Through the Rubble #3

The Pandorica Opens

What happened immediately as the USSR collapsed was that foreign goods and ideas, until then blocked off by the Iron Curtain, streamed into the country. And that was huge.

In the USSR, there was not much stuff. It was hard to find simple things like socks, underwear, footwear, anything really. Everything had to be hunted for. Bread and tomato paste were available in grocery stores at all times, but milk, butter, eggs, meat were not always there. And there was not much variety. I knew two kinds of ice cream: the chocolate ice cream was rare, it was a “Hurry up! There’s chocolate ice cream in the grocery store!”. The other kind was the regular, white. Vanilla? Well, there was no vanilla in it, but sure, you can call it that. We just called it, the ice cream. It was available often, but not all the time. Chocolate was rare. It wasn’t even my favourite of sweets, so rare it was. Cheese was just cheese, there was just one kind. Okay, there were two kinds, but the second kind, believe me, you will not consider cheese. That one was my favourite. And I am not kidding you, it really was. For meat, there was chicken, rarely pork or beef. Which kind of steak? The leftover steak. It was ground meat most of the time.

When I was in preschool my mom once brought a box of chewing gum from a business trip to Estonia, which was almost abroad and had much more stuff than the other Republics of the USSR. I distinctly remember my excitement at this new concept, and the delight at its fruity taste that blew my mouth. It immediately elevated my status at the playground.

I first tasted banana when I was 9. We were going home after visiting my aunt, boarding the bus after a long wait. It was winter, it was snowing. I saw my aunt frantically running, yelling, calling us to hold on a moment. She had a banana in her hand, and ran all the way from her place to share it with us. One banana to split between me and my sister. I have no idea where she got it from. In all the excitement, I barely felt the taste.

I first tasted olives when I was 13, first pineapple even later. None of that existed in the USSR.

So when the Iron Curtain fell and the borders opened, goods from the Western world, as well as China and Turkey, flooded our life. There were suddenly all these flavours of ice cream, candy in variety and quantity, yogurt, pop, chewing gum. Even adults were crazed about it. For a while, instant noodles and instant mashed potato became a legit family meal in our house, and a fancy meal at that.

The transition from the austere, pristinely ecologically clean and non-GMO Soviet produce to all these highly processed foods - and we, as a country, were getting the cheapest, the most brutally processed products - would have been deadly had it not been circumvented by how expensive it was. We would have choked on it all had it not been quite pricey, and the money was scarce.

The money was scarce, the jobs were uncertain, and the inflation was raging. That Soviet ice cream before 1991 was 20 kopeks (cents) for a cone, which was not really a cone, but never mind. I don’t remember how much ice cream was in 1992, but a piece of chewing gum was 100 roubles, so a cone of ice cream must have been at least 10 times more, that is, at least 1,000 rubles. To make sure, 1 ruble is 100 kopeks, so if we do the math, the prices went up by 10,000. For everything, bread and milk and all the basic as well as non-basic products. It did not happen overnight, but it did happen while I was still in the elementary school, and the elementary school in Russia is (and was) 3 years. That is to say, in my second grade of school I had a very real incentive to learn to count beyond 100 and do arithmetics in hundreds and thousands. And while for me it was just a math exercise, for the adults around me it was a cultural shock. They had not seen prices change for decades. In the communist government-regulated economy of the USSR prices were a constant determined by the government, not a variable of the free market. My mother could remember how much was a loaf of bread in the 70s because it had been exactly the same price for decades. I, for the life of me, always find it hard to remember prices for anything really, and I genuinely think that it is exactly because when I entered the world of monetary transactions, the prices were changing very quickly and very unpredictably.

The salaries were rising, too, but the salaries always follow the prices, usually with a lag, and when the prices speed up so much, the salaries don’t always give them a good chase. The stories I know about formerly middle-class people meticulously calculating whether they can afford an extra loaf of bread are from that time, between 1991 and 1994. My family was not in a dire fix, partly because my mom was lucky to get a high-paying job. My dad, on the contrary, was among those whose salaries did not increase quickly enough, or at all.

Professors were well in the middle class in the USSR. In fact, my elementary school teachers thought that I was from a very well-off family, because my dad was a prof, and even discriminated me a little because of that. The reality was that even before 1991, in the late 80s, the profs’ salaries were cut, which pushed them down from the middle class. In the early 90s, profs were the last thing anybody cared about, their salaries were practically frozen. There was a joke that soon they would be required to pay and entrance fee to enter their labs and continue their work (and they still would do that! – the joke went). This is how both social and financial status of college profs plummeted with the fall of the Communism. My dad was depressed. I didn’t know it then, but now I can see that he was clinically and quite severely depressed. For some years, I don’t remember us talking to each other, although he did spend a lot of time at home. Mind you, this is not a unique story of my particular family, this is what was going on in many people’s lives.