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Caviar
Its Allure, Provenance, and Destiny
By Keyvan Tabari |
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The
Iranian Source
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Iran
was the only
other country bordering the Caspian, which is the world's largest inland
body of water, as big as
California
. An expansionist
Russia
fought two wars with
Iran
in the 19th Century
and annexed large areas of the Persian Caspian littoral. These defeats
had the larger effect of changing Europe's image of
Iran
from a strong, enduring empire to a weak state. It became a pawn in the
contest between
Russia
and
Britain
for supremacy in the region. By playing them against each other,
Iran
succeeded in gaining international recognition of what are now its
current boundaries. Both Russian and
England
, however, continued their military threat in order to extract economic
concessions from
Iran
.
Russia
encouraged
and backed the Lianozov family to become increasingly active in fishing
in the Caspian provinces of
Iran
in the 1870s. The Armenian Lianozovs were probably the wealthiest
businessmen in
Russia
's newly acquired
province
of
Azerbaijan
. (Hammarback) When Stepan Matinovic Lianozof/Lianozov made his
overtures he had a receptive audience in
Iran
. Not only were members of his family until recently themselves citizens
of
Iran
, but the Iranian-Armenians in
Tehran
had easy access to the highest circles of the Iranian political elite.
One in particular was Malkum Khan who had risen to become
Iran
's ambassador to
England
, while his father was the influential secretary of the Russian Legation
in
Tehran
. They propagated reformist ideas and among their sympathetic
interlocutors was Mushir al-Dawla,
Iran
's prime minister from 1871 to 1873. Having obtained from the king a
ten-year right to limitless bulk fishing in the Caspian, in 1879 Mushir
al-Dawla, now foreign minister, leased his rights to the fisheries to
Lianazof/Lianazov for a huge profit. Enjoying the financial benefits of
high office was not unusual in
Iran
. The shah, Nasir al-Din Qajar, was himself a partner in many lucrative
transactions, as were his successors. The big money was in selling
concessions to foreigners. Even Malkum had now become a lobbyist in this
field. For the reformists, there was an additional rationale:
modernization with foreign assistance. The Lianozofs gradually created
and expanded a modern fishing industry in the Caspian provinces of
Iran
. They provided all that was necessary for commercial fishing and
exported to
Russia
all catches and fish products, especially including the caviar.
By 1881 Mushir al-Dawla was out of favor. His rights to the Caspian
fisheries went to the king's son, and soon thereafter to the Iranian
government which meant the reigning shah, all eager for the revenue. The
Lianazofs' concession was extended to 1925. (Amanat, 1997: 15-17,
253-54, 357-364, 393, 399, 417; Alam, 2001: 1) Following the October
1917 revolution in
Russia
, the Lianozofs stopped paying their dues under the concession. Although
they had grown so fabulously wealthy, through their diverse investments,
as to be called the Russian Rockefellers, they claimed bankruptcy caused
by the Bolsheviks. Indeed, they were the subject of Lenin's personal
wrath in a famous private letter to Maxim Gorki. (
Brigham
Young
University
Library) The Iranian government annulled the Liazonofs' contract in June
1918. It leased the Caspian fisheries to another Russian, Grigor Perovic
Vanitsof, in 1919 for a term of twenty years, but he too could not make
payments. Therefore, in 1921,
Iran
cancelled his lease and took over the fisheries assets. Meanwhile, the
Lianazofs were contesting the nullification of their concession.
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Iran
's treaty of
friendship with the new Soviet government in 1921 put an effective end
to the Lianozofs' claims by providing that the two states would directly
resolve the issue of Iranian fisheries. In 1927, they formed a joint
venture to which
Iran
granted a 25 year concession for its Caspian fish and fish products.
Russia
, in exchange, was to provide all the needed equipment, pay
Iran
an annual royalty and 15 percent of the gross profit. The net profits
remaining were to be shared equally between the two sides. (Caspian
Environment Programme: 12) When this joint venture expired in 1953,
Iran
refused the
Soviet Union
's proposal to extend it. Premier Mohammad Musaddeq was in power and he
had just nationalized
Iran
's oil industry against
Britain
's strong protest. Nationalizing the fisheries was in line with
Musaddeq's policy of establishing a negative equilibrium between the
East and the West.
The new state-owned Iranian fisheries company soon had numerous fishing
installations and processing plant warehouses along the southern coast
of the Caspian. The equipment and technology were Russian, and the staff
was also trained by the Russians. Some had gone to the
Soviet Union
for training. Ahmad Barimani who was appointed Director had even brought
back a Russian bride. He was from the Caspian region and the presents
that he sent from his new post to his best friend, also from his
hometown, were telling. They did not include caviar, only mahi
safid (A “white fish”, or kutum) and some ouzun
burun or sevruga sturgeon. These two exhausted the list of popular
fish among the people on the Iranian side of the Caspian. Recipes that
included the roe of the sturgeon existed in their cuisine (Batmanglij:
31), but were not widely used; they never developed a taste for caviar.
The rest of the Iranians consumed much less fish. The arid center of the
country is cut off from the narrow Caspian provinces by a mountain range
that rises to 18,000 feet, and the transportation facilities were
primitive.
The domestic market for caviar increased in proportion to the number of
foreign educated Iranians. They were not inhibited by the Islamic
clerics who called caviar unclean in the belief that sturgeon did not
have scales; not any more than they were by the sounder fatwa about the accompanying vodka. In the prosperous 1970s,
fashionable
Tehran
restaurants, such as La Residence,
regularly served the best Iranian beluga that money could buy. Caviar
was the gift of choice to foreign dignitaries. In the image-conscious
Iran
of the last Shah, caviar was projected as quintessentially Iranian. In a
1971 international conference organized in
Shiraz
to pay Auniversal homage to the ancient king Cyrus, the European scholar
W. Eiler
, delving into an etude lexicale, proclaimed that the very word caviar was a Persian
name. He argued that it was the alteration or variant of khaya-dar (having eggs), standing for mahi-e kaviar (egg-bearing fish), referring to any kind of sturgeon,
and then, by synecdoche, designating the eggs themselves. (Alam, 2000:
99) Eiler notwithstanding, if not Persian, indeed, what could be the
etymology of caviar? It is not Russian as the word for caviar in that
language is ikra, meaning
spawn. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the word came either
from Italian caviale or the
Turkish khavyar. Why would the Italians coin a word for a food which was
not indigenous, but imported? On the other hand, khavyar
does not sound Turkish. The word was first used in the 13th century by
the Turkish speaking Mongols who occupied the northwestern Caspian under
the leadership of Genghis Khan’s grandson, Batu Khan. (Saffron, 2002a:
52) They could have easily adopted it from Persian; their close
relatives adopted the whole Persian language when they came to power in
the neighboring areas,
Persia
and
India
, around the same time.
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Monopoly Communism
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The
international trade in caviar which began with the Bolsheviks' desperate
need for the cash in the Petrossians' suitcase in 1920, eventually grew
to bestow on caviar a status far beyond its economic value for the
Soviet Union
. It was the source of cultural respect which the outcast superpower
craved. By restricting production, the communists assured that caviar
would remain a luxury product. It was offered ostentatiously at
receptions in the Soviet Embassies; while at home it was available only
to the Kremlin elite.
The
attention paid to the caviar industry was comparable to that the Soviets
lavished on their space program. It was run with remarkable efficiency
and foresight under the strict control of a single government agency.
(Saffron, 2002a: 115; Ramade, 1999: 47) When dams on the river
Volga
, required for generating electricity, blocked the sturgeon from much of
their traditional spawning grounds, beginning in the late 1950s the
Russians built hatcheries to breed sturgeon and stock the Caspian. (Ramade,
1999: 47-48) Soviets scientists also perfected a cesarean section type
method of removing sturgeon's eggs which allowed saving the sturgeon's
life. (Bennett, 2004) While these measures promised that surgeon could
be protected from demise in the Caspian, in another pioneering work, the
Russians developed a new species of caviar producing sturgeon best
suited for raising in aquaculture farms.
The
Soviets stayed with their exclusive caviar trade partners in France, the
Petrossians, and in
Germany
, Dieckmann & Hansen (D&H). The latter, after World War II,
became a subsidiary of its own American creation, the Romanoff Caviar
Company. (Dieckmann & Hansen, 2004) Romanoff supplied the
U.S.
market with Russian caviar it received through D&H. The
intensification of the Cold War, however, forced both these companies to
import caviar from
Iran
. This was the only serious threat to seventy years of the Communists'
virtual monopoly of the world market in caviar.
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Mutant Capitalism
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collapse of the
Soviet Union
in 1991 had a devastating effect on the caviar industry. The three
Caspian
Republics
of
Kazakhstan
,
Azerbaijan
, and
Turkmenistan
declared their independence as new States. Ruled by the same old apparat
chiki, but now without any pretense of Marxist idealism, these
countries fast descended into third world corruption and inefficiency.
While this might have been predictable for the neglected Aperipheries of
the
Soviet Union
, the disaster in the Russian Acenter was more historic. In what
amounted to a sudden death of a country, factories closed, equipment
were sold, and controls disappeared. In the ensuing chaos and anarchy,
unemployed and impoverished citizens were victimized and, in
desperation, many became outlaws.
Nowhere was this state of affairs worse than in the Caspian areas.
Russia
's remaining Caspian shore is divided among three federal republics. Two
of these, the Moslem Daghestan and the Buddhist Kalmykia, were never
fully integrated into Russian society. Less developed, they now provided
fertile ground for a new Russian caviar industry, populated by poachers,
led by criminal gangs, and unregulated by government or health
standards. The third republic,
Astrakhan
, was not far behind. In all of
Russia
's Caspian region, failure to enforce restrictions allowed fishermen and
many others to engage in illegal fishing of sturgeon and the production
of caviar in makeshift work places; the income was far better than they
could find elsewhere in the ruined economy. (McCaffery, 2000; Pala ,
2004; Brand, 2002).
As a growing amount of illicit caviar flooded the markets in major
Russian cities, its price tumbled. It became affordable, especially to
the many Westerners who came to help reconstruct the new
Russia
. Soon this Russian caviar found its way to the
United States
where the prosperity of the 1990s created a new class eager to taste the
fabled food associated with luxury. Caviar was priced much higher in
this country, yet its consumers were numerous. For the first time caviar
was now offered not just by specialty shops and restaurants for the rich
but also in such commonly accessible places as supermarkets, department
stores, train stations, and the internet. Available to many, illicit
caviar was democratized for Americans, and the
United States
became its biggest market outside of
Russia
.
The
illicit Russian caviar had to be imported into this country via shady
conduit. Initially, most established dealers were not involved. Gino
International which supplied Zabar's among others, and U.S. Caviar &
Caviar that counted American Airline among its clients, were the big
firms which were eventually prosecuted for their corrupt practices. The
number of new caviar importers mushroomed, however, and as many were
able to discount the price with illicit caviar, others also became eager
to receive and sell it. A few held out. They joined the connoisseurs to
point out the defects of the illicit Russian caviar. Good caviar
requires exacting preparation and refrigeration which were hardly
observed by the producers of illegal caviar. Caviar must be made before
the sturgeon dies; the ovarian sack must be removed carefully from the
fish's womb to avoid destroying the eggs; within minutes ovaries must be
massaged gently by hand to separate the eggs from the membrane and salt
added at a precise ratio to the weight of the eggs. To protect fresh
caviar from spoiling or freezing, it must be preserved at twenty six
degrees Fahrenheit. (Saffron 2002a: 43-44. 199, 203-209; McCaffery;
Weiner and Simon, 1998; Ramade, 1999: 92-93)
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| Copyright 2005 Keyvan Tabari. All Rights Reserved.
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