This story is from Inna Lokshin:
All my life, I knew that food could not be taken for granted. In the Soviet Union there was a shortage of everything. There were only two kinds of cheese, and not in every store, and not every day. Sour cream had the consistency of buttermilk, maybe eighty percent water. Milk was not really milk. Sausages were made mostly of starch and filler. By the end of the day grocery shelves were bare, and because one could buy only a small amount of most things, people had to go food hunting almost every day.
And even what was available was often terrible quality. Potatoes were a major staple, but buying them meant standing with a large bag under a chute while a salesgirl dumped several kilograms of potatoes and dirt into it. At home you would sort through the pile and throw out sixty or seventy percent because they were so rotten that no part of them could be saved.
This was simply how we lived. We did not know any better, and the Iron Curtain made sure Soviet citizens could not even imagine that shortages of basic necessities were not the normal way of life outside the Soviet bloc.
As a child, I lived with my parents and my babulya, and it was their responsibility to get food on the table. But when Papa and I married, while I was still a sixth-year student writing my thesis, that responsibility became mine too.
We were given a tiny room in a communal apartment with fourteen rooms total, each occupied by an entire family of two to five people. There were two toilets, one sink, no bathtub or shower, and one kitchen with two stoves — four burners each, but one of the burners did not work. In effect, fourteen families shared seven burners. Think of making breakfast or dinner that way, waiting your turn and hating everybody.
Then I started working. I had to leave home before the stores opened, and by the time I got off work it was useless to shop because the shelves were already empty. So the young women on my floor at work created a system. We were all helping run the first Russian IBM-type computer, and we all had families that needed to eat. Each morning one of us would put her purse on the desk, hang her regular coat on the chair, throw on an extra coat we kept for this purpose, and run to the nearest store to buy whatever she could find for the others too.
If a manager asked where the missing girl was, we lied. She was in the bathroom. She had gone to the other building to fetch computer tapes. It was always something.
That too was Soviet life. Lying was the way to survive, the way to hide, the way to get through the day. Everybody lied, and everybody knew that everybody lied. And above all of it sat the biggest lie of all: socialism and communism themselves.