A Sudden Whiff of the Soviet Union | Yoko Hirose, Director of the Media Center / Professor, Faculty of Policy Management
April 25, 2023
Last year, my maternal grandmother passed away at the age of one hundred, and we had to begin the process of clearing out the family home. I was told to come and sort through my own massive collection of belongings to decide what to throw away and what to take with me. When I arrived at the house, I was greeted by a mountain of cardboard boxes and paper bags that needed my attention... It was a daunting sight, but as I began to sort through them, one interesting old item after another emerged: photos, letters, documents... I found myself reading each one, getting lost in memories, and making no progress at all.
Amidst it all, a small bundle of straw paper suddenly appeared. It was quite old, and I didn't recognize it. There was Russian writing on it, which is likely why my mother assumed it was one of my belongings.
As it turned out, the bundle was entirely made up of receipts from a Soviet "Beriozka" shop, all dated 1973. "Beriozka" (Russian for "birch tree") was the name for the foreign currency shops of the Soviet era. They were state-run luxury supermarkets that sold souvenirs and groceries, primarily to diplomatic corps, foreign businessmen, and tourists. Not only were Beriozka shops the only places where foreign currency could be legally used in the Soviet Union, but they were also said to have almost anything one could want, whereas in regular stores, long lines were mandatory for any purchase, and desired items were often unavailable. They reportedly stocked everything from meat, which was difficult to find in ordinary shops, to Western products and foods like Toshiba televisions. Initially, only the privileged class—high-ranking officials, diplomats, and athletes—could shop at Beriozka stores. Gradually, however, ordinary citizens also began to acquire foreign currency or exchange rubles for Beriozka vouchers to shop there. During the Perestroika era, Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party and President of the Soviet Union, closed the Beriozka shops as part of his "struggle against the privileged class," so they had already disappeared by the late Soviet period. However, I had heard that the first supermarkets (Note*) that began to appear when I started visiting Russia and other places were built on the sites of former Beriozka shops. When I entered one of the few supermarkets that existed in the late 1990s, I would wonder if it might have once been a Beriozka.
Note*: Supermarkets as we know them—where you put items in a basket and pay at a checkout counter—did not exist in the Soviet Union. For some time even after its collapse, only the Soviet-era "kassa system" shops were available. A *kassa* is the Russian word for a cash register, and shopping with this system was a major ordeal. First, you had to tell a clerk, "I want that, I want this." The clerks were often not very enthusiastic about their work, making even this step a challenge. In any case, the clerk would write some numbers on a piece of paper and hand it to you. You would then take that paper to the *kassa* to pay. The line for the register was often enormous, yet the cashier might be chatting with a customer, making the line stretch on endlessly. Once you finally paid, your paper would be signed or marked to show it was paid for. You then had to take the paper back to the clerk in charge of the goods, who would finally hand them over. This system demanded both communication skills and patience from the customer, and it remained the standard way of paying in the former Soviet Union until the early 2000s.
Now, to return to the main subject. The reason those receipts were there was that my grandfather had been in the Soviet Union from 1972 to 1973 to supervise the construction of a plant. In other words, the receipts were his. Looking at them, the item names—of course, handwritten—mostly consist of souvenirs like brooches and Matryoshka dolls, so I imagine they were from a large souvenir shopping trip before his return to Japan.
I am often asked, "Why did you start researching the former Soviet Union?" In response, I have always said that it began with being inspired by Gorbachev's Perestroika as a high school student, my interest in the major international shifts it caused, such as the Eastern European revolutions, the shock I felt when I met him in person at a "Talk with Japanese Students" event during his first visit to Japan in April 1991, and my strong interest in the turmoil following the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union.
However, seeing these receipts made me wonder if my grandfather's stories about the now-defunct Soviet Union might have had a major influence on the direction of my research. Our family home was full of Soviet souvenirs, as well as many of my grandfather's Russian language textbooks.
The stories my grandfather told about the Soviet Union were all dreadful. For example, at his hotel (he was forced to live in a hotel even for a long-term stay; during the Soviet era, several grand hotels were built for foreigners in Moscow, and my grandfather stayed in one of them, the Ukraina Hotel, which for many years was one of the tallest hotels in Europe and became the Radisson Royal Hotel after the collapse of the Soviet Union), he said that even if he woke up early, there was nothing for breakfast but potatoes and yogurt—he couldn't even get milk. That's why, when I told him in 2000 that I was going to study abroad in Azerbaijan, he exclaimed, "Don't go to a country where you can only eat potatoes and yogurt!" (Although Azerbaijan and Russia, where my grandfather stayed in Moscow, are of course different countries, he must have thought that all the former Soviet republics were in the same situation).
He also said he was constantly monitored by the KGB and always felt like someone was behind him. When he said he wanted to go to Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg), he was not given permission and ended up spending his weekends at the Moscow Zoo.
At the airport, it was apparently a problem that customs officers would go through foreigners' luggage and, saying things like, "This cannot be brought into the Soviet Union," would arbitrarily take items that were generally unavailable to Soviet citizens and keep them for themselves. Because of this, he was taught a trick for luggage inspection: place a large number of men's calendars on top of the luggage. (I myself remember that in the Showa era, calendars with pictures of women in swimsuits were quite common, and I imagine it was something of that sort.) When he did this, the officer supposedly said, "This is confiscated for corrupting Soviet morals," gave a smirk and a knowing look, and then left the rest of his luggage completely untouched. There were all sorts of survival skills back then.
Recalling these stories from my grandfather, I realized, all these years later, that my interest in Perestroika might have originated from the tales he told me about that strange country, the Soviet Union.
The fifty-year-old receipts that suddenly appeared brought back a flood of memories, along with the atmosphere of the Soviet Union. For that reason, I have a feeling that my task of clearing out the family home is nowhere near finished, but it was a fascinating experience to have unexpectedly discovered the origin of my own research.