What foreign products were available in the USSR?
Tangerines from Morocco, processed cheese from Finland, canned vegetables from Hungary and Bulgaria – Soviet housewives knew how to make an impressive holiday table spread.
Products from abroad, as well as other goods, came mainly from the Socialist Bloc countries, rarely from the Western powers. One of the first capitalist countries to start supplying products to the USSR was Finland. Boxes of ‘Viola’ brand cheese with a girl on the label were eagerly bought. As were frozen vegetables from Poland and canned vegetables from Bulgaria and Hungary. Almost every housewife had a jar of green peas for the New Year's table. Some products, such as bananas, were bought unripe. A bunch of green bananas (they were imported to the USSR from Ecuador and Cuba) was hidden in a cupboard, where it was supposed to lie until it ripened.
A typical picture from a Soviet movie: The main protagonist shows his apartment and, in one of the rooms, of course, there is a scarce wall unit with a bar, where bottles of foreign alcohol are displayed. The Soviet Union was regularly supplied with Czech beer, Bulgarian brandy and Romanian vermouth. And PepsiCo decided not just to begin supplying after establishing a working relationship with the Soviet government. In 1959, it presented its products at an exhibition in Moscow's Sokolniki Park and, in the 1970s, the first workshop for the production of the flagship drink opened in Novorossiysk.
