Lidija Kucinskaite – Haddar, a local woman living in the Hanworth area and my mother, once lived in the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. She was born to a Lithuanian father and a Belarusian mother and lived in a small village on the border with a fellow soviet republic, Latvia.
When speaking to her about this topic I wanted to keep in mind that during the era of the Soviet Union she grew up in (1974-1991) it was becoming more free and open. She first told me of the fashion in the Ussr and how ‘unique’ and ‘beautiful’ it was as many women had become extremely good seamstresses and designers as they knew they would not be able to find what they were looking for at the shops. ‘Clothes, in the Ussr, were valued unlike in today’s world of fast fashion and Primark’ she told me.
The reason clothes were so valued was not only for the fact that it was handmade but also for the fact that shops were scarce ‘you had to wait in long lines for anything good or know a friend who could get you the items and even then most people owned the same pair of shoes’ my mother informed me and she also told me of a funny anecdote she said ‘ me and my father went to Latvia to a market and this man speaking poor Russian asks my father for directions ,or something, and we can’t understand him because his Russian was not very good. So while my father is trying figure out what he is saying I looked down and realized they both had the same pair of shoes and that he was also Lithuanian. I tell my father “Dad, he is Lithuanian look at his shoes” and they both laughed at the situation’. This story in a modern capitalist country wouldn’t make sense but there was usually only one or two options of clothing for a certain item and each republic got different manufactured good.
The Soviet Union was ‘not that bad though’ my mother informed me. She said that she liked the fact that there was free medicine and that she could travel freely across the other soviet socialist republics. The arts were also important in the Soviet Union with children being able to attend music and art school for almost nothing. The issue with that she told me was that ‘the teachers were often very overworked because there were so many children in those schools that they would teach till eight in the evening’.
The soviet union during the time my mother lived was liberalising and did provide many opportunities for the youth in their country but it must not be forgotten that there was extreme corruption in the soviet union during the time of leonid Brezhnev (soviet leader from 1964-82) as my mother mentioned with the phrase ‘know friends’ so you don’t have to wait in long lines to get your consumer goods. By the year 1990 Lithuania had declared independence from the Ussr and now is a free and democratic country in the European union where travel is not restricted to just the 15 soviet countries but to a majority of the world.
