This is the second post in a series discussing my experiences in the Soviet Union from the early 1980s to the happy demise of this monstrous country.
FOOD
During the “stagnation years” (the late 1970s and the decade of the 1980s), food was especially scarce. Grocery stores stood empty. Once a day, chunks of butter or sometimes cheese were thrown out of huge metal dispensers in the grocery stores towards the customers. You had to sweep aside all other people gathered around the dispensers and pounce on your own carelessly packaged portion of butter. There was no possibility of choosing the chunk you preferred. You had to grab whatever was close at hand and guard it carefully from the less fortunate customers. Of course, this contest was always won by the most aggressive people, the ones who were ready to push everybody aside and practically walk all over other customers in the store.
Then you had to proceed to the cashier’s and wait in an endless line towards the perennially angry cashier who’d insult you any way she could.
“What are they throwing today?” became a stock phrase. Everybody knew what “throwing” referred to. Food was something that powers that be threw at you, whenever they felt like it.
Have you ever seen animals at the zoo fighting for a piece of meat? At least, the zoo animals are not expected to work in exchange for it.
Every day, after finishing work, the Soviet women (it was always women, even though all our women worked as much as men) had to embark on a journey of hunting for food. They went from one store to another, waiting in lines for hours, trying to find enough food to make dinner. I spent half of my childhood accompanying my mother on these trips. Ask me again, why I hate the Soviet Union.
Of course, the grocery stores were not the only place to buy food. There were also farmers’ markets. The markets (we called them bazaars) were filled with beautiful fresh meat and delicious fruit and vegetables. (Not fish, though. We lived too far inland and never got any fish. Remind me to tell you a funny story about this one time we bought fish.)
“So what’s the problem?” you’ll ask. “Why not just buy whatever you need at these great farmers’ markets?”
The reason why we only rarely visited the bazaars was that everything was insanely expensive there. N. tried remembering the occasions when his parents bought anything at the bazaar but could barely think of any. Instead, his parents cultivated their own plot of land on the outskirts of town. This meant that every weekend they had to take the train to their tiny plot and spend the entire weekend tending to the plants. In the scorching heat in summer and in the rain in autumn, with no roof over their heads and no toilet facilities, his white-collar parents had to work the land because they had no other way to give any fresh produce to their two children.
My parents didn’t have such a plot of land because my father is prevented by a disability from doing any manual labor. So we had to scrimp and save to buy food at the bazaar every once in a while. Of course, the vendors cheated like there was no tomorrow. They had to pay all sorts of bribes to be given access to the market, so their scales were always fixed. But the scales at the state grocery stores were also fixed in order to cheat the customers. After I moved to Canada, it took me a while to get out of the habit of coming home and checking the weight of everything I bought at the supermarket on my own home scales.
I remember once when I was 7 or 8 (which means this was 1983-4) my mother bought some beautiful apples at the bazaar. I was supposed to eat only one apple per day but I started reading, got lost in my book, and accidentally ate 3 apples. That was a disaster because they were so expensive. We lived in Ukraine, people. The Ukrainian lands are the most fertile in Europe. Everything grows and flourishes. You are not supposed to lack for apples in Ukraine.
More than the absence of apples or sea-food, however, I was tortured by all the aggression, humiliation, dishonesty and anger that surrounded the process of getting food. As much as I love fish, I can do without. But if I can’t have self-respect, that makes life hardly worth living.
(There is more I have to say on this subject, so expect a third post in the series.)
Clarissa's Blog 
Oh the memories.. Remember that time when we went to the market & bought 1 pickled apple to share, and you got distracted and ate the whole thing? I was probably not even 10 years old but that memory is still haunting me. Ha! 🙂
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No, it’s haunting ME. Because you keep bringing it up. 🙂 🙂
As long as I live, I will not be able to expiate for that half of a pickled apple, it seems. 🙂
I just made calculations, and that pickled apple cost approximately $14 USD (if you take into account respective salaries.)
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Here’s my story about communism. In 1981, our country was officially Marxist. In order to celebrate this state of independence from colonial power and to enjoy our new political status, we first year high school students were bused to a large sports stadium to see the Bolshoi Ballet. We sat on wooden benches and waited in the old tobacco storage building for two or three hours. Then we watched the ballet, which was good, although hard to see from quite a distance. One of my friends said the Russian ballet dancers didn’t shave their legs, so there were large hairs appearing through their stockings. I didn’t see this. Perhaps my friend didn’t either, as we really were a long way from the stage. After this ballet display, President Mugabe gave a speech about reconciliation with white people and how lucky we were to receive this peace offering. It went over our heads completely. Someone said, “My mum said he’s a terrorist.” Then we were given African beer in cardboard cartons to drink, on our way home. Chibuku is rather like fermented porridge.
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That’s a priceless story. I don’t know much about Mugabe’s rule but I wish I knew more.
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What would you like to know? I think one aspect of his rule that was never quite understood is that he respected the whites for fighting a good war against him. He never really wanted to get rid of them. He has a warrior mentality, despite being something of an intellectual, and thinks entirely in these terms.
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I really wonder what African Marxism looked like.
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Initially, there were a lot of excesses, during the excitement the new regime had over taking over. The new government ministers all ordered the latest model of Mercedes. There was one parking in a 5 ft storm water ditch at the bottom of my road for several weeks. It seems some of the ministers would celebrate their new status by drinking too much alcohol and driving. There were rumors among the white community that the new health minister had become really drunk and taken a number of his friends to various hospitals to show them what was now “his”.
Also, Mugabe began being escorted by a number of police on motorbikes. To this day it is still the rule that if you hear the sirens that accompany his excursions, you are to get off the road or you will be shot.
Nowadays, you are not allowed to take a picture of any government building, including schools, without first asking permission. Here is a picture of the ruling party’s HQ, taken from a safe distance:
Mugabe lives in the center of Harare, in a huge property surrounded by tall fences. Around each corner of this estate, there are soldiers skulking in full combat gear, with bayonets attached to the ends of their rifles. When I was in Zim in 2010, I was a passenger in a car and we had just come out of the city, which was bright and sunny, very normal like any city. At an intersection I happened to glance to my left and it was suddenly like Vietnam. There was this guy with a combat rifle shifting around in the shadow and pointing it in manifold directions. He was a few meters away from me and I deliberately avoided meeting him in the eye.
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This is semi-unrelated. I was reading a book which mentioned something about how there were prisoner quotas for labor camps? What kind of labor was it that they’d take people off the street?
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This was during Stalin’s era, so a little before my time. 🙂 🙂 After Stalin, there were no more labor camps.
But it’s true that there were quotas given to each district attorney’s office as to how many people had to be condemned as foreign spies or counter-revolutionaries. There was a quasi-legal procedure observed in every case (and the laws were changed to accommodate a speedy process). The prisoners in the labor camps are the people who created the USSR’s industrial revolution. They built everything in the country, everything that allowed it to go from a poor agrarian state into an industrialized giant within years. Stalin knew that this needed to be done and could find no way to motivate people to work this hard. So he started incarcerating them.
I’m not justifying the incarcerations, of course. I’m just saying that this wasn’t gratuitous brutality. There was a sort of a warped logic behind it. Today, Stalin’s numerous defenders in Russia adduce the rapid industrialization as a reason to respect Stalin.
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Reblogged this on OyiaBrown.
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