How in the USSR military equipment was exchanged for bananas

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Today bananas are no longer considered some kind of exotic fruit. You can buy them in almost every supermarket and small retail outlet. But there were also completely different times when this product was perceived as something special, festive and unusual.

Soviet people often joked that there were three types of these very bananas in the country - green, dried and textile. The latter group meant a model of trousers that were wide at the hips and narrow at the ankles. Absolutely all young people dreamed of getting this thing in the eighties.

As for natural edible bananas, they appeared in the USSR for the first time in 1938, some time after Stalin said the phrase, which became winged: "Life has become better, life has become more fun."

There really was some truth in this. After difficult times (revolution, and then the Civil War), the country gradually went through a recovery period. It was also possible to pamper citizens with exotic, unusual fruits for them.

But there was a catch. These fruits were not available to everyone. Bananas could only be bought by those who lived in Moscow or the population of the capitals of other republics. As for the provincial towns, and even more so in the villages, no one here knew anything about bananas or even heard. Even before the First World War began, bananas were sold in large cities in Tsarist Russia. On Tverskaya, in the famous Eliseev store, they lay in whole clusters, attracting the attention of buyers. But in twenty-five years they were simply forgotten.

Anastas Mikoyan, who at that time was the people's commissar of foreign trade, recalled that bananas were to Stalin's taste. Some time after the end of the Second World War, he gave the order to make purchases of these fruits especially for the central stores of all large Soviet cities. True, Mikoyan did not understand how it was possible to spend the scarce currency on this, since he himself did not like bananas.

Bananas came to the USSR unripe. They were cut off in this state on purpose in order to exclude damage during transportation. After the purchase, buyers first wrapped the fruits in paper and left them in a dark place to ripen, and only then, after a certain period, they ate.

Vietnam and China have become the main suppliers of these fruits to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics since the mid-1950s. The most interesting thing is that there was no need to pay with hard currency. They were supplied in exchange for military equipment and for the payment of loans. Gradually, the banana monopoly passed to Vietnam, as relations between the Soviet Union and China began to deteriorate and became very tense. Over time, Cuba also joined the supply. Today, bananas are mainly supplied by Colombia, the Philippines, Costa Rica and Ecuador.

Even in the movie "Old Man Hottabych" the bananas are green

Many of us remember the children's film "Old Man Hottabych", which was released in 1957. There was an episode with a bunch of bright green bananas. Of course, the fruits used for filming are not real. They were made of papier-mâché specifically for this scene. The property managers did not even suspect that the ripe fruits were yellow, and they made them in the form in which they were sold in stores.

Bananas were supplied to the Soviet Union not only fresh, but also dried or, as they said, dried. Chinese products were delivered in flat metal boxes. Vietnamese people came to us in vacuum transparent packages. In Soviet times, fresh bananas were not only a rare commodity, but also very expensive. A kilogram of fruit had a fairly high price - two rubles, which was approximately equal to ten loaves of bread.

The Customs Committee of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics issued a new decree in September 1991. According to him, an impressive list of goods was exempted from tax. The notorious bananas also got here. In this regard, their import into the country has grown six hundred times. Now we can buy bananas in any locality and in any grocery store, and very inexpensively.