Reader Kyle asks:
What did people in the USSR do for clothing? Was it supplied by the State? Did people make their own? Also, what did people eat there for the most part?
I’m always happy to blabber on about the Soviet Union, so questions are more than welcome.
CLOTHES.
There were clothing stores, of course, but everything in there was extremely ugly and uncomfortable. This is why everybody knew how to sew and knit. There was also a black market for clothes that people brought in from their trips overseas or contacts with foreign tourists. Those clothes were so horribly expensive that a regular person needed to save for years to get anything.
Another source of clothing was trips to Moscow. Since most foreign visitors ended up in Moscow, the capital was better stocked than other places in the country. This was done mostly to make a favorable impression on visitors to the country. Of course, the inhabitants of the Soviet capital believed themselves to be vastly superior (and, hence, more entitled to good things) to the inhabitants of “the provinces.” This attitude persists and creates a huge gap between people who live in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia.
I still remember a trip to Moscow my mother made in 1989. She needed winter boots (winters in our part of Ukraine are harsh) and had to travel all the way to Moscow to buy them. The boots ended up costing twice what my father, a PhD in linguistics made in a month. Plus there was the expense of the trip itself. The boots were very pretty, by the way, and my mother look stunning in them. But take a moment to calculate what the equivalent of their price in $USD would be and imagine how often one could enjoy such a purchase.
So here is the list of clothes I possessed in 1989-90:
- my school uniform;
- two sweaters that my mother knit for me;
- a pair of pants my aunt sewed for me;
- two summer dresses I inherited from my aunts;
- a hand-down winter coat;
- a hand-down Fall jacket (this piece had many generations of wear on it. When I traveled to the UK and the British people I was staying with saw this jacket, I swear I could see tears in their eyes. Of course, they gave me a new jacket instead, making me feel both grateful and embarrassed.)
- this ugly pink house dress that I will never forget because buttons kept popping off it at the worst possible moment;
- and the treasure of my wardrobe: a white jumper with an applique of a tennis racket that my mother bought for a humongous amount of money on the black market.
And that was it. Those were bad years for everybody (except the party apparatchiks) but please remember that I had two working parents who had higher education and only two children to feed.
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