Snickers, McDonald’s, and Other Russian Time Travel Devices

In a Russian television commercial for Snickers from the early 2000s, a massive and bearded warrior sporting a huge red cape rides a horse across a desolate wilderness, passing four ludicrous folk musicians dressed in peas- ant shirts, one playing a balalaika as big as a door. It’s right out of a Russian bylina, supersized myth meeting modern farce. The warrior stops his horse to face an unseen monster in a cave whose roars create a huge wind that splats half-digested food all over the warrior. He spits it off his face, then dramatically pulls from his wide hip’s sheath—to the singing sound of metal sliding from metal—a Snickers bar. He hurls it into the cave, then files his nails to the sound of a contented monster burping.

The Snickers bar arrived in Russia as a magic weapon, a power to sub- due dragons, a threat in the shape of a treat.

Its arrival rhymed with mine, in 1992, in the wake of the fall of Communism, and soon populated every other kiosk in Moscow. In the post-Soviet landscape of Russia, where the trains were standing room only, where drivers refused to use their headlights even at night, where hot water and electricity were intermittent luxuries, and cafés nonexistent, a single Snickers bar became a miniature time travel device. On an electric train heading into Moscow from the suburbs of Kaliningrad, in the cloud of diesel fume and cigarette smoke and laborer sweat, standing among the laborers, I tore into the wrapper of my first Russian Snickers. Though the chocolate was a little chalky, it filled my nostrils with home. I suddenly saw a vision of myself as a teenager in our family room, still sweating from wearing a rubbery monster mask, laying out a spread of Halloween booty, divided by kind, relishing the small pile of Snickers. The chewy caramel gave way to the crunchiness of peanuts, sweet and savory, the inextricability of joy and sorrow, each sweet bite closer to the bar’s disappearance.

The next day, walking back from the train station with little Alyosha, who was showing me his neighborhood, I passed a kiosk with a brown-and- blue-wrapped Snickers in the window. He was the child of the family that took me in while I was planning my first steps of a post-college fellowship year researching Russian poetry, and he had taken it upon himself to be my guide to all things Russian. He was ten years old, freckled and round faced, but he carried himself with the street smarts and wit of an apprentice hoo- ligan. A Russian version of Alfred E. Newman, Alyosha’s comically rudi- mentary English matched perfectly my comically rudimentary Russian. We were like two head-damaged drunks, slurring in tongues not quite our own.

“Snickers! Would you like one?” I asked in Russian. He shook his head, as if his neck hurt in the turning.

“Do you know Snickers?” he asked, his eyes wide. “Have you eaten one?”

“Of course.”

“It’s too mahch,” he said, even his vowels extending in complaint. “Too much?”

“That’s what a kilo of sausage costs. A month’s pass to the pool,” he said, in Russian.

I bought it anyway and reached it out toward him.

He looked at it in his hands for a long time, holding it as if it were art.

When he finally tore it open, his face mixed shame and delight.

Russian ads from that time touted the Snickers “fat” layer of choco- late—the word for “thick” and “fat” being the same in Russian. Soon, a joke circulated among kids: “What happened to Snickers when it came to Russia? It lost weight!”

Other than some portly babushkas, for whom weight was a sort of weatherizing, very few Russians were fat in the classic American sense. And how could they be? Russians seemed to be in constant motion, hus- tling from labor to labor, mostly getting around on their own two feet, then spending the weekends on their knees in rustic gardens, pulling weeds and growing what would keep them through the winter. They had just come out of the nightmare of Soviet power and now they found themselves in the chaos of the free market. In the first month after I arrived, the Russian ruble was brought into the open market, and its value plummeted. Within months, inflation ran over 2,000 percent. People lost their life savings over- night, and the new economy was more Wild West than Western Europe. Naturally, they panicked, despaired, begged, haggled, stole, and sometimes murdered to grab hold onto the cliffside down which all were falling. The whole country was going through the crescendo of the stages of grief—in denial or anger, in resignation or acceptance, but mostly just panicked bar- gaining over everything that could be bought or sold.

In a Los Angeles Times article two years later, Carey Goldberg would write,

I lived for three months with a modest Russian family on a modest Russian budget, waited in endless lines for tickets to packed and tardy trains, ate fish and sauerkraut and borscht even for breakfast, with few forays into the world of Snickers and Big Macs. I saw how the Maslovs suffered every expense, every little cost. They never lost their heads, like so many others, and tried to maintain their dignity amid despair. Svetlana would carry our lunch into Moscow, handmade bread and butter sandwiches and perhaps a little Mishka Russian chocolate for a treat. She never bought Snickers.

The Snickers bar was the avant-garde of American consumer capital- ism, the chocolate-enrobed, nougat-peanut-caramel spear tip of what we had to offer, both invitation and invasion. While Artemy Troitsky named Snickers a top-ten “object of the year” in 1993, a hardline newspaper edi- torial lamented sardonically how the West had “flooded the country with chocolate bars, and now when you ask schoolchildren to name the planets, they quickly answer, ‘Mars, Snickers ...’ ”

Since the beginning, the Soviet planned economy had been full of shortages; if capitalism runs on excess, communism was a system that ran on deficit. People were known to queue up outside a store just because other people were queuing up, knowing that the queue itself would reveal some- thing—baby toilets, light bulbs, watermelon—that could either be used or traded for something of use. Yet, of all the shortages in the Soviet economic system, the greatest shortage would not be found in stores. It was what most Russians had never known. Yet it was what I’d lived inside my whole life—the bubble of comfort. To know that you’d always have soft Charmin to do your daily business, for example, and not torn squares of yesterday’s newspaper. To have stable prices, visible on whatever you wanted to buy, not an invisible price that would be negotiated depending on your passport or the color of your skin.

Once, Svetlana and I walked into a Russian store. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It looked completely plundered. You could have bought every paltry thing in the place—two bottles of perfume, a few pairs of wom- en’s shoes, a pot, some hangers, and no umbrellas—and still gone through the express lane at Target. Svetlana scanned the options and, unperturbed, turned and walked out, hunting for the next store. Still in shock, I was rooted to the spot, frozen, amazed by both the poverty and the energy of people to find what they needed as the redoubtable shoppers bumped and swirled around me. I didn’t know if what I was seeing was the rotten fruit of communism or the unripe beginnings of capitalism, or the two of them sitting miserably together, waiting to be sold.

I wanted to become a poet, and having heard so much about the legendary Russian love of poetry, I wanted to learn how Russian poets and Russian people were dealing with the new post-Soviet realities, the head-spinning political and economic changes that swept through the country like invisi- ble tornados. I turned to Svetlana, my host mother, riding in the seat next to me and leaning on her elbow against the train window, her impassive and round face looking out. Her floral dress accentuated her strong shoulders, and the wind buffeted the edge of her thick reddish-brown hair.

“Do you read poetry?” I asked.

She smiled as if she were talking to a child.

“Poetry is okay, but it can’t buy you sausage,” she said.

In the coming months, I’d listen to a poet lament that her life savings of rubles, which had been stuffed in a mattress for safekeeping (as no one trusted the banks), now could not buy more than a sausage.

I’d later read that in a poll of Western European and Russian women at the time, the primary concern of the European women was sex, followed by money and education. The primary concern of Russian women: getting food for the family.

I discovered much to my chagrin that even on Tverskaya Street—the main artery that extends from the Kremlin and Red Square to the Garden Ring and beyond, toward Saint Petersburg—there was not one café or place to sit inside and linger. Just a single bread store rife with multiple and for- bidding queues, a sternly Soviet restaurant (hard currency only) invisibly above street level, and an old-fashioned candy store that did not satisfy my human need to sit and pause in the growing cold. Yes, one could sit on the benches at Pushkin Square for a few brief months in the year. But that was it for comfort.

It made me wonder whether this was an extension of the paranoia of the Stalinist era, when the public sphere was a site of suspicion, not an agora in which the free exchange of goods and ideas could take place. Perhaps this lack of cafés was not merely an economic shortfall but also a socio-political one. It may not have been an intention of communism, but it was a conse- quence of it.

There was one recent exception on Tverskaya, exactly related to the de- cline and fall of Communism: the Pushkin Square McDonald’s, opened in 1990. Outside, people gathered, carrying flags bearing the Golden Arches as if it were its own country, and the lines extended far down the street. It served 30,000 people on its first day, in the bitter cold of January. A couple years later, McDonald’s remained a symbol of wealth—even wealthy adults took their dates to order up something with fries, the word for which in Russian sounds like “free.” So it was there, without other options, that I often came to sit and eat.

Once, after a burger, in the middle of translating some Russian poems, I heard some guffaws, hoots and hollers, and looked over to see a group of boisterous American tourists—my people—gobbling their American meal. They were young men, probably a couple years younger than me, their first time in a foreign country, and they talked as if they’d just left a rock concert, in the bubble of their own self-drama. I hadn’t heard people talk that loudly in months. I was ashamed of their self-regard, their puffed-up noise. Our self-regard.

In the days of shock capitalism, the Big Mac became an index for the ruble’s value, because the sandwich sold for exactly the equivalent of an American dollar. Quite literally, people would check to see what the Big Mac was selling for in order to conduct their business that day. It seemed funny, this working-class American sandwich becoming not only the marker of Russian prosperity but also the key to the value of the local currency.

While along Tverskaya, at all hours, high-heeled women teetered on stilettos, shifting their hips back and forth in slow motion, an unsublimi- nal advertisement for sex watched by sweat-suited flat tops in tinted-win- dow glasses and behind tinted-windowed cars. Suddenly, everything—and nearly everyone—seemed to be for sale.

“Was this what the Cold War was fought for?” I wondered aloud to Stacey, as we watched the parade of desire outside the steamy windows of McDonald’s.

Stacey, a former gymnast, shook her head, sporting the short hair typi- cal of her sport. She was a Watson Fellow as well. While I was banging my head against Russian poetry, she was studying the gymnastics schools of Russia and the former Soviet Union, another of the institutions of pride in Russia. Like the poets, they too had been brought to their knees by the new economy.

“When I was a gymnast,” she said, “I couldn’t eat what I wanted, no matter how hungry I was. I had to keep my weight down to be able to com- pete. Once I quit, I could eat whatever I wanted, including fast food, and I suddenly grew a few inches. Suddenly, I could go to McDonald’s again. I was sick of it within a week.”

We both laughed and took another bite.

“But being here, I don’t know,” she said. “Feels like home.”

I told her that whenever I’d go to my friend Atanu’s house, I’d love the smell of the curries that his mother and grandmother would cook, but he’d always want to go to McDonald’s. Walking under the Golden Arches was to enter an American dream, where deep-fried potatoes were a side of happiness. It was hard to be sad in McDonald’s, even if you knew the food was killing you.

Outside, beyond our burgers and floor-to-ceiling window, where no one seemed to smile, the traffic of goods and needs streamed tirelessly. People picked their way around the beggars, blind or amputated or pickled in vodka, hungry for something. Even to watch it was exhausting.

Neither of us knew where this was going, but we knew what we were seeing.

Stacey and I said farewell, opened the door, and entered into the world behind the mirrored windows.

I’d been walking and working among the Russians long enough to see the contradictions—the illusory promise of choice, the electric possibility of the free market—clash against the reality of economic insecurity and ideo- logical hopelessness, like the commercial warrior and the unseen dragon. But there was no idiotic balalaika music as soundtrack for what they faced. The citizens of this falling empire were filled with lust and shame—lust for what they did not have and shame for what they were losing.

I felt a prickling shame myself. After all, it was my country’s victory that led to this country’s defeat. When I really admitted it to myself, I knew that I’d come to Russia not only to study poetry. Yes, the poets were remarkable, and powerful, and they would change my life. But I also came because I wanted to abide with the enemy. When Ronald Reagan called Russia “the Evil Empire,” I didn’t believe a whole people could be evil. It made me want to learn more, and when the chance came in college to choose a new lan- guage to study, I leaped at the chance to learn Russian. In my sophomore year, when the Berlin Wall fell, and in my senior year, when the Soviet Union finally collapsed, and crowds exulted in its defeat, I felt strangely sad. It wasn’t because I believed that Stalin was a saint or that the Soviet Union was the better alternative. It was because they had been the one force to counterbalance my own country’s terrible, avaricious self-regard, its impe- rial arrogance. Who would teach us the limits of our power?

Walking back from that lunch with Stacey, I kept thinking about the idea of Russia that I’d carried in my head, an idea as partial and incomplete as my idea of America. But now, in my Russian life, I’d gone so far from where I’d come, I was someone else. I wasn’t Russian, but I was no longer the suburban American that had arrived months before.

A week later, trudging along the Garden Ring road as dusk fell, hungry for food and for home, I passed a usual line of stone buildings—and now what—a supermarket of sorts, glassed in and modern and lovely. It was a hard currency store, where only foreigners and Russians with US dollars would be able to shop. Beriozki, or hard currency stores, had been around during the Soviet period. Party members with connections and American currency could enter and shop as they pleased, while the masses of Russians bided their time in endless lines with handfuls of rubles, hoping for some material comfort.

I was exhausted and dirty, having hoofed about the city in search of poetry or images or something else that no longer rises in my memory. I was always searching for something and unable to find it. Here before me, in this small supermarket, the lights inside were too bright, and the shelves stocked to the ceiling with multicolored boxes, boxes of pasta and cereal and cookies. And candy bars. Candy bars! Nestlé Crunch, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Three Musketeers, Mounds, Twix, Milky Way, Almond Joy. And yes, Snickers. It was like seeing a porn store in the middle of a monastery. I peered in, walked a bit farther along the window. I paused. In my other life, this would have been perfectly normal. I would have walked in, bought whatever I needed, and not thought more than a few seconds about the cost.

But now I felt sick to my stomach. There was just too much, too much of what I’d had my whole life, not knowing that I’d had it. I thought of Alyosha’s sadness, holding that Snickers bar, unsure that he deserved it. I thought of the beggars and their gaunt bodies all along the main boule- vards, shrinking beneath their soiled clothes. The name Snickers suddenly seemed like laughter, laughter at these people who saw in it a door and a power, something to transport them from the grim days they faced, but who could not afford a single bite.

I looked inside again, saw my dim reflection ghosting the window. I wanted to go in. It wasn’t a question of money; I had the money to spend. No, it wasn’t just the money. It was that that store was my patrimony. It was me. I was filled with a shame I couldn’t put into words.

To go in there, I would have to admit where I’d come from, or who I was, or which side I was choosing. For some reason, Alyosha’s face flickered in my mind again. I could easily have bought us a little pleasure, a pleasure packed with peanuts, something to satisfy his curiosity and remind me of home.

No, I turned away from the window and turned back to the station, where the family would be waiting, the week-old fish and kasha already hot on the table.