Tuber or Not Tuber

Russia’s Hate-Love Relationship with the Potato

Potatoes came to Russia long after they were a staple in the European diet. Introduction of the tuber to Russia is usually credited to Peter the Great, who became familiar with potatoes while learning the shipbuilding trade in the Netherlands, bringing back with him seeds with which to grow the plant in St. Petersburg. Another version has it that the potato came to Russia not only from the West but also from the East: via Kamchatka and Alaska, where the plant had long been locally grown.

According to the Great Encyclopedia of Cyril and Methodius, at first Russians thought that the edible part of the plant was the fruit growing on the potato bush after it blossomed, rather than the root growing underground. Hapless potato growers boiled the fruits and tried to eat them with sugar, but the taste was still so awful that they gave up on it. Apparently even Catherine served the wrong fruit of the potato plant to her husband Peter the Great after he gave her the “earthly apples” as a gift.

As was the case with many innovations in Russia, potato cultivation was imposed from above. In 1765 Catherine the Great directed the Senate to pass a decree and special regulations “On Potato Growing, Transportation, and Storage.” In each Russian gubernia, potato growing was to be monitored by the local governor. Yet, even 25 years later, in 1790, German settlers were about the only potato growers in St. Petersburg and its vicinities.

In 1797, during the reign of Paul I, state officials in villages were required to “introduce peasants to potato cultivation.” But Russian peasants are a conservative lot, and they were lukewarm about the mysterious root from abroad.

It took the iron hand of Tsar Nicholas I to break the peasants’ passive resistance and introduce cultivation of the kartofel on a national scale. The effort began with so-called udelnye and state peasants. Udelnye peasants (from the word udel, a land plot allocated to members of the imperial family) worked on imperial plots and were the property of the imperial family. State peasants lived on state lands, and paid rent to the state, but were considered to be free individuals.

On January 1, 1838, the Ministry of State Properties was founded to manage state peasants. Count Pavel Kiselyov, holding the military rank of general (Nicholas I called him his “head of the general staff dealing with the peasantry”), was appointed the ministry’s head. It was a tumultuous time for Russian farms. The years 1839-1841 saw bad harvests, and there was not enough grain even for seed crop, leading to a terrible famine. Thus, potatoes seemed a perfect way to spare peasants from starvation and Kiselyov became the tuber’s main proponent.

Unfortunately, Count Kiselyov had many opponents at court. The famous countess Eudoxie Golitsyn, immortalized in verse by Alexander Pushkin, launched a vehement counterattack against Kiselyov, calling the potato a threat to Russian national traditions.

Admiral (and Count) Alexander Menshikov, one of the sharpest tongues in high society, excoriated Kiselyov, saying his potato reforms would further ruin the peasants. Menshikov never let slip an opportunity to gore Kiselyov. At that time Russia was waging a war in the Caucasus and Nicholas asked Menshikov whom he should send to the region to put down seven rebellious Caucasian villages. “If you are looking for someone who is good at ruining,” Menshikov said, “then you can’t go wrong choosing Count Kiselyov. If he ruined the state peasants, he could ruin those remaining seven villages just like that!”

The government’s orders requiring potato cultivation on state and imperial property provoked the so-called “potato revolts,” first of udelnye peasants (1834) and then of state peasants (1840-1841). The revolts took place throughout much of western Russia, including the towns and regions of Perm, Vyatka, Orenburg, Tobolsk, Kazan, Saratov, Ryazan, Moscow, Vologda, Olonets and Tambov. Ironically, today these are Russia’s most important potato growing lands.

In one of its reports, the Third Department of the Chancellery of his Imperial Majesty [the secret police] wrote: “Ignorant allegations to the effect that the potato is a cursed fruit whose cultivation brought about God’s refusal to bless the Russian land with fertility, were the cause of disobedience of peasants of the Moscow gubernia, who, in some villages, destroyed entire potato fields.”

A highranking official in Kiselyov’s ministry blamed revolts in the Saratov gubernia on “the ignorance and frenzy” of peasants: “That very ignorance and attachment to a free lifestyle inculcates in their minds the idea that every governmental measure aimed at improvement will result in the alienation of all of their rights and property; hence the reason for such stubborn resistance to potato growing in 1841.”

State peasants feared that potato cultivation would lead to their further impoverishment or, just as bad, to their transformation into udelnye peasants. In the recent past, peasants had been forced to grow beetroot and then work in sugar factories to process the plants—taking them away from the land. Peasants in Saratov gubernia apparently feared that potato growing would encourage the land owners to build yet more “sugar factories” which, to quote Decembrist Nikolai Turgenev, the peasants “feared like the plague.”

As the cited report indicates, religion and superstition also fed into the revolts. In one of the villages of the Vyatskaya gubernia some provocateurs spread the rumor that “the [Orthodox] faith is going to be changed, and that it was everything to do with potato growing.”

Over 500,000 peasants took part in the potato revolts, ravaging potato fields, assaulting state functionaries and launching armed attacks against troops sent in to quell the riots. In some places, the most active insurgents were shot. For the State was determined to stay their “potato course.” On August 25, 1841, the Executive Secretary of the Ministry of the Interior, Count Stroganov sent Russian governors the following Ruling of the Sovereign: “His Majesty the Emperor, upon reading reports regarding cases of disobedience by some state peasants in connection with potato sowing, gave the following Supreme Order: culprits fit for military service shall be conscripted and those unfit shall work as serfs in Bobruysk [a city in present day Belarus].”

To borrow a phrase from Russia’s revolutionary-democrat Alexander Herzen, potatoes were grown in Russia “the hard way.”

It took another decade for the potato to earn some respect in Russia and for the crop’s cultivation to spread. In fact, by the second half of the 19th century, Russians had begun to adopt the potato as their own, even boasting homegrown brands at international exhibits. By the turn of the century, the potato was firmly planted in Russian cuisine and culture.

In the early decades of Soviet rule, the potato saved millions from famine during the Civil War and the lean years of WWII. In the 1940s Muscovites even grew potatoes in small plots or gardens within the city.

And yet, the coercive element in potato cultivation persisted, albeit in a somewhat modified form. Every fall in the post-WWII Soviet era, high school, university and institute students, and even research fellows at scientific institutes, were required to spend one to one-and-a-half months on “kartoshka missions,” helping collective farms harvest the potato crop. The army was also called in as “free labor” to dig and pack the tubers.

Actually, for servicemen, the work was a welcome change from military routine. But students were split: the lazy ones loved to go on kartoshka missions; good students regarded the “social chore” as a total waste of time. But for either, protesting would have been an ideological revolt rooted in a “misunderstanding of the Party and komsomol line,” with the inevitable consequences for one’s career. “Kartoshka dodging” was heavily frowned upon.

The most interesting solution was offered by film director Eldar Ryazanov, in his 1980 film Garage, a sharp satire on Soviet reality. In it, a respected professor of zoology joins his research fellows in packing potatoes at the potato warehouse. He then put his business card in every carton of potatoes, as proof of the quality of his work. “If they send me there,” he says, “one who is paid R600 a month [a huge salary in Soviet times], then I must be fully responsible for the quality of my packing work.” Some customers found his business card and called his research institute bosses to inform on the matter. From then on, the professor was left off the packing crews.

Of course, today, with the transition to a market economy, mandatory potato missions have stopped.

Free of all compulsory aspects or ideological imperatives, the potato is now free to simply be itself: a beloved side dish in Russian cuisine. A position it earned, needless to say, at no small price.  RL

Semyon Ekshtut is a historian specializing in 19th and early 20th century Russia and a frequent contributor to Russian Life. His article on Karl Bryullov was published in the Jan/Feb 2000 issue.