities of salted herring are limited (lack of supplies). There is a shortage of full-fat milk, full-fat cheese , fatty cottage cheese, bryndza cheese. There are limited quantities of hard cheeses. Moreover, there are shortages of semi-durable bread (including gryam [sic!], breadcrumbs, there is no real honey, cubes and liquid spices, and there are full restrictions on delicatessen products. ..."
Rumours about "Train full of meat on its way to Soviet Union welded to the rails by Railway workers" at the time of moscow Olympics didnt help.
This lead to full Martial Law a year later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_in_Poland
>>The official reasons for imposing martial law were the deteriorating economic situation of the country, the manifestations of which included, among others, lack of supplies in stores (including food), rationing (from April to October 1981, many important goods were again covered by the so-called food card system, e.g. meat, butter, fats, flour, rice, baby milk, etc.)
Soviets tried to quench the unrest by sending meat from military reserves ... in coal wagons. Rumours quickly spread about coal wagons full of rotten dirty meat from moscow.
TLDR: No Pizza because no meat, thats why we ate toasted mushroom sandwiches.
However I think NY Pizza from American movies is probably what everyone is thinking about. As a teenager I went to London in 2001 and was amazed that Pizza Hut was a sit down white table cloth restaurant.
Assemble the pie in a frying pan. Cook ~5 minutes (until the edge of the crust just starts to brown) on the stovetop, then duck it inside a pre-heated oven (as hot as it will go), under the broiler, for about 3--4 minutes (it will bake fast, pull it out before it's burnt, though some crisping is fine).
I do this with homemade sourdough crust and mostly hand-prepped ingredients (I'll usually go with a store-bought sauce, video below shows how to hand-make fresh from tomatoes). It beats the pants off any store-bought and most restaurant pizzas.
Original inspiration: <https://yewtube.com/watch?v=HXAW2GseICs>
Headline comment: "There is more drama in this video than in the entire Transformers franchise."
Watching this again for the first time in a year or two ... I've made some changes (dough, prep, toppings), but the key is the cast-iron pan, stovetop, and broiler, and results are delish.
(The YT channel is also great for baking, and is where I learned much of my own sourdough game.)
There's only one life aspect I might concede. Ugly "commie blocks" of prefab concrete were built plentifully. Right now we have a ludicrous housing crisis where even those old apartments that were planned to be obsolete nowadays are so expensive that purchase is out of reach for average young person.
The reason was that nobody actually knew what is a pizza. USSR was a totalitarian state. All information flows from abroad were tightly controlled. There was no internet, and only a limited set of curated Western movies and books, none of which even mentioned pizza.
Recipes aren't movies, or books, nobody's was going to go to prison for sharing one, and they have no problem spreading virally. But when core pizza ingredients aren't available, you bake a pirog.
It wasn't exactly unavailable, but there wasn't an abundance of it.
And much of it was consumed in the form of kefir or sour cream, or butter, or cottage cheese...
Sure, you can turn a bottle of milk and a bag of flour into a pizza, but when the steps for doing so start including 'making your own cheese at home', is it any surprise that people would turn those ingredients into other, simpler-to-prepare/more-culturally-familiar foods?
Probably an urban legend but thats the level of shortages you get in these regimes. Similar things happened to us in Venezuela. There was a scandal in my town because people were mixing in cardboard with a typical shredded fish dish. In Maracaibo, women we're being assaulted in the streets to cut off their hair and sell it to make hair extensions.
It gets really crazy.
Of course. Polish pizza has to have cabbage.
We made it in a rectangular tray in the oven and it used pita-like spongy dough. My mom got a better recipe using dough mixed with cheese made from maturated farmers' sheep's cheese that is found in the Balkans, at farmers' markets. There's a dry or a creamy version and looks like this:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1258003877/mihalic-cheese-natur...
The dryer version is minced and kneaded like dough to obtain the cheese that you mix in the dough.
One would pre bake the dough and then put ground meat mixed with ground tomatoes or tomato slices or thick tomato stock, mushrooms and maybe some spinach for something green. Then you'd bake the whole thing.
Actually pizza was originally shepards' pie, but the Italians also put tomato sauce on it, their cheese was mozarella and spiced it with basil, of course. They took it with them to the US and the Americans loved it. So contemporary pizza is an Italian American food, because it got really popular in the US. Just like spaghetti alla carbonara, where the US soldiers stationed in Sicily during WW2 would eat their ham and eggs mixed with pasta for breakfast, then went along their business bombing Axis countries using the B17 Flying Fortress.
I always thought pizza drama was ridiculous ("pizza should not have pineapple!")
But cabbage on pizza may make me reassess my opinion...
There were some bistros-like places, where menu was simplified and there were no waiters. We call them Milk Bars, you know, pierogi and soup. It's actually sad there is a shortage of such cheap places nowadays.
Larger work places often had their own cafeterias with basic food for employees. Schools often as well. You didn't really go to a restaurant just to eat. There had to be a reason.
They handled shortages by connections, cheating and poor quality.
Can't really tell who used restaurants as I was too young, but recall official events like wedding parties were a thing. Party members, politicians, priests and crooks had to drink somewhere as well. I recall it was customary to do business using vodka as well, more than modern sales dinners - get shitfaces and yell at each other before shaking hands. It was a thing also after communism, but less so. If you had a deal to make, it was almost expected to discuss that with way too much vodka. Normalization of alcoholism is a stench that we still try to wash off.
I don't miss those times, I still can smell those cheap cigarettes that everyone smoked EVERYWHERE. No-one cared if children were there. Not having money was less of a problem, empty stores were. If you didn't knew a lot of people, you had nothing. You had disgusting green bathroom with tiles like a hospital, for 30 years. Yet you were happy, at least they delivered tiles that one time and your friend told you quickly.
Small businesses existed the whole time, but it was not an easy life.
https://dzieje.pl/ksiazki/prywaciarze-biznes-w-peerelu-1945-... (article about a Polish book on that topic).
The economy was like 20-40 ministries, formed like Korean chaebols -- with many in-house services to compensate for their poor public counterparts. Like kindergartens. Or own housing -- to get an apartment (for rent) from the municipal authorities, you'd be in a long queue with some people more equal than others, and corruption, and normally you'd get one by retirement. So enterprises built it for their workers, in some exchange with the construction enterprises (idk which ministry they'd belong, probably dispersed among many entities).
You probably can imagine a huge Google -- where departments can't trade on a free market with each other -- but with a lot looser control and more corruption, which created some black market.
For example, I suppose, restaurants must have belonged to the retail ministry. Under the minister himself, there was the republican department with its manager, the regional, and the municipal one, and only down there was a "Restaurant #5 <<Sunflower>>" (#5 in the retail department of city X), and its director. This made him like CEO, but in reality it was like small group manager in a big hierarchy.
Just as in any big capitalist corporation, such a manager is risk averse, because failures lead to being fired, but sudden big profits go in the corporation pockets, not manager's.
But if you add some corruption, you could be an entrepreneur in a way: make good services (expensive) => be popular among the elites => have some high-profile friends to protect in case of turf wars (e.g. city's Communist party 1st secretary (president) is your friend => city's retail department can't fire you) => exchange some services/goods/commodities beyond the counter (as it was said "from the back door of the shop"). (Black market prices were high, so you could easily sell something elsewhere and put the nominal amount of cash in the box.)
Regarding the shortages issue, they existed for the buyers at the front door of public retail. Retail & restaurants managers exchanged the stuff (they were supposed to sell to the public) between them to fill the gaps.
Here a humorous sketch from a 1980 comedy Miś by Stanisław Bareja criticizing living conditions under Iron Curtain.
Milk mar 'Apis' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-viM9WyGss
Milk bar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_mleczny
>Polish cafeteria which during the Communist era provided government-subsidized traditional Polish cuisine at low cost. The name comes from cheese cutlets, which were often sold when meat was rare.
It wasn't like we were lacking in Italian food. Pasta was a major staple at our home.
My only memory of pizza prior to that was a trip to Boston, MA, 1988 (?) where I accidentally ordered an entire "small" pizza from one of those places that I noticed (in hindsight) everyone was ordering by the slice. The staff all looked at me funny and double-checked I really wanted a "small" pizza. I thought they meant it was going to be too tiny for a husky chap like me. This pizza when it arrived was enough to feed a small British family for a week :D
The last slice I tried was in a pizzeria in Kiev. It looked like a normal pizza place from the outside. I paid for my slice and I guess I was so hungry I didn't even notice there were no pizza ovens. They just straight up took a frozen pizza and microwaved it. I took one bite and immediately tossed it in the bin in front of them. I'm sure they thought I was some crazy American, but the the thought of serving a frozen pizza in a dedicated pizza restaurant just seemed so ridiculous to me.
Interestingly I'm in Shanghai as I'm typing this and the pizza here is very similar to Russian pizza. We ordered from a few places, including Pizza Hut which is popular here, and they're all the thick doughy style. Usually when all else fails my kids will eat pizza. But they even refused the Pizza Hut slices. I wish I could see if they had the classic Pizza Hut I ate as a kid, but nearly all restaurants here require you to have one of the chinese mobile apps just to view the dang menus which is a whole separate topic.
After 1989, in only a few years, at least in Warsaw, it became commonplace with pizza networks or Italians opening their restaurants everywhere.
Although many might contest Pizza Hut qualifying as real pizza. :)
It’s a shame authentic pizza didn’t grab hold earlier, especially with the origins of pizza being egalitarian peasant food.
Two early post-Soviet pizza events, both involving Pizza Hut, are somewhat relevant here.
Not so much about the introduction of Pizza, but the Pizza Hut proxy introduction of capitalism(western success) and dissolution of communism(Soviet failure).
Gorbachev Pizza Hut commercial(post Soviet collapse and during Russian Financial Crisis):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUTIc-f1h3E
Pizza Hut also paid the Russian space program(in deep financial distress at the time) a considerable sum to have cosmonauts eat Pizza Hut in space, delivered on a Soviet-era Proton rocket carrying a 50ft Pizza Hut logo.
So pizza certainly existed in the waning days of the Soviet Union, but a deeper question might be what role did pizza(Pizza Hut specifically) play in influencing, exemplifying, or merely footnoting the troubled geopolitics between Russia and the pizza eating west?
The reasons were the chronic lack of wheat, especially hard varieties, lack of milk and cheese producing culture and technologies, lack of fresh vegetables and culture and storage and logistic technologies, lack of meat, lack of customers, lack of common sense etc.
Who needs pizza when you can stand in line for six hours and buy a blue chicken carcass consisting of bones and bones?
It's not the answer to the question that's interesting, but the questioner himself.