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Thursday was fish day in the USSR

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Re: Thursday was fish day in the USSR

#31

Post by dsego »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #26
krzyk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Yep, food coupons. It wasn't so bad in yugoslavia, but we still had coupons for stuff like gasoline. We also had odd-even days, where you could only drive your car on odd or even days (depending on your licence plate - so every second day).

This odd-even thing always comes up as an example of how things were bad in socialism, yet everyone fails to mention the context of a global oil shortage and that other places had similar policies, like in the US for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd%E2%80%93even_rationing

Re: Thursday was fish day in the USSR

#32

Post by mantas »

mathgorges wrote: post #18
aaronchall wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that you'd actually be able to buy it unless you were quite privileged...

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 propagandis…

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.

Re: Thursday was fish day in the USSR

#33

Post by baryphonic »

drran wrote: post #28

> 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…

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.

Re: Thursday was fish day in the USSR

#34

Post by tuukkah »

baybal2 wrote: post #22
nine_k wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not here to glorify Stalin; he was a pretty bad guy. But read about Occidental Petroleum, Armand Hammer, and how that guy sold the Ford tractors and built Soviet tractor plants for a nice sum in gold at the time when nobody wanted to touch commerce with USSR with a ten-foot pole. These plants later produced a lot of tanks for WWII. USSR was not an industrial giant by 1940. Still, without buying Western tech, it w…

> These plants later produced a lot of tanks for WWII. That's a plainest myth every moderately educated schoolchild in Russia knows.

Perhaps moderately brainwashed?

Re: Thursday was fish day in the USSR

#35

Post by teachingassist »

adrianmonk wrote: post #2

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 the…

> 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.

Re: Thursday was fish day in the USSR

#36

Post by vodkapump »

tuukkah wrote: post #30
vodkapump wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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?

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.

Re: Thursday was fish day in the USSR

#37

Post by zokier »

adrianmonk wrote: post #2

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 the…

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)

Re: Thursday was fish day in the USSR

#38

Post by Tuna-Fish »

mathgorges wrote: post #18
aaronchall wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that you'd actually be able to buy it unless you were quite privileged...

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 propagandis…

> Why would the propagandists push people to eat foods they couldn’t access?

It this case, the workers probably had access to the foods, but there are a lot of assumptions in that sentence that don't apply to the Soviet Union.

At one point, the Soviets decided that western ads were insidious propaganda that needed to be countered, and decided that every company must spend one percent of it's budget on ads. Don't make anything for consumers? Doesn't matter, still need to spend that one percent advertising to them. Either make ads for things no consumer is interested in, or just invent products that don't exist.

Then once the tv ads were done, the people in charge of tv scheduling didn't care one bit about where the product was actually available. People living in Estonia grew up frequently seeing ads for orange juice that was only available in Ukraine.

In general, when western people look at the USSR they see a state where everyone does exactly what they are ordered to do, and assume that they were following a coherent plan of some sort. Lol no. The guys giving the orders, and the guys giving those guys orders, were all just following the letter of their orders too. The place where the original plans come from were so far removed from facts on the ground they might just as well have been on Mars.

Re: Thursday was fish day in the USSR

#39

Post by throwaway0a5e »

baybal2 wrote: post #22
nine_k wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not here to glorify Stalin; he was a pretty bad guy. But read about Occidental Petroleum, Armand Hammer, and how that guy sold the Ford tractors and built Soviet tractor plants for a nice sum in gold at the time when nobody wanted to touch commerce with USSR with a ten-foot pole. These plants later produced a lot of tanks for WWII. USSR was not an industrial giant by 1940. Still, without buying Western tech, it w…

> These plants later produced a lot of tanks for WWII. That's a plainest myth every moderately educated schoolchild in Russia knows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volgograd_Tractor_Plant

Re: Thursday was fish day in the USSR

#40

Post by pilsetnieks »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #38
mathgorges wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 propagandis…

> Why would the propagandists push people to eat foods they couldn’t access? It this case, the workers probably had access to the foods, but there are a lot of assumptions in that sentence that don't apply to the Soviet Union. At one point, the Soviets decided that western ads were insidious propaganda that needed to be countered, and decided that every company must spend one percent of it's budget on ads. Don't make…

> At one point, the Soviets decided that western ads were insidious propaganda that needed to be countered

There was no Western advertising in the Soviet Union at all.

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