More City Life -- with garbage

Recently my former student, the Ukrainian poet, shared an article about the masses of plastic trash that are filling the oceans of the world. The article (from the Ukrainian newspaper Zbruc) featured this image:

The original article can be found here.

Most of us are aware of this huge environmental issue, though when you are a landlubber like me you might not always be focused on the problems of the marine world. But you don't need to be in a sea kayak to know that our world is endangered by trash.

Having grown up in the 1970s, I have always been obsessed with recycling and reusing. Some parents my age complain about their children the eco-terrorists, who internalize the lessons of elementary school and torture them at home with their righteousness about environmental issues. But I actually got those lessons from my own father, with whom I used to cart bottles to the recycling station. We had to separate them into clear, green and brown, and my dad made a game of it. We also recycled paper, smashed aluminum cans to store them more easily before finding somewhere to redeem them, and reused glass jars whenever we could.

Here's an example of a rug braided from bread bags!

And we saved Mason jars, which my grandmother would return to us filled with bread and butter pickles or applesauce or rhubarb sauce or canned peaches. Our family friend, Mrs. Prindle, collected plastic bread bags and braided them into rugs (hard to imagine, I know, but they were actually fairly functional). And of course my grandmother was the queen of plastic flower vases made from old dishwashing soap containers, decorated wastebaskets that had once been 5 gallon ice cream tubs, and so on.

Now, as an adult, I carry cloth bags or backpacks with me to the grocery store, I reuse my Bonne Maman jam jars for spices, and I make my own selzer water rather than buying it in twelve-packs. We pride ourselves on generating fairly little trash (though our recycling container is often filled to the brim).

But our efforts are nothing compared to life in the late Soviet Union. There may have been lines at the stores and food distribution problems, but there was also almost no packaging.

Classic Soviet string bag

In those days, everyone carried an avos'ka or string bag.  Avos' has a funny etymology, and in my mind it must have taken the place, in Soviet times, of the expression "Дай Бог" ("God grant..."). The name might be seen as optimistic, but really came to imply the unlikelihood that you might actually buy anything in the Soviet consumer landscape. Apparently the word emerged in a 1935 monologue by Soviet comic actor Arkady Raikin, for whose character hope sprung eternal: «Это — авоська. Авось-ка я что-нибудь в ней принесу» / "This is a string bag. With any luck I'll bring something home in it." On Russian websites like "Encyclopedia of our Childhood" memories of the avos'ka include children's embarrassment at neighbors seeing what they bought at the store, amazement at how many empty bottles fit into the bag when claiming the deposit money, and joy at the recollection of vegetables and fruit of one kind or another, especially how well a watermelon fit into the string bag. When my aunt visited me in Moscow in 1988, she was so impressed with how local people shopped that I brought her a string bag straight from the source when I returned to the U.S.

Made in a Siberian prison outside of Kemerovo!

In 1992 when my mother and I toured a Siberian prison (that's another whole story!), we came away with several items made in the prison workshops, including a knotted bag that still garners compliments every time I use it. (My usual response, "Oh, I got it in Siberia, a gift from a prison director," cause a kind of stunned silence -- so much so that I've now taken to merely saying "Thank you.") The important factor here is size and packaging. If you walk to the store with your string bag, you can't buy that much -- and you become a "European" shopper who buys for one day at a time. But it is also the case that in the old Soviet system, when you purchased fresh food (such as cheese cut to order and wrapped in paper, or several onions by weight, or even a watermelon), there was very little packaging! 

The huge transformation in Russia came not with the fall of the Communist Party, but with the concomitant rise of consumerism, and consumer packaging. It turns out that the supermarket is more convenient -- more goods on the shelf, more access (instead of requesting something from an employee, you can pick it up yourself and put it in your cart), more of what you need in one place rather than in separate MEAT and FISH and BREAD stores -- but it also generates more trash.

Trash spilling out of the urn --
like an American city park after a weekend festival.

Classic Soviet rubbish urn

Trash receptacles in Soviet cities were not bins, but "urns" -- small and metal or concrete and in fact fairly discreet. This was fine, because there wasn't that much to throw away. Mostly people discarded newspapers, ice cream wrappers, and cigarette butts -- and when the urns caught on fire, the fire was well-contained. I recall walking by smoldering trash urns on the streets of Leningrad and Moscow in the Soviet era. That all ended with the advent of packaging, with the results now something like this photo of a park (right). 

The tragedy of trash is a world-wide phenomenon, and it's funny to look back on Soviet days as halcyon. I wonder whether this babushka would feel the same.

Note the double string bags, filled with bread!