‘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…
