44 Chapter 1
establish their own proprietary farms. Resters in 1933 complained that the
rest home issued them only six hundred grams of bread, compared with the
thousand grams they received daily at home; one rest home’s meals were
so meager that patients used their own money to buy additional meals at a
canteen outside the grounds. Even when quantities were suffi cient to provide
the required daily caloric intake, between 4,000 and 4,500 calories, patients
complained about the quality and the variety of the meals they received.
Menus from Sochi’s Krasnaia Moskva sanatorium in August 1933 (collected
as part of an investigation into a case of food poisoning) indicate a marked
reduction of meat: fi shcakes, tomato, butter, coffee, and milk for breakfast;
pureed carrot soup, “meat puree” with butter, and fruit kissel (blancmange)
for dinner; tea with cheese pastry; and tomato and cucumber salad, tea, and
a roll for supper.^85 By the middle of the 1930s, as more and more places op-
erated their own farms, resters publicly praised the rest home food as “tasty
and varied,” but complaints persisted. Now, however, the blame fell on a
shortage of skilled cooks rather than food products. Interviewing a potential- GARF, f. 5528, op. 4, d. 131; d. 132; op. 6, d. 220, ll. 7–7ob.; f. 9493, op. 1, d. 2, ll.
81, 30–31.
Factory workers dining at a one-day rest home near Moscow, 1932. RGAKFD g. Krasnogorsk,
no. 243650. Used with permission of the archive.