Soviet Retail Playlist: ua-cam.com/play/PLNq3y0OU1_Bbof7PgmfV3R1qhkt2oPFH_.html Thank you for watching the Ushanka Show! My name is Sergei Sputnikoff. I was born in the USSR in 1971. Since 1999 I have lived in the USA. The Ushanka Show was created to share stories as well as my own memories of everyday life in the USSR. My books about arriving in America are available at www.sputnikoff.com/shop (Russian or English versions) or on Amazon: www.amazon.com/dp/B0BNQR1FBC?binding=paperback&searchxofy=true&ref_=dbs_s_aps_series_rwt_tpbk&qid=1688731325&sr=8-1 Please contact me at sergeisputnikoff@gmail.com if you would like to purchase a signed copy of “American Diaries” Fan Mail: Ushanka Show P.O. Box 96 Berrien Springs MI 49103, USA You can support this project with SuperThanks tips, or: Via Patreon here: www.patreon.com/sputnikoff Viia PAYPAL: paypal.me/ushankashow Ushanka Show merchandise: teespring.com/stores/ushanka-show-shop Instagram: instagram.com/ushanka_show
I love you're videos Surgei the communist USSR was never able to work. Communism can't work cause government can't run businesses effectively and when you kill your best farmers everyone starves to death. China killed 80 million of their own people just to get rid of the smartest and best workers cause thought them as a threat. You can't feed the people if the people can't get enough food. I respect you I just hope America doesn't go this way. It only takes enough people to go to the left to destroy us evocibly.
So not enough people watched the previous video on Soviet retail so you attach it to the new one? Ha! My friend, you have just given the viewers a living example of a "nagruska." 😂 I absolutely love your videos. It is great to document all of this information before it disappears from living memory. If you want to do videos on Soviet terminology, maybe you can make one on "silka." (This suggestion is coming from a person who used to live in Yuzhno-sakhalinsk). 😆
Yes, he did this practice but that was due to UA-cam hiding a video due to the way things were done a few years ago with policies that were found to be discriminatory to certain cultures or topics, USSR or Communism in general being one of them for fear of making communism into a good thing by some Chinese people living outside China who are told to spread their communism to others. They even swept under how ex slaves lived during the Reconstruction period. At the same time but still going a bit later UA-cam people also screwed over some artists due to odd policies on the Music with indy artists who were allowed and stated in posting they were allowed to make remix or alternate version of another indy artist at the same time often the one that got posted a few seconds or minutes later onto UA-cam got blocked or beyond hidden even if they are the original creator and they had to go through the process again to repost the new version that has 1 extra second or 1 less second just to avoid issue of blocking a video that is identical, this was in 2021 for the music having the worst policies on UA-cam at the time that screwed Indy artists.
I enjoyed this video very much, it is similar to what my parents told me about shoping in communist Czechoslovakia. People in that times had "sieťovka" bag, waited in lines for deficit goods and used friends to get "podpultový tovar" under the counter goods like jeans, oranges, furniture or car parts. A bit better than USSR but not too much.
Well, maybe you can get revenge by coming to Sakhalin (formerly Karafuto) for some cheap golf games. In fact, if you are a Japanese citizen, then just wait a little while and you will be able to come without a passport - once Ukraine wins the war, and the Russian Federation breaks apart, Sakhalin and Kuril Islands will probably just become Japan again anyway!
I'm from Vietnam and throughout the 80s; a lot of products from Russia were unloaded on the Vietnamese at cut throat prices. The rationale is to pay for war debt as Russia had donated a lot of weapons and ammunition to Communist Vietnam during the war.
I read that sewing machines were massively overproduced in the Soviet Union. Retailers would have dozens and dozens of them gathering dust, more than any town could possibly buy. No doubt some clever bureaucrat deep in some godless government ministry building reasoned that Soviet citizens didn't have enough clothes, so they must be keen to make their own!
You could have read it in the Pravda 😂 Some sewing machine worker couldn't take it any more and wrote a letter to the state paper They underproduced at first then invested heavily then overproduced then made thousands to many merrily for years😂 It's funny story 😂
@@RJDA.Dakota And that's the point. This was the soviet era saying. The sad part is, it's pretty accurate again, when the current ruling party pretty much destroys Poland's economy.
Magazine has the same meaning in English as well.We apply it differently but we do use magazine in that manner. For instance,a storage building for munitions so they can be deployed quickly is called a magazine.
It’s like going to the store to get a refrigerator. Having to get on a wait list for refrigerators. You wait 9 months. Then When something comes available it’s a chest freezer, it’s 3 cities over, and you also have to also buy two dozen crankshafts for a tractor because the factory can’t meet their demand quotas. So you have a choice… wait another year or two for a refrigerator, or find a way to get 3 towns over, get the freezer, modify it, and then find someone who wants to trade you two dozen crankshafts for something you can use because all your money went towards those crankshafts.
i was reading about how the soviets didnt even need to go through that but since criminals were in control of supply grandma's had to wait for bread all day.
Awesome video, it's impossible to truly imagine what it feels like to live in a system that doesn't allow you to buy whatever you want and have it delivered within a week if you have grown up with everything at your fingertips. Can you tell me what the brightly coloured squares spilling out the bag are in the image at 8:29?.
1980’s we got special treatment in shops, the alternative was the local market & dollars always worked. We received around 30 Roubles a day which we did not appreciate was a lot of money. For Moscow, my best retail memory was seeing frozen chickens being broken up on the floor of the Goom (opposite the Kremlin) the Goom now(was) has to be one of the most expensive shopping centres in the world. Happy days 🤪🤪🤪🤪
As far as I know, Kruschev liberalised the Union politically, which of course was absolutely necessary, but destroyed it financially. Up until then, small and medium sized private enterprise up to 20 employees were legal, as well as cooperatives who had productive motivation, and they played an important role in the "Great Rebuild" and reaching from the ultimate destruction of the War to space. Stalin had not upheld Lenin's New Economic Policy in agriculture, but he had upheld it in urban retail. Krushchev let you speak again, but nationalised all commerce down to the lemonade stall and made life harder for cooperatives. Everything became a matter of this "blat". Years later some of it changed, but the whole private sector had already gone black. It was late.
Thanks for this Video. Nagruzku is quite an interesting phenomenon, that I had never heard of before. But I think it's purpose wasn't always just to shift food items near their expireing date. Things like the canned sea weed or fish might have been byproducts or simply products of regions with little other economic activity. So the government kept locals overproducing these items in order to keep people at work. With books and newspapers however I think another purpose of nagruzka might have been shifting propaganda material. Comrad wants to read a magazine about fancy cars or other capitalist decadencies he can't buy? better make shure he also reads pravda newspaper to insure no one develops any naughty thoughts.
The idea was to fulfill the sales plans. Plain and simple. So that people spend more. Sea weed and similar products were seen as "useful, albeit not popular". So, they were trying to push people to buy it, instead of the more popular but hard-to-produce salmon, meat, etc. Pravda, being the most important newspaper; its release did not depend on how well it was sold. So, there was never a lack of stock.
Actually there’s still some echo of this practice even now. Electronics retail almost always tries to sell you unwanted simcards/phone glass protection/paid installation of some nonsense like antivirus with your purchase, especially if you buy a new phone or PC. The reason is simple - salesmen have plans on simcards but the demand on them is much lower than back in the 00s when most of the population was getting their first phone ever. Of course you can refuse to buy this but retail workers try to persuade you it’s obligatory or already included in the paycheck. Obviously it doesn’t work on me but, for example, an elder can fall into it or a migrant or people who want to buy tech on time (if you don’t buy a couple of simcards, your loan won’t be approved) Same happens in some banks where they sell unwanted insurances, completely useless and not needed by anyone.
Barely can be dried and makes a wonderful tea with a somewhat earthy and nutty taste. Surely people made it into a tea...right? I literally have some cold brewing right now.
Magazine in English can also be used refer to a type of store. In US military terms a magazine refers to an ammunition storage location, compartment or container.
This sounds like something Oceania might impose upon the proles, if they wanted to get away from the war-based wasteage system described in 1984. Hmm... I wonder why...
@@OmmerSyssel Commies seized Baťa factory in 1945, renamed it to Svit. The Baťa family emigrated to Canada, Brazil and they continued their business there.
Having lived in Belarus during the CCCP days I would have to say I never saw Nagryzka, maybe it was more of a Soviet Ukraine thing. Also I loved the Soviet sea weed, maybe an acquired taste but everyone in my family loved it. Also “black entrance” simply explained into English would be black market.
Magazine also used to mean 'a small store, or a chche' and we used the word like the Russians do. That's why ammunition magazines still retain that meaning. I'll bet English started using magazine for a gazeta because it was like a small store of text.
The Soviet whaling industry was such a waste. Massive, and illegal, overhunting for a product that almost nobody wanted. At least the Japanese actually wanted to eat the whales they caught.
You can find whale beef in ordinary food stores freezers in Norway now, so I guess it's about what part of the whale it is, and how it's been prepared.
Kinda sorta. Whale meat is in surplus in Japan and it's dumped on the school children in the form of fried whale cutlets. The Act on Securing the Sustainable Use of Cetaceans of 2019 required the promotion of its use in school lunches. It's to revive whale meat in school lunch menus, mainly in areas with a long history of whaling such Wakayama, Yamaguchi, and Miyagi. Whale was much more common in the 1960s (1962 was the peak year at 230k tons) because it was cheap. More whale was eaten than pork and beef. Not many people nowadays want to eat it.
@@gagamba9198 I was referring more about Japan vs Soviet Union back in the Cold War era. Today it is different. The Japanese government has to subsidize the whaling industry to keep in viable since it isn't really profitable anymore.
My friend´s mother grew up in Soviet Union then moved her family to Canada - she remembers her mother crying in disbelief the very first time that she walked into a Safeway grocery store and was overwhelmed by the many acres of completely packed shelves of wonderful tasty foods from all over the world - and in particular, the mountainous piles of nearly limitless options of fresh fruit, vegetables, pastries, bread, meat, etc. Then they were shocked that they did not even have to wait in a long line to pay for it. I also remember that my Canadian grandfather liked to point us to the many miracles found in any grocery store like getting oranges, bananas and pineapples in the middle of frozen January winters. It really is impressive and we all seem to take it for granted that this international supply system operates so efficiently.
Don't worry about the critical people. I believe you are telling the complete facts on how you grew up. Me growing up in the US during the cold war there was propaganda for us the same. It is interesting to learn how the other "side" lived.
I remember my grandmother waiting in line for 3 hours in a city 400kMs away just so she could buy 3 sticks of salami. Also one of my neighbors was an international truck driver and they had the best things around (it was contraband).
Examples of pushing undesirable goods exists in the US but not so much on the retail level, usually it's bundling cheaper items with the thing you want to "enhance" its overall value. Definitely happens in finance where good securities are grouped with worse ones in tranches that have to be bought as a set. And the music industry was so resistant to individual song purchases because they made most of their money by forcing consumers to buy entire albums when the one good song wasn't released as a single. EDIT And I forgot the biggest one: cable and satellite providers that constantly up their rates by adding channels you would never choose under an a la carte model. I think the common thread here is monopoly or near monopoly control.
Yeah, the classic one is phone and internet plans. Usually, a phone plan is "bundled" that ultimately ups the cost, but if you try to remove a service from the bundle, you lose out on the bundle discount, upping the price of the other services, "forcing" you to take another service you might not need, usually for additional cost, just to get a discount on the other service. It's a really scummy wasteful tactic that many countries have rightfully outlawed. Not in the good ol' US though.
Exactly. Give someone monopoly power and they will abuse it or at the very least become so lazy that they no longer would be in business without it. And unfortunately too many cannot see that applies to political parties as well as businesses.
I just made a post with another example of US Nagruzka. and tygomaster's term of "bundling" is a pretty good translation of Naguzka. Please see my post. And you're right, it's more done at the distribution level, but tygomaster's example of cable bundling is at the retail level. I love the comment sections of interesting videos.
The soviets wanted us to queue just so we lose more time and energy on simple tasks (groceries). They did not like to let people rest so they do not get any ideas. During Sundays people were taken to make a parade in Romania, every weekend. It's like "you are free today, but you love your life and your leader, so you should celebrate and sing for your leader. This is the will of the people, the people want this, not me (the dictator), so I will let (force) them to make a parade and sing :D" Context: Communist Romania
@@thehipsterking2184 And the fact that you were forced to believe that Elena Ceaușescu was not only a doctor but a world-renowned one just shows the despite of dictators egos.
You make a video about Soviet retail bundling unpopular items with popular ones, and at the very end, you bundle a less popular video of yours with this one 😂
It's been 21 years and I heard every week the story from my mom who lived in Jugoslavia. She went for 4 months to Russia (she won a scholarship) and she always told me "it was full of coacroaches" Wich is already bad. but she also stated "they did not have salad, they just had some seaweed" and I was never able to understand what she was talking about til now. Now I know, 🤣 it's been so many confused years, thank you. She also has a funny story about caviar 🤣... But that is also due to her being from a poor household in Jugoslavia
Interestingly, "magazine" originally meant a place where you store things. So in guns, it's where you store the ammunition. The term "magazine" for a periodical originally was metaphorical -- a "storehouse" for information. "Store" (as in a shop) also comes from the word meaning to "store" something for later use. So it's interesting how Russian took the old meaning of "magazine" and used it in the same sense we use "store."
A relative's surname is Magazine, and he was from Ukraine. We don't know the origin of the name, but we always assumed it was related to a general store. A storehouse of information makes perfect sense.
I was sent to USSR as a punishment because of bad school results in russian language. It was in 1986 when USSR was bottom low in the first years of perestroika. I remember dead horse cut in the market from head to tail sold as - probably only - source of meat. Kilometers long lines of very aggresive - involuntary sober - men trying to buy vodka - that was banned by Gorbatchev because of alcoholism...... "Chleba net" = "We do not have bread" - in most of grocery stores. That was very shocking - I improved my russian by 2. grades during that vacations, but It became clear to me that communism is a lie - even in my teenage years
@@noname-cp8ki Sent from communist. Czechoslovakia (We had similar problems with goods like USSR but at little fraction of their level) Sent by my mother Who was from family of rich pre WW2. bussinesmen - robbed by communist regime.
My dad had a similar experience. He had the "privilege" of visiting Moscow as part of a brotherly exchange between the Czechoslovak and Soviet industry. It would appear that there is nothing more effective at dispelling the illusion of the Soviet greatness than a quick visit.
I've seen the same concept other times as well. In the 90's Anime scene, translation companies in the US trying to buy the rights to a specific anime would have to get some of the studio's less popular anime as well. Which is why there was such a glut of mediocre and bad OAVs. And when the PSP first game out, most retailers would only sell it at launch if you also purchased with it a minimum of games and accessories. (And the launch titles were mostly pretty bad.) Also, the use of "mystery boxes" or "bundles" to include unwanted products is still somewhat common.
As a sixteen year old North American teenager, Russian language student & summer visitor to the good old Sovyetski Soyuz in 1971, I remember queueing up in the specialty stores for essentials like fruit, bread, meat & sausage. What a waste of a person's time! We did find a few "supermarkets" in big cites, but nothing with the items in like a Safeway or Loblaws, like we were used to back in the US & Canada. Thankfully, before we drove across the border from Helsinki to Vaalimaa Finland where we crossed into the USSR we stocked up on candies, chewing gum, canned & dry goods of all sorts. The gum and candies we brought for the countryside kids in the selo's or villages, the homes most often constructed like log cabins, izba's. The kids would see our VW bus barreling down the two lane "highway" and stand close to the lane waving their arms above their heads, screaming and begging for "Kaugummi! Kaugummi!", German for "Chewing gum! Chewing gum!". We would stop and we would get out of the van to hand out candies and chewing gum to the kids. We also brought yo-yo's which we in very high demand in these little villages. We brought soccer balls and Super Balls to. WOW What a hit the latter were! The memories of these smiling children have stayed with me for over 50 years.
Haha, I have heard so many similar stories in Finland. Tights were another thing people exported to the USSR from/through Finland. I also know some people who smuggled export controlled stuff like Western electronics and computers. To my understanding the USSR rarely paid well for smuggler and spies because they were able to find people who were leaning towards the East and communism, so it was more of an ideological thing rather than making money.
I am reminded of stories told by my mother about rationing and shortages in the UK during WWII. She said that people would join any line outside a shop because if you didn't want what was on sale, someone you knew would want it so you had something to trade. She told me that when their house was hit by a bomb, her sister was hurt and in hospital. She joined a line at a greengrocer's shop for strawberries. She told the people ahead of her that she wanted the berries for her sister and everyone stood back and let her buy first. There was also a joke that when buying whale meat people would ask for the head for their cat!
You experienced that during the war, - while we Russians lived like that for decades. And now our boomers , who grew demented, remember that time as "great time when no one was hungry". Shameful.
You need to have the equipment to to properly brew beer, equipment you probably wouldn't be able to get in a small village. You also probably wouldn't be able to get the material to make your own still either, and that's provided you aren't reported or caught by authorities.
I visited the USSR for 6 weeks in 1987. It was unbelievable to imagine stores could exist without having goods for sale, but sure enough, there they were. Not that stores were empty, just empty of what one might want to buy. Our guides were fiercely proud the stores existed, but they only took us shopping at the hotel stores for tourists.
I also visited the U.S.S.R. in 87. We ditched our guides and went to the market near the Moscow Hotel. Bought some horrific cookies. Hard as concrete. The streets were so empty back then.
That’s a really funny ending. The episode covered being forced to buy what you didn’t want to get what you wanted. At the end you mentioned a previous video that didn’t do well, but now comrade, you must watch it too.
It's interesting, the USSR could've imported a lot more items if it wanted to, but this would've led to devaluation of the Ruble and a large trade deficit. Isn't this basically what happened in the post USSR Russian Federation?
@@sotch2271 The black market plus the state-sponsored drunkenness that diminish productivity on top of other problems just helped chip away at their economy even more. It really sucks to suck.
I live in Japan. I teach English to a lot of older people here. Since the war in Ukraine started they have started telling me about the old days and their memories of Russians. What happened is this: after the Soviet Union fell, Russia normalized relations with many nations including Japan. Russian ships would dock in Japan, and the sailors would walk around much like American military personnel do now. And when they saw anything being thrown out on the street - like a home put their sofa outside for the trash truck to take it away, or a someone put a mini fridge out to be thrown away, the Russian sailors would come by, and take the stuff back to their ships. They would collect the garbage because to them it was useful, or valuable. This is a memory that sticks in the heads of many in Japan to this day.
@@Allen667sjja Yes, all the time. (Japan borders Russia and they have an ongoing land dispute with them - the Soviet Union took control of a series of Japanese islands populated by Japanese people after World War 2 and they've never given them back)There are houses around me with Ukrainian flags and the shopping center near me had a big Peace in Ukraine display in the window. And much more besides. I've even seen people sitting in the park with signs saying "No Putin, No War" which is as close as the Japanese come to a demonstration.
@@OmmerSyssel it’s not a weird statement, I support Ukraine as well but I wouldn’t expect ppl like all the f way in like idk Cambodia to care much about a war that far away
Lived in finland back then, ussr reeked poverty and squalor. Some goods found their way over the border, people didn't want them even for free. Well except for Ladas. There was a saying if something was broken "still works better than a brand new soviet one".
Thanks for this very informative and entertaining subject. I lived my childhood in a capitalistic neighborhood country with warm relationship with Soviet Union. Relationship with our countries were in fact so good that our media often depicted stories of how needs of regular Soviet Joe were met. But we never heard of a word of Soviet retail secrets. 😊
I worked with a woman who was married to a KGB man, and she used to pull all sorts of bs to get out of doing her work. One time when she went and told our boss something totally false to get out of doing her job, I got really pissed and yelled at her that she had no blat at work, and that the boss finally saw through her crap. She freaked out because I knew what blat was and that she was no longer special. Just a worker bee now. I learned Russian when I lived in West Berlin.
This seems to ro have been quite common im Eastern Block countries. East Germany had a massive "Nimm ein Ei mehr" ("take another egg") advertising campaign, sounding the praise of all the health benefits of eggs. *Fictional* health benefits, by the science of if the day, but the country had plenty of eggs, they needed to move from store shelves. Somewhat ironically, they were right about some of those health benefits by pure chance, while the west was scared of the (imaginary) danger of bad cholesterol from eggs. 😅
Doesn't sound that different from the US and their "food pyramid" - it might have originated as a good public health information program, but then it was heavily revised under pressure from lobbyists competing to have their particular projects declared as healthy essentials. Most notably, meat and dairy products were given a more prominent position.
I remember when I visited Kiev in 1994 I visited a department store. The area that sold the good stuff was roped off for dollars only. I got in by waving my passport at them. At the time Ukrainian currency were called “coupons” and had terrible inflation.
This happened a while back when there was a sudden shortage of a certain kind of computer part. Sellers were either pricing them through the roof, or selling them in 'bundles' with unwanted, poorly selling items. One of which proved to be outright defective. They two figured they could
Same thing happened in 2000's with the Swine flu people feared the pigs would all get sick and so they were selling them with Chicken special in 2008--2009 as the free item or pay 1/2 of full price added to original price for the pork. The item was some cheap imported chicken that was grown crappy with antibiotics even when not sick, HGH and the Chicken was poor quality so much my family parents and I (going to a satellite community university for the schools in South Dakota under same BA degree before I dropped out) got sick off the cheap chicken because no matter how long you cooked it, the insides were under cooked as you would have had to opened the chicken and got all the meat off the bone just to have it cook right. We used the rest in a Chicken Noodle soup recipe that was amazing and did not get us sick becuse the Chicken was off the bone and in little pieces and slightly precooked when in the deboning process. Soon after the USA Government amended the rules to not allow for humans the Chicken from places that do use HGH and daily antibiotics or the like where the food gets people sick.
One interesting thing about Soviet language is that they called Nazi Fascist and bandits. I guess they didn't like the word Socialism (Nationalsozialismus) attached to their former allies and later enemies. Now Kremlin warmongers are calling all who don't agree with them Nazi.
Italian fascists were in power 10 years before Hilter. Also it's a catchy phrase to throw around at anyone you disagree with, the Komintern used the term "Social fascism" in their campaigns against the Social Democrats in the west already in the late 20's, so still a good 5 years ahead of the Nazi Party came to power in Germany.
@eerokutale277 Sorry to break it to you, Ukraine has a nazi problem. Azov battalion, Right Sektor, the list goes on. The conflict in Ukraine predates February 2022 by 8 years - removal yanukovich and installation of Washington friendly puppets by Victoria Newland. In that time the people of Donetsk and Lugansk were bombed by their own government..... silence from the West Now you can't move for stupid people waving Ukrainian flags to signal their virtue. I sincerely hope for peace in Ukraine. For that to happen, Yankees need to leave their cuckoo nest and take their chick with them.
That's actually exactly the reason. Stalin thought "National Socialism" sounded too similar to his "Socialism in one country" so the terms fascist and Hitlerite were promoted.
Also, "national socialism" didn't really have anything to do with socialism. The "National-socialist Workers' Party" simply sounded good for the masses, but when they were confronted about the word "socialism" in their name by the big capital they were courting, the Nazis clearly stated to them that they had no socialist leaning ideas, and so it was. The Nazis mercilessly persecuted anyone with actual leftist ideas, from communists to ordinary social democrats.
@@ocudagledamBut the Volkswagen (Beetle) were invented for common man. Certain parts of Hitlers insanity aimed at giving ordinary people a better life, like holiday possibilities ...
As an American I installed some equipment at the Soviet Space Center in 1976. One of our group had been sightseeing and saw a long line. A woman nearby was waving a pair of red shoes. She had been given the wrong size and was hoping to find someone near the front of the line that needed them and could get her right size.
A magazine, in english, was also a storage place for military goods, like ammunition and provisions. Commonly used on naval ships. The powder magazine and such. This would be...vaguely...similar to a shop. I guess, maybe.
That soviet word i guess could be best translated as slang english word "Voluntold" It basically means that you are not given a choice but the people ordering you are pretending that you do.
I feel like the US grocery conglomerate, Kroger, is doing something similar but with their store branded items. Since Covid, online grocery ordering has become normal and it's suspicious that certain items are commonly substituted with Kroger brand rather than showing the original item as out of stock.
Man, I'll pay like $6 for a small bowl of seaweed salad at a Japanese restaurant. I wonder if I'd like the Soviet version? I love the stuff. Salty and fishy goodness.
that is super crazy. then again im also reminded that much of the supermarket food in the west is just dumped into landfill which is also a crazy thing to do.
As a Spaniard I know as a fact that you have way more insightful view that any of us would have about the old days in Russia since we only know what movies and propaganda tell us(mostly silly US ones,comedy type)…Keep up the good work with this channel camarada😜
The JFK coffee from India is wow pretty good. At our local "Russian" store (that's actually run by Ukrainians) the JFK coffee started coming in "half size" tins, and now I haven't seen it on the shelf for a few months.. :-(
The question who´s last (Tko je zadnji?) is still used in present day Croatia, usually when you´re waiting for the doctor either at the counter where you have to be checked in. The complaint book, is or was mandatory in stores and Cafes in Croatia (taken over form Yugoslavia) now-days there´s a piece of paper with the complaint e-mail written down. The usefulness of this complaint book is loosely disputed, as it was used as a joke in the sense of a useless activity (why don´t you write it into the compliant book). So in a sense similar to the USSR, almost as if it´s been a socialist thing. There´s another similarity the maintenance hours, they were more explicit with those,it would say "I´ll be back soon" some stores had this sign even engraved. Just shows how much socialism cared about the buyer.
This would totally work in the US to boost unpopular products. Want to go to an NBA game? You have to also buy a ticket for a WNBA game. Want to see a professional men's soccer game? You also have to buy a ticket for a women's soccer game. Want to see the latest megabudget blockbuster film? You also have to buy a ticket to the local artsy-fartsy theater. Nagruzka is a brilliant idea!
In the 90s this nagruzku problem mostly went away. Inflation was so high that people would rather buy an extra kettle of whatever was "thrown" to maybe barter with later, instead of waiting for their money to loose all value. Of course this made both shortages and inflation worse. In Poland, the question was "co rzucili?", which also means "what was thrown?" I never heard of sea cabbage (Japanese use some for sushi and it's not bad) or canned whale meat. There was just this greasy minced and pressed int slabs mystery meat called "mielonka".
As someone who makes jewelry, I'm kinda interested in Soviet made jewelry. Did they wear much? Did men wear anything other than a watch and wedding band?
What are you talking about? No USSR citizen could afford luxury articles and hardly anything were available... If anything were produced it was kept for the communist elite or sold to western customers. Are you living under a stone?
We call publications "magazines" because it originally meant storehouse in English as well and they were considered to be like storehouses for various written articles. The original meaning became obsolete in English, but the French still use the word "magasin" for store.
It's not completely obsolete in English. It is still used for military storehouses, specifically those storing ammunition. And also for the portion of a gun that contains the bullets.
It's not really an exclusively Soviet thing. When computer graphics cards were scarce during the pandemic, newegg (a huge online tech retailer) was at times only selling them in bundles with things that didn't move well, including computer power supplies that were so bad that they were literal fire hazards.
This is rather unusual. In capitalism you would just increase the price, if the demand for a specific product exceeds the expectation (and this is what most retailers did for NVIDIA graphics cards in 2020 - the retail price was twice as high as the original MSRP or even higher). In the USSR you could not do it, because the prices were dictated by the government.
Нагрузку exists in the United States, and it's referred to as "packages". Do you want just one Spanish channel included with your cable TV plan? You have to get "the Spanish package". Do you want one specific specialty channel? You have to subscribe to the whole package. As far as I know, this started with cable TV, but now it's everywhere, including your cellphone plan and other services.
Something you explained in 3:25 actually happen during Weapon Procurement from USSR You see Indonesia back in 60's wanted to bought MiG-21 but we also need to Bought MiG19 which the performance was actually worse than MiG21
Fun “magazine” fact, it is also a place to store bulk ammunition, explosives and related items. Less commonly used it can/has been used synonymously with “commissary” to describe a military store (In English anyway)
Funny that this tactic has been used by US retailers many times before. Like when there was the graphic cards shortages where retailers would make you buy low quality Power Supplies and other unsold itemss if you wanted to buy a RTX 30xx Video Card. Also, In Soviet Russia, UA-cam watches YOU!!!
There are interesting parallels here to the GPU/chip shortage of recent years. Unscrupulous retailers were bundling desirable GPUs with mediocre power supplies and components that would have otherwise sat on shelves. There were also people buying prebuilt computers solely for the graphics cards they came with.
Добрый день товарищ Сергей. I was wondering if you could shed some light on office/writing stationary in Soviet Union? I am a writer myself so I would love to know about pens, pencils and even typewriters and office machinery. I know that in the west it was common for students and office workers to have a typewriter at home and while I know that in the DDR they were common for a coming of age present, I am interested in where Cyrillic typewriters were coming from as opposed to German language machines which were also produced in the west. I have come across names like Moskva and Lyubava from Soviet Russia that made typewriters for Russian speaking market.. but there is limited documentation. While it may seem like a dry topic, maybe there is some interest from other Western Spies too? Love from South Africa.
The expression for wanting condense milk but forced to buy an item not wanted is called in Jamaica, marrying. That comes about when necessary items are not available or in short supply when an item is u der the counter....and only if you know the person. Some get, others don't. I've experienced this in Jamaica first hand. Thankfully that is not the way now. Regards
I would like to add note that can explain better to your western viewers ,why was this invented in the first place. You could not throw expired goods because of a law called "wasting state goods" , I think in the west there is an equivalent "misappropriation of state goods". For those that dont know , in communist states , the state owns everything - including growseries. Wasting State goods a.k.a. throwing something without approval , braking something , needing more materials then allocated to you by some burocrat that knows nothing about your production can land you in jail for a long time. The "Proper" process is for you to notiffy proper autorities that you have expired food stuff that is not fit for human consumtion and reqsting approval to despose of it. There was a rulle about this , if you ware a store clurc and you needed to know this . There response is "dont bother, you will never get that approval". This will cause 2 problems: 1. You will get investigated on why didnt you sell that before it expired and can land you in jail. 2. It will force a bunch of burocrats to transfer responsablity to someone else. We like to call it "Tossing the ball" . What it means in reallity is that a burocrat that is in theory reponsable for managing that activity will transfer it to an other useless burocrat who in tern will transfer it. That will go on and on until it finaly gets to someone UP who will order you to "Find alternative use of those goods" (whatever that means). The problem is that it will have to go down through the same usless chain of burocrats that will just toss it to someone else. By the time it reaches you (if it ever reaches you) , a couple of years would of passed and you would of already gotten rid of them. So - just lie on the paper (stating you had done it) and pray for the inspector not to find how you did it. This is why stuff like that got invented , because you are allways in the wrong and the gov is right. Funny enaugh this method of offloading goods is still alive today - we just call it "Bundle".
Things that are thrown out is more important even today than Westerners know. Russia and eastern Europe buy huge lots of container cars full of packaged meat products past the expiration date in the US.Thats big business,was before and still is now.
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Soviet Retail Playlist: ua-cam.com/play/PLNq3y0OU1_Bbof7PgmfV3R1qhkt2oPFH_.html
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Congrats, your nearly to 100,000 subs!
Thank you! 3 more years and we will get there!
Attaching an unpopular video to the end of this one. I see what you did there.
I love you're videos Surgei the communist USSR was never able to work. Communism can't work cause government can't run businesses effectively and when you kill your best farmers everyone starves to death. China killed 80 million of their own people just to get rid of the smartest and best workers cause thought them as a threat. You can't feed the people if the people can't get enough food.
I respect you I just hope America doesn't go this way. It only takes enough people to go to the left to destroy us evocibly.
because they banned plastic bags in the west, I find i have to keep a shopping bag just in case I see something...
And at the end he added his old video as "nagruzka"👍
😁
You call I nagruzka, I call it a double feature
I noticed that!!!!!
So not enough people watched the previous video on Soviet retail so you attach it to the new one? Ha! My friend, you have just given the viewers a living example of a "nagruska." 😂 I absolutely love your videos. It is great to document all of this information before it disappears from living memory. If you want to do videos on Soviet terminology, maybe you can make one on "silka." (This suggestion is coming from a person who used to live in Yuzhno-sakhalinsk). 😆
Yes, he did this practice but that was due to UA-cam hiding a video due to the way things were done a few years ago with policies that were found to be discriminatory to certain cultures or topics, USSR or Communism in general being one of them for fear of making communism into a good thing by some Chinese people living outside China who are told to spread their communism to others. They even swept under how ex slaves lived during the Reconstruction period. At the same time but still going a bit later UA-cam people also screwed over some artists due to odd policies on the Music with indy artists who were allowed and stated in posting they were allowed to make remix or alternate version of another indy artist at the same time often the one that got posted a few seconds or minutes later onto UA-cam got blocked or beyond hidden even if they are the original creator and they had to go through the process again to repost the new version that has 1 extra second or 1 less second just to avoid issue of blocking a video that is identical, this was in 2021 for the music having the worst policies on UA-cam at the time that screwed Indy artists.
I enjoyed this video very much, it is similar to what my parents told me about shoping in communist Czechoslovakia. People in that times had "sieťovka" bag, waited in lines for deficit goods and used friends to get "podpultový tovar" under the counter goods like jeans, oranges, furniture or car parts. A bit better than USSR but not too much.
I grew up right below there in Wakkanai Hokkaido Japan...you guys sent "us" the nastiest lumber
Well, maybe you can get revenge by coming to Sakhalin (formerly Karafuto) for some cheap golf games. In fact, if you are a Japanese citizen, then just wait a little while and you will be able to come without a passport - once Ukraine wins the war, and the Russian Federation breaks apart, Sakhalin and Kuril Islands will probably just become Japan again anyway!
LOL I didn't catch that. Very meta of him.
I'm from Vietnam and throughout the 80s; a lot of products from Russia were unloaded on the Vietnamese at cut throat prices. The rationale is to pay for war debt as Russia had donated a lot of weapons and ammunition to Communist Vietnam during the war.
Sounds so typical.
And yet the USSR never paid its war debt to the West for Lend Lease. Just said nope.
Get a lot of Russian tourists still?
I read that sewing machines were massively overproduced in the Soviet Union. Retailers would have dozens and dozens of them gathering dust, more than any town could possibly buy. No doubt some clever bureaucrat deep in some godless government ministry building reasoned that Soviet citizens didn't have enough clothes, so they must be keen to make their own!
You could have read it in the Pravda 😂
Some sewing machine worker couldn't take it any more and wrote a letter to the state paper
They underproduced at first then invested heavily then overproduced then made thousands to many merrily for years😂
It's funny story 😂
China is doing that now with electric cars.
Food prices are going up...but at least tanks and steam engines are getting cheaper. ;)
@@janzbedny5241like that does anyone any good.
@@RJDA.Dakota And that's the point. This was the soviet era saying. The sad part is, it's pretty accurate again, when the current ruling party pretty much destroys Poland's economy.
Magazine has the same meaning in English as well.We apply it differently but we do use magazine in that manner.
For instance,a storage building for munitions so they can be deployed quickly is called a magazine.
It’s like going to the store to get a refrigerator. Having to get on a wait list for refrigerators. You wait 9 months. Then When something comes available it’s a chest freezer, it’s 3 cities over, and you also have to also buy two dozen crankshafts for a tractor because the factory can’t meet their demand quotas. So you have a choice… wait another year or two for a refrigerator, or find a way to get 3 towns over, get the freezer, modify it, and then find someone who wants to trade you two dozen crankshafts for something you can use because all your money went towards those crankshafts.
Just wanted to say i like your channel, i went to Vyborg once as a child, and it made a deep impact.
i was reading about how the soviets didnt even need to go through that but since criminals were in control of supply grandma's had to wait for bread all day.
Navruskah... what a foreign concept to an American like me. But SUPER interesting. Keep up the uploading!
What a chad. Putting a real nagruzka in his video about nagruzka 😉
👍
Awesome video, it's impossible to truly imagine what it feels like to live in a system that doesn't allow you to buy whatever you want and have it delivered within a week if you have grown up with everything at your fingertips.
Can you tell me what the brightly coloured squares spilling out the bag are in the image at 8:29?.
Sucking candy, I believe
another great video from JOHN WAYNE CHEESEBURGER thank you sergei!
1980’s we got special treatment in shops, the alternative was the local market & dollars always worked. We received around 30 Roubles a day which we did not appreciate was a lot of money. For Moscow, my best retail memory was seeing frozen chickens being broken up on the floor of the Goom (opposite the Kremlin) the Goom now(was) has to be one of the most expensive shopping centres in the world. Happy days 🤪🤪🤪🤪
As far as I know, Kruschev liberalised the Union politically, which of course was absolutely necessary, but destroyed it financially.
Up until then, small and medium sized private enterprise up to 20 employees were legal, as well as cooperatives who had productive motivation, and they played an important role in the "Great Rebuild" and reaching from the ultimate destruction of the War to space. Stalin had not upheld Lenin's New Economic Policy in agriculture, but he had upheld it in urban retail.
Krushchev let you speak again, but nationalised all commerce down to the lemonade stall and made life harder for cooperatives. Everything became a matter of this "blat". Years later some of it changed, but the whole private sector had already gone black. It was late.
I propose “junk bundling” as a colloquial translation of “nagruzka”
Thanks for this Video. Nagruzku is quite an interesting phenomenon, that I had never heard of before. But I think it's purpose wasn't always just to shift food items near their expireing date. Things like the canned sea weed or fish might have been byproducts or simply products of regions with little other economic activity. So the government kept locals overproducing these items in order to keep people at work.
With books and newspapers however I think another purpose of nagruzka might have been shifting propaganda material. Comrad wants to read a magazine about fancy cars or other capitalist decadencies he can't buy? better make shure he also reads pravda newspaper to insure no one develops any naughty thoughts.
The idea was to fulfill the sales plans. Plain and simple. So that people spend more.
Sea weed and similar products were seen as "useful, albeit not popular". So, they were trying to push people to buy it, instead of the more popular but hard-to-produce salmon, meat, etc.
Pravda, being the most important newspaper; its release did not depend on how well it was sold. So, there was never a lack of stock.
Actually there’s still some echo of this practice even now. Electronics retail almost always tries to sell you unwanted simcards/phone glass protection/paid installation of some nonsense like antivirus with your purchase, especially if you buy a new phone or PC. The reason is simple - salesmen have plans on simcards but the demand on them is much lower than back in the 00s when most of the population was getting their first phone ever. Of course you can refuse to buy this but retail workers try to persuade you it’s obligatory or already included in the paycheck. Obviously it doesn’t work on me but, for example, an elder can fall into it or a migrant or people who want to buy tech on time (if you don’t buy a couple of simcards, your loan won’t be approved)
Same happens in some banks where they sell unwanted insurances, completely useless and not needed by anyone.
Magazine is a store room for weapons and ammunition.. like a shop (uk) or a store (us) is store room for goods...
Barely can be dried and makes a wonderful tea with a somewhat earthy and nutty taste. Surely people made it into a tea...right? I literally have some cold brewing right now.
Little clearing up. Magazyn in polish is warehouse, not a shop. Shop in polish would be "sklep"
Which sounds like a "burial tomb" in Russian. Lol
this reminds me of cable TV packages
Magazine in English can also be used refer to a type of store.
In US military terms a magazine refers to an ammunition storage location, compartment or container.
12:02 And in Dutch, the word "magazijn" also means a storage space (f.i behind a shop or office".
Did he add the other video as nagruska for us?
This sounds like something Oceania might impose upon the proles, if they wanted to get away from the war-based wasteage system described in 1984.
Hmm... I wonder why...
At 18:00 the shoes are made by Svit - a Czechoslovak company (Baťa, Zlín/Gottwaldov).
Baťa used to be quality products, or was it only western export?
@@OmmerSyssel Commies seized Baťa factory in 1945, renamed it to Svit. The Baťa family emigrated to Canada, Brazil and they continued their business there.
These modern snowflakes ❄️ don't know what it means to grin and bear it and make due with what you have.great story thanks for sharing.
Your generation is so pathetic.
Reminds me of cable TV
Having lived in Belarus during the CCCP days I would have to say I never saw Nagryzka, maybe it was more of a Soviet Ukraine thing. Also I loved the Soviet sea weed, maybe an acquired taste but everyone in my family loved it.
Also “black entrance” simply explained into English would be black market.
In French, magazine is means store
Magazine also used to mean 'a small store, or a chche' and we used the word like the Russians do. That's why ammunition magazines still retain that meaning. I'll bet English started using magazine for a gazeta because it was like a small store of text.
In dutch it means warehous, so storing stuff seems universal
Interesting.
And in polish language - Magazyn means literally "Warehouse"
Cool music!
This video : " Explaining how bad is nagruzka system in Soviet Union"
Also this Video : "8:42 - 9:04"
Me: "😑😑😑😑"
The Soviet whaling industry was such a waste. Massive, and illegal, overhunting for a product that almost nobody wanted. At least the Japanese actually wanted to eat the whales they caught.
You can find whale beef in ordinary food stores freezers in Norway now, so I guess it's about what part of the whale it is, and how it's been prepared.
Kinda sorta. Whale meat is in surplus in Japan and it's dumped on the school children in the form of fried whale cutlets. The Act on Securing the Sustainable Use of Cetaceans of 2019 required the promotion of its use in school lunches. It's to revive whale meat in school lunch menus, mainly in areas with a long history of whaling such Wakayama, Yamaguchi, and Miyagi.
Whale was much more common in the 1960s (1962 was the peak year at 230k tons) because it was cheap. More whale was eaten than pork and beef.
Not many people nowadays want to eat it.
@@andershansson2245 Minke whales are still allowed to be commercially hunted in Norway so it is not surprising there is whale meat in grocery stores.
@@gagamba9198 I was referring more about Japan vs Soviet Union back in the Cold War era. Today it is different. The Japanese government has to subsidize the whaling industry to keep in viable since it isn't really profitable anymore.
@@FlintIronstag23 I know, I got some once when I was in Oslo. They also had grouse, or tarmigan, in the same freezer.
My friend´s mother grew up in Soviet Union then moved her family to Canada - she remembers her mother crying in disbelief the very first time that she walked into a Safeway grocery store and was overwhelmed by the many acres of completely packed shelves of wonderful tasty foods from all over the world - and in particular, the mountainous piles of nearly limitless options of fresh fruit, vegetables, pastries, bread, meat, etc.
Then they were shocked that they did not even have to wait in a long line to pay for it.
I also remember that my Canadian grandfather liked to point us to the many miracles found in any grocery store like getting oranges, bananas and pineapples in the middle of frozen January winters. It really is impressive and we all seem to take it for granted that this international supply system operates so efficiently.
Not only your mother was shocked!
ua-cam.com/video/s_PZCnW-2Mo/v-deo.html
Yes we take a lot for granted here in the USA and the West in General.
capitalism is beautiful
And yet we have 12 million children in the US go to bed hungry every night. Beautiful.
@@jerryhampton5755 I try to go hungry to bed as well.
Don't worry about the critical people. I believe you are telling the complete facts on how you grew up. Me growing up in the US during the cold war there was propaganda for us the same. It is interesting to learn how the other "side" lived.
Thanks for this video. I’m from Canada and it’s always nice to see how others lived without rose tinted glasses from tankies
pp checks out
I remember my grandmother waiting in line for 3 hours in a city 400kMs away just so she could buy 3 sticks of salami. Also one of my neighbors was an international truck driver and they had the best things around (it was contraband).
Examples of pushing undesirable goods exists in the US but not so much on the retail level, usually it's bundling cheaper items with the thing you want to "enhance" its overall value. Definitely happens in finance where good securities are grouped with worse ones in tranches that have to be bought as a set. And the music industry was so resistant to individual song purchases because they made most of their money by forcing consumers to buy entire albums when the one good song wasn't released as a single.
EDIT And I forgot the biggest one: cable and satellite providers that constantly up their rates by adding channels you would never choose under an a la carte model. I think the common thread here is monopoly or near monopoly control.
Yeah, the classic one is phone and internet plans. Usually, a phone plan is "bundled" that ultimately ups the cost, but if you try to remove a service from the bundle, you lose out on the bundle discount, upping the price of the other services, "forcing" you to take another service you might not need, usually for additional cost, just to get a discount on the other service. It's a really scummy wasteful tactic that many countries have rightfully outlawed. Not in the good ol' US though.
Exactly. Give someone monopoly power and they will abuse it or at the very least become so lazy that they no longer would be in business without it. And unfortunately too many cannot see that applies to political parties as well as businesses.
I just made a post with another example of US Nagruzka. and tygomaster's term of "bundling" is a pretty good translation of Naguzka. Please see my post. And you're right, it's more done at the distribution level, but tygomaster's example of cable bundling is at the retail level. I love the comment sections of interesting videos.
So you mean like junk bonds and housing divertives
@@firesideshats Not really. There is no "bundling" going on there. They are just poor purchases.
As a Brit, your people's ability to queue, whilst simultaneously making exception for the elderly... Is admirable.
The soviets wanted us to queue just so we lose more time and energy on simple tasks (groceries). They did not like to let people rest so they do not get any ideas. During Sundays people were taken to make a parade in Romania, every weekend. It's like "you are free today, but you love your life and your leader, so you should celebrate and sing for your leader. This is the will of the people, the people want this, not me (the dictator), so I will let (force) them to make a parade and sing :D"
Context: Communist Romania
@@thehipsterking2184 CCP should take notes.
@@thehipsterking2184 And the fact that you were forced to believe that Elena Ceaușescu was not only a doctor but a world-renowned one just shows the despite of dictators egos.
That was most probably pokazukha. Soviet queues were not quite as orderly and well-behaved as British ones
It's enough to make you weep...
You make a video about Soviet retail bundling unpopular items with popular ones, and at the very end, you bundle a less popular video of yours with this one 😂
It's been 21 years and I heard every week the story from my mom who lived in Jugoslavia. She went for 4 months to Russia (she won a scholarship) and she always told me "it was full of coacroaches" Wich is already bad. but she also stated "they did not have salad, they just had some seaweed" and I was never able to understand what she was talking about til now. Now I know, 🤣 it's been so many confused years, thank you. She also has a funny story about caviar 🤣... But that is also due to her being from a poor household in Jugoslavia
Interestingly, "magazine" originally meant a place where you store things. So in guns, it's where you store the ammunition. The term "magazine" for a periodical originally was metaphorical -- a "storehouse" for information.
"Store" (as in a shop) also comes from the word meaning to "store" something for later use.
So it's interesting how Russian took the old meaning of "magazine" and used it in the same sense we use "store."
A relative's surname is Magazine, and he was from Ukraine. We don't know the origin of the name, but we always assumed it was related to a general store. A storehouse of information makes perfect sense.
Magasin still has the old meaning in Swedish as well. A store is a magasin but it also means "gun magazine".
The original word is French, as is natural for most military terminology. Russians took it from French.
I forgot, Swedish 'magasin' can also, just as in English, mean an illustrated paper as well.
It took me a few seconds to realize that you gave us all a UA-cam nagruzka. 😂
I was sent to USSR as a punishment because of bad school results in russian language. It was in 1986 when USSR was bottom low in the first years of perestroika. I remember dead horse cut in the market from head to tail sold as - probably only - source of meat. Kilometers long lines of very aggresive - involuntary sober - men trying to buy vodka - that was banned by Gorbatchev because of alcoholism...... "Chleba net" = "We do not have bread" - in most of grocery stores. That was very shocking - I improved my russian by 2. grades during that vacations, but It became clear to me that communism is a lie - even in my teenage years
_I was sent to USSR as a punishment because of bad results in russian language_
interesting phrase
two questions
1-sent from where?
2-sent by who?
@@noname-cp8ki Sent from communist. Czechoslovakia (We had similar problems with goods like USSR but at little fraction of their level) Sent by my mother Who was from family of rich pre WW2. bussinesmen - robbed by communist regime.
Well said...thanks for sharing
@@konstantinjirecek970So the USSR was the Siberia of Czechoslovakia. Got it. 😂
My dad had a similar experience. He had the "privilege" of visiting Moscow as part of a brotherly exchange between the Czechoslovak and Soviet industry. It would appear that there is nothing more effective at dispelling the illusion of the Soviet greatness than a quick visit.
In Soviet Estonia "nagruzka" was called "Brezhnev package" where you got book "little land" and ham or candy in a same deal.
So the soviet government was like a gigantic cable company?
Perhaps. One could say the USSR was a big company town as well.
Good description. Maybe we should use that for all the kids who seem to believe socialism was great.
@@shannonkohl68 "Like a cable company with an army."
@@shannonkohl68 There's boomers from these countries that still think it was better then.
@@fungo6631depends. Most of them miss their youth, but i can confirm, it was pure trash
I've seen the same concept other times as well. In the 90's Anime scene, translation companies in the US trying to buy the rights to a specific anime would have to get some of the studio's less popular anime as well. Which is why there was such a glut of mediocre and bad OAVs. And when the PSP first game out, most retailers would only sell it at launch if you also purchased with it a minimum of games and accessories. (And the launch titles were mostly pretty bad.) Also, the use of "mystery boxes" or "bundles" to include unwanted products is still somewhat common.
As a sixteen year old North American teenager, Russian language student & summer visitor to the good old Sovyetski Soyuz in 1971, I remember queueing up in the specialty stores for essentials like fruit, bread, meat & sausage. What a waste of a person's time! We did find a few "supermarkets" in big cites, but nothing with the items in like a Safeway or Loblaws, like we were used to back in the US & Canada. Thankfully, before we drove across the border from Helsinki to Vaalimaa Finland where we crossed into the USSR we stocked up on candies, chewing gum, canned & dry goods of all sorts. The gum and candies we brought for the countryside kids in the selo's or villages, the homes most often constructed like log cabins, izba's. The kids would see our VW bus barreling down the two lane "highway" and stand close to the lane waving their arms above their heads, screaming and begging for "Kaugummi! Kaugummi!", German for "Chewing gum! Chewing gum!". We would stop and we would get out of the van to hand out candies and chewing gum to the kids. We also brought yo-yo's which we in very high demand in these little villages. We brought soccer balls and Super Balls to. WOW What a hit the latter were! The memories of these smiling children have stayed with me for over 50 years.
Haha, I have heard so many similar stories in Finland. Tights were another thing people exported to the USSR from/through Finland. I also know some people who smuggled export controlled stuff like Western electronics and computers. To my understanding the USSR rarely paid well for smuggler and spies because they were able to find people who were leaning towards the East and communism, so it was more of an ideological thing rather than making money.
@@hbp_ Can you imagine being the Kaugummi oligarch of the USSR? LOL
So Kamela Harris is nagruska to Joe Biden. And Joe is brak. Very Soviet, yes.
It amazes me how people don't understand how horrifying the Soviet Union was where you couldn't even buy food if you wanted.
I am reminded of stories told by my mother about rationing and shortages in the UK during WWII. She said that people would join any line outside a shop because if you didn't want what was on sale, someone you knew would want it so you had something to trade. She told me that when their house was hit by a bomb, her sister was hurt and in hospital. She joined a line at a greengrocer's shop for strawberries. She told the people ahead of her that she wanted the berries for her sister and everyone stood back and let her buy first. There was also a joke that when buying whale meat people would ask for the head for their cat!
You experienced that during the war, - while we Russians lived like that for decades. And now our boomers , who grew demented, remember that time as "great time when no one was hungry". Shameful.
Like feeding everyone with s*t food was such an achievement, apparently. "Soviet ice cream was the best there was!" - says 70 y.o Putin.
It was so funny 20 years ago, now it grew to a horrible nightmare
@@AnnaLuchia Interesting question. I know that Spam was sent but unsure what else.
In soviet times it was far after the war
Pearl barley used to be a popular ingredient in soups and stews in UK. You could also use barley to make beer.
MMMMM Beer- the Barley Sandwich.
You need to have the equipment to to properly brew beer, equipment you probably wouldn't be able to get in a small village. You also probably wouldn't be able to get the material to make your own still either, and that's provided you aren't reported or caught by authorities.
I visited the USSR for 6 weeks in 1987. It was unbelievable to imagine stores could exist without having goods for sale, but sure enough, there they were. Not that stores were empty, just empty of what one might want to buy. Our guides were fiercely proud the stores existed, but they only took us shopping at the hotel stores for tourists.
Kind of like tour guides only take tourists where they want to go? I don't understand why that's always so weird when Communist countries do it.
I also visited the U.S.S.R. in 87. We ditched our guides and went to the market near the Moscow Hotel. Bought some horrific cookies. Hard as concrete. The streets were so empty back then.
@@katieluv8422 Liberalization was fucking disastrous.
You don't know a country from 6 weeks. It's the same in all 5 stars hotel. And save space. And nobody knows if you go home to 1 and 0 star.
That’s a really funny ending. The episode covered being forced to buy what you didn’t want to get what you wanted. At the end you mentioned a previous video that didn’t do well, but now comrade, you must watch it too.
It's interesting, the USSR could've imported a lot more items if it wanted to, but this would've led to devaluation of the Ruble and a large trade deficit. Isn't this basically what happened in the post USSR Russian Federation?
I’m thinking there were probably lots of goods embargoes too… so they may not have been able to import enough of some things if they wanted to?
@@mattkaustickommentsblack market was there to fill that gap, and that in part why the soviet uniok become corrupt and nepotism became the norm
@@sotch2271 The black market plus the state-sponsored drunkenness that diminish productivity on top of other problems just helped chip away at their economy even more. It really sucks to suck.
I live in Japan. I teach English to a lot of older people here. Since the war in Ukraine started they have started telling me about the old days and their memories of Russians. What happened is this: after the Soviet Union fell, Russia normalized relations with many nations including Japan. Russian ships would dock in Japan, and the sailors would walk around much like American military personnel do now. And when they saw anything being thrown out on the street - like a home put their sofa outside for the trash truck to take it away, or a someone put a mini fridge out to be thrown away, the Russian sailors would come by, and take the stuff back to their ships. They would collect the garbage because to them it was useful, or valuable. This is a memory that sticks in the heads of many in Japan to this day.
Do they care/talk about the Ukraine war much? I’m suprised given it’s so far away from them
@@Allen667sjja Yes, all the time. (Japan borders Russia and they have an ongoing land dispute with them - the Soviet Union took control of a series of Japanese islands populated by Japanese people after World War 2 and they've never given them back)There are houses around me with Ukrainian flags and the shopping center near me had a big Peace in Ukraine display in the window. And much more besides. I've even seen people sitting in the park with signs saying "No Putin, No War" which is as close as the Japanese come to a demonstration.
@@Allen667sjjaweird statement, for example Australians are supporting Ukraine with weapon and finances. RuZZian madness influences the whole world!
@@OmmerSyssel it’s not a weird statement, I support Ukraine as well but I wouldn’t expect ppl like all the f way in like idk Cambodia to care much about a war that far away
@@globes179 interesting, pleasantly surprised
Lived in finland back then, ussr reeked poverty and squalor. Some goods found their way over the border, people didn't want them even for free. Well except for Ladas. There was a saying if something was broken "still works better than a brand new soviet one".
Thanks for this very informative and entertaining subject. I lived my childhood in a capitalistic neighborhood country with warm relationship with Soviet Union. Relationship with our countries were in fact so good that our media often depicted stories of how needs of regular Soviet Joe were met. But we never heard of a word of Soviet retail secrets. 😊
Finland?
@@MsThePrettiest Yes.
I worked with a woman who was married to a KGB man, and she used to pull all sorts of bs to get out of doing her work. One time when she went and told our boss something totally false to get out of doing her job, I got really pissed and yelled at her that she had no blat at work, and that the boss finally saw through her crap. She freaked out because I knew what blat was and that she was no longer special. Just a worker bee now. I learned Russian when I lived in West Berlin.
This seems to ro have been quite common im Eastern Block countries. East Germany had a massive "Nimm ein Ei mehr" ("take another egg") advertising campaign, sounding the praise of all the health benefits of eggs. *Fictional* health benefits, by the science of if the day, but the country had plenty of eggs, they needed to move from store shelves.
Somewhat ironically, they were right about some of those health benefits by pure chance, while the west was scared of the (imaginary) danger of bad cholesterol from eggs. 😅
Doesn't sound that different from the US and their "food pyramid" - it might have originated as a good public health information program, but then it was heavily revised under pressure from lobbyists competing to have their particular projects declared as healthy essentials. Most notably, meat and dairy products were given a more prominent position.
I remember when I visited Kiev in 1994 I visited a department store. The area that sold the good stuff was roped off for dollars only. I got in by waving my passport at them. At the time Ukrainian currency were called “coupons” and had terrible inflation.
This happened a while back when there was a sudden shortage of a certain kind of computer part.
Sellers were either pricing them through the roof, or selling them in 'bundles' with unwanted, poorly selling items. One of which proved to be outright defective. They two figured they could
Same thing happened in 2000's with the Swine flu people feared the pigs would all get sick and so they were selling them with Chicken special in 2008--2009 as the free item or pay 1/2 of full price added to original price for the pork. The item was some cheap imported chicken that was grown crappy with antibiotics even when not sick, HGH and the Chicken was poor quality so much my family parents and I (going to a satellite community university for the schools in South Dakota under same BA degree before I dropped out) got sick off the cheap chicken because no matter how long you cooked it, the insides were under cooked as you would have had to opened the chicken and got all the meat off the bone just to have it cook right. We used the rest in a Chicken Noodle soup recipe that was amazing and did not get us sick becuse the Chicken was off the bone and in little pieces and slightly precooked when in the deboning process. Soon after the USA Government amended the rules to not allow for humans the Chicken from places that do use HGH and daily antibiotics or the like where the food gets people sick.
Yup. Wanna buy a graphics card? Then take this power supply that may explode under load (as shown in independent tests).
@@peepeepoopoo5932 why because its cheap and it works on animals as well
Video cards and fauly PSU's.
Well human hormones are actually addictive to humans when eaten, so thats probably one reason...
One interesting thing about Soviet language is that they called Nazi Fascist and bandits. I guess they didn't like the word Socialism (Nationalsozialismus) attached to their former allies and later enemies.
Now Kremlin warmongers are calling all who don't agree with them Nazi.
Italian fascists were in power 10 years before Hilter. Also it's a catchy phrase to throw around at anyone you disagree with, the Komintern used the term "Social fascism" in their campaigns against the Social Democrats in the west already in the late 20's, so still a good 5 years ahead of the Nazi Party came to power in Germany.
@eerokutale277
Sorry to break it to you, Ukraine has a nazi problem. Azov battalion, Right Sektor, the list goes on.
The conflict in Ukraine predates February 2022 by 8 years - removal yanukovich and installation of Washington friendly puppets by Victoria Newland. In that time the people of Donetsk and Lugansk were bombed by their own government..... silence from the West
Now you can't move for stupid people waving Ukrainian flags to signal their virtue.
I sincerely hope for peace in Ukraine. For that to happen, Yankees need to leave their cuckoo nest and take their chick with them.
That's actually exactly the reason. Stalin thought "National Socialism" sounded too similar to his "Socialism in one country" so the terms fascist and Hitlerite were promoted.
Also, "national socialism" didn't really have anything to do with socialism. The "National-socialist Workers' Party" simply sounded good for the masses, but when they were confronted about the word "socialism" in their name by the big capital they were courting, the Nazis clearly stated to them that they had no socialist leaning ideas, and so it was. The Nazis mercilessly persecuted anyone with actual leftist ideas, from communists to ordinary social democrats.
@@ocudagledamBut the Volkswagen (Beetle) were invented for common man. Certain parts of Hitlers insanity aimed at giving ordinary people a better life, like holiday possibilities ...
As an American I installed some equipment at the Soviet Space Center in 1976. One of our group had been sightseeing and saw a long line. A woman nearby was waving a pair of red shoes. She had been given the wrong size and was hoping to find someone near the front of the line that needed them and could get her right size.
"Magasin" in French means "store". That's likely where the Russian word comes from.
Most likely. Russians borrowed many words from French language
A magazine, in english, was also a storage place for military goods, like ammunition and provisions. Commonly used on naval ships. The powder magazine and such. This would be...vaguely...similar to a shop. I guess, maybe.
That soviet word i guess could be best translated as slang english word "Voluntold" It basically means that you are not given a choice but the people ordering you are pretending that you do.
VOLUNSOLD then! 😁
I feel like the US grocery conglomerate, Kroger, is doing something similar but with their store branded items. Since Covid, online grocery ordering has become normal and it's suspicious that certain items are commonly substituted with Kroger brand rather than showing the original item as out of stock.
That was all very interesting. Just subscribed, going to watch your other videos.
Welcome aboard!
Excellent presentation.
I have no friends.
using "pravda" as toilet paper is soo soviet.... i love it
Man, I'll pay like $6 for a small bowl of seaweed salad at a Japanese restaurant. I wonder if I'd like the Soviet version? I love the stuff. Salty and fishy goodness.
If I’d have to guess, no. Judging by the looks of it, quality doesn’t seem to have been very high.
But is it your $6 seaweed salad from a can? This stuff is canned and looks pretty nasty.
In chinese cuisine the seaweed is dried: no problem preserving the stuff.
that is super crazy. then again im also reminded that much of the supermarket food in the west is just dumped into landfill which is also a crazy thing to do.
As a Spaniard I know as a fact that you have way more insightful view that any of us would have about the old days in Russia since we only know what movies and propaganda tell us(mostly silly US ones,comedy type)…Keep up the good work with this channel camarada😜
The JFK coffee from India is wow pretty good. At our local "Russian" store (that's actually run by Ukrainians) the JFK coffee started coming in "half size" tins, and now I haven't seen it on the shelf for a few months.. :-(
3:20 package deals is what its called here. Not very common in big stores but extremely common in second hand markets.
The question who´s last (Tko je zadnji?) is still used in present day Croatia, usually when you´re waiting for the doctor either at the counter where you have to be checked in. The complaint book, is or was mandatory in stores and Cafes in Croatia (taken over form Yugoslavia) now-days there´s a piece of paper with the complaint e-mail written down.
The usefulness of this complaint book is loosely disputed, as it was used as a joke in the sense of a useless activity (why don´t you write it into the compliant book). So in a sense similar to the USSR, almost as if it´s been a socialist thing. There´s another similarity the maintenance hours, they were more explicit with those,it would say "I´ll be back soon" some stores had this sign even engraved. Just shows how much socialism cared about the buyer.
If no one wants them or needs them, are they still goods? Or would they be bads?
This would totally work in the US to boost unpopular products. Want to go to an NBA game? You have to also buy a ticket for a WNBA game. Want to see a professional men's soccer game? You also have to buy a ticket for a women's soccer game. Want to see the latest megabudget blockbuster film? You also have to buy a ticket to the local artsy-fartsy theater.
Nagruzka is a brilliant idea!
I would use the the WNBA ticket to blow my nose
In the 90s this nagruzku problem mostly went away. Inflation was so high that people would rather buy an extra kettle of whatever was "thrown" to maybe barter with later, instead of waiting for their money to loose all value. Of course this made both shortages and inflation worse.
In Poland, the question was "co rzucili?", which also means "what was thrown?"
I never heard of sea cabbage (Japanese use some for sushi and it's not bad) or canned whale meat. There was just this greasy minced and pressed int slabs mystery meat called "mielonka".
Dude I love your stuff so much. Don't stop making videos please. People need to know this stuff.
As someone who makes jewelry, I'm kinda interested in Soviet made jewelry. Did they wear much? Did men wear anything other than a watch and wedding band?
What are you talking about? No USSR citizen could afford luxury articles and hardly anything were available... If anything were produced it was kept for the communist elite or sold to western customers.
Are you living under a stone?
3:36 The Fifth Element lol
We call publications "magazines" because it originally meant storehouse in English as well and they were considered to be like storehouses for various written articles. The original meaning became obsolete in English, but the French still use the word "magasin" for store.
It's not completely obsolete in English. It is still used for military storehouses, specifically those storing ammunition. And also for the portion of a gun that contains the bullets.
It's not really an exclusively Soviet thing. When computer graphics cards were scarce during the pandemic, newegg (a huge online tech retailer) was at times only selling them in bundles with things that didn't move well, including computer power supplies that were so bad that they were literal fire hazards.
This is rather unusual. In capitalism you would just increase the price, if the demand for a specific product exceeds the expectation (and this is what most retailers did for NVIDIA graphics cards in 2020 - the retail price was twice as high as the original MSRP or even higher). In the USSR you could not do it, because the prices were dictated by the government.
@@losarpettystrakos7687 unusual but it does happen.
@@losarpettystrakos7687reality in USSR (and RuZZia) were that most products couldn't be manufactured, never mind how needed they were ...
Нагрузку exists in the United States, and it's referred to as "packages". Do you want just one Spanish channel included with your cable TV plan? You have to get "the Spanish package". Do you want one specific specialty channel? You have to subscribe to the whole package. As far as I know, this started with cable TV, but now it's everywhere, including your cellphone plan and other services.
Something you explained in 3:25 actually happen during Weapon Procurement from USSR
You see Indonesia back in 60's wanted to bought MiG-21 but we also need to Bought MiG19 which the performance was actually worse than MiG21
Fun “magazine” fact, it is also a place to store bulk ammunition, explosives and related items. Less commonly used it can/has been used synonymously with “commissary” to describe a military store (In English anyway)
Funny that this tactic has been used by US retailers many times before. Like when there was the graphic cards shortages where retailers would make you buy low quality Power Supplies and other unsold itemss if you wanted to buy a RTX 30xx Video Card. Also, In Soviet Russia, UA-cam watches YOU!!!
They have the same thing in the USA - they're called subscription boxes. Or Temu will just ship you the wrong thing.
Comment nr 666.
Communist Poland was almost exactly like Soviet Russia. 14 years in que for a landline phone number. I'm not kidding.
There are interesting parallels here to the GPU/chip shortage of recent years. Unscrupulous retailers were bundling desirable GPUs with mediocre power supplies and components that would have otherwise sat on shelves. There were also people buying prebuilt computers solely for the graphics cards they came with.
Добрый день товарищ Сергей. I was wondering if you could shed some light on office/writing stationary in Soviet Union? I am a writer myself so I would love to know about pens, pencils and even typewriters and office machinery. I know that in the west it was common for students and office workers to have a typewriter at home and while I know that in the DDR they were common for a coming of age present, I am interested in where Cyrillic typewriters were coming from as opposed to German language machines which were also produced in the west. I have come across names like Moskva and Lyubava from Soviet Russia that made typewriters for Russian speaking market.. but there is limited documentation. While it may seem like a dry topic, maybe there is some interest from other Western Spies too? Love from South Africa.
The expression for wanting condense milk but forced to buy an item not wanted is called in Jamaica, marrying. That comes about when necessary items are not available or in short supply when an item is u der the counter....and only if you know the person. Some get, others don't. I've experienced this in Jamaica first hand. Thankfully that is not the way now. Regards
I know that. That’s is your Frito Lay chips variety pack. You only get 4 bags of real chips, and maybe 10 bags of Fritos…
I would like to add note that can explain better to your western viewers ,why was this invented in the first place.
You could not throw expired goods because of a law called "wasting state goods" , I think in the west there is an equivalent "misappropriation of state goods". For those that dont know , in communist states , the state owns everything - including growseries. Wasting State goods a.k.a. throwing something without approval , braking something , needing more materials then allocated to you by some burocrat that knows nothing about your production can land you in jail for a long time.
The "Proper" process is for you to notiffy proper autorities that you have expired food stuff that is not fit for human consumtion and reqsting approval to despose of it.
There was a rulle about this , if you ware a store clurc and you needed to know this . There response is "dont bother, you will never get that approval".
This will cause 2 problems:
1. You will get investigated on why didnt you sell that before it expired and can land you in jail.
2. It will force a bunch of burocrats to transfer responsablity to someone else. We like to call it "Tossing the ball" . What it means in reallity is that a burocrat that is in theory reponsable for managing that
activity will transfer it to an other useless burocrat who in tern will transfer it. That will go on and on until it finaly gets to someone UP who will order you to "Find alternative use of those goods" (whatever that means).
The problem is that it will have to go down through the same usless chain of burocrats that will just toss it to someone else. By the time it reaches you (if it ever reaches you) , a couple of years would of passed and you would of already gotten rid of them.
So - just lie on the paper (stating you had done it) and pray for the inspector not to find how you did it.
This is why stuff like that got invented , because you are allways in the wrong and the gov is right.
Funny enaugh this method of offloading goods is still alive today - we just call it "Bundle".
The 5th Element picture had me dying
Things that are thrown out is more important even today than Westerners know.
Russia and eastern Europe buy huge lots of container cars full of packaged meat products past the expiration date in the US.Thats big business,was before and still is now.