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Memoirs of a Russian teacher: Moscow 1988.
By Vlada 19 July 08
or is 20 years enough to make a city unrecognisable?
More stories from a Russian tutor in London, or things you may be interested to know but won’t learn in a Russian course.
The other day one of my students said that I am not old enough to remember the Soviet Union. I was very flattered (I wonder if he actually meant it or just wanted to be kind) but I remember it all too well, both the Soviet Union in its traditional state and the Soviet Union on the brink of collapse and chaos.
Moscow 1988 was an interesting place to live in, often for the wrong reasons. I am going to tell you a few facts of life in those days. But first, can you imagine Moscow without any advertising, any commercial kiosks selling stuff, without traffic jams or too many cars, without any glamorous restaurants or hotels, no places to have a meal for a tourist, no public toilets, but with huge queues in empty shops? That’s what it was like! It had its charm, though. You could stroll down the huge spacious streets and enjoy a sunny day without bumping into millions of other people trying to do the same, you could travel on the tube without being squeezed to death, and actually drive around, and not sit in solid traffic jams. But you couldn’t buy anything, apart from basic stuffs, or have a decent meal in a restaurant (it’s hard to imagine now!), or go abroad on holiday.
And the facts are:
• A young new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had just been elected. It was a shock for the country. Not only was he young and full of energy (all the previous guys were ancient and trying to rule the country from their deathbeds), but he also had a glamorous well-educated wife who started appearing everywhere with him, a thing unheard of for a Soviet leader. And – shock, horror! – he decided that Russians drank too much and imposed restrictions on selling vodka. What was he thinking, God knows, but he couldn’t think of a better way to make Russian people hate him. And most did, with a passion, and still do, after all these years. Not just because of the vodka ban, of course.
• Something very awful was happening to the Soviet economy. Of course, in the Soviet times we could never buy anything fancy and nice easily but in 1988 shops became completely empty. You could still buy the basic stuffs like bread, milk or potatoes, but the moment something less basic, like, say, cheese or sausage appeared on the counters, the queues got horrendous.
• Especially enormous queues were seen outside wine shops because vodka could only be sold after 2 pm, and there were a lot of people who needed it earlier!
• Decent clothes had to be bought either through connections (friends and relatives who had access to warehouses or the back entrance of shops) or from the black market dealers who resold them at huge prices, having bought them from people with access to imported goods, foreigners or those who could travel abroad. If one didn’t have the right connections, other options were making your own clothes, or having them made in the tailor shop where they usually came out rather different from what you had asked for.
• People had money but not much could be bought for money. Every citizen was given a set of vouchers which you had to show in the shop, in addition to paying money. Different vouchers were given for different sorts of goods. So you felt like they should be used before they expire, and as a result I still have a number of totally unnecessary objects, acquired in the late 80-s, in my Moscow home.
• Advertising was unheard of, either on the telly or anywhere else. When I first got to America in 1990, and started watching a film, I honestly thought that the girl running around with some washing powder was part of the movie.
• It was still a criminal offence to have foreign (hard) currency without a special reason for it, or change foreign currency in the street. In banks, you could only change currency if you could show proof that you were travelling abroad, and the maximum sum you could change was the equivalent of $200. The official exchange rate was 66 kopecks to the US dollar, so the rouble was supposed to be high and stable (the truth was of course very different).
• Relations with foreigners were liberalised. In 1988, one could already bring foreign guests to one’s place openly, without fear of being watched, and engage in correspondence with foreigners. A letter from/to the US took 2 months to get there, and to Europe – about a month. There was no automatic dialling system to call abroad, so you had to go to the central post office and “order” a conversation through an operator, or do it through an operator from your home phone.
• You could get English or Russian lessons for as little as 3 to 5 dollars per hour! Even if you include an air ticket to Moscow and back, it would have been much cheaper than learning Russian in London! I am surprised more foreigners didn’t speak perfect Russian!
• Borders were open a year or two later, and hordes of people went abroad for various reasons, some of them never to return. The only ticket provider, the state airline Aeroflot, sold tickets months in advance, there were huge waiting lists and people had to turn up in person every morning for a month to tick their name on the waiting list, otherwise they were thrown out of the queue. Before that, one could only travel abroad for work or as part of an official delegation.
• The first McDonald’s opened in Moscow in 1990. Admittedly, it’s not the best place to eat in any city, but in those days it was the only place where a tourist could come for an easy snack and a visit to the loo. Those were the days!
Which Moscow would I prefer to live in? Of course the modern day one! It turns out that 20 years is enough to make a city unrecognisable, and whatever you say about the modern problems, they are nothing in comparison to what we’ve been through.