In the USSR, when you got your hands on a can of green peas, you’d treasure it. You’d hide it and keep it safe for months. You’d fall asleep calm in the knowledge that your can was secure. That for this year, you had fulfilled the goal of finding your can. Next year, the battle would resume but for now, you were in the clear.
Canned green peas are an ingredient in the Olivier salad, the main dish of the Soviet New Year celebrations. No canned green peas meant you were the kind of abject loser who couldn’t give your family one evening of eating well in a year. People went out of their way to make sure that New Year was celebrated as it should.
Those who somehow snagged several cans of green peas would use them as currency. People valued by the regime would get food packages as a form of recognition. We didn’t have such people in our family but from others I heard that a can of green peas was often part of these special foodstuffs. These people could sit in comfort, knowing that their peas were waiting for them.
Of course, you can’t celebrate New Year’s with canned green peas only. There are many, many other ingredients that you had to gather during the year to make the whole puzzle come together. Canned sprats, mayonnaise, alcohol, and many other things. You had to gather them, treasure them, make calculated decisions about what would be swapped for what else.
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—People valued by the regime would get food packages as a form of recognition.
In our neck of the woods securing good food packages was the job of the (labour) union. Basically, the job of the union was not fighting for workers’ rights as they are normally understood but distributing anything that was scarce – fancier-than-average food, vacation trips, permissions to buy a car straight from the factory, state-owned apartments, etc.
Another fun fact from our neck of the woods – scientists (from the non-military govt research facility… so I guess they were “valued by the regime”…) were in the same “labour union” with the KGB…
That said, I am a bit surprised by some of your descriptions of life in soviet Ukraine. Yes, our people brought and sent food (regular food, like meat, butter, cottage cheese, candies) as gifts whenever they went to Russia, but I thought that level of scarcity was limited to Russia (outside Moscow and Leningrad) and Ukraine had roughly the same availability of food as we did. I never heard anybody taking regular food as gifts to Ukraine…
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N is also very surprised when I tell him , for example, that I’d only ever see cheese once a year for New Year’s. So I literally ate cheese about a dozen times total in my whole life until 1991. He says his family ate it as a matter of course.
I once saw a classmate eat a cheese sandwich and I still remember thinking, “wow, I wonder what her parents do if she can just eat cheese sandwiches like that.”
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“N is also very surprised”
Well isn’t he almost from the greater moscow area? Is his hometown still separate or has it been absorbed?
A fact that often gets forgotten about the ussr is how money didn’t work in the same way as in the west – with proximity and connections being far more important. So a small town in the shadow of moscow will have more than a theoretically much richer big city further away.
And your family didn’t seem to have the kinds of connections that would translate into hard-to-get goodies.
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I grew up in Kyiv (I’m 2 years older than you) and we ate cheese regularly- no problem with buying it in gastronom. In my family we preferred certain kind of cheese, so that could’ve been an issue to buy it if it wasn’t available when we needed it, but there were other cheeses in stores. The canned green peas for Olivier were not readily available but we were still able to buy them in stores- you just had to know where to look. We had one family member (my grandma’s sister), who had access to “special” store as she was married to a city government bigwig (don’t remember his title but he had official car and driver, as well as a very small basic dacha, but nowhere near to what current government workers have access to), so we sometimes where able to get some delicacies that way.
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In SA, we celebrate new years on the beach, and then get into fights with racists.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/05/south-african-woman-faces-criminal-charges-racist-tweets
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What can I say? The fight goes on. Racisty racists have not yet been defeated and continue racisting.
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People wouldn’t know what to do with themselves without the racists.
https://mg.co.za/article/2004-06-11-terreblanche-dont-fall-off-your-horse/
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That is an excellent point.
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