Take Care of Your Breasts!: Nostalgia for the Soviet Period in the ex-Soviet Union

As I planned my trip through Russia and the Caucasus, I began to prepare by interacting with more and more people from ex-Soviet countries. Mostly, I met them online. My friends were typically born after 1980, and spent their childhoods in the perestroika-era Soviet Union. Many of them professed a kind of nostalgia for the Soviet Union of their childhoods. “In some ways, it was a great childhood,” I remember one Russian telling me. “We didn’t know a class system. Of course there were problems but as a child, I wasn’t aware of all that. It was a great childhood, for me.”

A few friends from other ex-Soviets spoke well of the Soviet education systems of their childhoods, and decried the loss of the education quality that has occurred in their countries since 1991.

I was surprised to hear these perspectives. The North American collective consciousness had left me with little knowledge of social life in the Soviet Union. Sure, I had nebulous ideas about nuclear armament and Stalin’s purges, but no real timeline or concept that the Soviet Union wasn’t a static entity and that it had undergone massive changes across its history, even if North Americans weren’t easily privy to them. I couldn’t think of anything that the Soviet Union had done that could be considered beneficial to its population. It wasn’t that I had anything against acknowledging that there might have been some good things about the Soviet era. It was simply because, as a North American, my exposure to the social culture and history of the Soviet Union was limited.

Now that I’ve been to a few ex-Soviet countries, I’ve found that the nostalgia I noticed before I left is common – although not universal – across the ex-Soviet Union. A few months ago I wrote about how little of this nostalgia I noticed in Georgia, but I spoke too soon. At a language-practice meeting in Tbilisi, I met a woman in her fifties. “How was it living in the Soviet Union?” I asked, expecting her to reiterate what the other Georgians had told me about how the evil Russian occupation had not managed to subdue proud and tenacious Georgia. (These statements, I later learned, were somewhat ironic as Stalin himself was . . . Georgian.) She didn’t. “Oh,” she said, “It was wonderful. The education system was excellent. We learned many foreign languages. And it was so cheap to travel from here to Moscow.”

What characterizes collective memories of the Cold War period for North Americans doesn’t seem to be the same across the post-Soviet world. Did Soviet citizens live with the same terror of nuclear war that North Americans did? I don’t know.

What I do know is that, these days in the ex-Soviet Union, nostalgia for the Soviet period abounds. It’s certainly not universal; many people have terrible things to say about the difficulties endured during the Soviet era. But . . . it is common, and it takes many forms – from lamenting how expensive travel to Moscow has become since the break-up, to buying postcards and magnet editions of vintage Soviet posters, to spending time at one of the three museums of Soviet Arcade Games that grace Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kazan.

This is the Museum of Soviet Arcade Games in Moscow. Yes, you can play the games, but only if you feed them Soviet money.

Another Russian friend pointed out that North Americans also have some kind of nostalgia for the Soviet period. “For example,” he said, “the game Fallout is about Nuclear War, which was a big preoccupation of the Cold War.” He was right – with one major difference. In the ex-Soviet Union, nostalgia for the period is about many different aspects of Soviet culture and society whereas in North America, Cold War nostalgia tends to be about . . . the threat of war.

I picked up these postcards at a gift shop in Moscow. They came in a pack of twenty. Many of them are military themed, but what struck me were the four related to public health campaigns.

These two cards both address the issue of overdrinking. The one on the right reads, “A river begins with a small stream” and dates to 1929. The Soviet Union obviously continued to struggle with this public health issue as the card on the left, which simply reads, “NO,” dates to 1954. 

These two posters are also about public health issues. The one on the left reads, “Take care of your breasts” while the one on the right reads “After work, go to the bathhouse.” In the Soviet Union, many apartments did not have baths inside, so inhabitants were forced to frequent bathhouses (back before they had connotations of homosexuality.) Both of these posters date to the 1930s.

Stalin’s purges aside, the social history of the Soviet Union is not well-known in North America. It’s a shame, really, that it isn’t. To conclude this post, I present you with a question my Ukrainian roommate in Georgia asked me about the social culture of North America that proves that a mutual lack of cultural knowledge exists up until the present day.

“Kate,” he said. “Do people in North America read on the john, or is that just something that people in ex-Soviet countries do?”

I was quick to assure him that piles of books and magazines are common features of many North American bathrooms. Although the Soviet Union has been gone for 24 years, the vestiges of the Cold War live on in a mutual lack of knowledge about these – admittedly perhaps insignificant – cultural details. Still, I don’t think that a North American one-dimensional understanding of the Soviet and ex-Soviet space is insignificant at all (although, in the case of bathroom reading, perhaps it is.) In fact, the more you know . . . the more you are likely to make reasonable judgments about North American and post Soviet people and their mutual relationships. Sure, there’s bad stuff, but there’s also good stuff. And if you aren’t the sort to divide social movements into such easy moral categories, I can say for sure that there’s plenty of interesting stuff to be learned about the countries that make up the ex-Soviet Union.

So come on in! The water’s fine!