This gives me the chance to discuss one of my favourite journal articles: "Edible Ethnicity How Georgian Cuisine Conquered the Soviet Table" by Erik R. Scott and published in Kritika, Vol. 13. No. 4 (2012) (subsequently edited and made a chapter in his book, Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire (2016). I highly recommend it to anyone interested in how the various ethnic groups of the Soviet Union impacted the overall state.

Anyways, Scott uses the phrase "domestic internationalism" to describe how the Soviet authorities promoted the diversity of the Union to its people, which meant "importing" (my phrase) cultural practices (including cuisines) to the larger audience. Thus several local dishes, most notably Georgian food and drink, became staples of the larger Soviet gastronomical experience. Restaurants that specialised not only in Georgian food, but the presentation (the table loaded with plates of various foods and wine, a spot reserved for the tamada, the toastmaster who leads the drinking festivities), and it became important to be seen dining at a table at one of these restaurants, Aragvi, which were booked full throughout the 1950s (I would compare it to a high-class restaurant in somewhere like New York today; it was more important to be seen there and known you had a seat, though the food was also of high class).

Of course that Stalin was Georgian, and was notorious for keeping up this one piece of his heritage (he would have Georgian cooks specially picked to serve for him, and in order to supply him with his prized Georgian wine and other products, whole supply systems were established to effectively transport goods from Georgia to Moscow. That several other high-ranking Bolsheviks were Georgian, or from the Caucasus in general, didn't hurt the cause).

The more common Soviet citizen was also able to experience the newly-promoted Georgian cuisine. Shashlyk, a kind of skewered meat dish, originates from Georgia, though it is a staple of any Russian restaurant today; it was (ironically) popularised in the aftermath of Khrushchev's 1956 Secret Speech denouncing Stalin, seen as an easy way to provide the populace with a mass-produced food that tasted good. Similarly, tkemali, a plum sauce (that honestly goes with everything), was mass produced, a process made possible due to the rapid industrialisation of the Soviet Union.

This is not to say that it was only Georgian food that impacted the Soviet dining habits. Much like Aragvi, ethinc-based restaurants were established throughout Moscow that catered to Armenian, Uzbek, and Azerbaijani cuisines, to name a few. Foods like borshch (from Ukraine), plov (from Uzbekistan, or more generally Central Asia), and drinks like Armenian cognac and Baltic liqueurs became staples.

So in short, the Soviet Union promoted its ethnic diversity through its cuisine, and the result was a lot of non-Russian dishes were made more mainstream and popularised, both at a higher level and more among the common people.