Thanks to the kitchen factories, domestic life had to disappear forever from the life of a Soviet person, and the time that was previously spent on cooking should be spent exclusively on building a communist paradise on earth.
After the end of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks began to build their new wondrous world on the principles of collectivism, the likes of which had not yet existed. Every citizen of this world was obliged to work for the common good, and those who did not work were declared parasites and were subject to forced forced labor. From now on there should be no beggars, no vagrants, no idle landlords. Everyone became equal, and everyone had to work hard.
Summarize and Automate
All awaited a "bright future", in which they were promised "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," the absence of suffering and even immortality - right here, on our sinful earth.
The country lived in a fit of unprecedented enthusiasm - it erected power plants and new factories, smelted steel, plowed the land, increased milk production and really believed that happiness lay ahead.
To bring it closer, not only men had to work, but all women, including housewives. The struggle against the bourgeois life began in the days of the New Economic Policy, around the same years constructivist architects began to build communal houses in which Soviet people had to live together and eat together. It got to the point of absurdity - in some houses even bedrooms were shared, and the spouses could retire in a special room on schedule.
Kitchens in such houses were not envisaged at all, new people had to eat in a new way - in kitchen factories.
Promotional video:
The monuments of constructivism "Horseshoe House" and "House-Ship" in Ivanovo (formerly Ivanovo-Voznesensk) can become striking examples of communal houses designed without kitchens. In general, nothing should have distracted the citizens of the country from work - neither food, nor women.
It was not possible to resettle everyone in communal houses in the near future, and it was necessary to feed the builders of socialism. Therefore, to feed the working people, it was decided to build kitchen factories, in which workers and employees, cogs of a huge social mechanism, could quickly and cheaply "refuel" and go on to work for the benefit of future victories.
Another task of the factories-kitchens was to distract the people from all kinds of wine-glasses and snack bars, because the Soviet person had to be healthy in body and soul. Do not fall into melancholy and do not think about the futility of all that exists, but play sports. In extreme cases - chess.
A bomb thrown into an old life
At the origins of the creation of kitchen factories was the chairman of the "People's Nutrition" (Narpit) partnership, Artemy Khalatov, aka Artashes Khalatiants, an associate of Anastas Mikoyan.
Kitchen factories were supposed to become not just a "school of public catering", they were supposed to be developed and launched on a strictly scientific basis. The food of the worker was supposed to become rational, and the very manufacture of the product was to be fast, technological and cheap. The popular Soviet nutritionist Manuil Pevzner believed that food does not have to be tasty, the main thing is that it should be balanced in fats, proteins and carbohydrates and sufficiently (but not too) high in calories. It was he who developed a menu for workers and even 15 medical tables-menus for patients, of which there were many among yesterday's revolutionaries.
It was planned not only to feed citizens in the building of the factory itself, but also to supply semi-finished products to canteens, schools and institutes, hospitals and even home. And the pies and pastries were left for street trading.
The first factory-kitchen, which was nicknamed "the bomb thrown into the old way of life", opened at the end of March 1925 on Krutitskaya Street in Ivanovo-Voznesensk. She occupied a two-story building of a former carriage workshop, which later served as a hospital, and after the revolution - the Faculty of Civil Engineering.
To equip the factory in Germany, the latest equipment was purchased: refrigerators, lifts, conveyors, washing and cutting for vegetables, dryers, bread slicers and industrial meat grinders - this was to increase the throughput of the kitchen.
The culinary workshop was located on the first floor, and the dining room for 285 people was located on the second; a kitchen factory supplied food to eight factory canteens. If on the opening day it could feed 600 people a day, then after purchasing 19 autoclave boilers from Germany, the productivity increased to 5 thousand meals, and soon a quarter of the city's population ate here.
The experiment was considered so successful that soon kitchen factories appeared in Nizhny Novgorod (1927) and Dneprostroy (1928), after which they began to grow in the cities of the USSR like mushrooms after rain.
In 1929, on Leningradsky Prospekt in Moscow, the largest kitchen factory in the USSR, Factory Kitchen No. 1, was opened. The gray three-story building had such a huge hall for visitors that up to 4 thousand dishes were “served” here in one evening. The food was inexpensive: a vegetable salad cost 3 kopecks, a dish from "white-rowed teshka" - 1 ruble, a portion of pork - 1 ruble 50 kopecks, a bun cost 25 kopecks, and a cake - 35 kopecks.
Soon in Moscow, kitchen factories were built on Budyonny Avenue, on Kutuzovsky Avenue, on Vladimirskaya, Bolshaya Tulskaya and Novozavodskaya streets, and in other places.
Culture for lunch
These weren't just places to eat. Citizens of the USSR were obliged to try to accustom them to culture. For example, in Moscow, a live orchestra played on Leningradsky Prospekt, post offices, pharmacies, and libraries were set up in other kitchen factories. The kitchen factory on Narvskaya in Leningrad occupied an entire block and was merged with a huge department store.
A completely unique building of glass and concrete was built in Samara - the kitchen factory of the Maslennikov defense plant had the shape of a hammer and sickle. It was designed by the architect Ekaterina Maksimova for the "People's Food" partnership.
As conceived by the creators, the "sickle" was supposed to house a dining room with circular continuous glazing, the "hammer" - production premises, and in the "arms" of these architectural masterpieces - a gym and a library. The project was to open a summer terrace where workers could dine; in total on this monster of catering they expected to cook up to 9 thousand dinners daily.
Each factory kitchen was a true work of art - it was a large building with tape-glazed dining rooms, huge dining rooms with high ceilings. Automation reigned in the workshops. From bakeries they adopted the idea of sequential processing of products, from automobile plants - the idea of a conveyor. Most of the processes were automated: machines washed vegetables, peeled them, chopped them, cooked, washed and dried dishes. The cooks themselves turned into cogs and nuts of a huge mechanism designed to feed all the workers of the USSR.
For example, almost 500 people worked at a kitchen factory in Minsk. The factory made from 10 to 30 thousand servings of food a day, although it could cook up to 65 thousand servings daily.
Back to home comfort?
It would seem that this is the heyday of socialism! But it was not there.
In the mid-1930s, factory construction ceased. Firstly, it turned out to be expensive: individual projects and expensive equipment did not justify themselves. The very first kitchen factory in Ivanovo operated for only 20 years.
Secondly, the situation in the USSR has changed. Hunger is a thing of the past, ration cards have disappeared, groceries have appeared in stores. Sausages, juices, cakes appeared on the shelves. They even began to produce Soviet analogues of American hamburgers - "sausages in buns." Women were now encouraged not to waste time in the kitchen, but simply to wrap up on the way from work to the store and buy high-quality semi-finished products there - pancakes, pies, cutlets or dumplings that can be quickly cooked or reheated at home.
But the main thing is that it was in the 1930s that the line pursued by Stalin won out, and the USSR made a powerful U-turn from inciting a "world revolution" to the development of its own country. The family was again declared the main value, and family comfort and homemade food became the key to the future healthy and happy life of the builders of communism.
And although they stopped building huge factory kitchens, they continued to exist on the territory of the USSR until the early 1990s, as small factory kitchen factories that fed workers of large enterprises and produced semi-finished products, confectionery and baked goods for factory buffets.
Alexander LAVRENTYEV