Lenka, a pair of jeans and the temptation of the West

That morning, Lenka left home with sixty “vouchers” in her pocket. She had bought them for 300 crowns from the brother of Jana, a classmate of hers, who had connections with the money changers who huddled in front of the Tuzex shops. She felt a mixture of joy and apprehension. While her mother was lining up for meat at a sad shop on the outskirts of Prague, entering Tuzex was like traveling to the West. The smiles of the salespeople, selected from among the elite personnel or among the relatives of the directors of the chain, seduced, the aroma of coffee assailed, the perfumes made one feel think one was in a Paris boutique, and one was seized with the desire to do like the policeman in the joke who climbs over the counter and asks for political asylum. There were Western tourists who paid in cash, privileged compatriots who showed off their “vouchers”, gotten through their work abroad or from their friends or relatives who had emigrated, and then there were the ranks of ordinary citizens, who had purchased their “vouchers” on the black market.
Lenka tightly held on to those colorful little piece of paper that would allow her to buy her first pair of jeans to wear in the evening, and perhaps would even be enough for a bar of Swiss chocolate and a packet of American cigarettes. She remembered the television ad for the Tuzex where they had shown fashionable clothes, necklaces like dreams, modern television sets, and even a toy dog that would pee. As in other socialist countries, because of the failure of the planned economy and the need for hard currency, in the sixties Czechoslovakia created a network of shops offering goods of top quality, either domestically produced or imported, at unfeasible prices for “workers and peasants” but competitive with the western market. In this way, the regime directly squeezed hard currency out of foreigners (tourists or diplomats) or out of its citizens who were not entitled to have it and so were forced to change it into “vouchers”.
With subtle changes depending on the country, the system of stores for the privileged was established throughout the Eastern bloc, although the first experiment dated back to Torgsin, introduced in the USSR in the early thirties with the goal of absorbing the gold rubles still in circulation. In the cities and major ports of the USSR, as well as in the hotels for westerners, the Berjozka stores flourished, at least until 1988 when the Soviet government, in their campaign to “fight against privilege and in favor of social justice”, got rid of the possibility of paying in “vouchers”, and then, in the mid-nineties, the entire Berjozka network was closed because it was losing money. In East Germany, these shops were called Intershop, and were even introduced at border crossings and along the highways that crossed the country, where, however, one could only enter with a passport. The greed for foreign currency was such that, in the eighties in East Berlin, an Intershop was opened directly along the Friedrichstrasse subway station platform for travelers coming from West Berlin. One could go down, buy every possible thing on sale at discounted prices, get back on the next train and get back to the West without being subjected to customs controls. Needless to say, the Stasi watched the Intershop both to know who was in possession of the currency, and to discover thieves and smugglers.
In Poland, instead, there was the Pewex chain, which offered, in addition to western items (with prices discounted up to 40%), domestic products normally intended for export. During the economic crisis of the early eighties, the Pewex stores were often the only places where one could buy essential goods including toilet paper, or cars and apartments without waiting an entire generation. In Bulgaria, the chain Corecom was famous for its Kinder chocolate eggs, renamed the “Corecom eggs”.
With the dissolution of communism, these chains suffered a similar fate. Their budgets were in the red, and their lack of entrepreneurial ability or renewal resulted in the customers retaining the idea that they were stores for the privileged few. The post-communist citizens preferred to use the large western chains, despite the quality of the goods available in the old state network of stores.
Lenka left the shop with her jeans in a bag, still smelling the French perfume for a moment, before the acrid smell of coal brought her back to her world. Everything that the propaganda trumpeted about the corrupt West and “decaying” capitalism was increasingly at odds with the desire for transgression instigated by the regime itself through those sparkling windows, a regime that de facto supported the black market and showed that not all citizens were equal and that the difference between communism and consumerism, in some respects, was only a matter of a few different letters.

(translation by Maria Bond)