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.
Clarissa's Blog 
Clarissa thank you for writing posts addressing my questions, I do appreciate it! 😀 Regarding clothing, I have another question, was the material to knit and sew also hard to come by?
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Oh yes, hunting for yarns and fabrics was also an adventure of huge proportions. You had to be very careful with the yarns. Often, you had to take old things, undo them, straighten the yarn, clean it, and use it to make a new piece.
I used to know how to do all that. 🙂
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My aunt’s policy was, a coat a year to the USSR. I wonder what else she sent, because there must have been more. My mother was shocked that some of the coats she sent were not in great condition but my aunt said they were worth sending.
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Your Soviet relatives were lucky.
We weren’t even in touch with our relatives all over the world, so we never got anything. 😦
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How hard was it for foreign relatives to send messages and items to you? What kind of roadblocks did the authorities put in the way?
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“How hard was it for foreign relatives to send messages and items to you? What kind of roadblocks did the authorities put in the way?”
– I’m not Z, but my parents severed all contacts with foreign relatives and friends because it was too dangerous to maintain them.
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We Americans are so spoiled. I grew up with very poor parents, but my grandparents provided things like clothes and toys. My mom did make most of our clothes, but the fabric wasn’t hard to come by.
One of my good friends is from Romania — her stories remind me of yours. Incredible.
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No, you Americans are normal. We were the ones deprived of normalcy. I still have a lot of resentment.
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I am from FSU too, and asked my mother to be extra-sure:
In our town there were good fabrics in shops. My grandmother f.e. had a good seamstress, which made beautiful dresses for her.
With shoes, the matters were more complicated. We or bought imported shoes in shops, which one had to be lucky to find, or ordered them at a shoes’ factory. Before we emigrated, I remember going to order a pair to a (small?) factory shop, have them take my exact size, etc.
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We wrote letters in the normal way. This was to Moscow. It is not clear to me how my S.F. aunt got actual objects through customs and so on. I think she may have known someone in US DoS, or had some other sort of connection. She was an administrator for Social Security so she knew people in government, in Red Cross, and so on, and was clever.
I never got a visa to USSR, there was always some bureaucratic snafu, but one of them came here as tourist in 70s or so. None of this seemed to cause them any problems.
We have lost track of them now, the older generation that stayed in touch died and the newer ones do not speak French, which was how we talked. The address, I think, is Sevastapolski Prospect 36, apt. 61, Moscow 113461. I should mapquest it, now that this is possible.
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I know quite a few people who kept in touch with relatives overseas, in one way or another. In my building, however, we had a man who was jailed for 7 years for speaking with 2 American tourists. He was the most peaceful, nerdy Jew you can imagine. Father of 2 small girls. The second most peaceful, nerdy Jew with 2 daughters in our building was my father. So you can understand why my parents were scared.
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Yes, I always heard you couldn’t talk to tourists. Which was why it was not interesting to be a tourist, since you couldn’t talk to anyone. But we were just family members, writing family news, steadily since the 19th century, so it may not have been the same.
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“But we were just family members, writing family news, steadily since the 19th century”
– Wow, that’s amazing. I wish we hadn’t lost touch with so many family members. 😦
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“But we were just family members, writing family news, steadily since the 19th century, so it may not have been the same.”
I’m surprised that it made a difference to the regime. But then I’ve never set foot in it (thankfully).
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Ha! I did, and it is an even bigger street than I imagined. But the apt. was #19.
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“I wish we hadn’t lost touch with so many family members.”
Yes. My parents and their generation pretty much broke the chain, but the earlier people were pretty good about this kind of thing, in my family. It was good, in my view.
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I think it was wonderful. Family history is priceless. When my grandfather finally got in touch with his cousin in Uruguay from the branch of the family that had been lost to us since 1917, these two old gentlemen in their eighties who didn’t even speak the same language just cried over the phone to each other. It was heart-breaking.
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All my clothes were hand-downs from a very early age until the time I left Zimbabwe. Even then, after I left, I had only some very cheap and badly fitting clothes from the supermarket. I suppose this was sad, but everybody in Zim was in the same boat. Nobody knew what fashion was and nobody seemed to care. Ah! I remember, now, that I did have one or two new items. When I was about ten or eleven, I received a “boob tube” and some of the typical 70s running shorts that were in vogue. The shorts looked like the ones in the picture, but were shinier. http://frumpfactor.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/shorts.jpg?w=640
My parents also purchased a crocheted two-piece dress that I used to wear for church. It was quite ugly and you had to wear nylon underwear as the first layer of clothing. The crocheted stuff was sold to us by a woman who came to our gate.
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70s boob tube: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-W118n_zgkHM/T8dQ4BNq48I/AAAAAAAAJBY/JSp09wn1tYw/s1600/0.jpg
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” I suppose this was sad, but everybody in Zim was in the same boat. Nobody knew what fashion was and nobody seemed to care. ”
– I went to school with the children of very rich people, so I could see very expensive clothes every day.
“My parents also purchased a crocheted two-piece dress that I used to wear for church. It was quite ugly and you had to wear nylon underwear as the first layer of clothing. ”
– I also had this crocheted dress that my aunt made for me that I refused to wear because my aunt seemed to forget that teenage girls don’t appreciate their nipples popping out of the crocheted fabric. There were endless fights where people tried to make me wear the stupid dress and I resisted.
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Ha. Yes, that was a problem with those dresses. Nobody seemed to notice how frumpy they were or the fact that they revealed your underlying body shape in grotesque ways.
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@kennethuil, just think from a security p.o.v. and you’ll see — not just for USSR but for any venue where there is vigilance. There is similar arbitrariness trying to visit prisoners in US, for instance, and related weirdness in other authoritarian regimes.
USSR, mundane letters and packages of used clothes from known persons seemed to be one thing, and meetings in person between people who had not met before, quite another.
Also, living in Europe I would try to get visas to visit family, Moscow is straight shot from Paris or Cologne on the train. They would spend hours in line making arrangements. Finally, visas would arrive by slow mail, on beautiful paper with lovely and colorful ink but expired already, and sent to my parents’ address in USA. Total deniability: they had not refused the visit in theory, only in practice.
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