Two years after a famine killed millions of Ukrainians, Stalin declared 'life has become more cheerful' and published a cookbook

Two Russian food stories, separated by a few decades, at opposite extremes

Few food histories in this series contain a starker contrast than Russia’s. On one side: elaborate Tsarist court dining, refined over centuries into an entire genre of appetizer. On the other: a government-engineered famine that killed millions, followed almost immediately by state propaganda celebrating culinary abundance.

Zakuski: Russia’s own answer to the multi-course spread

Russian court cuisine developed across four distinct historical periods — Old Russian (9th–16th century), Old Moscow (17th century), the era of Peter and Catherine the Great (18th century), and Petersburg cuisine (late 18th century to the 1860s). By 1910, formal Russian dinners featured zakuski — an elaborate spread of appetizers served before the main meal, alongside dishes like kulebiaka (a stuffed fish pie) and chilled fish soup. Zakuski functioned similarly to the multi-course display logic covered elsewhere in this series (Thai royal fruit-carving, Hue’s 50-dish imperial table): a formal, codified system for demonstrating wealth and hospitality through structured abundance, refined over centuries by court kitchens.

The Holodomor: a famine engineered by policy, not weather

In 1929, Stalin launched forced agricultural collectivization as part of the First Five-Year Plan. The result, from 1932–33, was the Holodomor — a man-made famine that devastated Ukraine specifically, killing an estimated over seven million people across the broader Soviet famine of that period. This wasn’t a crop failure or a natural disaster; it was the direct, documented consequence of state agricultural policy, making it one of history’s deadliest instances of food itself being wielded as an instrument of political control.

The cookbook that followed two years later

Here’s the detail that makes this genuinely one of the starkest juxtapositions in food history anywhere: in 1935, just two years after the Holodomor’s peak death toll, Stalin publicly declared “Life has become better, comrades; life has become more cheerful,” and the Soviet state published a lavish cookbook celebrating an idealized vision of Soviet culinary plenty — full of dishes and abundance that bore no resemblance to the famine conditions millions had just survived, or died in. It’s a documented, deliberate act of state food propaganda, published in the immediate aftermath of state-engineered mass starvation.

Why this belongs in the same series as British Restaurants and World Central Kitchen

Every crisis-feeding story covered elsewhere in this series — Rome’s grain dole, Rumford’s soup, WWII’s British Restaurants, World Central Kitchen — involves a government or institution responding to hunger. The Soviet case is the dark mirror of that pattern: a government causing the hunger through policy, then using food imagery as propaganda to obscure it. The same tool — controlling what people eat, and how that’s publicly represented — appears throughout history as both genuine crisis response and, in this case, its opposite.

What this means beyond the history

Food is never fully separable from power — who controls production, who controls distribution, and who controls the story told about abundance or scarcity. The Tsarist zakuski table and the Soviet cookbook are both, in their own way, food used to project status and control; the difference is that one reflected genuine (if unequal) prosperity, and the other was a deliberate fiction published over a mass grave.

How CalcMenu keeps your operation’s numbers honest, regardless of what the story says

Whatever narrative surrounds a menu or a food operation, the actual numbers behind it — cost, supply, real availability — should never be a matter of propaganda or convenient framing.

• Real cost and supply visibility, not an idealized version of what’s actually available.
• Consistent, honest recipe data across every site, regardless of external narrative pressure.
• Accurate margin tracking, grounded in what’s actually happening, not what looks good on paper.

CalcMenu can’t fix a government’s relationship with the truth. It can make sure your own kitchen’s numbers are never a fiction, however convenient a fiction might be.

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Want your kitchen’s numbers to reflect reality, not a convenient story? Book a free 15-minute call with our team — no commitment: Schedule a call.

Sources

• Russian cuisine – Wikipedia
• The Soviet Union Collapsed. Then the Fight Over Food Began – Bloomberg
• Holodomor – Britannica
• Droughts and famines in Russia and the Soviet Union – Wikipedia