“It wasn’t as bad in the USSR as you say,” N declares. “We had all kinds of things. Once I went out and bought some cheese. That was back in 1986.”
“Cheese!” I exclaim. “You colonizers! Living in the lap of luxury while exploiting the colonized nations!”
“It was just once, though,” N says.
“But still!” I conclude triumphantly.
Clarissa's Blog 
In the 80ies and 90ies one could buy cheese (tvorog and smetana) on a market of our small town. And meat, milk, sausage, etc.
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The 80s and the 90s are very different eras. And cheese is a very different product from tvorog. It can’t be sold on a farmer’s market because farmers can’t produce it on their own. This is why it was so hard to get in the USSR.
Tvorog I can make at home.
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Cheese could not be bought anywhere in the USSR except Russia. As to cottage cheese and sour cream, yes, we could buy it at the market place.
Ukrainian market places were much better than those in Russia, hence Russians’ dislike of Ukrainians. 🙂
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From now on, you should refer to your husband as “Mr I bought cheese once!” or maybe “the cheese merchant”
“What does Mr I-bought-cheese-once want for supper?”
“When will the cheese merchant be home tonight?”
The funny thing (for those less aware of communist era practices) is how that type of totally banal “accomplishment” of the kind taken for granted in the third world were bandied about as if they were real achievements of socialism. I can totally see “I bought cheese once” in a copy of the old “Soviet Life” (which I used to read out of morbid curiousity).
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““What does Mr I-bought-cheese-once want for supper?”
“When will the cheese merchant be home tonight?””
– I’m actually very likely to start doing it. 🙂
“The funny thing (for those less aware of communist era practices) is how that type of totally banal “accomplishment” of the kind taken for granted in the third world were bandied about as if they were real achievements of socialism”
– Exactly. 🙂 And it’s about to start happening all over again.
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Come on, do not be abusive towards your husband. 🙂 Or, if you have to, be abusive from feminist perspective – what? you went to the shop only once during your childhood? girls did not have that luxury, they stood in various lines alongside their mothers. Etc.
Otherwise, cheese always existed. Including the 80-ies. All this exaggeration of the consumerist horrors of socialism reminds be of a good friend of mine, whose family emigrated to the US in 1989, I guess. And we exchanged letters for a about a year after that. The perception of a person who lived all her life next to me, just months before, shopped in the same shops, knew my views and my friends, etc changed very quickly and very drastically. First she started writing to me how guilty she is every time she looks into her full fridge and remembers that we back home have no food. Next she half-jokingly asked if I have not become an anti-Semite yet… Apparently, all they were showing on American TV about FSU were empty shelves in the stores and rallies by the anti-Semitic “Pamyat” (Memory) organization…
SU was a horrible place. But primarily for the moral climate, not even fully reducible to the lack of freedoms. Otherwise no one should be appalled by Putin’s Russia – Soviet Union with consumer problems solved…
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“Otherwise, cheese always existed. Including the 80-ies.”
– No, it didn’t. The very idea of going to a store and buying cheese is similar to the idea of going to a store and buying a machine gun.
“SU was a horrible place. But primarily for the moral climate, not even fully reducible to the lack of freedoms.”
– Nobody’s arguing. But still, I’d maybe see cheese once a year for New Year’s, and that wouldn’t be every new year’s.
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In my very first Polish class in the 80s the teacher (by no means an enemy of the system) went ballistic over a dialogue in an early lesson about going to the store to buy oranges.
There were a lot of lectures about how utterly unlikely that was (at that time there _might_ be oranges once a year around Christmas) and how completely insane the textbook was to have someone casually going to a store to buy oranges, oranges, I tell you, what’s next Oh I’m going to go to the supermarket and buy a zebra! (and on and on like that for a while).
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About oranges – I agree with other participants.
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Oranges were sometimes sold in the street, in winter. But we had tangerines more often, also in winter.
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Clarissa, does Valter07 know your husband socially? He sounds like his buddy.
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No, he knows me socially. 🙂 Valter07 is my friend. For some unfathomable reason, all of my friends feel the need to defend my husband from me. 🙂
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