Born in the USSR: 10 Things I Grew Up Without

A list of ten things that were scarce in my childhood that I now take for granted

When I think back on my childhood I mostly see it as a happy time, a period of limitless reading, discoveries, and fun. Only when I compare it with my friends in Spain, where I currently live, I am reminded that a lot of things that were a given in their childhoods and that I take for granted now, were missing or scarce in mine.

Was I unhappy because I didn’t have them? I don’t think so. Their absence was what I then took for granted. Also, there were many people around us that lacked even more. I had always considered myself fortunate. Others, even in Soviet Lithuania, lived in relative abundance and would probably find a few things on the list below surprising.

In no particular order, here are the ten things that were scarce in my childhood that I now often take for granted:

Hygiene

In the late 80s, when my grandfather was sick, my father would sometimes take me to his office. There was a lemonade vending machine in the building where he worked. We would stop in front of it, my father would drop in a coin of 20 kopeks, and I would happily drink my glass of sweet yellow liquid.

We would then put the glass back into the machine. There was only one glass for everyone’s use.

It was also very common to share the same glass around the table when having strong drinks. And it’s not because glasses were scarce. It was a way to make sure everyone was on the same page and had the same share of alcohol.

I sometimes wonder how many people have contracted flu or hepatitis through those shared glasses, but there’s no way to tell.

Space

My parents did not have their own apartment until I finished high school. My maternal grandparents, my parents, my older brother, and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment together for eighteen years.

My grandparents slept in the living room on the sofa-bed which in the daytime was converted into a sofa. Our family of four slept in the adjacent room one entered from the living room. There was just enough space for another sofa-bed, a bunk bed for me and my brother, a desk, a wardrobe, and a bookcase.

My brother would use the desk to do his homework, so I would do mine on the bed. That sofa-bed, always kept open and covered with a blue plaid quilt, provided space for most of our daily activities. We would eat, do homework, read, and play on it. And in the mornings, when our parents were away and could not scold us, we would use it as a trampoline to jump on from the top bunk of our bed.

My father, horribly fed up with the situation, joined the Communist Party — even though he was strongly against it — hoping that he would be placed in the queue for getting an apartment. The decision got my father into a horrible row with my mother. His name was eventually put on the list, but his turn never came until Lithuania declared independence in 1990 and that system of favors was shut down.

Privacy

I first had a room of my own when I was 19 and started university. By then, twelve years after the independence, my parents managed to put together enough money to buy a two-bedroom apartment, and we moved out of my grandparents' place.

Until then, the toilet was the only place where I could be alone. It was the place where I first touched myself, and where I cried inconsolably when my boyfriend left me in my last year of school — all this tainted by the knowledge that at any moment someone would knock on the door and scold me for taking so long. In a family of six with only one toilet, I had to come to terms with the fact that the boundaries of our privacy were determined by very basic needs.

Silence

These days — or rather nights — when I lie awake listening to some far-away muffled noises from a neighbor’s apartment, I often think back on the time when I would easily fall asleep with my grandparents’ TV roaring in the next room, and my parents watching their portable TV in our bedroom.

I would play, do my homework, read with the TV on, with my family talking, or more often arguing, sometimes even threatening to kill each other.

Maybe that’s why I loved — and still love— books so much. They never failed to grant me those three things I did not even realize I was lacking — space, privacy, and silence. I would get away from the cramped space of our Soviet apartment the moment I opened a book.

And maybe that’s why I have never owned a TV.

Toilet paper

The Soviet Union started producing toilet paper in the late 60s, more than ten years after successfully launching Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite in history. As all factories were owned by the government, there was no competition, and thus no need for quality. The Soviet toilet paper was brownish and so coarse, that you could easily hurt yourself by using it.

In any case, we didn’t have to face that problem, as even in the late 80s there was still a shortage of toilet paper, and often times we used ripped newspapers instead. Thanks to my grandmother who worked in a hospital laundry, sometimes we also got to use cellulose wadding which was meant for medical use. I used to find pieces of it on top of our WC, and for years it did not occur to me to question its origin.

Landline

One could have a landline phone in Soviet times, but in Lithuania, it was still quite rare until the fall of the Soviet Union. I was in my first year of school when it was installed in our apartment in 1991. Our phone number was 258004 — yes, I still remember it — and for the first year we only paid a small fixed monthly fee, so I would spend hours on the phone with my classmates.

Sometimes when I marked the number, there would be a strange sound, and I would hear voices of another call interspersing with mine in the background. Those moments of accidental eavesdropping were mysterious and thrilling, and I would try all possible tricks to repeat them.

Color TV

We had two TV sets at home: a huge Soviet “Tauras” lamp TV, and a tiny portable TV set “Silelis”. Both were black and white, and we would spend a lot of time trying to find the right direction for their antennas and catch the signal.

My other grandmother, who lived across the road, was the first one to get a color TV in the mid-90s, and all our family would gather in her apartment on weekends to watch nature documentaries. Seeing all these distant and unknown lands so vivid with color filled me with wonder and is still one of my fondest childhood memories.

WC

There are few things that disgust people born in the Western World more than a squat toilet. If you are about to stop reading, don’t panic, we did have a WC at home. But.. not at school.

I started school months before Lithuania declared its independence, but that piece of Soviet legacy extended way beyond the Soviet era. Only squat toilets were available in my school until I finished it in 2002.

Hot water

For many years in a row during my childhood hot water was switched off for several weeks or sometimes even months in summer. And after living for more than a decade in Spain and sometimes brushing my teeth with cold water, I can say that cold water is really cold in Lithuania. Your teeth would ache if you tried to brush them with it even in summer.

I don’t know if it was because summer was considered the best time to fix the pipes — something I highly doubt was done every year — or because of any other reasons, it was a common practice in most of the Soviet Union, and is still being done in Russia these days.

I still remember my grandmother and my mother heating huge pots of water for our weekly bath.

Fruit

The smell of mandarin oranges still transports me to my grandparents' apartment in Lithuania on Christmas. It was the only time in the entire year when we got to eat mandarins.

On Christmas morning my brother and I would each find an entire bag of mandarins under the Christmas tree. We would try not to eat more than one mandarin a day, but my brother was always better than me in saving things for later, so it would always end in teasing and tears.

For years I thought that bananas were these wrinkly brown gummy sticks that my grandmother once brought home. Were they caramelized bananas she must have gotten from someone as a bargain? Is there such thing as caramelized bananas? I don’t know. I only know that they looked ugly and successfully took my mind away from exotic fruit for a few years.

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