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Posted on January 26, 2010 - by Venik

The Soviet chocolate named after Lenin’s widow

News from Britain

After a facelift, the Krupskaya brand is as popular in Russia as ever

There isn’t anything quite like it. Madame Mao’s Sweet’n'Sour Sauce? Natalia Trotsky’s Mexican Pick’n'Mix? Perhaps not. Somehow the wives of communist dictators just don’t cut it as food brands. Except in Russia, where for the last 70 years Krupskaya chocolate – named after Lenin’s widow – has been a national favourite.

After Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya died in 1939, Leningrad workers petitioned Sovnarcom, the Council of People’s Commissars, to immortalise her by renaming the local chocolate factory in her honour. Although reduced to churning out ersatz chocolate during the 900-day siege of Leningrad, the factory never actually stopped production, and once the second world war was over Krupskaya was listed in the city’s Honour Book and the chocolate became firmly identified as the “local hero” brand in the region.

In recent years, though, Krupskaya has been fighting on two fronts – against ­indigenous Russian brands, such as Red October, Babaevskiy and ­Korkunof – and western competitors, such as Nestlé and Mars. For the first time in its history Krupskaya looked like it might come off second-best, so it called in British design agency Coley Porter Bell to give its brands a facelift.

“Our task was to modernise the brands and packaging without throwing away the goodwill they have built up over the years,” says Vicky Bullen, CPB’s chief executive officer. “Chocolate takes us back to our childhood and we all have a childish fondness for the memories that go with it.”

For the sake of nostalgia, alongside the blues that are more reminiscent of a bar of Lindt, CPB has also reintroduced an iconography that is unmistakeably more old Soviet in style; the Krupskaya griffin logo (the symbol of St Petersburg) has been made more prominent and retains the ­legend “Factory named after the wife of Lenin”. It is an oddity yet to be explained that someone who was famously renowned as the symbol of sour-faced Soviet womanhood should be remembered as one of capitalism’s most pleasurable indulgences.

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