'In the Soviet Union We Didn't Have Bananas and All Was Fine'

Shortages in Russia always begin with bananas and then ripple through society at the lightning speed

“Be calm, bananas are on the way,” is the headline that greeted St. Petersburg residents jonesing for bananas these days. What I hear in these words is “Get ready for lines, folks.”

The first year I arrived in the Soviet Union, in 1990, lines were everywhere. Of all of the basic things that weren’t available in the Soviet Union, there was always an inexplicable shortage of bananas.

There is a banana shortage developing again in Russia. As reported in a local newspaper in St. Petersburg, there is no reason to worry about the missing bananas and then the paper goes on to give a list of reasons why the bananas are missing.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t lost on the many readers who commented on the online version of the article that bananas in the Soviet Union were a mythical fruit that appeared only in movies and children’s coloring books.

One woman by the screen name “Zdobsi,” however, was unfazed by the temporarily-missing bananas. She wrote:

In Soviet times, we did without bananas. There were apples. Having bananas isn’t critical and not mandatory. Moreover, the quality of bananas is so-so. And they will bring bananas if they run out somewhere. This is not an essential product, and even harmful to consume every day. There are grapefruits, pomelo, apples, pears, mangoes, grapes, tangerines, and oranges. Even lychees and bananas are also available. No need to panic. There is everything you want (Be Calm, People, Bananas Are On the Way).

This woman’s comment resulted in a tsunami of commenters mocking the woman’s ability to foolishly accept the current deprivations while comparing 2023 with the worst of times in the Soviet Union.

Of course, not having a banana available if you want one is not the kind of deprivation that results in life-or-death situations. The banana, however, is a symbol of much more, and a lot worse to come. I view the banana as a “Rubicon” of sorts. Once the supply chain that resulted in an abundance of them in Russian supermarkets gets severed, the lines tethering the Russian diet to so many other imported products will begin to snap one after another.

Russia won’t go back to the empty stores of the late 1980s and early 1990s but a fair amount of things that the pro-Putinists under 40 take for granted will begin to vanish. Russians did a good job since 2014 replacing a lot of imported products with locally-made ones, but the Western spare parts and technology needed to produce food were still available.

The sanctions today are designed to retard Russia’s technological capabilities. As things break down, and food production machines break down hourly, either those food items won’t be produced or they will be produced in a greatly-reduced quality. The really low quality for which most Soviet-produced items were known will return quickly and many Russians won’t like it.

A long way to go

And yet, there are people like the woman whose comment above ignited so much scorn, who regards the missing bananas as one of those “we are Russians” moments and “we thrive when confronted with privation.” This woman is the kind of Russian citizen upon whom Putin relies even more so than he does on the conscripted soldiers. She is the silent majority who finds strength in material sacrifice.

There are a lot of Russians who have lived lives that many of us would consider abysmal if not tragically impoverished and nevertheless those people thrive on less. I wrote about this way back at the beginning of the war.

Western cultures, even many in the former, socialist countries of eastern Europe, simply can’t fathom how miserable a Russian person has to be to fight back against his government. Even the soldiers rioting in Russia are not demanding Putin’s head but rather merely asking for more respect from the officers.

Today it’s bananas, and as it turns out French fries as explained to me by a restauranteur friend from St. Petersburg, and tomorrow it will be something else. Little by little, cut off from world markets, Russia will do what it can and as I mentioned a lot is being made locally, but it won’t be able to keep up. The needed equipment will break down and the rubberbands and glue won’t suffice to get the pasteurizers, tractors, fillers, and more up and running again — corners will be cut and eventually, things just won’t be produced.

As privation spreads through society, the attitudes of women like the one who posted the above comment will harden. The shittier life gets, the better it gets in the eyes of these “Soviet-minded” people. The more the world seems to be against them, the more determined they become to resist. The more convinced they become that the “Bush legs” were pumped with drugs to make Russians infertile and gay.

To sum up the sad absurdity of the comment from Zdobsi, a reader reminded us all that: “In the Soviet Union, there also was often no toilet paper.”

This too, folks, is sadly true. Pardon the details I share, but once I had a choice between three pieces of cardboard in a public bathroom or a pocket full of soft, 25-ruble notes. At an exchange rate of 40 rubles to $1, I pampered myself.