Soviet stores (56 photos)

29 May 2012

In Soviet times, the naming of stores was very simple. Stores in all cities were named simply, without any frills: “Bread”, “Milk”, “Meat”, “Fish”. In large cities there were grocery stores and supermarkets. There were also all sorts of religious goods, and in the villages the ubiquitous General Store... Moreover, citizens could determine exactly by name what exactly was not in a given store...

1959 Grocery department. Typical. If my vision serves me correctly, there is not a lot of food on the counter, to use euphemisms. And to put it bluntly and without embellishment, the counter is completely empty. True, it should be recognized that there is something hanging behind the seller’s back. To be honest, I didn’t understand what it was. Either decomposed meat carcasses, or something wrapped in oiled paper. Okay, let's assume it's meat.

1964 Moscow. GUM. Gumov ice cream has always been popular. And in '64...

and in 1980...

and in 1987.
But, as they say, not just ice cream...

1965 "Gastronomic store"

And here is the toy department. The store, therefore, is a department store. Still the same 1965. I remember in 1987, a girl I knew, a saleswoman in the Dom Knigi store on Kalininsky, told me that she felt uncomfortable every time when foreigners stood stunned, looking at her calculating the cost of a purchase on their accounts.

But that was 1987, and in 1965 the scores did not surprise anyone. The sports games department is visible in the background. There are different types of chess, checkers, dominoes - a typical set. Well, lotto and games with dice and chips (some were very interesting). In the foreground is a children's rocking horse. I didn't have one.

Still the same 1965. Selling apples on the street. Please pay attention to the packaging - a paper bag (the woman in the foreground is putting apples in it). So, even in the late 80s, a plastic “T-shirt” cost a ruble! You can consider this a fight for the environment...

1966 Supermarket – Self-service department store. At the exit with purchases there is not a cashier with a cash register, but a saleswoman with bills. The check was threaded onto a special awl (standing in front of the abacus). On the shelves there is a typical set: something in packs (tea? tobacco? dry jelly?), then cognac and some bottles in general, and on the horizon are traditional Soviet pyramids of canned fish.

1968 There is progress. Instead of an account there are cash registers. There are shopping baskets - by the way, quite a nice design. In the bottom left row you can see the buyer’s hand with a carton of milk - such characteristic prisms. In Moscow there were two types: red (25 kopecks) and blue (16 kopecks). They were distinguished by their fat content.

On the shelves, as far as one can discern, are traditional tin cans and bottles of sunflower oil (it seems). It is interesting that at the exit there are two sellers: a person checking purchases and a cashier (her head peeks out from behind the right shoulder of the aunt-seller with a facial expression typical of a Soviet seller).

1972 Let's take a closer look at what was on the shelves. Sprats (by the way, they later became scarce), bottles of sunflower oil, some other canned fish, on the right - something like cans of condensed milk. There are very, very many cans. But there are very few names. Several types of canned fish, two types of milk, butter, kvass wort, what else?

1966 I still can’t figure out what exactly the buyers are looking at there.

1967 This is not Lenin's room. This is a department for the House of Books on Kalininsky. Today these shopping areas are chock-full of all kinds of books (on history, philosophy), and then - portraits of Lenin and the Politburo.

1967 For children - plastic astronauts. Very affordable - only 70 kopecks per piece.

1974 Typical grocery store. Again: a pyramid of canned fish, bottles of champagne, a battery of Globus green peas (Hungarian, it seems, or Bulgarian - I don’t remember). Half-liter jars with something like grated beets or horseradish with beets, packs of cigarettes, a bottle of Armenian cognac.

On the right (behind the scales) are empty flasks for selling juice. The juice was usually: tomato (10 kopecks a glass), plum (12 or 15, I don’t remember), apple (same), grape (same). Sometimes in Moscow there was tangerine and orange (50 kopecks - wildly expensive).

Next to such flasks there was always a saucer with salt, which you could add to your glass of tomato juice with a spoon (taken from a glass of water) and stir.

1975 City Mirniy. On the left, as far as one can judge, there are deposits of bagels, gingerbread and cookies - all in plastic bags. Which, by the way, made them 15 kopecks more expensive! About a third of the price. And don’t be surprised after this that the bags were taken care of and washed... On the right are eternal canned fish and - below - 3-liter jars of canned cucumbers.

1975 City Mirniy. General view of the store interior.

1979 Moscow. People are waiting for the end of their lunch break in the store. The display window is decorated with a typical pictogram of a "Fruit and Vegetables" store. In the window itself there are jars of jam. And, it seems, of the same type.

1980 Novosibirsk General view of the supermarket. In the foreground are a battery of milk bottles. Further on, in metal mesh containers, there are something like deposits of canned fish. In the background there is a grocery store - bags of flour and noodles. The overall dull landscape is somewhat enlivened by plastic icons of departments. We must pay tribute to the designers there - the pictograms are quite understandable. Not like Microsoft Word icons.

1980 Novosibirsk Manufactured goods. Furniture in the form of sofas and wardrobes. Next is the sports department (checkers, inflatable lifebuoys, billiards, dumbbells and various other small items). Even further, under the stairs there are televisions. In the background are partially empty shelves.

View of the same store from the household electrical appliances department. In the sports department you can see life jackets and hockey helmets. Overall, this was probably one of the best stores in Novosibirsk (I think so).

1980 Vegetable department. The line is tensely watching the saleswoman. In the foreground are green cucumbers, which appeared in stores in early spring (and then disappeared).

1980 Sausage. Krakow, it must be.

1981 Moscow. Typical store design. "Milk". On the right, a woman is pushing a wildly scarce imported stroller with “windows.”

1982 At the market, the Soviet people rested their souls.

1983 Queue for shoes. Surely the imported boots were “thrown away”.

1987 Queue for something.

Kvass saleswoman. People went for kvass with aluminum cans or three-liter jars.

1987 Electrical goods.

No comments.

Soviet underwear, as it is. Without any colorful bourgeois packaging.

Particularly spiritual people do not need fashionable shoes. But the women in this photo don’t look very cheerful.

Also shoes... Where to go? There is no other one.

An almost sacred place is the meat department. “Communism is when every Soviet person will know a butcher” (from some movie).

“Pork” – 1 ruble 90 kopecks per kilogram. Grandmothers don't believe their eyes. “Butcher, bitch, he sold all the meat!”

Soviet turn. What an intense look from people - “is that enough?”

“They’ll bring the meat now. You’ll see, they’ll definitely bring it.”

"Eat meat!" Local fight over the best piece.

Phallic symbol. It is enough to look at the reverence with which the aunt holds this object to understand that in the USSR sausage was much more than just a food product.

You need to cut more pieces of sausage, which will then be instantly swept off the counter.

Frozen hake is, of course, not sausage, but you can eat it too. Although, of course, it all doesn’t look very aesthetically pleasing.

Not just sausage... For a Soviet color TV, a Soviet person had to pay almost 4-6 months’ salary (“Electronics” costs 755 rubles).

Vegetable department. In the foreground is a cart with some kind of rot. Moreover, it was assumed that someone could buy this rot.

Ineradicable antagonism between Soviet buyers and Soviet sellers. It’s clear in the man’s eyes that he would gladly strangle the saleswoman. But it’s not so easy to strangle such a saleswoman - Soviet trade hardened people.

Soviet saleswomen knew how to deal with customers. More than once I saw a flurry of indignation and attempts at rebellion in the queues, but the result was always the same - victory remained with such saleswomen.

One of the features of Sovk was the presence of a sophisticated system of benefits (all sorts of veterans, “prisoners of concentration camps,” etc.). Various beneficiaries with red crusts in Soviet queues were hated almost as much as saleswomen. Look, there's a snout in the hat - not to take the allotted duck "like everyone else", he puts in the red crust - apparently he's laying claim to two ducks.

This photo is interesting not so much for the hake being sold, but for the packaging. In the USSR, almost all purchases were wrapped in this brown, rigid paper. In general, the darkest thing that happened in Soviet trade was packaging, which, in fact, did not exist.