- made here an interesting selection of photographs from 1989 and 1990. In 1991, the USSR ceased to exist, and those who claim that the Union collapsed "unexpectedly" are wrong - everything was quite expected, people were waiting for changes and knew that the Soviet power would soon be gone. Suffice it to recall at least the fact that in 1990 (more than a year before the collapse of the Union) in Minsk schools they no longer accepted first-graders in October - it ended.

So, in today's post I will show you photos from the life of people in the late USSR (deficit, rallies in support of Yeltsin, Soviet catering, etc.), and in the comments I will be glad to read your memories of this period of history)

02. At the very end of the 1980s - early 1990s, various international catering enterprises began to appear in the USSR. Perhaps the most famous was the opening of McDonald's in January 1990. The picture shows a poster about the imminent opening of a cafe, the photo was taken in Moscow in December 1989.

03. January 1989, car factory, workers rest. Production schemes remained largely Soviet, although during the time of perestroika, all sorts of modern things began to be introduced to enterprises, plus real trade unions began to appear in places.

By the way, I wonder if in 1989-1990 it was already possible to freely buy a car, or were there still Soviet "queues"? Haven't seen any information about it.

04. February 1989, school. Children studied according to Soviet programs, but with the beginning of Perestroika in 1985, the ideological component in education began to gradually fade - for example, in Minsk in 1990 (more than a year before the collapse of the USSR), first-graders were no longer accepted in October. Much depended, among other things, on the personal initiative of the teachers - until 1991, someone continued to talk about the "good grandfather Lenin", someone scored and simply taught the subject.

05. Exercise bikes, photo 1989. At the end of the eighties, there was a general fashion for aerobics and sports, everyone bought “health” circles for themselves, and in some institutions they installed such simulators. Back in those years, "rocking chairs" were finally allowed, which began to open en masse in basements and at gyms.

06. Another foreign fast food company, this time Soviet-Finnish. Specializes in the sale of burgers (an unusual and fashionable product in the late USSR).

07. Ladies dry their heads at the hairdresser. In the late eighties there was a fashion for bouffant hairstyles and perms), and the hairdressers themselves were among the first to switch to semi-commercial cooperative work.

08. Winter in one of the Moscow microdistricts, photo 1989. Please note that there are practically no cars in the yard - they began to be massively bought already in the nineties.

09. With the beginning of Perestroika (especially after 1987), all sorts of meetings and rallies were allowed in the USSR - which immediately began to be held in large numbers, mainly against the Soviet government, the USSR and for Yeltsin.

10. Car repair in one of the Moscow yards. In those years, there were no normal car services, and many car enthusiasts were at the same time good auto repair masters. Somewhere since 1987, private cooperative car services began to appear.

11. Lady with an accordion on the Arbat - which at that time became a prominent tourist attraction in Moscow.

12. This is also the Arbat, the poet reads his poems, photo 1990. With the beginning of the policy of glasnost, it became possible to read anything - even obscene poems about Stalin and Gorbachev.

13. What international news worried Soviet citizens in those years? In January 1990, they talked in some detail about the withdrawal of Soviet troops from united Germany, and a year earlier they showed a lot about the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

14. They talked a lot more about Chernobyl and its consequences, the topics of product contamination with radionuclides and nitrates began to be raised. This photo was taken in 1990 in the fields near the Thirty-Kilometer Exclusion Zone, a guy measures radiation levels with a RKSB-1000 dosimeter. By the way, this is a household dosimeter not designed to detect soil pollution)

15. 1990, queues at Sberbank for deposits - around this time, the Soviet monetary system began to burst at the seams, many deposits were frozen.

16. An uncle without legs begs for alms in one of the passages in Moscow, photo 1990. Yes, in the USSR there were also homeless people with disabilities and homeless people.

17. Homeless. Also Moscow.

18. In 1989-1990, there were literally empty shelves in stores - something could only be bought in the markets, and even then not always. The photo shows a queue of customers for a small batch of meat that was "thrown out" in one of the Moscow stores.

19. Scarcity.

20. May 1990, completely empty shelves in one of the Moscow supermarkets. By the way, the signs are very modern, more characteristic of the year 1993-1994 in design.

21. Empty market stalls, also photographed in 1990.

22. Those who had money could go to a restaurant, but dinner there was quite expensive - most often all sorts of anniversaries, family holidays, etc. were celebrated in restaurants, the Soviet people didn’t go to restaurants just like that)

23. Public catering in 1990 - in the photo, apparently, one of the Moscow dumplings. A woman in a scarf ordered a version with broth (just dumplings in the water in which they were boiled, sometimes bay leaves and black pepper were added there), from an uncle in a cap - a version without water, mixed with mustard. There is also tea in disposable cups.

24. In 1989-1990, protests took place in Moscow and other major cities of the USSR for any reason - here, for example, demonstrators with a poster in support of the independence of Lithuania.

25. And these are street protests in support of Yeltsin, the protesters are carrying a poster "B.N. Yeltsin for President of the RSFSR."

26. Rally against the CPSU. The guy has an interesting poster, on which the font "KPSS" consists of bones.

27. Student strike.

Do you remember the last years

30s
katrinkuv:
Yes, living people who remember the 30s are unlikely to be written here. But I remember what my grandmother told me, then my aunt confirmed it.
They lived then on Krasnoselskaya, in the house where Utyosov lived. The house was from the railroad. My grandfather worked there. Well, I don’t think it’s necessary to talk about what 37 is. They took everyone around! I don’t know why, maybe that’s why, but my grandfather didn’t work. And every day I went skating in Sokolniki. Grandmother said that the "funnel" was expected every night. The bag of belongings stood by the door, waiting to be arrested. Kaganovich warned. (honestly, I don’t know these relationships, my grandfather wasn’t even 30 at that time, why Kaganovich was close to this “boy” - my grandfather - I don’t know, but my aunt prays for him, says that he saved his grandfather’s life, which means and me, my father was already born at 44) and "sent" the family of my father's parents to Kaluga. Something like that…
I have many more memories of life in Moscow from my ancestors.

50s
laisr:
Life was not raspberry. Father returned from 4 years of German captivity at the end of the war. He was met in the village by a hungry wife and two children. And I was born in 46. To feed the family, the father with the same hungry five fellow villagers stole a bag of wheat during sowing. Someone pawned, a search at the father. Accomplices, more cunning, advised the father to take over everything, otherwise, they say, they would put everyone in a group for 25 years. Father served 5 years. With my current mind, I'm joking, Hitler held him for four years, well, but Stalin could not give less, so he put me in jail for five years. In the 1950s, I didn’t eat enough bread, which is probably why today I eat everything with bread, even pasta, sometimes I joke to my friends about this, that I even eat bread with bread!

***
In my second year (1962) in Ufa in a department store, absolutely by chance, by luck, I bought Japanese nylon swimming trunks! Then ours were rag with two laces on the side for tying on the thigh. The Japanese ones were shaped like shorts, beautiful, vertically striped, tight. I wore them for a very long time, they are still lying around somewhere with me. Here is the memory of my student life!

60s
yuryper, "about the shortage of bread":
somewhere in 63 or 64 in Moscow, flour was distributed through house administrations, according to the number of registered ones. It wasn't in the stores. In the summer we went to Sukhumi, it turned out that white bread is only for locals, on cards.
In Moscow, bread did not disappear, but the variety characteristic of the early 60s gradually decreased, and by the early 70s this difference became very noticeable.

70s
sitki:
Early 70s, my mother-in-law is a single mother, Krasnoe Selo, pay 90 rubles.
Every (!) year I took my son to the sea. Yes, a savage; yes, sometimes they brought canned food with them and ate them for the whole month. But now my husband tells me about those trips with rapture. This is his childhood.
What cleaning lady can now take a child to the seaside for a month?

pumbalicho (8-10 years):
For some reason, the 70s stuck in my memory ... Those were good years. And not only economically (I suspect that abundance was not everywhere. But I still can’t forget the shop windows of that time), but also some kind of special cohesion or something ... I remember that they reported the death of three Soviet cosmonauts at once - no one I didn’t order, but people really sobbed in the streets ...

matsea:
We walked in the yards for 4-5 years alone. I was 8 years old (early 70s) when a schoolgirl was killed in the Udelny park next door. The children continued to walk alone as well. Well, such was life.

80s
matsea (born 1964):
I remember well the expectation of the first spring salad (I am 64 years old). There were no fruits in winter. In autumn, apples are plentiful and inexpensive. By November, they are sold in brown spots and expensive. By January they are gone. If you're lucky, you can catch Moroccan oranges on occasion. Infrequently. Peter, winter darkness, beriberi. And shoot at night tomatoes with sour cream, so red. And here is March and happiness - they threw out hydroponic cucumbers. Long ones, dark green, like crocodiles. Three pieces in a kilogram, a kilo in one hand. Enough - not enough? Enough! We stood for about forty minutes, brought. Salad with onion, egg, and hydroponic cucumbers - hooray, spring has come! Well, everything, now you can safely wait for the tomatoes. It's not until June.

mans626262:
the leading engineer in the late 70s and early 80s had a salary of 180 rubles - this is me personally at the research institute.

michel62 (born 1962):
In 1982 I went to Donetsk by bus for sausage and butter from Rostov-on-Don. Mom at the watch factory organized these trips. To Donetsk, to Voroshilovograd.
***
Struck!
When I arrived as a young specialist in the Penza region and, working as a road foreman, I wandered around the villages, maintaining local roads, I saw so many different imported clothes in village shops that it took my breath away. I bought shoes and a coat for my wife there ... The villagers looked at me like I was crazy. You know, it's impressive when there are galoshes and Italian shoes on the same counter, and a sweatshirt and a Finnish coat hang on a clothes hanger next to each other ... It was simply impossible to buy something from clothes in Rostov. The queues have been busy since the evening. Everything is just from under the floor or by pull. I have a feeling that if jeans or something like that were freely sold during the USSR, then there would be no perestroika and subsequent collapse.
***
Born in 1962 in Rostov-on-Don
Of course, the USSR for me is childhood, youth, growing up, the first child ...
I look now at how my son (16 years old) lives and it seems to me that we were happier in childhood. Even if I didn’t travel abroad with my parents and the first jeans were bought for me when I was in my first year at the institute. But everything was somehow richer. This is my personal opinion and I'm not going to argue with anyone. I remember how, while already working, the party organizer asked me at a reporting meeting (he worked as the chief engineer of one communal sharaga): "How did you M.M. reorganize? ..." dining "demagogue")? What did I need to rebuild in myself if I, a young guy, worked conscientiously and wear and tear? ... In the family, when I was a boy, there was a sack of food. Food was in the first place. But my father altered my clothes from his own. By the way, my father was the head of the enterprise, but there was no chic in our house. But my father’s attitude towards the USSR was this: “If they told me, an officer of the Soviet army, to shoot themselves for Stalin, I silently pulled I would have shot myself with a gun ... ". I remember in the year 72-74 there was a rumor along the street that they were selling pepsicol .... I stood in line for two hours and scored two shopping bags ... I still swear when I remember how her home. Memories of the pioneer camps are very warm. Every summer, three shifts to different camps. Vacation at home was only five days st-ten before September 1st....
And while working, he adapted, like everyone else, to be able to take his wife to a barbecue on the left bank of the Don on weekends and go on vacation in the summer. Now I have a vacation for a maximum of a week, if I'm lucky ... I remember how my mother came from a business trip to Moscow. We met her with the whole family. Poor - how she pearled all these bags of sausage and oranges ....
I also remember the Diet store, where my mother and I went when she was picking me up from the kindergarten. She bought three hundred grams of sausage (certainly not Moscow and not serverat) doctoral or amateur and asked to cut a little for me. And there was a bread shop nearby, where we bought FRESH bread. Here I was, chewing a sausage sandwich. I have never seen such a taste of sausage and bread. Of course, delicacies were always in short supply, but parents got them for the holidays. I remember the queues for carpets, dishes and clothes ... I lived right next to the department store "Solnyshko" and I remember it all well. The queue was occupied since the evening and the crowd was hustling all night (I lived on the second floor and it all happened under our balcony). I remember the store "Ocean" on Semashko, where carp and sturgeon swam in the aquarium. And then the same "Ocean", where there was nothing except for briquettes of shrimp and some kind of crap like seaweed. I remember coupons for vodka and oil. But this is already at the end of the USSR. But I worked in the road organization and "spun". (just don't say that because of people like me we have bad roads). Who wanted to live, then spun. Everything was both good and bad. Now, of course, remember the good. The bad is forgotten. I forgot that I did not have a tape recorder as a child. But I remember New Year's gifts from the Christmas tree in DC. The queues for beer are forgotten, but its taste and the fact that it turned sour in a day and not in a month are remembered. I remember with a smile how I was driving from work in a crowded bus, holding a plastic bag with beer in my hand above my head, and there were many like me ... Everything was - both bad and good. You can argue about this time until the carrot spell, but it was and is remembered with a smile.

nord100:
I remember my first business trip to Vilnius. It was around 1982. He was shocked by what he saw abroad. Then I got coffee in beans, for a whole year in advance.
In those same years, I visited Moldova for the first time, where I was struck by the abundance of imports in stores. And the books! I have not seen so many scarce books since childhood!
I still remember my trip to Kuibyshev in the late 80s. In the evening I checked into a hotel and decided to buy food for dinner at the grocery store. Nothing came of it - I didn’t have local coupons ...
I remember many things about those years, but mostly with warmth. After all, it was youth :)

Second half of the 80s
Frauenheld2:
I remember that I was engaged in fartsovka, just somewhere in the 89-90s)
You go there - "Kaugumi, chungam", but because you're ashamed - sometimes it's just, you ask the time, in Russian, of course. But foreigners do not understand, and give something - sweets, chewing gum, pens. Now it seems - trifles, but at school I went godfather to the king with these colored pens, and for chewing gum (!), Classmates just didn’t kiss their feet.

alyk99:
Secondary school No. 1 in Zvenigorod near Moscow. I am 10 years old (1986), there is some kind of meeting in the assembly hall. The director broadcasts: "We vote. Who is for?"
We all raise our hands as one. "Who against?" Two lonely hands of some high school students are raised. The director starts shouting: "How can you? Hooligans! Get out of the hall! Shame on the school!"
In the evening, I tell the story to my mother and add from myself that the high school students behaved shamefully. "Why?" she asks. "Maybe they had a different opinion. What's shameful?" I remember very well that it was at that moment that I first understood what it was like to be one of the dumb sheep in the herd.

Childhood memories of the USSR
roosich (was 10 years old in 1988):
Something the stories of this lady, who rode abroad, about the absence of bread in the USSR (apparently, we are not talking about the 20-30s, but about the 70-80s) do not inspire confidence.
My childhood was in the 80s. I was born and still live all my life in a small town near Moscow. With my parents (with my father, to be more precise), we often went to Moscow on weekends. But not for food, like supposedly the rest of the USSR, but just for a walk - VDNKh, Gorky Park, museums, exhibitions, etc. And there was enough food in our local stores. Of course, there was no such abundance on the shelves as it is now, but no one went hungry. Of course, they can object to me here that a small but Moscow suburban town is far from the same thing as an equally small town, but somewhere in a remote province .... But the majority still did not live as hermits in distant villages. The deficit became quite active only in 1988.
Continuing the store theme now about manufactured goods. I remember somewhere in the middle of the 80s - in our local department store I saw on the shelves and TVs, and refrigerators, and washing machines, and players (cassette recorders only began to appear in the late 80s), and radios, and clothes with shoes, and stationery .... Another thing is that by the standards of the average salaries of that time (this is about 200-odd rubles for the mid-80s), these household appliances were quite expensive. I remember our first color TV - a hefty and heavy Rubin, bought only in 1987, cost well for 300 rubles.
***
But if we compare it with today, then the most radical difference from that time is people. Then, too, of course, different people could meet in life, but now - man is a wolf to man. Today's parents are afraid to let their children go alone to walk even in a neighboring yard, but then they were not afraid to let us go. And not only in the next yard. And until late at night.
***
The USSR of the 88th model is no longer the same country as it was back in 83-85. Although it would seem that only a few years have passed, the differences were already quite striking.
***
So I'm saying that the general shortage of everything and everything with absolutely empty counters and kilometer-long queues for them with coupons and cards came only at the very end of the 80s! And the author /meaning the author of the vg_saveliev project) apparently thinks that under the USSR people lived like in the Stone Age, and when the Democrats came, happiness immediately came. But the Russian people did not believe this happiness and began to die out at 1 million a year.
***
Yes, I still remember in the summer of 1988 we went on vacation with my aunt and her son (that is, my cousin) to the village to her relatives somewhere on the border of the Moscow and Tula regions. The village was alive. There was work in the village. And a lot of hardworking middle-aged people, and a lot of children .... I think now in most of these rural places only a few old people are left, but summer residents have appeared.

General impressions and reasoning
lamois (born 1956):
Tell me, do memories have to be negative? Judging by the posted - yes, you started just such a selection.
And if I write that I am happy that I was born in 1956 and saw many difficulties, but also a lot of happiness, as at any time. My parents are teachers, they opened a secondary school in a virgin village. People were sincere in their enthusiasm and unfeigned love for each other. I do not regret that those times have passed, everything ends sooner or later. But I will never throw a stone at the history of my country. And you don't hesitate.
They write how they hated school rulers, but I remember the fun and exciting game Zarnitsa, hiking, songs with a guitar. Each person has his childhood and youth and they are good at any time. And now it is infinitely difficult for many, the current difficulties are not much easier, but for many more difficult than then. For the majority, the loss of cultural identity is a greater tragedy than the then shortage of sausage for some especially hungry, although it was precisely that there were no hungry people then, but now they are. But I don't trust people who remember their childhood with hatred or regret. These are unfortunate people, and they are always biased, just like you, in fact.
I am sure that you will never publish my opinion on your own.

vit_r
Well, queues, well, shortage.
A person with a backpack, coming to any village, to any village, and even to any town, could find shelter and lodging for the night. They gave keys to an acquaintance of acquaintances and left them in an apartment where money and crystal lie on a shelf.
And to compare. I know those who now do not have enough money for bread. The ceiling has gone up. But not for everyone. The population has dwindled and oil prices have skyrocketed. The Union fell apart when there was no longer enough oil to import goods and export communism. And the party and economic bosses then lived abruptly than the current oligarchs.
The only problem with the union was that there was no way out. It's true.

chimkentec:
No, the party and economic bosses then did not live abruptly than the current oligarchs. Party and economic bosses were just as inaccessible to what was consumer goods for most people in developed countries.
***
...my grandfather was the "economic boss", the head of YuzhKazGlavSnab, an organization that was engaged in the supply of three Kazakhstani regions.
But he, just like all the other townspeople, could not buy normal coffee, he could not repair the TV for half a year (there were no necessary spare parts). He had to convert his own built bathhouse into a barn.
He had a dream - he wanted to grow a lawn in the country. And even the seeds of lawn grass, he managed to get. But he could not get the simplest electric lawn mower - someone decided that Soviet citizens did not need lawn mowers.

There will also be a rubric "Without an exact designation of time" and "Discussions". Until these materials fit.
There are a lot of stories without a clear indication of time and age. Try to be specific about the timing.

“We were lucky that our childhood and youth ended before the government bought FREEDOM from young people in exchange for roller skates, mobile phones, star factories and cool crackers (by the way, soft for some reason) ... With her own general consent ... For her own (seemingly) good…” is a fragment from a text called “Generation 76-82”. Those who are now somewhere in their thirties reprint it with great pleasure on the pages of their Internet diaries. He became a kind of manifesto of the generation.

The attitude towards life in the USSR changed from a sharply negative to a sharply positive one. Recently, a lot of resources have appeared on the Internet dedicated to everyday life in the Soviet Union.

Unbelievable but true: the sidewalk has an asphalt ramp for wheelchairs. Even now you rarely see this in Moscow

At that time (as far as photographs and films can tell) all the girls wore knee-length skirts. And there were practically no perverts. An amazing thing.

Excellent bus stop sign. And the pictogram of the trolleybus is the same in St. Petersburg today. There was also a tram sign - the letter "T" in a circle.

All over the world, the consumption of various branded drinks was growing, and we had everything from the boiler. This, by the way, is not so bad. And, most likely, humanity will come to this again. All foreign ultra-left and green movements would be delighted to know that in the USSR you had to go for sour cream with your own can. Any jar could be handed over, the sausage was wrapped in paper, and they went to the store with their string bag. The most progressive supermarkets in the world today at the checkout offer to choose between a paper or plastic bag. The most environmentally responsible classes are returning the earthenware yogurt pot to the store.

And before, there was no habit at all to sell containers with the product.

Kharkov, 1924. Tea room. He drank and left. No Lipton bottled.

Moscow, 1959. Khrushchev and Nixon (then Vice President) at the Pepsi booth at the American National Exhibition in Sokolniki. On the same day there was a famous dispute in the kitchen. In America, this dispute has received wide coverage, we have not. Nixon talked about how cool it was to have a dishwasher, how much stuff there was in supermarkets.

All this was filmed on color videotape (supertechnology at the time). It is believed that Nixon performed so well at this meeting that it helped him become one of the presidential candidates the following year (and 10 years later, president).

In the 60s, a terrible fashion for any machine guns went. The whole world then dreamed of robots, we dreamed of automatic trading. The idea, in a sense, failed due to the fact that it did not take into account Soviet reality. Say, when a potato vending machine pours you rotten potatoes, no one wants to use it. Still, when there is an opportunity to rummage through an earthy container, finding some relatively strong vegetables, there is not only hope for a delicious dinner, but also a training in fighting qualities. The only machines that survived were those that dispensed a product of the same quality - for the sale of soda. Still sometimes there were vending machines for the sale of sunflower oil. Only soda survived.

1961st. VDNH. Still, before the start of the fight against excesses, we did not lag behind the West in graphic and aesthetic development.

In 1972, the Pepsi company agreed with the Soviet government that Pepsi would be bottled "from the concentrate and according to the technology of the PepsiCo company", and in return the USSR would be able to export Stolichnaya vodka.

1974th. Some boarding house for foreigners. Polka dots "Globe" top right. I still have such a jar unopened - I keep thinking: will it explode or not? Just in case, I keep it wrapped in a bag away from books. It’s also scary to open it - what if I suffocate?

From the very right edge, next to the scales, you can see a cone for selling juice. Empty, really. There was no habit in the USSR to drink juice from the refrigerator, no one was chic. The saleswoman opened a three-liter jar, poured it into a cone. And from there - in glasses. As a child, I still found such cones in our vegetable shop on Shokalsky Drive. When I was drinking my favorite apple juice from such a cone, some thief stole my Kama bike from the store's dressing room, I will never forget.

1982 Selection of alcohol in the dining car of the Trans-Siberian train. For some reason, many foreigners have a fixed idea - to travel along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Apparently, the idea that you can not get out of a moving train for a week seems magical to them.

Please note that abundance is apparent. No exquisite dry red wines, which today, even in an ordinary tent, at least 50 types are sold. No XO and VSOP. However, even ten years after this picture was taken, the author was quite satisfied with Agdam port wine.

1983 The worm of consumerism has settled in the naive and pure souls of the Russians. True, the bottle, young man, must be returned to whom she said. I drank, enjoyed the warm, return the container. They will take her back to the factory.

In stores, Pinocchio or Bell was usually on sale. "Baikal" or "Tarhun" was also not always sold. And when Pepsi was exhibited in some supermarket, it was taken as a reserve - for a birthday, for example, to be displayed later.

1987th. An aunt sells greens in a dairy store window. Cashiers are visible behind the glass. The very ones that had to come well prepared - to know all the prices, the quantity of goods and the department numbers.

1987th. Volgograd. In the American archive, this photo is accompanied by a comment of the century: "A woman on a street in Volgograd sells some sort of liquid for the invalids of the Great Patriotic War (the Soviet name for World War II)." Apparently, at the same time in the 87th, they translated the inscription from the barrel, when there was no one else to ask that WWII invalids were served out of turn. By the way, these inscriptions are the only documentary recognition that there are queues in the USSR.

By the way, in those days there was no struggle between merchandisers, there were no POS materials, no one hung wobblers on the shelves. No one would have thought of giving away free samples. If the store was given a beach ball with the Pepsi logo, he considered it an honor. And exhibited in the window sincerely and for nothing.

1990th. Pepsi vending machine in the subway. Rare copy. Here are the machines that are on the right, they met everywhere in the center - they sold the newspapers Pravda, Izvestia, Moskovskiye Novosti. By the way, all soda machines (and slot machines too) always had the inscription “Please! Do not omit commemorative and bent coins. It is understandable with bent ones, but commemorative coins cannot be omitted, because they differed from other coins of the same denomination in weight and sometimes in size.

1991st. Veteran drinks soda with syrup. On the middle machine, someone had already scratched the Depeche Moda logo. Glasses were always shared. You come up, wash it in the machine itself, then put it under the nozzle. Fastidious aesthetes carried folding glasses with them, which had the peculiarity of folding in the process. The photo is good because all the details are characteristic and recognizable. And a payphone half-box, and a Zaporozhets headlight.

Until 1991, American photographers followed the same routes. Almost every photo can be identified - this is on Tverskaya, this is on Herzen, this is near the Bolshoi Theater, this is from the Moscow Hotel. And then everything became possible.

Recent history.

1992 near Kyiv. This is no longer the USSR, just by the way I had to. A dude poses for an American photographer, voting with a bottle of vodka to trade it for gasoline. It seems to me that the photographer himself issued the bottles. However, a bottle of vodka has long been a kind of currency. But in the mid-nineties, all plumbers suddenly stopped taking bottles as payment, because there were no fools left - vodka is sold everywhere, and you know how much it costs. So everything has gone to the money. Today, a bottle is given only to a doctor and a teacher, and even then with cognac.

With food in the late USSR, everything was pretty bad. The chance to buy something tasty in a regular store was close to zero. Queues lined up for tasty treats. Delicious food could be given "in order" - there was a whole system of "order tables", which were actually distribution centers for goods for their own. In the order table, he could count on tasty things: a veteran (moderately), a writer (not bad), a party worker (also not bad).

Residents of closed cities in general, by Soviet standards, rolled around like cheese in butter in Christ's bosom. But they were very bored in the cities and they were restricted to travel abroad. However, almost all of them were restricted to travel abroad.

Life was good for those who could be of some help. Let's say the director of the Wanda store was a very respected person. Super VIP by recent standards. And the butcher was respected. And the head of the department in Detsky Mir was respected. And even the cashier at the Leningradsky railway station. All of them could "get" something. Acquaintance with them was called "connections" and "ties". The director of the grocery was reasonably confident that his children would go to a good university.

1975 year. Bakery. I felt that the cuts on the loaves were made by hand (now the robot is already sawing).

1975 year. Sheremetyevo-1. Here, by the way, not much has changed. In the cafe you could find chocolate, beer, sausages with peas. Sandwiches did not exist, there could be a sandwich, which was a piece of white bread, at one end of which there was a spoonful of red caviar, and at the other - one round of butter, which everyone pushed and trampled under the caviar with a fork as best they could.

Bread shops were of two types. The first one is with a counter. Behind the saleswoman, there were loaves and loaves in containers. The freshness of bread was determined in the process of questioning those who had already bought bread or in a dialogue with the saleswoman:

- For 25 a fresh loaf?

— Normal.

Or, if the buyer did not cause rejection:

- Brought at night.

The second type of bakery is self-service. Here, loaders rolled up containers to special openings, on the other side of which there was a trading floor. There were no saleswomen, only cashiers. It was cool because you could poke the bread with your finger. Of course, it was not allowed to touch the bread; for this, special forks or spoons were hung on uneven ropes. The spoons were still back and forth, and it was unrealistic to determine the freshness with a fork. Therefore, each took a hypocritical device in his hands and gently turned his finger to check in the usual way how well it was pressed. It's not clear through the spoon.

Fortunately, there was no individual packaging of bread.

Better a loaf that someone gently touched with a finger than tasteless gutta-percha. Yes, and it was always possible, after checking the softness with your hands, to take a loaf from the back row, which no one had yet reached.

1991st. Soon there will be consumer protection, which, together with care, will kill the taste. Halves and quarters were prepared from the technical side. Sometimes it was even possible to persuade to cut off half of the white:

Who will buy the second one? - asked the buyer from the back room.

No one gave packages at the checkout either - everyone came with his own. Or with a string bag. Or so, carried in the hands.

The grandmother is holding bags of kefir and milk (1990). There was no Tetrapac then, there was some Elopak. On the package was written “Elopak. Patented." The blue triangle indicates the side from which the bag must be opened. When we first purchased the packaging line, it came with a barrel of the right glue. I found those times when the package opened in the right place without torment. Then the glue ran out, it was necessary to open it from two sides, and then fold one side back. The blue triangles remained, but since then no one has bought glue, there are few idiots.

By the way, at that time there was no additional information on the product packaging - neither the address nor the phone number of the manufacturer. Only GOST. And there were no brands. Milk was called milk, but differed in fat content. My favorite is in the red bag, five percent.

Dairy products were also sold in bottles. The contents differed in the color of the foil: milk - silver, acidophilus - blue, kefir - green, fermented baked milk - raspberry, etc.

Joyful queue for eggs. There could still be Krestyanskoye oil on the refrigerated display case - it was cut with wire, then with a knife into smaller pieces, wrapped immediately in oil paper. In the queue, everyone stands with checks - before that, they stood in line at the cashier. The saleswoman had to be told what to give, she looked at the figure, counted everything in her head or on the accounts, and if it converged, she gave out the purchase (“let go”). The check was strung on a needle (it stands on the left side of the counter).

In theory, they were obliged to sell even one egg. But buying one egg was considered a terrible insult to the saleswoman - she could yell at the buyer in response.

Those who took three dozen were given a cardboard pallet without question. Whoever took a dozen was not supposed to have a pallet, he put everything in a bag (there were also special wire cages for aesthetes).

This is a cool photo (1991), here you can see video rental cassettes in the background.

Good meat could be obtained through an acquaintance or bought in the market. But everything in the market was twice as expensive as in the store, so not everyone went there. "Market meat" or "market potatoes" is the highest praise for products.

Soviet chicken was considered to be of poor quality. Here is the Hungarian chicken - it's cool, but it has always been in short supply. The word "cool" was not yet in wide use (that is, it was, but in relation to the rocks).

4.2 / 5 ( 6 votes)

1. In the Soviet Union, hundreds and even thousands of people could drink sparkling water from a single glass in a vending machine. I drank soda, rinsed the glass, put it back. Everyone who lived at that time remembers that even "thinking for three" very rarely took a faceted glass from a soda machine.

2. In the USSR, we spent most of our free time on the street. These were parks, courtyards of high-rise buildings, sports grounds, rivers and lakes. There were not many ticks in the forests. The lakes were not closed due to epidemiological indications. In the villages, until the early 80s, children could run barefoot. Broken glass on the streets was a rarity, because all the bottles were surrendered.

3. We all drank from the tap. And in the biggest city, and in the most distant collective farm. The sanitary norms in the USSR were such that there was no Escherichia coli, hepatitis Bacillus or any other filth in the water supply.

4. It’s scary to think, but in the store the saleswoman served a pie or shortbread with her hands. Bread, sausage, and any other products were served with hands. Nobody thought about gloves.

5. Many children spent one or two shifts in the pioneer camp, without fail. It was considered good luck to go somewhere to the resort, the main children's camps were an hour's drive from home. But it was always fun and interesting there.

6. We rarely watched TV compared to today. Usually in the evenings or on weekends: Saturday and Sunday.

7. In the USSR, of course, there were people who hardly read books, but there were very few of them. And school, and society, and the availability of free time pushed us to read.

8. We did not have computers and smartphones, so all our games were played in the yard. Usually a crowd of boys and girls of different ages gathered, games were invented on the go. They were simple and not intricate, but the main factor in them was communication. Through games, we became aware of patterns of behavior in society. Behavior was evaluated neither by words, nor even by deeds, but by their motives. Mistakes were always forgiven, meanness and betrayal never.

9. Were we fooled by Soviet propaganda? Suffered from a bloody regime? No no and one more time no. We didn’t give a damn about all this in our 12-14 years. I remember that each of us looked to the future with undisguised optimism. And those who wanted to serve in the army, and those who decided to become drivers and workers, and those who were going to enter technical schools and institutes.

We knew that there was a place for each of us under the sun.

The case when I will give someone else's text. This is a rather ancient boyan. But it is very concise, and clearly outlines the main realities:

Do you want to live like in the USSR?

Get a job at any dying research institute. Turn off the Internet and mobile phones, leave only the First Anal of Russian Television on the TV. Replace toilet paper with newspapers. For food, you buy sausage, bread, powdered milk, canned seaweed, a bottle of inexpensive vodka, processed cheese, pasta and tea of ​​the worst quality, dilute beer with water, only rotten vegetables, only apples from fruits. Before buying anything, to simulate a queue, just stand in front of the store from 20 to 2000 minutes. If there is an opportunity, then you can find and repair the "Lada" - "penny". To work only in the tram. Do not wear good quality clothes. Shoes should always get wet. Ask them to treat their teeth without painkillers. And the most important thing is the feeling of meaninglessness and endless longing. If it is possible to reproduce it, then there will be an almost complete immersion in the USSR.

He himself answered a similar question, although not about specific decades:

No need to embellish! Life in the USSR was not so bad as in this libel. We lived well without the Internet and mobile phones - no one died. You can compare the statistics of death in the USSR and today. There were 2 television channels. We watched what was shown - everyone is still alive! Sausage, bread, milk were natural and tasty, not like now. Nobody died without toilet paper! Inexpensive cheese and NORMAL vodka were taken by men to drink around the corner - but not FANFURIKI from a pharmacy, as in modern times! The draft beer was often watered down. Large queues were only in Moscow in large shopping centers - GUM, TSUM, Children's World for fashionable clothes and shoes. Well, to work on the tram - this is the WEST of today's youth, and then it was very good for us - after all, not on foot! And the MOST IMPORTANT - the FEELING of LONGINGNESS and MEANNESSNESS did not occur to anyone! We all wanted to raise the PRESTIGE and AUTHORITY of our MOTHERLAND!!! And then they write here all sorts of nonsense about life in the USSR !!!

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You know what's the matter, "better" is a concept referring partly to subjective sensations.

I conscientiously put pluses to Lekha the Wise and Boris Popov. I quite vividly remember my feelings and the mood of my parents and their colleagues. Yes, there are many outrageous things to say. In addition to the above - buying books was a problem in our most reading country in the world.

But. People's feelings are greatly influenced by how they feel, not individual pictures, but a sequence of changing pictures.

The 70s is still a very active development. Production, institutions, housing - all this is being built. There are a lot of discoveries in fundamental science. People expect to live better.

And the 80s ... serious problems began and it was no longer development, but even what was there was called into question.

79th - the entry of troops into Afghanistan. 80th it is already clear that things did not go as expected. People are seriously concerned about this. What is there to fight for? Brezhnev is already in a state that his relatives would later describe as "he wanted to retire, but they didn't let him go."

82nd Brezhnev died, Andropov came. The autopsy of a mass of problems with corruption in power began.

84th Andropov died, Chernenko came. Died in 85.

The party itself is already publicly acknowledging problems with food, and problems with housing, and with the economy as a whole.

At this point, everyone himself thought, as best he could, what awaits us. But most were not optimistic. Jokes about half-dead general secretaries and their races in hearses.

As usual, a lot of different things are mixed in one question ...

20 years is a serious period of time. Different people lived differently at different times. In the second half of the 70s it was relatively good.

It is very difficult to compare life now and almost half a century ago. Then there were completely different terms.

There was one TV channel and one newspaper instead of dozens and hundreds, not counting the Internet.

Most people went to work like it was a holiday, because they played the fool on her, celebrating birthdays and showing off new clothes.

The people were healthier due to the lack of serials, mobile phones and Odnoklassniki.

There was no future, but there was "confidence in the future."

And then oil prices fell...

If you look closely, then the heyday is more likely the first half of the 1970s, and not the second. From the second half, melancholy and gradual fading began. Because at the same time Brezhnev began to fall into insanity. It is enough to watch films from the early 1970s. In general, this is a kind of fantastic ideal world, which did turn out. Before that, there were the brave and energetic 1960s. Well, after the last spurt of enthusiasm, we decided to arrange a general relaxation. Here it is, finally, the happy life of a Russian person in a socialist system! Further - some attempts to consolidate the conquered. I hope someone understands...

But my second grandmother (God grant her more health), was a simple controller at the factory, she was not supposed to be thanked. at night, in the morning I arrived, stocked up, went home), I bought decent meat from the back door through connections, and she only had decent shoes that her son brought from the tour, and now she has a pension of 23 thousand, children and grandchildren doing their own business and those same hundreds of varieties of sausage and cheese and within walking distance. She now likes it more than in the USSR.