Evolution of public catering institutions in the USSR (1920s-1930s): key issues of everyday life
The article examines the evolution of public catering institutions in the USSR during the 1920s-1930s as a core element of Soviet alimentary culture and socialist everyday life. The relevance of the study lies in the need to analyze food practices not only as a sphere of material provision but also as a space of ideological, institutional, and cultural conflicts. In the context of industrialization, urbanization, and social transformation, public catering was conceived by the Soviet state as a tool for shaping a new way of life and a new type of individual. However, a persistent tension emerged between the proclaimed goals of modernization and the actual practices of food consumption. The novelty of the research consists in interpreting public catering institutions as a conflictual environment where centralized state control intersected with informal survival strategies, ideological norms, and everyday culinary habits. Drawing on regulatory documents, memoirs, journalistic sources and academic works on everyday life in the Soviet Union, the article outlines the key stages in the development of public catering, from the early state canteens of the Civil War and the New Economic Policy, to the factory kitchens and rationing system of the industrialisation period. Particular attention is paid to the formation of the “taste for necessity,” the marginalization of culinary diversity, and the prioritization of physiological nourishment, sanitary standards, and production efficiency. The study demonstrates that the Soviet public catering system was initially constructed outside the logic of gastronomic taste, which led to its long-term “anti-culinary” orientation. The article concludes that public catering institutions functioned not only as mechanisms of food distribution but also as instruments of socialization, discipline, and ideological influence. Their evolution reveals the contradictory nature of the Soviet project, in which food became a field of political regulation, cultural transformation, and everyday resistance.
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