You might think that kefir has absolutely nothing to do with Marxism, but you'd be wrong. Thread.

In the 1880s Pavel Aksel'rod and the other founders of Russian Marxism lived in misery in Swiss exile. Aksel'rod had worked as a typesetter and a banister polisher (apparently without much success), but the birth of his third child placed new economic pressures on the family.

Even worse, A fell into a serious depression in 1884 that completely incapacitated him. Nothing prescribed by doctors helped. Finally, his sister-in-law suggested... kefir, which she insisted could heal all manner of ailments.

No one drank kefir in Switzerland, so Aksel'rod's long-suffering wife, Nadezhda, began to make it at home, in spite of the fact that she was also supporting the family by working as a tailor while raising the children.

The kefir cure not only worked, but gave Aksel'rod a new lease on life. After he recovered, the couple decided to open a kefir factory in their 4th floor apartment.

Aksel'rod peddled his miracle cure in Swiss clinics, and it took off. People liked it and swore that it worked. But a clinic director told the Russian that the steep climb to his dingy apartment deterred potential clients, suggesting that he find a more welcoming location.

But Aksel'rod was still too poor to make a move possible. Enter fellow Marxist exiles Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, who loaned their friend 500 francs to rent a first-floor apartment with a cellar. Kautsky himself became a fan and wrote a long treatise on kefir's benefits.

Aksel'rod worked day and night, shaking the bottles every two hours to keep them fresh. When another famous Marxist, Parvus, visited the factory in 1887, he quipped, "Pavel Borisovich, you will extract 'surplus value' from yourself."

By the early '90s, A's business really took off, allowing him to support his family, hire employees, and devote himself to writing full time. It's scarcely a stretch to say that kefir thus made great contributions to Russian Marxism.

There was only one problem: young, newly arrived revolutionaries, including Leon Jogiches, better known as Rosa Luxemburg's lover, sneered at Aksel'rod's economic comfort, denouncing his kefir-supported "bourgeois lifestyle."

And with that, I'm off to consume my morning kefir, with gratitude to the babushki who long ago taught me of its miraculous healing powers. H/t to Abraham Ascher, whose old but very good biography of Aksel'rod is the source of these wonderful details.