From Khrushchev’s Kulish to Chicken Kyiv: How Soviet Power Redefined Ukrainian Cuisine

Abstract

During the rule of Josef Stalin, the Soviet government sought to promulgate a common culinary aesthetic to facilitate the goals of the Soviet project. But pushback against these “socialist realist foodways” emerged in Soviet Ukraine. During the Khrushchev era the Ukrainian government took the step of creating Ukrains”ki stravy (“Ukrainian Dishes”). First published in 1957, this Ukrainian-language cookbook sought to articulate foodways that were both socialist realist and distinctively Ukrainian. The inevitable contradictions within this effort foreshadowed the problems that would dominate Soviet food discourse in subsequent decades, as the USSR’s citizens increasingly critiqued the shortcomings of the Soviet food system and attempted to reclaim prerevolutionary, and particularly national, culinary traditions. Drawing on published and archival Ukrainian sources, this paper explores the uncomfortable balance between nationality policy and official Soviet food discourse in the postwar era, and how this contributed to the eventual demise of socialist realist foodways.