Printing House "Intar", a printing cooperative, an artel of war and labor invalids under the jurisdiction of Lenkoopinsoyuz in the 1930s.
In Leningrad, in late winter 1937 through spring 1938, a high-profile political campaign was carried out to eliminate "sabotage" in the public catering system; in the course of it, the heads of Lennarpit and Gorvnutorg were convicted and sentenced to the highest measure of punishment. The official rhetoric in this case was fairly typical of all campaigns against "sabotage"; however, one cannot fail to note a certain specificity tied to problems of organizing meals, pushed to the point of absurdity. Thus, the minutes of the Leningrad Soviet meeting of February 19, 1938, on measures to eliminate the consequences of the activities of the "enemies of the people" in public catering recorded the following devastating arguments, presented as evidence of sabotage: "We now have foreign objects getting into food, and this is not accidental. This is an enemy foray; here the hand of an enemy of the people is at work... There is a known case that occurred on January 9 in the canteen at the Technological Institute, when an enemy hand planted in a student's bowl of soup a boiled, dressed rat."
The "saboteurs" were also blamed for the very idea of commercializing public catering enterprises, or more simply, the idea of turning all previously closed canteens into accessible venues, often of a restaurant type. Such freedom of access for the broad masses to meals outside the home did not correspond to the new norms of power—this time in the sphere of gender policy. The normalizing, and later normative, judgments that emerged in the second half of the 1930s were aimed at stabilizing the patriarchal family order, whose foundation included, among other things, the inviolability of preparing food at home. The development of the restaurant business, in contemporary terms, was merely an advertising move: the authorities created a large-scale simulacrum of a luxurious life in the USSR even within the system of public dining establishments.