Ilya Magid

THE JUNK HEAP IN THE SOVIET UNION AND IN THE USA

This book could be written only with help of Steven Siegel

Boston
1997.

THE JUNK HEAP IN THE SOVIET UNION AND IN THE USA

CONTENTS

1. The American Junk Heap
2. The Soviet Junk Heap
    2.1 The peculiarity of the soviet Junk Heap
    2.2 Spoiled Food
    2.3 Paper Business
    2.4 Commission Shops

1. The American Junk Heap

The best job that I have ever had has been examining a Junk heap. That is similar to discovering gold in the Klondike. The American Junk Heap surprised me as a Russian. I will describe this problem in the Soviet Union later in this article.

America has everything, but the prices in the regular shop are too high for people like me. America is a mobile society. People drive to their jobs. Many Americans change their apartments during the period from August to October. (During that time their leases expire.). Some people have many things they do not need or use.

The Americans have the possibility to dispose of their extra things in the following ways:

-Junk heap
-Yard sale
-Flea market sale
-Sales organized by the church, synagogues
-Thrift shops
- Charitable donation

If American people donate something to the church, synagogue, thrift shops they can receive a tax deduction. As an alternative they might be able to receive money after a resale shop sells those things. The shop provides a receipt for the sale. The prices for the customers could be 1\10 of the prices in the regular shops or free. I have to tell you that regular shops also organize sales with greatly reduced prices.

The American people place their trash in a junk heap in bags, big things without bags, on the sidewalk on a certain day of the week. At a certain hour, the truck comes to take the trash from the sidewalk.
A big building, such as mine for elderly people, has a chute with a hatch in the corridor. We throw our garbage through the hatch into the chute. In the yard there is a big dumpster. A few times a week a truck comes to empty the dumpster.

In America you can find in the junk heap a good TV, shelf for books, etc. Many immigrants from Russia acquired all their things for their first apartment from a junk heap. Near my building there is a thrift shop. Its owner drives from one junk heap to the other and chooses furniture and other things for the shop.

America has yard, garage, flea market sales, sales by churches and synagogues, etc. How do the potential customers learn about the sales? They could read the advertisements in different places (post, bulletin board, etc.). They could read in the local newspapers about that. Individual families organize yard and garage sales. Volunteers organize sales at a church or synagogue. Private persons organize a flea - market, usually in the suburbs. There one can buy new things cheaper than in regular shops.

In America also there are many thrift shops. I know one thrift shop where the price of things for retired citizens is reduced by 20% on Mondays.


Junk food

In Boston there are different prices for similar foods. -' Shops very often organize a sale for some foods. In the Haymarket you can buy food cheaper than in the regular shops. Before the closing of the Haymarket on Saturday evening you can buy everything cheaper or receive some things free.

In the church you could also receive food free but very often that food is purchased with expired sales date. The church organized a free dining room for some people. You could receive food free from the Red Cross. All the same, much food is thrown out.

In America there is taking place a re-distribution of wealth. When I see a person, I can't understand how wealthy he is.

In the Soviet Union, even though my wife and I were engineers and under the Soviet standard we had good income, we found it very difficult to buy everything we needed.

Here in America we have closets about which we could only have dreamed before. All our things in America are foreign for Russia. Such things were in the dreams of each Soviet person.

2. The Soviet Junk Heap
(My Leningrad experience)

2.1 The peculiarity of the soviet Junk Heap

The Soviet people very rarely changed the places where they lived. In the Soviet Union a Junk Heap consisted of trash, leftover and spoiled food. (See" Spoiled food".) The Junk Heap didn't consist of papers and clothing. (See "Paper business" and" Commission Shop".)

The shop did not provide bags as in American shops and did not sell garbage bags. The citizens did not have the opportunity to place garbage and trash into plastic bags for disposal. They accumulated their trash in metal or plastic buckets.

My neighborhood consisted of three 9-story cooperative buildings (with 45 apartments each) and six 5-story government buildings (with 100 apartments each) and 2 food shops. For my neighborhood there was one place for storing garbage. There were two big containers where the citizens took their garbage in a pail. My contemporary 9- story building had a trash chute with sealed hatches that could not be opened. This restriction against using the chute was to prevent the infestation by mice and cockroaches in the buildings. I went with my metal bucket from the 8th floor to the garbage storage maybe 10 minutes away. Twice a week a garbage truck took the garbage to a central dump.

2.2 Spoiled Food
In the Soviet Union all persons bought food in Government shops. A wealthy person could also buy food in the private, open market for higher prices. The government shops had constant prices ascertained in Moscow. From their beginning the Government shops did not have good food. Vegetables were without bags. If vegetables were bad a person rarely bought them. Sometimes the vegetables were not so bad, but the prices were the same. Then there was a big line and people bought a big quantity of those products. (We stood in lines for many hours.)

Bread was also without a bag. The price of bread was low. In bread shops we saw government ads: "Bread is our treasure." "You have to be concerned about the importance of all bread.". They gave advice about what you could prepare with stale bread.

Very often the soviet people panicked. They bought out all the food and bread. The government announced on TV: "We produced more than three times the daily requirement for bread. We have enough flour and food." They began to give one loaf per person at a time. However, each person -- would go to the line many times or all family members would go to buy bread, to obtain many loaves of bread. Then they dried the bread to preserve it.
All the same, the bread and groats spoiled and produced worms, and then the people threw all the spoiled food into the garbage.

One time the government placed a metal container on each floor of the apartment building for storage of food products. They probably wanted to send that food to government farms. That was not so good for the tenants. There was an odor in the corridor; maybe the residents put garbage into the containers. After a short time the containers were removed.

Big cities such as Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev were in a special position. One woman from a province told me: "The whole country worked for those cities."

People maybe from 150 miles around Moscow traveled by train to Moscow for food. About other special cities the situation was the same*.

_________________________________________________
*The Soviet people could not live where they wanted; they had to have a special registration in the passport about their permanent home.
__________________________________________________

In those special cities the shops had one or two kinds of boiled sausage. Those sausages I had to eat within 1-2 days after buying them or they would spoil.

The vendors brought from the big cities 10-20 pounds of sausage to their town. (You thought that it was easy to buy 20 pounds of sausage. The shop's clerk gave the vendor only - 2-3 pounds at one time. The vendors stayed many times in the same line or went to other shops to buy more sausage.) Those sausages spoiled very quickly. Perhaps the customer gave them to the dogs. The same situation existed about other food.

In towns and villages far from Moscow I thought that problem with spoiled food did not exist because they did not have food or gave food to customers for a card.

I never heard about giving free food (or clothing) in the Soviet Union. Food was cheap. Very poor persons went to cafeterias and ate remainders from the tables.

2.3 Paper Business

The first difference between a Soviet and an American Junk heap was the quantity of paper. Printed papers in Russia were produced in smaller quantity than in America. All soviet newspapers consisted of two and rarely three pages.

In the 70s-80s the government organized the paper business. The Government needed paper for recycling to reduce the paper shortage. On the other hand there were not many books available for the public. A bookstore had many books about each succeeding dictator and other ideological books. Each dictator burned the books of the last dictator. (They could not go for recycling.). If there sometimes appeared a book for the public, a very long line formed and the police kept order in the line.

Around the paper business there arose a boom. If you sold 20 kilograms of paper you could receive 40 kopeks and a ticket to receive a certain book. You could go to the bookshop and buy that book for the regular price. Before the organization of that business you could sell paper for the price of 1 kilogram for 2 kopeks but people rarely sold paper, because it had a very low price.

The government organized a distribution system with many new trucks and small shops where merchants received paper for recycling. The number of people who were ready to - give away waste papers exceeded the number of tickets for books that the government made available for sale.

In Leningrad the closest truck to me was 6 stops on the - bus. An activist person organized a list for the vendors of wastepaper. Once a month all those people met together to be checked. You could hear: "if your name is in notebook #5 come to this tree, etc." If you didn't check in the notebook two times, they would delete you from the line. The activists could have included their friends dishonestly.

The radio would announce the day when the wagon would receive paper in exchange for a ticket for a certain book. Previously an activist would assign a number for each person. With that number all citizens with packets of paper 20-60 kilograms (50-150 pounds) went to the shop. My wife and I with a shopping cart with maybe 40 kilograms of paper went to the bus sop and rode to the truck. (Then we were younger than right now.) On that day the police kept order. There was the danger of a fight.

Very soon people used all the paper that they had saved. They began to steal plant paper. Then there was an order not to accept plant paper and other rules for vendors. The vendors would refuse to accept the paper and sent the customer away. However, the customer would beg the vendor to accept the paper without receiving cash, but only for a ticket for a bundle of paper. The vendors were rich people.

As I remember, the names of those "waste paper" books were:

-"Three Musketeers,"
-"Count of Montecristo,"
-"Queen Margo," all by Dumas, and
"Woman in White by Collings, etc.
________________________________________________________
*At that time there was an anecdote: A black man with a bundle of papers entered the Soviet Union by driving across one of its borders. The guard asked him: "Why do you take paper?" He answered: "I heard that in the Soviet Union I could buy a white woman for 20 kilograms of paper."
___________________________________________________

Sometimes you could buy illegally a ticket for a book for the price of 5 rubles.

When you had a ticket, another problem was to be able to find the book in the shop.

Students' schools also had a plan for giving wastepaper. That created the problem for parents and grandparents of moving the paper to the schools.
When I am walking on the sidewalk in Boston I see much wastepaper, and I think of how many "waste paper" books I could have received in Russia.

Before emigration I mailed all "trash" books to Boston. After stacking those books on our shelf in Boston, I sold them very well for a price of $20 (1 book for $1).

2.4 Commission Shop

All the times in Leningrad we had a problem with high fashion merchandise. It was hard to buy in the regular shops. We also had nothing compared to American discount s sales. We did not have yard, garage, flea market sales, or sales organized by the church, because they were forbidden. I In the Soviet Union all shops, including commission shops, were government owned. All retail shops had a constant price - for the same kind of thing. The prices in the retail shops and commission shops were nearly the same. You could buy good things at a higher price than the indicated shop price. However, that as illegal and was called speculation; those - participating were prosecuted.

Commission shops had 5-10 times more workers than in comparable American shops. There were also the special inspectors of the merchandise. The main principle of commission trade did not permit a consignor to earn additional money. The shop received only 7% of the selling price.

There was a procedure in place for receiving merchandise. The shop's clerk wrote each item on a Slip. He or she evaluated every thing in a catalog of products that were produced in the Soviet Union. They checked a suggested selling price. Very often they argued about the price. There were also rules for checking foreign clothes, which were in increasing demand. They wrote a receipt for all merchandise, which the commission shop accepted for sale.

You could go to check the process of selling. The big notebook was in the trade hall with the numbers of items being sold. If the things were sold, a date of sale was entered. Money was received three days later. If a product did not sell during the month, the shops could reduce the price by 20%. Usually valuable things, especially foreign, sold on the first day. The shop's sales people bought them and they could sell them illegally for a higher price to their friends, acquaintances, etc. In the Soviet Union the sales people were people with small earnings below the Soviet standard, but they lived very well as a result of their illegal sales.

A very big problem was the consignors' big lines in the commission shops. All shops in Leningrad had dinner break from 2 to 3 p.m. We had to go earlier than the shop really opened to get in line. Maybe in that situation we could give things before the dinner break. In other cases, we had to go out of the shop and wait in line until dinner break was - over. If you wanted to consign different kinds of things you had to wait in line in different departments or special shops. If the vendor did not accept all things, a consignor could go to other commission shops. That way I introduced myself to a new region of Leningrad. (The soviet citizens -, very rarely had their own car.)

To avoid a crowd of people that stood in line for a long - time, one big commission shop changed its rules of receiving - merchandise from consignors. On the first day of each month, upon opening the shop there was organized a line for consignors of merchandise for the full month. The vendors gave to the consignors the tickets for the designated time - of arrival of the merchandise. You could not come at any other time. (I think vendors at a slow time could receive merchandise illegally from their friends.)

In the Soviet Union wealthy people wore foreign things or Soviet things, which were very hard to buy in the shops (high style shoes, sweaters, leather coats, etc.). Poor persons - wore Soviet clothes until they wore out. The status of Soviet persons was evident from the clothing they wore, and depressed expression on their faces.

Home | Email Us