From Gruyère to Gatchina: The Meanings of Cheese in Modern Russia
Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia 19 University Place, 2nd Floor, New York CityAlthough Russia has an extensive tradition of dairy products including fresh cheese, ripened and aged cheeses were introduced from abroad at least by the seventeenth century, and they immediately took on all sorts of new meanings. Cheese was a commodity, an object of international trade. Cheese was the product of technology that Russians came to hope to master. And cheese…