8 ms·

Thursday was fish day in the USSR

52 points by Stratoscope 5y ago

adrianmonk 5y ago
At first I wondered why bother. If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own? So it seemed unnecessary and superfluous. But I suppose there's another possible reason. If you can't give people what they want (meat), give them something else (fish) and try to convince them they do want it. If you can actually pull that off, then maybe it makes you look better and/or makes them feel better.
- veltas 5y ago
  >If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own? So it seemed unnecessary and superfluous. No, what will happen is some people will get meat for the week in their shop, and some will get none. Imagine meat is like toilet roll, one day a family turns up late to get their food from the store and there is no meat left for them. It's better to avoid situations like this by trying to convince households to eat more alternatives, than to leave some households with no meat at all or let meat queues start etc.
  - gtm1260 5y ago
    Ok but if you turn up at the meat shop and can't get any, wouldn't you then go to __x food shop down the street__ and get something else instead?
    - nanis 5y ago
      > wouldn't you then go to __x food shop down the street__ A-hem. Command economies and central planning are interesting like that.
      - antifa 5y ago
        If there is a shortage, it doesn't matter if your market is "free" or if your economic planner is Sam Walton or Сталин or Bezos, you better hurry to next shop and hope they still have some, or hope you're rich enough to buy from scalpers, or hope there is enough supply for rationing.
- nanis 5y ago
  > If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own? Maybe, just maybe, I am really going out on a limb here, the USSR did not have prices for things that reflected the relative scarcity of items.
- vodkapump 5y ago
  Could also be for the same reason my family made sure we had at least 1 (fatty) fish meal every week. We live far north in Norway, sunlight is relatively scarce through the year, which means Vitamin D deficiency is a concern. But what is also a good source of Vitamin D? Fish!
  - tuukkah 5y ago
    Good point. Did the USSR leaders know about the positive health effects of fish (vitamin D, fatty acids etc.) though, and if they did, why didn't they use that as an argument to convince people?
    - vodkapump 5y ago
      Come to think of it, they probably didn't. But a quick online search seems to show that the 70s was around when the world understood Vitamin D a lot more, so could be.
      - kayuri 5y ago
        They definitely did, since they promoted fish oil consumption in their healthy lifestyle propaganda ads since 1950s and maybe even earlier.
        tuukkah 5y ago
        Wow, that's a big omission in the article then.
- teachingassist 5y ago
  > If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own? Encouraging weekly fish-eating habits is also a mechanism to ensure that you have a healthy national fish industry, that you can dial up as soon as you need it. This is something that modern [especially European] nations seem to have institutionally neglected or forgotten. By importing all necessities and instead focusing on exporting services, you put your nation and people at risk from any such crisis.
- zokier 5y ago
  Note that fish day applied mostly to "commercial" kitchens: > This prompted Mikoyan to issue an order on the “introduction of a fish day at public catering establishments.” It didn't have to be Thursday, but from that moment on, factory and other canteens began to serve fish one day a week (emphasis mine)
- rsynnott 5y ago
  > At first I wondered why bother. If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own? In the early months of the Covid pandemic, most developed countries saw a toilet paper shortage. Not due to supply, but due to consumer behaviour. If anything, a real or perceived shortage tends to cause consumers to behave less rationally, not more. Markets don’t self-regulate well in these circumstances.
tuukkah 5y ago
I wonder if they got the idea of devoting a day of the week to a specific food item from the long and continuing custom of their Nordic neighbours: "Consumption of pea soup in Sweden and Finland dates back to at least the 13th century, and is traditionally served on Thursdays." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup
- mustafa_pasi 5y ago
  It was much more likely meant to mock the Christian tradition of eating fish (actually the point is, not eating meat, but then people naturally turned to fish) on Fridays (and for the hardcore ones also on Wednesdays). This same Christian tradition has become a bit of a joke nowadays since fish is now more of a luxury and is more expensive and less accessible than meat, which is now super common and much cheaper.
  - larsiusprime 5y ago
    What you're describing is the modern post-vatican II Catholic fasting tradition. If one follows specifically the Russian Orthodox fasting rules strictly, you'd be approximately vegan for half of the year (every wednesday and friday, as well as lent, apostle's fast, dormition fast, nativity fast, a few others sprinkled in, etc). On a conventional strict fast day (other than e.g. Clean Monday in lent where you eat nothing at all) you'd eat no meat, dairy, wine, or oil. Some of these fasting days (such as when a feast day happens to align on what would otherwise be a fast day) are loosened to be "fish days" when you are allowed to have fish (but not meat). So maybe it was intended to mock the Christian tradition of eating fish ... but like... unless the Thursday was during Lent or another major fasting period, if you weren't a monk you could already eat Fish that day? It doesn't seem too much like the Discordian tradition of eating Hot Dogs on Friday, as an attempt to roll up as many possible religious taboos at once (Halal, Kosher, Catholicism, and Bougies who are grossed out by hotdogs)
    - krzyk 5y ago
      I doubt it was to mock. Former east block countries had supply issues with meat. My experience is from Poland where the Party was not only glad that Catholics don't eat meat on Fridays (and you are allowed to eat Fish, but if you don't have it you won't eat it) but also tried to introduce No Meat Monday. BTW. In 80ties (don't remember exactly when) each family was receiving paper slips that allowed to buy meat (you had to give also money beside the sleep) and some other high value merchandise. If you had children you were given more such slips for meat (and probably other items).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aaronchall 5y ago
> Collectivization and aggressive food taxes on the peasantry had led to a pig breeding crisis, a reduction in livestock and, ultimately, mass famine in 1930-33. Ah, the malicious incompetence of Soviet ideology is why they had "fish day." I remember a joke from visiting Ukraine. "A sausage is the best fish." They had a lot of wonderful sausages too...
- nine_k 5y ago
  Collectivization was about crushing the independent peasantry, which was created about 15 years before, when the Bolsheviks confiscated land from large landowners hand handed it to landless peasants. It created a class which was too pro-capitalist and too economically independent for the later Bolsheviks' taste. So the land was effectively taken back again. But the aggressive food taxes were not incompetence, but a calculated sacrifice. Food was one of the very few items the young USSR was able to export. It was paid in gold, because the Bretton Woods system was still in force, and real currencies were backed with gold. Yes, the USSR exported a lot of food right at the time its own citizens were dying from famine. The USSR then paid that gold for technology, in particular, for buying entire factories from the US. American firms built a number of large car, truck, and tractor factories, and taught the workers the then-current advanced manufacturing technologies. These factories were later converted to produce military trucks and tanks, which played a key role in WWII. BTW the Soviets were shrewd and bold, and of course cheated: they did not pay the last tranche of the gold once the last factory was completed according to the contract. In a few years, WWII started, and the point became moot for decades.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    That's what the urban legend tells. Yes, USSR splashed gold left, and right on fancy things from the West, including the Moscow metro, but it wasn't US factories which played anything in USSR's WW2 preparations, or anything. USSR wasn't any kind of industrial giant by the time WW2 started. That's a purest propaganda myth. Stalin was terrible in running the economy, probably even more than any subsequent USSR's ruler. Sputnik was possible mostly thanks to post-war short growth spurt resulting from undoing Stalin's biggest economic blunders.
mapgrep 5y ago
> until the death of Stalin, black and red caviar was very inexpensive and accessible. Actively farmed in the Caspian Sea, it was one of the country’s top exports. What? Why would the death of Stalin impact the price and availability of caviar? Maybe someone else knows the history here? Perhaps the elites, previously held in check by fear of Stalin, began hoarding for themselves and exporting for hard currency?
- cromka 5y ago
  > What? Why would the death of Stalin impact the price and availability of caviar? Because it wasn't free economy, but a centrally regulated one. So if Stalin wanted caviar to be cheap for whatever reason, he'd make that happen.
  - aaronchall 5y ago
    Not that you'd actually be able to buy it unless you were quite privileged...
    - mathgorges 5y ago
      Is that true? That seems at odds with what the article says. > What’s more, until the death of Stalin, black and red caviar was very inexpensive and accessible. Actively farmed in the Caspian Sea, it was one of the country’s top exports. But whereas in tsarist times caviar had been willingly consumed, Soviet people didn’t really get it. Some posters even exhorted: "Make yourself eat caviar." Why would the propagandists push people to eat foods they couldn’t access?
      - mantas 5y ago
        Or put up posters to make it look like it's accessible. Sort of like making ads for personal cars. You couldn't buy one without a special permit. And queue for a regular citizen was next-to-eternity. But ads still were made. Overfishing may have been an issue too. Soviets weren't exactly concerned about ecology.
      - 5y ago
malinens 5y ago
it is still called fish day in many places in post soviet block
drran 5y ago
> Collectivization and aggressive food taxes on the peasantry had led to a pig breeding crisis, a reduction in livestock and, ultimately, mass famine in 1930-33. Mass famine was planed famine with intention to kill "kulaks" class as whole. Kulaks were farmers, which used their own fist ("kulak") instead of pillow, because they were so busy with work in field that they had no time to return to home for sleep. Any food in any quantity was confiscated, even minuscule amounts of partially rotten food, according to the law called as "law about 3 spikelets". Villains were shot by armed guard when they tried to dig rotten potatoes left in the field. Houses of kulaks and sub-kulaks were confiscated or disassembled in winter, to freeze to death their families. Trains were running regularly twice a week to collect corpses and hide them somewhere at territory of Russian Federation. (Location of corpses is still top secret of RF.) It was not a famine, it was a genocide.
- bdefore 5y ago
  There are several famine events in the history of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian 'Holodomor' is a fascinating case. It appeared to be in the interest of both East and West at the time to deny that there was genocidal intent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
- baryphonic 5y ago
  Not only this, but "kulaks" had generally been peasants 15 years earlier before the Russian Revolutions. Lenin had attempted collectivization, but it was a massive failure, so instead peasant farmers were given the land. They became fairly successful and increased productivity. But this was one of those intolerable contradictions of Marxism - socialism in the cities, capitalism in the countryside -, so Stalin and the Party orchestrated this murderous rampage you describe. Truly awful.

52 points by Stratoscope 5y ago

At first I wondered why bother. If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own? So it seemed unnecessary and superfluous. But I suppose there's another possible reason. If you can't give people what they want (meat), give them something else (fish) and try to convince them they do want it. If you can actually pull that off, then maybe it makes you look better and/or makes them feel better.

veltas 5y ago
>If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own? So it seemed unnecessary and superfluous. No, what will happen is some people will get meat for the week in their shop, and some will get none. Imagine meat is like toilet roll, one day a family turns up late to get their food from the store and there is no meat left for them. It's better to avoid situations like this by trying to convince households to eat more alternatives, than to leave some households with no meat at all or let meat queues start etc.
- gtm1260 5y ago
  Ok but if you turn up at the meat shop and can't get any, wouldn't you then go to __x food shop down the street__ and get something else instead?
  - nanis 5y ago
    > wouldn't you then go to __x food shop down the street__ A-hem. Command economies and central planning are interesting like that.
    - antifa 5y ago
      If there is a shortage, it doesn't matter if your market is "free" or if your economic planner is Sam Walton or Сталин or Bezos, you better hurry to next shop and hope they still have some, or hope you're rich enough to buy from scalpers, or hope there is enough supply for rationing.
nanis 5y ago
> If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own? Maybe, just maybe, I am really going out on a limb here, the USSR did not have prices for things that reflected the relative scarcity of items.
vodkapump 5y ago
Could also be for the same reason my family made sure we had at least 1 (fatty) fish meal every week. We live far north in Norway, sunlight is relatively scarce through the year, which means Vitamin D deficiency is a concern. But what is also a good source of Vitamin D? Fish!
- tuukkah 5y ago
  Good point. Did the USSR leaders know about the positive health effects of fish (vitamin D, fatty acids etc.) though, and if they did, why didn't they use that as an argument to convince people?
  - vodkapump 5y ago
    Come to think of it, they probably didn't. But a quick online search seems to show that the 70s was around when the world understood Vitamin D a lot more, so could be.
    - kayuri 5y ago
      They definitely did, since they promoted fish oil consumption in their healthy lifestyle propaganda ads since 1950s and maybe even earlier.
      - tuukkah 5y ago
        Wow, that's a big omission in the article then.
teachingassist 5y ago
> If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own? Encouraging weekly fish-eating habits is also a mechanism to ensure that you have a healthy national fish industry, that you can dial up as soon as you need it. This is something that modern [especially European] nations seem to have institutionally neglected or forgotten. By importing all necessities and instead focusing on exporting services, you put your nation and people at risk from any such crisis.
zokier 5y ago
Note that fish day applied mostly to "commercial" kitchens: > This prompted Mikoyan to issue an order on the “introduction of a fish day at public catering establishments.” It didn't have to be Thursday, but from that moment on, factory and other canteens began to serve fish one day a week (emphasis mine)
rsynnott 5y ago
> At first I wondered why bother. If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own? In the early months of the Covid pandemic, most developed countries saw a toilet paper shortage. Not due to supply, but due to consumer behaviour. If anything, a real or perceived shortage tends to cause consumers to behave less rationally, not more. Markets don’t self-regulate well in these circumstances.

tuukkah 5y ago

I wonder if they got the idea of devoting a day of the week to a specific food item from the long and continuing custom of their Nordic neighbours: "Consumption of pea soup in Sweden and Finland dates back to at least the 13th century, and is traditionally served on Thursdays." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup

mustafa_pasi 5y ago
It was much more likely meant to mock the Christian tradition of eating fish (actually the point is, not eating meat, but then people naturally turned to fish) on Fridays (and for the hardcore ones also on Wednesdays). This same Christian tradition has become a bit of a joke nowadays since fish is now more of a luxury and is more expensive and less accessible than meat, which is now super common and much cheaper.
- larsiusprime 5y ago
  What you're describing is the modern post-vatican II Catholic fasting tradition. If one follows specifically the Russian Orthodox fasting rules strictly, you'd be approximately vegan for half of the year (every wednesday and friday, as well as lent, apostle's fast, dormition fast, nativity fast, a few others sprinkled in, etc). On a conventional strict fast day (other than e.g. Clean Monday in lent where you eat nothing at all) you'd eat no meat, dairy, wine, or oil. Some of these fasting days (such as when a feast day happens to align on what would otherwise be a fast day) are loosened to be "fish days" when you are allowed to have fish (but not meat). So maybe it was intended to mock the Christian tradition of eating fish ... but like... unless the Thursday was during Lent or another major fasting period, if you weren't a monk you could already eat Fish that day? It doesn't seem too much like the Discordian tradition of eating Hot Dogs on Friday, as an attempt to roll up as many possible religious taboos at once (Halal, Kosher, Catholicism, and Bougies who are grossed out by hotdogs)
  - krzyk 5y ago
    I doubt it was to mock. Former east block countries had supply issues with meat. My experience is from Poland where the Party was not only glad that Catholics don't eat meat on Fridays (and you are allowed to eat Fish, but if you don't have it you won't eat it) but also tried to introduce No Meat Monday. BTW. In 80ties (don't remember exactly when) each family was receiving paper slips that allowed to buy meat (you had to give also money beside the sleep) and some other high value merchandise. If you had children you were given more such slips for meat (and probably other items).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

aaronchall 5y ago

> Collectivization and aggressive food taxes on the peasantry had led to a pig breeding crisis, a reduction in livestock and, ultimately, mass famine in 1930-33. Ah, the malicious incompetence of Soviet ideology is why they had "fish day." I remember a joke from visiting Ukraine. "A sausage is the best fish." They had a lot of wonderful sausages too...

nine_k 5y ago
Collectivization was about crushing the independent peasantry, which was created about 15 years before, when the Bolsheviks confiscated land from large landowners hand handed it to landless peasants. It created a class which was too pro-capitalist and too economically independent for the later Bolsheviks' taste. So the land was effectively taken back again. But the aggressive food taxes were not incompetence, but a calculated sacrifice. Food was one of the very few items the young USSR was able to export. It was paid in gold, because the Bretton Woods system was still in force, and real currencies were backed with gold. Yes, the USSR exported a lot of food right at the time its own citizens were dying from famine. The USSR then paid that gold for technology, in particular, for buying entire factories from the US. American firms built a number of large car, truck, and tractor factories, and taught the workers the then-current advanced manufacturing technologies. These factories were later converted to produce military trucks and tanks, which played a key role in WWII. BTW the Soviets were shrewd and bold, and of course cheated: they did not pay the last tranche of the gold once the last factory was completed according to the contract. In a few years, WWII started, and the point became moot for decades.
- baybal2 5y ago
  That's what the urban legend tells. Yes, USSR splashed gold left, and right on fancy things from the West, including the Moscow metro, but it wasn't US factories which played anything in USSR's WW2 preparations, or anything. USSR wasn't any kind of industrial giant by the time WW2 started. That's a purest propaganda myth. Stalin was terrible in running the economy, probably even more than any subsequent USSR's ruler. Sputnik was possible mostly thanks to post-war short growth spurt resulting from undoing Stalin's biggest economic blunders.

mapgrep 5y ago

> until the death of Stalin, black and red caviar was very inexpensive and accessible. Actively farmed in the Caspian Sea, it was one of the country’s top exports. What? Why would the death of Stalin impact the price and availability of caviar? Maybe someone else knows the history here? Perhaps the elites, previously held in check by fear of Stalin, began hoarding for themselves and exporting for hard currency?

cromka 5y ago
> What? Why would the death of Stalin impact the price and availability of caviar? Because it wasn't free economy, but a centrally regulated one. So if Stalin wanted caviar to be cheap for whatever reason, he'd make that happen.
- aaronchall 5y ago
  Not that you'd actually be able to buy it unless you were quite privileged...
  - mathgorges 5y ago
    Is that true? That seems at odds with what the article says. > What’s more, until the death of Stalin, black and red caviar was very inexpensive and accessible. Actively farmed in the Caspian Sea, it was one of the country’s top exports. But whereas in tsarist times caviar had been willingly consumed, Soviet people didn’t really get it. Some posters even exhorted: "Make yourself eat caviar." Why would the propagandists push people to eat foods they couldn’t access?
    - mantas 5y ago
      Or put up posters to make it look like it's accessible. Sort of like making ads for personal cars. You couldn't buy one without a special permit. And queue for a regular citizen was next-to-eternity. But ads still were made. Overfishing may have been an issue too. Soviets weren't exactly concerned about ecology.
    - 5y ago

malinens 5y ago

it is still called fish day in many places in post soviet block

drran 5y ago

> Collectivization and aggressive food taxes on the peasantry had led to a pig breeding crisis, a reduction in livestock and, ultimately, mass famine in 1930-33. Mass famine was planed famine with intention to kill "kulaks" class as whole. Kulaks were farmers, which used their own fist ("kulak") instead of pillow, because they were so busy with work in field that they had no time to return to home for sleep. Any food in any quantity was confiscated, even minuscule amounts of partially rotten food, according to the law called as "law about 3 spikelets". Villains were shot by armed guard when they tried to dig rotten potatoes left in the field. Houses of kulaks and sub-kulaks were confiscated or disassembled in winter, to freeze to death their families. Trains were running regularly twice a week to collect corpses and hide them somewhere at territory of Russian Federation. (Location of corpses is still top secret of RF.) It was not a famine, it was a genocide.

bdefore 5y ago
There are several famine events in the history of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian 'Holodomor' is a fascinating case. It appeared to be in the interest of both East and West at the time to deny that there was genocidal intent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
baryphonic 5y ago
Not only this, but "kulaks" had generally been peasants 15 years earlier before the Russian Revolutions. Lenin had attempted collectivization, but it was a massive failure, so instead peasant farmers were given the land. They became fairly successful and increased productivity. But this was one of those intolerable contradictions of Marxism - socialism in the cities, capitalism in the countryside -, so Stalin and the Party orchestrated this murderous rampage you describe. Truly awful.