Авоски

[faustin.livejournal.com]

I found this brief lesson in the December newsletter of the School of Russian and Asian Studies, http://sras.org.

(I think a native speaker could further amplify the significance of "Авос..." -- from a discussion a few months ago, I understand this to be a culturally-laden term, fatalistic, like "Who's to say?" or the Hebrew "shtam!" -- it happened for no reason! More recently, I heard it means something "stronger than maybe".)

Try mouse-over of underlined words to see a great use of HTML; I do this using the acronym tag. I couldn't preserve their "bold red" and "bold black" (also valuable!) but the mouseover effect was my work.

Language: Авоски ...Shopping Soviet-Style

Specific language developed around the complicated process of shopping in the Soviet Union. For example, "дефицит" came to mean not only "a shortage of goods" but was used to refer to the hard-to-find goods themselves. Some of this vocabulary is still in use today (indicated in bold black), while some has become "old fashioned" (indicated in bold red).

If people were lucky enough to see дефицит for sale, they wanted to отовариться with it, even if they did not need this particular thing at that time, just for the future. There was a specific etiquette that was employed. Newcomers would ask the queue:"Кто последний?". After some person replied, usually with a simple "Я" (I am) or "Я последний", the appropriate response was: "Я за вами". With this, the newcomers занимали очередь. Sometimes some rude person tried to пройти без очереди, but the rest of the queue used to tell him «Вас здесь не стояло». This process and language is still used in Russia wherever lines form (such as at a doctor's or government office).

Women in the Soviet Union did not often rest during their lunch break, as it was regarded as valuable time to достать groceries. Ladies used to take авоськи to work and бегали по магазинам during their lunchtime. It was also not uncommon to find men carrying meat or oranges in their otherwise empty briefcases if they had found these дефицит items for sale. However, it was not just food that was often hard to find. When some scarce good appeared in the stores, people used to say, for example: "Ботинки выбросили!".

A person was lucky if he or she had блат. This person could get дефицитные товары and many other things. There was a пародоксальная ситуация – for people with connections, холодильники были забиты едой, в то время как в магазинах был дефицит продуктов.

In mid-80s, талоны were introduced. However, in the bigger towns there were кооперативные магазины where wealthier people could buy sausage and other дефицитные товары at higher prices.