This is how the USSR was dying: what the store shelves looked like in the last days of the Soviet rule

TheUSSR and shortages are inseparable. Soviet stores had one big, albeit dubious, advantage: they were spacious. Customers came as if to a museum, looking at rare exhibits. Unlike today's supermarkets, which are overflowing with goods, Soviet stores had an extremely scarce assortment.

For example, in a refrigerator, you could see only one type of a certain frozen product. But there was plenty of canned food - it was displayed in pyramids to take up all the free space. OBOZ.UA tells what store shelves looked like in the last days of the USSR.

Those who lived through the Soviet era say that the stores of that time constantly smelled of something. Refrigerators had bad compressors that often broke down. No one was in a hurry to clean up the mess either, so the meat department smelled like meat cuvettes, the dairy department reeked of cheese that had gone rancid in paper packages, and potatoes and onions were rotting in the vegetable department.

Vegetables, by the way, often rotted on the way because the USSR lacked proper food storage technologies. By the way, it was forbidden to choose potatoes or tomatoes on your own: you had to take whatever the seller gave you.

But the pyramids of canned food also boasted a wide range of products: "a few in a tomato," "tourist breakfast," stew, and even a "delicacy"-cuts of cow tails mixed with pearl barley porridge. The USSR was a country of hunger, canned food, and rockets.

Dairy products were also available, but only with a hint of quality. There were bottles of milk and kefir, liquid sour cream in plastic jars, and cottage cheese, which was always sold sour and in very uncomfortable paper packaging. But there was no choice - we had to take it.

The food situation even in cities was sometimes quite critical. But in the villages and in the province, people had to literally survive. The windows of a provincial village store could be completely empty. The so-called great technological and space power could not provide its citizens with the most basic necessities.

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