Quirky Euro-Asia Files: Back in the USSR Kitchen -- Russian Nostalgia for Soviet-Era Food

This comes as a little surprise to me, as I was unaware that the Soviets had food worth eating. (/sarcasm)

Here's the blurb:

Gastronom No 1, best known for its luxury champagnes and caviar, has opened up a new line catering to Soviet-era nostalgia.

Inside a grand Tsarist-era shopping arcade on Red Square, its spotless food hall has added a range of soggy, Soviet-era stodge to the more refined delicacies of the capitalist world.

. . . "People want to remember the good times, with good friends - a time when the grass was greener and the sun was shinier," said Albert Popkov, the wealthy founder of Odnoklassniki, a social networking site that is Russia's answer to Facebook.

He has visited the shop, but has so far failed to find the product he misses most from his youth on Russia's Far Eastern island of Sakhalin - a kind of chocolate butter that he hasn't seen since 1991.

Instead the shop is decorated with pyramids of sweetened condensed milk and tins of pork stew, in the simple packaging that denoted Russia's products before the arrival of capitalist glitz and glamour.

"Most products in Soviet times weren't really delicious – it's more like nostalgia," said Ilya Brodsky, 30.

He said he likes the look of goods that remind him of simpler times.

. . . Visitors can buy half a litre of unbranded Soviet-style vinegar for the equivalent of 50p - or look two shelves up and grab a bottle of Italy's finest balsamic, at £52 for 100ml.

As if "capitalist glitz and glamour" were a bad thing? Nope, I'm an unashamed capitalist pig and free market, low-tax evildoer. Look, the entire idea that you can now CHOOSE whether to buy Soviet-era stuff or not is a step forward from the days when you had no choice, when you had to wait in endless lines for poor-quality stuff from almost-empty shelves. Or starved entirely under Communist power. I retain no positive feelings for the old USSR or its wretched ideology that belongs in the dustbin of history. Losing is chic these days, I guess.

Also, does anybody else find it amusing that the luxury food shop with the Soviet food is housed in a grand Tsarist-era building? That's three entirely different visions of Mother Russia under just one roof. Well, nobody ever said Russia was easy to grasp.

Anyway, this whole news story is an odd little combination of food, communist/Soviet chic, a Russian sort of Ostalgie, and the idea that it's easier to wax nostalgic and reminisce fondly about the "good old communist days" if you are no longer living in an oppressive totalitarian communist society and therefore don't have to live also with the daily terrors and miseries of that system.

Notice also which kind of Russians are now buying Soviet-era nostalgia-food. RICH Russians. Wealthy Russians who have become financially successful in the post-Soviet era. Gee, this is like Marie Antoinette pretending to be a milkmaid in the backyard of her palace. Only the rich think poverty is romantic. I am serious! I'll also paraphrase Mae West: I've been poor, and I've been rich. Rich is better. Girl, you can say that again.

Random personal note: the whole thing about communist-era food makes me think of that great plotline in the delightful German film "Goodbye Lenin" -- the frantic search for GDR-era Mokka Fix Gold.