Appetite for Revolution

The idea of what this looks like is well established — a culture of anti-service, where servility is avoided, tips non-existent, and tongues are sharp — but as an idea it goes way back to the earliest days of socialism, both from above and from below, in the early nineteenth century. You can root it equally in workers’ co-operatives in the North of England, and in the vast utopian communal dining halls imagined by Charles Fourier and partially realised in New Lanark by Robert Owen. In Poland, the milk bar idea has been dated by some to the late nineteenth century, when the bulk of Poland, including Warsaw, was under Tsarist Russian occupation. Milk bars would offer locally produced food to benefit Polish farmers, and there would be no alcohol to cloud the minds of Polish workers, and also, importantly, little meat, which would make the food both cheaper and healthier. But nearly every milk bar in Poland was opened between 1945 and 1989, becoming the local example of a subgenre of cheap communal eating facilities built and encouraged by state socialist governments; what distinguishes it today is the fact that it still endures, for reasons which are complicated and surprising.

Communal eating was regarded as being of crucial importance by Bolshevik thinkers from the start. Partly, this was a consequence of their pioneering feminism. Both for Lenin and for explicitly liberationist thinkers like Alexandra Kollontai, one of the central tasks of the revolutionary government that seized power in October 1917 was to free working-class women from ‘kitchen slavery’, as exemplified in the St Petersburg’s textile industry, which saw women work in factories all day and then go home and cook (and clean) for their menfolk. Early plans were highly ambitious, and they were integrated with avant-garde architecture and urban design; a few remnants of this programme survive in the larger cities of Russia, and Ukraine in particular. When researching a book on Soviet architecture in the 2010s, I went looking for a few of these, and the results were often sad to behold. In St Petersburg — then Leningrad — at the end of the 1920s, a team of architects, some of whom had worked with Vladimir Tatlin on his famous unbuilt twisting tower in tribute to the Third International, were charged with designing communal kitchens in the factory districts of the city. All three of them survive, but they have been turned into dodgy nightclubs, cheap malls, or worse: the finest of the group, a fabulous, dynamic, futuristic building, in the Narvskaya Zastava district, had been subdivided into little units by, among others, McDonalds. In Moscow meanwhile, enormous Constructivist bakeries were built around the city. One of the largest of them, Bakery Plant No. 5, was turned into a museum of Constructivism in 2022; the year, that is, of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a vainglorious nationalist slaughter that would have horrified the socialist modernists behind these buildings.

In the 1920s, housing was sometimes built in such a way as to encourage its inhabitants to eat collectively. In Moscow’s experimental Narkomfin Communal House, duplex apartments were connected by a walkway to a restaurant, a library, a nursery, and a gym, with a roof garden on top; inside the flats, kitchens were either tiny or, in the ‘fully collectivised’ apartments, absent entirely, with the assumption that you could always eat in, or take your food from, the communal restaurant. For its Constructivist architect Moisei Ginzburg, this would liberate women residents entirely from the assumption — unavoidable in the early twentieth century — that they would be cooking the dinner. But in the Stalin era, Soviet food culture became much more hierarchical. These dreams of vast avant-garde dining halls serviced by streamlined, automated processes and administered by happy class-conscious workers were replaced with, at the top, a series of luxury restaurants for the nomenklatura; at the bottom, factory canteens; and, in between, the stolovaya — a network of public dining halls across the country, expanded especially in the more egalitarian Khrushchev era, during which period modernist glass box cafes also appeared in the larger urban centres, as a return to the 1920s dreams of automated communal luxury.

Many stolovayas still survive, and anyone who has spent time in a milk bar will find them very familiar, and not just because Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish foods are similar to each other (as are Bulgarian, Greek, and Turkish foods, or Irish, Scottish, and English). Nostalgia is part of the appeal in both, and many stolovayas — which survive reasonably well in the poorer parts of the big cities and, especially, in post-industrial towns — have seldom been much renovated or updated since the early 1990s. They have no legal status and are not subsidised by the state. What has happened, instead, is the opening of retro stolovayas, which offer a hyperreal simulacrum of mid-century modern Soviet food culture for a clientele born at the very end of, or after, the Soviet era. The biggest of these, Stolovaya 57, is in GUM, the iron and glass Tsarist shopping arcade that directly faces the Kremlin. It is cheap, for the area, but it has a kitsch, Marie Antoinette quality — a place where you can play at being a Soviet citizen in the sixties, safe in the knowledge that the Prada store is a minute’s walk away.

Poland’s milk bars are seldom so spectacular as the remnants of the Soviet ’20s — though modern architecture fans would enjoy, for instance, the mid-century glass pavilions of Bar Sady or Bar Rusałka, both in Warsaw, both built as part of housing estates. But milk bars are ordinary. They exist in huge numbers, they are usually packed out, and they are vehemently defended by their users. They are a real, living part of the urban landscape in Poland, and every city has several, often, as in the case of Bar Familjny, in the centre of town, surrounded by the paraphernalia of contemporary capitalism. This isn’t because of some sort of superiority of the milk bar over the stolovaya. The stereotypes that attend any discussion of state socialist food culture were much the same in Poland or the Soviet Union. It was claimed frequently in the novels, films, and TV series of the 1980s and 1990s that these places had brusque, often rude, customer service (which was and is true — these people are here to do a job, not to wish you to have a nice day); that they were uncomfortable, homogenous, and sterile (a rather dated objection — none of them would come close to a Pret or Costa in the alienation stakes) and that the food was bad (which, at least judging by contemporary milk bars, was simply untrue). After 1989, it was assumed that the milk bars would all disappear, as people voted with their feet for either McDonalds (for the masses) or swanky restaurants (where staff members would pretend to enjoy their customers’ company) for the new ruling class. That didn’t happen.

Aftertastes of Socialism

Milk bars have a particular legal status in Poland. They were not — contrary to some lazy anti-communist assumptions — simply run by the state. The average milk bar was and is run by a consumer or producer co-operative, and sometimes by a private business, and on the condition that prices are kept low, so that pensioners, students, and poorer workers — the milk bar’s main clientele — can keep eating there. Rather miraculously, these rules are all still in place, and milk bars continue to be subsidised by the Polish state, irrespective of the enthusiasm for ‘free market’ economics common to its centrist and hard-right electoral blocs. In 2011, the liberal-conservative government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk mooted plans to cease state subsidy to milk bars, but a public outcry saw the measure dropped: state subsidy has been maintained both under the illiberal nationalist governments of Jaroslaw Kaczynski and the current liberal coalition under Tusk.

The continued public support also owes something to the places where milk bars were set up. Milk bars were never just factory canteens aimed at the workers, with better food served up to the bosses — they were opened everywhere there were workplaces, meaning that some of the best of them, like Warsaw’s Bar Bambino, were opened in office districts. They have always had diners who are reasonably affluent, as well as the very young and very old who are most identified with milk bars. As a result, they are a small lesson in the virtues of universalism. Although there are of course a few people, especially the rich, who would never eat in a milk bar, for the most part eating extraordinarily cheap local food in a subsidised socialist-era canteen is something that nearly everybody does, regardless of their politics, which is a rarity in a country which is sharply polarised by age and class. To use the Anglo-Polish anthropologist Michał Murawski’s phrase, the milk bar is ‘still-socialist’, an example of egalitarian, welfarist, and communal forms still managing to endure — and to be popular — in a capitalist context.

What is the case, however, is that like most examples of post-war Europe’s welfare state, whether in its east or its west, milk bars are rather residual: what already exists may survive and thrive, but for a new milk bar to open is very rare indeed. Ten years ago, there was a press hoo-ha when Bar Prasowy, a Warsaw milk bar on the verge of closure, was saved by a public campaign and then taken over and run by a ‘hipster’ business. The bar’s design values were heightened, with communist-chic additions like a new red neon sign; a creche was added; and that ultimate of luxuries, a toilet, was opened for the customers. Some of the reaction was the usual boring hipster-bashing, given that the prices stayed subsidised, and, as the place’s name and location (‘Bar Press’, in an area once dominated by newspaper offices) indicated, it was hardly a miners’ canteen in the first place. To be generous, what the furore over the hipster milk bar tapped into was a fear that a real piece of social infrastructure might be turned into kitsch nostalgia, as evidenced by Moscow’s Stolovaya 57. Today, Prasowy still endures as a pleasant milk bar, if with a somewhat younger group of diners than most.

Poland’s politics frequently hinge on culture war issues — understandably, given the strength of a fanatically bigoted religious right — but in almost every high street there’s an example of a socialist space that pretty much everyone uses and everyone likes. If someone in government or business tries to take it away, the people who go there will almost certainly protest. In a place where ‘green’ issues are considered by the right-wing press to be a metropolitan distraction, milk bars offer food whose impact on the planet is minimal, and which, in a country with a profound urban–rural hostility, is often grown locally by the farmers. Accordingly, milk bars are little models of sustainability in a country which can sometimes come across as a polluted, car-centric, concrete monolith. Poles have their reasons to be suspicious of socialism — the post-war experience of it was tied up inextricably with authoritarianism and Russian imperialism — but the milk bar shows that in a certain form, socialism is welcomed by a remarkable range of people, from mohair-bereted devoutly Catholic pensioners to intersectional feminist twentysomethings. As we line up for our fresh and delicious borscht and dumplings, we are all equal.