Coupons for supposedly "therapeutic meals," issued not for illness but by nomenklatura position. Each day one was entitled to three coupons: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. However, almost all holders of the "Kremlin ration" preferred to take the products due to them as a food parcel, at least for breakfast and dinner. The parcel consisted of a set of the very finest products, unobtainable in any Moscow shop.
In a lane next to the Central Committee building, beside a 17th-century little church, they put up a bright three-story cafeteria building. Entry is allowed only with CPSU Central Committee passes, and a KGB guard standing by the door checks them carefully. People who are not staff of the Central Committee apparatus but are doing some kind of work in the Central Committee building are also admitted with special passes. One hour before closing, staff of the Higher Party School and the Academy of Social Sciences under the CPSU Central Committee are also admitted.
You enter a spacious lobby. On the left is a newspaper-and-magazine kiosk, and behind it the cash desks, where you will get receipts for the dishes you have chosen. On the right is the cloakroom; from the cash desks there is a door into the large room of the special snack bar, where diners buy, at a low price, various delicacies to take home—things that have not existed in ordinary shops since 1928.
By elevator or up a staircase built in the Art Nouveau style, you go up to the first or second dining hall: downstairs is the general hall, upstairs the diet hall. Small tables—each for four people. Off to the side, on a large table, are containers with fruit, berry, and vegetable juices, and a vitamin drink made from rose hips. Here you can pour them into a glass yourself, putting a couple of kopeks on the saucer standing right there. Nimble waitresses bustle around the hall.
The cafeteria was placed directly opposite the CPSU Central Committee Department for trips abroad—this curious hybrid of the party apparatus and the KGB: here, not only would hardly anyone want to take photographs, but even to walk down the lane one extra time. Lunch will be tasty, prepared from excellent products. Portions will again be small, so people take not two or three but four or five dishes. It costs the same as a lousy two-course lunch plus kissel in an ordinary cafeteria, where at the same time working people stand in line at the serving counter during their lunch break.
Menu of the Central Committee cafeteria general hall:
1 Kopeck 1976.
CPSU Central Committee. Cafeteria. Main Hall.
