Nostalgia Feeds Taste for Soviet Era

Russians may be divided sharply on whether the Soviet era was the good old days. But it is the time when most of them were young.


So, like it or not, a patina of nostalgia, or maybe kitsch, has spread over that gray world of communal apartments, chronic shortages, propaganda slogans, controlled newspapers and political taboos.


The door to Petrovich, a popular club in the basement of a nondescript building off Myasnitskaya Ulitsa, has five clumsy doorbells, just as the old communal apartments had. The membership card is a Communist Party ticket. Inside, window sills and walls are packed with junky Soviet memorabilia.


Outside the toilets hangs a glossy black-and-white photograph of a large group of men in ill-fitting suits and women with beehive hairdos under a statue of Leonid Brezhnev. The caption identifies them as an "all-Union conference of psychiatrists" held in 1977 in Brezhnev's native city, Dneprodzerzhinsk.


On the menu, a pancake with caviar is called "No to Racism!" - after a typical slogan of a May Day parade.


This is stuff anyone who remembers the world before 1991 would appreciate, as they would the patched accordion their grandfather kept on a shelf, the washed-out postcards perched in the glass bookcase, the old taxi meter that never worked, or the cheery girl on the cover of Soviet Peasant.


"The idea was to recreate the forgotten years - the communal apartment, the Soviet 'middle class,' the herring, the pickles, the postcards," said Yekaterina Razgovora, a manager of Petrovich. "People feel at ease here. They feel at home. This is an era they all remember, a youth they can appreciate."


Interest in Soviet memorabilia is hardly new, at least among tourists. But those Russians who couldn't dump their Soviet junk fast enough when the old order collapsed are those who now find themselves attracted to echoes from the past.


Even in the shopping mall under Manezh Square, whose three floors of shops are unabashedly aimed at the nouveau riches, one of the stands in the food court is called Dining Room No. 14, as it might have been in the Soviet days.


You find it on television, too. A commercial for a popular brand of Indian tea that used to be in great shortage in the Soviet Union starts with black-and-white images of a man proudly bringing the familiar package with an elephant home to an admiring family. The package acquires color and a voice intones, "The tea you remember."


Foreign companies have not failed to recognize the draw of the past. Dannon, the yogurt maker, markets a "classic kefir," supposedly made to taste like the yogurt-like dairy product Russians grew up on.


One of the more popular television shows, "Old Apartment," draws huge audiences on Sundays focusing on something from the past and finding people who remember to discuss it. Grigory Gurvich, the host, says the discussions often get emotional.


"Of course, those who remember the past seriously, remember a hell, a nightmare, especially the communal apartments," Gurvich said. "But as Yevgeny Yevtushenko said when he was on recently, it was a horror, but that's how we grew up. We were young."


It is this world that Petrovich tries to recreate - in a mushroom julienne named "Petrovich's dream of Paris, where he has not yet been," or in the black-and-white movies about the triumphs of a young Bolshevik in agriculture that constantly play over the bar.


"Sometimes I wonder if my kids will ever believe what it was like," said a businessman in his 30s, whose wife works for a Western car company. "I try to tell them about the lines, about living in a two-room apartment with their grandparents, about how nervous we were if we met a foreigner.


"They just look at me as if I'm describing an alien land. I am."