A Memoir of Soviet Ukraine, 1983: Part 2

John-Paul Himka

Soviet Ukraine in 1983 was no place for a foodie, unless you had friends and relatives who invited you over for meals. My wife and I were lucky – we had many relatives and some close friends, so we would be treated to local Galician cuisine, Moldavian wine, and the ubiquitous vodka. But much of the time, of course, we had to fend for ourselves, so we got to know the food situation rather well.

              We arrived in Lviv in January and left around the end of June or early July. So about half of our stay was in the winter. Grocery stores in the winter were a sorry sight. There was almost no produce, except some cabbages. There were dry goods: noodles, salt, flour, sugar, sometimes tea. There were also tins and jars of marinated tomatoes, birch sap juice, and sometimes fish. Available also on occasion was a limited selection of sausages and cheeses, none of it of good quality. Very occasionally we would run across frozen tomatoes from Bulgaria and, more rarely, frozen shrimp from, if I remember correctly, Cuba. Also, readily available during our stay in Ukraine were calamari. They had just arrived in the stores while we were there, and no one yet knew how to prepare them. Uncertain Soviet homemakers would reach for the mayonnaise, add some diced onions and maybe another vegetable, and create a salad with the boiled squid. No one battered and fried the kal’mar.

              Milk products were generally sold in special dairy stores. In spite of its many problems and its historic baggage of atrocities, the postwar Soviet Union fostered a child-friendly culture, and milk was readily available for the little ones. Particularly tasty products, in my estimation, were the kefir and what we might call sour cream, although Ukrainian smetana has as much relation to North American sour cream as wine has to Pepsi.

              There were also separate bakeries. Bread was a staple, and when we were there it was rare to have to wait in line for it. In fact, there was so much bread, and it was so heavily subsidized, that farmers used to buy it to feed their pigs. Tortes were sold in separate sweet shops.

              A saving grace in the whole food situation was the existence of farmers’ markets. Buses from the countryside, packed with women carrying huge bags full of produce, would bring in all kinds of goodies – dried mushrooms, honey, apples, fresh vegetables and berries, and flowers. Of course, prices were higher in the markets. In Lviv we would visit the Galician Market (Halyts’kyi rynok) and in Kyiv the famous Bessarabian Market. If one visits the Bessarabian Market today, it’s an airy, clean space filled with refrigerated counters offering meat, fish, and produce. In 1983, wretched cuts of meat, covered with flies, were the principal attraction. There was no refrigeration.

              Also, back then a truck would occasionally pull up somewhere and sell some rare product, such as live carp. On hot days, trucks would also pull up with kvas or beer. Lines formed immediately behind these trucks. People would first join the line and then ask what was being offered for sale.

              There were restaurants in Soviet Ukraine too. They were modest affairs and not noted for spotlessness. At first my wife and I tried to order from the menus we were presented with. But before long we caught on that the list of items on the menu had little relation to what was actually available for consumption. So when we did go out, we would ask what they actually had on offer, usually potatoes and some meat, maybe cabbage, always vodka. Working in a restaurant was a choice job in the Soviet Union. The staff would take home hard-to-acquire meat and produce, which helps explain why the printed menu did not match what the cooks and waiters were willing to share with customers.

              There were cafeterias that specialized in one dish or another. For example, there was a pel’mennaia that offered pel’mennye, dumplings filled with meat, a Russian dish that was popular in Ukraine, even in Lviv. Lviv also had a venue that sold potato pancakes (deruny) and another that served an odd combination of jelly donuts (ponchky) and beef consommé (rosil’).

              Today, with our post-pandemic sensibilities, we would be reluctant to use one institution of Soviet life. There were vending machines on city streets. You put in a kopeck or two and you would get a glass of carbonated water with fruit flavoring. But there was only one glass, made of glass, and it would be reused by all consumers. Before getting a drink for yourself, you would put the glass upside down in a niche and push a button – then cold water would squirt up from below, washing the glass. Then you would turn the glass right side up and press another button to deliver your beverage.

              Particularly in Lviv, cafés were popular. We would often get a sweet Turkish coffee (kava po-turets’ky), brought to a boil in a special little pot in a pan of hot sand. We’d accompany that with a little glass of some liqueur from the Baltic. Sometimes chicory was substituted for coffee. Cafés also served as bars.

              When we were there, I recall no one looking for a handout. Nor were people going through the trash in search of edible items. We didn’t see those sights until the 1990s, when Ukraine took the capitalist road. In the late Soviet Union, there was not great variety in food, but there was enough of it, and it was affordable. It took decades, but Soviet Ukraine had finally left behind the crises of the famine years and war years.