Ask Lemmy

I was born in USSR and it collapsed when I was seven so my memories of it were at the very end when things were tough and scarce. I remember school books that were still about Lenin and Stalin, and we would write essays about Labor day parades and red hammer-and-sickle flags during our English classes, it sounded funny even for us first graders.

Yet, whatever little was available was cheap, we would have deficit problems but not financial ones unless you were trying to buy something that was smuggled into the country, like jeans.

We would take flights to Kazakhstan where my grandma lived, no borders no visas obviously. They lived on their own land there and were much better off in terms of food availability (Google USSR deficit to see what stores looked like).

Then we reached the point when food stamps had to be distributed and it was outright scary. I remember standing by our front door crying, because my mom gave me a bread stamp and sent me to get some bread, and I lost the stamp on the way and couldn't bring myself to go back home. Eventually I was absent long enough for her to start worrying and she opened the door to go out and found me there sobbing.

Never lived in the USSR but travelled through the country on the Trans-Siberian Railway with my dad years ago when just a kid. He spoke fluent Russian and struck up conversations with locals wherever we stopped. At one point, they broke out into gales of laughter before we reboarded the train. I asked him what that was all about.

He said he had asked if anyone practiced religion in the USSR? At first, they were reluctant to answer. Who wants to know? Why do you ask? And he said well, I notice there are signs all over the train station that it is forbidden to walk over the tracks. Yet I see people going so far as to crawl under one train to reach another. After a moment of awkward silence, that's when the laughter broke out. "Ah shit man, you got us. Religion is alive and well here!"

I was just a kid when I came to the USA so most of my memories are in the context of how different things were after we came to America.

One particularly vivid memory for me is of bananas. My grandma would go on business trips to Moscow sometimes and she would bring bananas back for us. Otherwise the fruits we had were the ones that grew locally, and you had to preserve them if you wanted them out of season. It blew my mind when I came to the USA and I could just go to a grocery store and buy bananas at any time.

There were a few foods there that are harder to find here.

• Buckwheat, which is my favorite grain.

• Fresh peas, not the kind that people eat along with the pod but rather the kind with an inedible pod and big seeds, like canned peas but raw.

• Russian-style rye bread. My family was so surprised that Americans had such an abundance of food but still ate Wonder Bread.

• Kvas, a sweet beverage made out of fermented bread. I think it tastes way better than soft drinks so I'm not sure why everyone isn't drinking it. Maybe it's an acquired taste?

Also American cakes are usually terrible and American deep-fried french fries are inferior to Russian pan-fried potatoes.

Edit: one more thing, crepes. They're not exclusively Russian, of course, but they've very common in Russian cooking with a variety of sweet or savory fillings - applesauce, jam, cottage cheese, mashed potatoes, ground meat, etc. Sometimes they're fried after being filled.

Check out the Ushanka Show YouTube channel. He's got tons of stories. I've really enjoyed the stories of the hassles of trying to have a car and how grocery stores worked, plus all the ways people figured out to "beat the system" of equal distribution. It really gives you the necessary background to start to understand "Soviet engineering" of unique solutions.

I spent my some of my childhood in communal housing where we had 1 toilet, 1 bathtub and 1 fridge for 6 families and half of the walls were curtains. My parents and grandparents never told me anything positive about USSR, it was all nepotism and scarcity and "know your place peasant" type of deal, they all thought the 90s was godsend despite banditry, but even they think what is currently happening in Russia (and has been happening for the last decade and a half) is on another level of awful than the worst that USSR had. The most terrifying thing is that soviet cheeses and sausages were absolutely ghastly.

I was born a bit after it collapsed, but I grew up in it's ruins. The people who talk about it will give you this picture:

Everybody stole, but friends shared. You can go to a store and find empty shelves, but go through people's houses and most people have most things.

Money was largely meaningless. Don't try to have a 100 roubles, try having a 100 friends instead. The friend from a dairy factory will give you sour cream, the friend from a store will give you best meat and canned goods from underneath the table, stuff not really available to the regular customers. The friend from the shoe supplies will give you a pair of shoes that last years.

Corruption was a way of life. To the older people, it still is.

I really wanted to write something (I was also born in about-to-fall-apart USSR), but it's hard to choose what to start from. We're looking a øt a book-sized amount of content here.
I'm up for AMA format though