Part 1: Back in the USSR: Daily Life in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc Nations

                                                Krishna Jaswal, Narrator
November 9th, 2024 marks 35 years since the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The dramatic end of “The Wall,” a symbol of the tensions between East and West, Communism and Capitalism, served as a climax to what became known as the Revolutions of 1989 - the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Thirteen months later, the Soviet Union would be dissolved ending a sixty-nine year experiment with communism.
Through this podcast series, Over the Wall: Remembering Life Behind the Iron Curtain, through interviews with Champaign-Urbana residents who grew up in the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries, we better hope to understand daily life under communism, Western influence, and resistance movements.
Krishna Jaswal, Diza Baryshnikov, Narrators
This is Back in the USSR: Daily Life in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc Nations, I’m Krishna Jaswal and I’m Diza Baryshnikov. In this podcast, we will hear about Eastern bloc countries’ relationship with the West, exploring education, travel, and ideas of what life was like on the other side to better understand the beliefs that the United States and Soviet Union had about each other.
Tania Ionin
It was an apartment. Because we lived in a big city, everybody lived in apartments. And in the Soviet Union, apartments were assigned by the government. You couldn't just buy or rent whatever you pleased. You were, so to speak, written into an apartment. So, you were written into whatever apartment you were born into, or if two people got married, one of them could be written into the other's apartment. So it was complicated bureaucratic arrangements. A lot of people didn't even live in private apartments, but rather in communal apartments, where you had multiple families actually occupying the same apartment, like one family per room. My family was fortunate in that we did have our own apartment. It had four rooms and we were six people in it, which, by Soviet standards, was pretty roomy.
Krishna Jaswal, Narrator Champaign resident Tania Ionin, who we just heard from, explained how her family’s living arrangement during her childhood reflected housing arrangements during the Soviet times. Ionin spent her childhood in Leningrad, which is now St. Petersburg, during the 1970s and 80s.
During Soviet times, many families migrated from the countryside to the cities for new economic opportunities. Under communism, the government owned all housing. While many families in the cities lived in communal apartments with common areas such as kitchens and bathrooms which were shared with other families in the building, some families, like Ionins, did have their own apartment.
University of Illinois professor Olga Khessina, who also grew up in the Soviet Union, recalls living in an urban apartment as a child, and the community that came with it.
Olga Khessina
I grew up in apartment buildings. So people know each other only limited to one apartment building and even one part of the building where the apartments are in the same stall. You don't know many people outside of your apartment building or your school or your work. But here, because it's more spread out horizontally rather than vertically, you'll get to know your neighbors and the neighborhood where you live.
Krishna Jaswal, Narrator
Soviet family sizes, especially in urban areas where housing was limited, were often small. Studies have shown a decrease in birth rates during Soviet times. According to American sociologist and Russian specialist Professor Jerry Pankhurst, the rate of one-child families was higher in the Soviet Union compared to capitalist countries such as the United States.
Professor Valeria Sobol, who grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine, a Republic in the Soviet Union, comments on her family’s size, and the reasons behind the trend.
Valeria Sobol
I'm an only child, which is pretty common actually. You might have heard that from other people. Not the policy like in China, but it was just economically more common. It was just easier, as with apartments sometimes with great grandparents in the same apartment. So it was easier for my family just to have one child and be done.
Krishna Jaswal, Narrator
In addition to the government control of housing, under communism the government also owned all businesses. Michal Ondrejcek, who grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, describes how grocery stores operated.
Michal Ondrejcek
We didn't go very often, actually, probably once a week, and there were no markets. So everything was owned by the state. This was unique in the Czech parts, even of Czechoslovakia, that there was no private ownership, even of small, small stores. So everything was state-owned.
Krishna Jaswal, Narrator
A Western stereotype about daily life under communism is the image of the “bread line” - people waiting in line for the hard to come by goods and foods. Several interviewees affirmed this reality through their memories.
Champaign resident Elena Dzhaman, who grew up in the small-town of Pushchino, Russia, located about 80 miles from Moscow, recalled such memories.
Elena Dzhaman
While it was still Soviet Union and the government regulated economy, there wasn't really, like, the big assortment, a big variety of goods in stores. There were some goods, of course, there was
foods and clothing. But the assortment definitely was not that big. I can say there was a deficiency. When something appeared in the store that people would like to buy, there would be a line, typically, because people would hurry to that store to buy that. You kinda need to keep an eye on what appears in the store. In case you want this particular thing, you'll need to be quick and get there and buy before other people did. It was a very different than what we see for example here in the United States or anywhere else in the western countries.
Krishna Jaswal, Narrator
Similar to Dzhaman, Professor Khessina also remembers shortages in Russian markets.
Olga Khessina
Oh, it depends where you live. I mentioned that my early years, we lived in a city on the north, like north of Moscow. It had some food issues. Because I remember I loved sour cream. As a kid I loved it. They would bring it only certain days of the week and there would be a line. I was reluctant to be in line for anything else, but I was ready to spend an hour in a line to get sour cream. My grandparents lived in this, it's more like the west south from Moscow, so I remember there would be a line, they would bring meat, there is a line; sausage, there is a line; butter, it’s a line. And as a kid I hated like I didn't care about butter or sausage, I remember I would always hide when I see that they bring them to the store because they would give a certain amount of packages of butter per person. So my grandmother always like “Let’s go get it like two more” because they don't they didn't bring them every day. And they're like, “Oh, butter is in the store - I better hide.” because otherwise like I will be standing in this long food line. There was food but there was some food more deficit. There will be lines, that's outside of Moscow, then when we moved to Moscow, Moscow had everything. In Soviet times, like some cities had it really well and some cities had it not so easy.
Krishna Jaswal, Narrator
Communist countries throughout the Eastern Bloc also experienced these food shortages. Eda Derhemi recounts trying to buy milk in communist Albania.
Eda Derhemi
I remember my first daughter was born in 1987 and I didn't have milk to breastfeed her, so we had to buy the milk. But to buy the milk, you had to wake up at 2 A.M, and stay until around 7 A.M in the line. And you had to wake up at 2 A.M. because otherwise, you would be at that point in the line in which there will be no more milk. Both my ex-husband and I had to both wake up very early. And there were two lines: the women and the men were in separate lines. So, he would be in the men's line, I would be in the women's line and wait until the milk would come so that we could secure the milk for the baby. Because the quantity was measured. But it was for everything, lines for potatoes, lines for … I don't remember lines for onions, but lines for flour, lines for coffee. We never tried bananas, for example, so there was no line for bananas because I only tried some bananas when I was probably 10 or 12 years old, and I remember those came from Cuba, which was a communist country so they brought us bananas, with a shipment, and that is the only time for a few months there were bananas. We saw what they were. After that, I had bananas when I left the country when I was 26.
Krishna Jaswal, Narrator
Urbana resident Michal Ondrejcek grew up in Czechoslovakia, a nation which became communist in 1948 after a Soviet backed coup by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Ondrejcek reflects on his memories of food shopping in the communist Czechoslovakia.
Michal Ondrejcek
We always had bread. There was meat, there was vegetables. There were seasonal vegetables, obviously we didn't have oranges in winter. And also all the food came from friendly countries. Oranges were only in summer and they came from Cuba. I remember we didn't have yet bananas, but we had bananas for Christmas only. That was very rare. So like these exotic foods, there were lines for that. You could buy only certain amount of apples and bananas. So I remember the families were usually doing it. They send different family members to buy more and more. So I remember my mom sent me to buy yet another kilo of something. But it wasn't the basic food. It was like the luxuries.
Krishna Jaswal, Narrator
Communist control of the economy also meant shortages for other material goods. Champaign resident Ihor Dzhaman, who grew up in Soviet Ukraine recalls his limited clothing options.
Ihor Dzhaman
…There was like some model of shirts. And there was only one model this store. So, like, next day when you go to school, like, or to play on playground, everybody had same shirt because it's like – only one. This was not choice color or model just like, like different sizes in some time, just two or three sizes. So you buy and after that, your mom should adjust it to your size.
Krishna Jaswal, Narrator
Eda Derhemi recalls a similar experience in communist Albania.
Eda Derhemi
The clothing was very hard to get. So, most of my clothes were homemade by my grandmother and my aunt was a seamstress. She also did my dresses. Very, very hard to find shoes. It was very difficult. Usually we had one pair of sandals, one pair of shoes, one pair of pants, two pullovers. We had very limited amount of clothing.”
Krishna Jaswal, Narrator
Some people tried to get around the shortage of clothes by traveling to other countries to buy clothes, as described by Tania Ionin who grew up in Leningrad, Russia, now St. Petersburg.
Tania Ionin
There was always a shortage of everything including clothes, so I think for a lot of people there wasn't that much notion of fashions you wore what you could get. Nevertheless, I know that a lot of people, women especially, were always trying to get things that would look better. I remember my grandmother actually traveling to Estonia to do clothes shopping because we knew that you could get things in Estonia stores that you couldn't get in Russian stores.
Krishna Jaswal, Narrator
And Michal Ondrejcek recalls the shortage of a favorite personal good in Prague, Czechoslovakia.
Michal Ondrejcek
We’d have lines for books, for example, it was always Thursdays were like the new release day.
Krishna Jaswal, Narrator
This lack of goods often resulted in black markets popping up in communist countries which, in turn, created an underground economy. University of Illinois professor Zsuzsa Gille recalls this reality growing up in communist Budapest, Hungary.
Zsuzsa Gille
Every time you have a shortage economy, people will be resourceful and find some other ways to secure a certain commodity. And then, because it's in shortage, they can get a much higher price for it, then it's really worth it or it would be if it were in the stores. So there were black markets in my early childhood, so '60s, early '70s. This primarily took the form of what here we would call like a flea market. It’s a huge open-air area where people just came and sold everything. Later in the 1980s, there were so-called Comecon markets. Comecon was the economic organization, alliance of all the Socialist Soviet Bloc countries. And this was a kind of tongue in cheek name for these little opportunities to shop things because the sellers were often Poles or Russians. And they brought things here that they knew we couldn't buy in stores and then they would just stand on the street corner. And then you would have to haggle over the price. That was a form of black market that I experienced.”
Krishna Jaswal, Narrator
Prague, Czechoslovakia had similar black markets according to Michal Ondrejcek.
Michal Ondrejcek
There was a black market for records. So if you wanted to, like buy Western music, you had to go somewhere, you knew where and then for a lot of money, you just bought some music. That was black market. Black market was, there were these special stores where you can buy either for dollars or German marks or for some special convertible crowns which were hard to get. And these stores, they were full of, like, you could buy jeans, you can buy some kind of electronics and so on. But, but that wasn't technically black market. What was black market was actually to convert your own crown currency to this special currency or to Western currency. So that, that worked as a black market and exchange rate.
Krishna Jaswal, Narrator
Personal connections also helped secure coveted goods as described by Tania Ionin.
Tania Ionin
In the Soviet Union, connections were a very big thing. You could get things if you were connected. So if you'll just take an example, let's say, you know somebody who works in a factory that makes nylon pantyhose. So then you might actually be able to get nylon pantyhose. Whereas, if you just go to a store, you probably wouldn't get it them. If you just depended on what's available in the store shelves, you suddenly wouldn't be able to think about fashion at all.
So you have to have connections, you have to have some ability to get things from beyond what's available on just the store shelves.
Krishna Jaswal, Narrator
Leisure life under communism took many forms, including city dwelling families seeking relief from urban life during the summer months. Many families would travel to state owned summer homes in the countryside. Ionin shares her memories of this system.
Tania Ionin
If you've ever heard the word dacha, it goes to before Soviet times, but it was also popular in the Soviet Union for families to spend the summer somewhere out in the country, by lake, by sea in a summer home. And some people were able to save up and buy their own tiny little summer homes. Most people, like my family, rented them.
Krishna Jaswal, Narrator
For fun, children growing up in communist countries had interests similar to American children, as described by Valeria Sobol, who grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine
Valeria Sobol
I was really into reading. I play piano. I took music lessons for eight years. I did some dance, mostly that, and we didn't have theater program like you have here, but we did our own a lot of performances that just students themselves produced.
Krishna Jaswal, Narrator
Michal Ondrejcek reflects on his interests as a youth growing up in Czechoslovakia.
Michal Ondrejcek
What young people, they just did hiking a lot. So we just left on Friday, we just jump on the train and we went outside and we spend, like, three days outside and we just hiked and slept in the woods and which was permitted. And so we did that a lot. So communal. You take your friends, we were partying obviously. But hobbies, reading, there's a lot of reading, Sports. Going to movies here as well.
Diza Baryshnikov, Narrator
Children and teens, of course, also spent a lot of their time in school. The school culture in communist countries provided an opportunity to socialize children to embrace communist ideals. Champaign resident Tania Ionin, who attended elementary school in Soviet Leningrad, recounts how schools revered Lenin.
Tania Ionin
So, stories about the wonderful Lenin. That was a staple part of childhood education. Children's books about Lenin as a child and what an amazing child he was and all the gifts that he gave to his mother and how kind he was to his siblings. And I mean, he was really venerated like it was raised to the level of religion. I would say that, that level of veneration, our amazing grandfather Lenin, pictures of him everywhere. So constant propaganda about how wonderful and amazing the country.
Diza Baryshnikov, Narrator
Another aspect of Soviet schools was its rigid classroom culture and standardized education programs. Professor Baryshnikov shares his memories of the Soviet school curriculum.
Yuliy Baryshnikov
In the Soviet Union, the school program was extraordinarily rigid. All schools, this is large country, twelve or ten, time zones, and in all the schools and whole country, all the kids were learning exactly the same stuff. Same textbooks, same program. The syllabus was exactly the same everywhere. In the so-called national republics like Ukraine or Kazakhstan, like that, the national languages will be also learned. Ukrainian in Ukraine or Romanian in Moldova and so on. But, by enlarge, literature, math, everything was exactly the same. It was in some sense was good because when you met somebody you knew that you read the same books. You could use a reference and everybody would understand you. People would expect to know exactly the same amount of math.
Diza Baryshnikov, Narrator
Professor Eda Derhemi also recalls intensive discipline during her school years in communist Albania.
Eda Derhemi Less freer than here. For example, the way you were evaluated was through, what in Italian they call it interrogazione, like as if it is interrogation– the same root as the word interrogation in English. Which is not like police interrogation, but you had to get up and stand in front of the whole classroom, in the very center of the blackboard and answer any questions that the teacher wanted to ask you. It was some sort of torture. I love talking and I love being in the center, but there were students that hated it. And some of them were very good students. So it's not that they were not prepared to answer, but that position in which you are put in that very, very center of attention bothered them. And that's not right. But, there was no way out.
Diza Baryshnikov, Narrator
Secondary schooling would become associated with intensive learning. 1980s Soviet Union held pride in its demanding education program, which included requiring advanced courses in math, literature, and ideological history. Professor Sobol shares her memories of school in Soviet Ukraine.
Valeria Sobol
We had very strong maths program. We had elements of calculus in high school and it was required, it wasn't like choice. So basically when I was taking the GRE for example for American graduate school, it covered math, the math part not the math subject, but the regular, covered math from through the eighth-grade of the Soviet schools. So it was very good. All the subjects were required, so we had physics we had chemistry, but for several years it wasn't as condensed as here it was kinda spread out more. Four years of physics, three years or four years of chemistry, a couple of years of biology, a lot of Russian literature and language, Ukrainian literature and language. All Russian schools had Ukrainian as a subject twice a week. English, didn't learn so well then. It was in college that I learned it better.
Diza Baryshnikov, Narrator
Professor Baryshnikov reflects on the pressure of school in Moscow, but also the pride he felt in the rigor of the Soviet curriculum.
Yuliy Baryshnikov
There were quite a bit of pressure. The work was harder. Pretty rigorous testing; like you couldn't get to the next grade if you don't pass this test. It was quite a bit of pressure on you.
Diza Baryshnikov, Narrator Education also took place outside of the classroom through the All-Union Leninist Communist League of Youth organization starting with the “Little Octobrists” for young children, the “Young Pioneers” for pre-teens, and the Komsomol for teenagers. These government run youth organizations provided an environment for young people to learn about communist history and ideals. Tania Ionin recalls her experience as a Young Pioneer growing up as a child in Soviet Moscow.
Tania Ionin
Every single child, school child, had to become a Young Pioneer actually at the end of elementary school; at the end of third grade. It was a very big deal. During elementary school, all the little kids were what are called Octobrists, like October children, because of the October Revolution. We wore a little pin with a little picture of Lenin as a young child. Then when you graduated to Pioneers, you got a different pin with Lenin, as now an old man bald and with a beard, and you got a red tie to wear. I think they got that from the boy and girl scouts movements. Even though everybody was expected to become a young pioneer upon moving from elementary to middle school, it was a very big deal, I would guess, probably everywhere, certainly at my school, at what point you got to become a Young Pioneer. So there was early admission for the really good kids: the ones who are very well behaved and are classroom leaders. And we had to vote on them; who are our best kids, who gets the first dibs in becoming young pioneers in, I don’t know, let’s say, February. And then let’s say April, I don't remember the exact date, most of the rest of the class, myself included, the regular kids, became Young Pioneers. But then the bad kids, the troublemakers who got bad grades, their young pioneering was delayed all the way until May. And, so the Soviet system was very big on this kind of division. Identifying who are the good kids, and who are the bad kids. Putting people in ranks like that. That was a very big thing.
Diza Baryshnikov, Narrator
Professor Valeria Sobol recounts the activities held during the Pioneer Program meetings in Soviet Ukraine.
Valeria Sobol
There were some meetings, we collected recycling. That wasn't the favorite part. The favorite parts was all the creative projects. Sometimes there was some competitions of, like, political song, but you had to present it as kind of almost a skit, also like theatrical way. So that was kind of interesting. A lot of just meetings and some kind of discussions of politics, which wasn't very really discussions so.
Diza Baryshnikov, Narrator
Professor Khessina shares her experience with the Young Pioneers and how it connected to future opportunities in the Soviet Union.
Olga Khessina
I was a member of all three. Everybody was. I mean, everyone was Octobrionic, everybody was a Pioneer. Komsomol becoming more selective, but was not the question not to be in that because you would need to be a member to get into any college. So it was a normal career building.
Diza Baryshnikov, Narrator
Professor David Cooper of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois provides his perspective on the effectiveness of the Soviet Union’s education system despite its other flaws.
David Cooper
One thing that studying this part of the world teaches you is, there's a lot of problems with the Soviet Union. Serious problems, with the incarceration and killing of their own citizens and the ways in which the politics worked to sort of stifle dissent. On the other hand, there were a number of things that worked well in the Soviet Union and the drive to equality in maybe different forms than we recognize. It was effective in some ways. So, education and literacy was quite strong in that part of the world.
Diza Baryshnikov, Narrator
Life in the USSR came with its challenges, but was also enduring. From living in communal apartments, to being an only child, to food shortages, to having hobbies like any other kid, to standardized education, all of these aspects capture the unique experience of living in the USSR. These firsthand accounts from Champaign-Urbana residents provide insights into daily life in a communist country.
Thank you for listening to “Back in the USSR: Daily Life in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc Nations” the 1st episode of “Over the Wall: Remembering Life Behind the Iron Curtain” a student-produced podcast by Uni High’s oral history project team. Each episode in this series focuses on part of the experience of Central Illinois residents who lived in the Soviet Union or other communist Eastern bloc countries, from daily life experiences to relationships with the West. All interviews featured in this podcast were conducted in Spring 2023 by Uni’s eighth-grade class. If you’d like to listen to more episodes of “Over the Wall: Remembering Life Behind the Iron Curtain,” check out the WILL website at will.illinois.edu/illinoisyouthmedia