Did pizza exist in the Soviet Union?

https://www.quora.com/Did-pizza-exist-in-the-Soviet-Union

by vinnyvichy • 2 years ago

62 84 2 years ago

ggm• 2 years ago

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.

ivan_gammel3• 2 years ago

Pizza was a good fit for a planned economy and should have been widely available

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?..

vinnyvichy10• 2 years ago

But but but the confederation of tstsarogi is the largest of them all

golergka6• 2 years ago

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.

fredgrott• 2 years ago

as part Russian and Polish, no a pirogi is not an effing calzone!

vinnyvichy10• 2 years ago

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)

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B8%D1%86%D1%86%D0%B0

08234987234987212• 2 years ago

So what filled the pizza niche in the Union?

(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.

vinnyvichy10• 2 years ago

Khachapuri?

It's alluded to in the answers, but Khachapuri comes closest imho

08234987234987212• 2 years ago

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?)

kdmtctl• 2 years ago

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.

pimlottc• 2 years ago

It's definitely as delicious as pizza, mmm...

insane_dreamer• 2 years ago

Pirogi

daliusd2• 2 years ago

It depends on country or region which was part of Soviet Union.

aebtebeten• 2 years ago

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...

rasz3• 2 years ago

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.

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/

rasz3• 2 years ago

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.

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.

wil4212• 2 years ago

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.

morbicer3• 2 years ago

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.

solarkraft• 2 years ago

A tiny fraction of the pizza I eat has meat on it.

fullspectrumdev• 2 years ago

As a mushroom enjoyer, I now know exactly what I’m going to be searching for when I am next in Poland (soon).

brnt• 2 years ago

Go late summer/autumn, and just drive around the countryside. You can pickup all kinds fresh on the roadside.

atemerev• 2 years ago

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.

vkou2• 2 years ago

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.

SoftTalker• 2 years ago

You can make mozzarella-like cheese at home pretty easily with whole milk and white vinegar. Was fresh whole milk hard to get?

surfingdino• 2 years ago

No. I did not. It required western-sourced mozarella, tomatoes, and meat. Kale was promoted as an alternative.

cptaj• 2 years ago

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.

It gets really crazy.

stratocumulus02• 2 years ago

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.

seanthemon• 2 years ago

Lol Saigon Pierogies

stratocumulus02• 2 years ago

Not even Pierogies, these were literally wheat crepes folded twice in a turnover way. It's basically krokiety, just with a different shape.

petre• 2 years ago

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:

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.

m463• 2 years ago

Of course. Polish pizza has to have cabbage.

I always thought pizza drama was ridiculous ("pizza should not have pineapple!")

But cabbage on pizza may make me reassess my opinion...

softbuilder2• 2 years ago

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..

szszrk2• 2 years ago

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.

culebron213• 2 years ago

I must notice that in the USSR, private companies were allowed only in 1988, 4 years before its end.

culebron213• 2 years ago

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.

rasz3• 2 years ago

State owned or incorporated as Worker Cooperative.

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.

softbuilder2• 2 years ago

The screwed-in bowls and chained spoons, great stuff. :)

ak13942• 2 years ago

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.

qilo• 2 years ago

Was it before 1988? (before the Law on Cooperatives was implemented, which allowed the creation of privately owned enterprises)

ak13942• 2 years ago

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.

vbezhenar• 2 years ago

Why would it exist? Soviet Union embraced national dishes. Promoting food from the former fascist state - that would be nonsense.

golergka6• 2 years ago

Most of national Russian cuisine have simply disappeared in Soviet union, only with a few simplified recipes remaining of it.

qingcharles• 2 years ago

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

nogridbag2• 2 years ago

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.

golergka6• 2 years ago

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.

nogridbag2• 2 years ago

Fair, and now that I'm thinking back, most of the pizza I ate in Russia was in Voronezh.

tptacek• 2 years ago

... but could you get true Chicago thin-crust, cut into squares, cracker-crust? The true mark of any pizza-bearing civilization.

alkyon• 2 years ago

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.

chriselles• 2 years ago

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):

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?

azubinski• 2 years ago

Definitely not.

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.

Did pizza exist in the Soviet Union?

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