Russian Flavors

Red Bread

Masha Avakian (pictured, above) is a waitress at the new café Tovarishch (Comrade), opened by the Union of Youth in Cherepovets. The café is in the building of former City Komsomol Committee (Communist youth organization) and is designed in the style of the 1960s-1970s. There are red banners everywhere, a bust of Vladimir Lenin, photos of party and Komsomol leaders, and newspapers of that era on the wall. Communist partisans and opponents of globalization are the café’s regulars. The menu, meanwhile, reads like a text book on CPSU history: there is the salad “Cruiser Avrora,” the GKChP cocktail (named for the August 1991 putsch), solyanka “Proletarskaya,” etc. The guest book signed by many visitors attests that it is, for them, not just a place to have a good, cheap meal, but somewhere to come and reminisce about the past.