Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Seeing through mum’s eyes: The “Russian grocery shop” in Regensburg and memories of the late Soviet era in Georgia

“Field Trip” with mum

The so-called “Russian grocery shops” in Germany are places that I have been observing since 2021. Initially as part of my ethnographic research in Osnabrück (Lower Saxony) and currently for my project in Bavaria.

I take these grocery shops as specific “places of transgression” to transnational and translocal worlds. The shops are fluid zones for blurring of borders – a space for tastes, smells, and ideas that “flow over” from other worlds.

The idea of going there with my mother was linked to my curiosity about how she would feel there. What heartstrings of intimacy and alienation would the place evoke in her? What memories would come up with individual products? I wanted to understand how mum’s memories would differ from my own childhood memories. Were there any products that were not available in the 1960s when Sopio (born in 1956) was a child? Did food have a different status back then than it did later? And did we share the same passion for this or that food?

My mum was visiting my twin brother in Munich and I invited her for a weekend. She could visit me in the “field” and we would go together to places relevant to my research. My parents had already visited me during my research year in Azerbaijan, so it was nothing new for my mum. However, the “assignment” for this Saturday in April 2024 was different. I was to accompany her to the “Russian grocery shop” and observe her at work. She received no instructions from me and was free to choose what she wanted to focus on. I would ask questions there, but also talk to her in detail afterwards.

My plan led to an exciting and emotional day full of giggles, joy and curiosity. My children and my husband as well as my twin brother and my nephew were also there. However, they kept to themselves at distance so that I was alone with my mum to “explore”. The first detail my mum confirmed to me was a familiar smell in the shop: a kind of mixture of fruit, smoked fish and pickled vegetables.

We walked along the shelves and I asked questions from time to time. But mostly I watched her in silence.

Mum looked concentrated. She took one thing or another from the shelf, checked and compared the prices of food in Germany and Georgia and seemed visibly enthusiastic about the task.

She laughed out loud when she discovered a hot water bottle that she obviously wouldn’t have expected to find in today’s Germany. And examined her favorite chocolates with great excitement.

I took photos of her and my husband took photos of us. After about an hour and a half, we left. On the way home, my mum said that it was the first time she had been in a shop like that since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In a shop where “there were so many well-known products from all over the former USSR.”

Photo by the author. 

Condensed milk and zephyr: different experiences with product availability in the centre(s) and peripheries

The next day, I asked my mum to tell me what memories the shop had awakened in her. What were her perceptions and connections to certain products?

She was very nervous and unsure at first. “What should I say at this point?” she asked me, doubting whether what she wanted to say would be right and useful. It was a very interesting experience, because even though mum knows from my stories what I do and how I research, it was the first time she acted as a “real interlocutor.” I assured her that there could be no wrong answer. That it was important to me what she remembered. And she began to talk:

“The strongest memories are associated with tinned condensed milk (Moloko) and zephyr [A type of soft confectionery made by whipping fruit and berry purée with sugar and egg whites]. My mum [my grandma] didn’t want to buy it for a long time. She said: ‘I bring fresh milk from the neighbor, how can milk from a can taste good? Surely it can’t be healthy.’ I was already married [at the end of the 1970s] when condensed milk was available in the shops in Telavi (a small town in eastern Georgia). […] Zephyr. That was a sensation. They didn’t even exist in Telavi. Only in Tbilisi [Capital city in Georgia]. Your grandmother secretly brought it from the “Legion” [a settlement for people from Russian Soviet Republic, military personnel, doctors and special cadres, called ‘small-town’ Городок] in Telavi. A friend of Grandma’s, an ethnic Russian woman, lived there. She sometimes gave her a few of these sweets.

It was always very clean in this ‘gorodok’ and it was considered privileged to live there. […] I was in fifth grade when my mother took me to Moscow to visit my brother [who was studying there], and there I was able to eat zephyr in abundance. There were also a number of other products there that we didn’t know from Georgia. Dutch cheese, for example. Mom didn’t speak Russian, only I did from school and I ended up standing in line there to do some shopping. […] Also, caviar. That was rare. Your grandfather had friends who secretly brought it from Baku [Capital city in Azerbaijan] every now and then and he bought it from them personally.” (Sopio, Regensburg, 14 April 2024.)

Photo by the author. 

This passage from Mum’s memoirs contains important details about consumption and society in the late Soviet era. There were serious differences between the centers and the periphery in terms of “privileged” food, due to large cities like Tbilisi. And it was common for certain places to be “special”, such as “gorodok” for Russians in Telavi. To put it another way, in the peripheral areas, there were inequalities between the locals and the “elite” Russian settlements. Contrary to my mother’s memories, gorodok was a sad, dreary and dilapidated place in my childhood in 90s. When the Soviet Union collapsed, ethnic Russians left the country due to wars and economic crises and internally displaced people from Abkhazia lived there.

There were also differences in the opportunities available in the Russian cities and in the republics. Another strand of the interpretation leads us to the everyday coping strategies of Soviet citizens to get hold of limited goods. My grandparents were by no means an exception with activities that enabled them to gain access to “delicatesses”, such as zephyr, or caviar despite the restrictions through informal practices and special relationships.

The dependence between the center and the periphery in the consumer sector was by no means one-sided (towards the major canters). Not everything was necessarily to be found in Capitals, but was sometimes brought from large cities to smaller ones across the “invisible” republican borders, like caviar from Baku to Telavi. The story of Mama is reminiscent of the consumer migration of Soviet citizens, whereby the urban centres were no longer exclusively recognized as famous shopping destinations. In the 1970s and 1980s there was also movement in the opposite direction, when some seasoned urban shoppers went to the peripheries and small villages in search of desirable goods. Kutaisi in western Georgia, for example, became a similar destination, with people even travelling from Tbilisi to visit Georgian Jews selling “special goods.”

And finally, the mother’s history shows dynamic changes in terms of attitudes towards flavors or quality. What grandma’s generation considered unhealthy or dubious (condensed milk from tin cans) later became a trademark for sweet treats (cakes and pies) throughout the Soviet Union. To this day, Moloko is considered the product from the former USSR that many migrants remember very well.

Visiting the store with my mother was a good opportunity to piece together the puzzle of intergenerational memories of what my family knew as the USSR. Our experience has shown that one and the same place and one and the same product range evoke different memories and are embedded differently in historical contexts. Mama’s story pointed to a specific and complex entangled economic situation between center(s) and peripheries in late soviet times. There was not just one center (exemplarily Moscow) and the big cities were not always the places where one could get limited goods.

Further readings

Aivazishvili-Gehne, N. 2024a. Tales of the “Good Neighborhood” Post-Soviet Immigrants in a German City. In. Templin (ed.), Arrival Neighborhoods in European Cities, 1870-2020 (Routledge Advances in Urban History), s. 268-286. London; New York: Routledge.

Aivazishvili-Gehne, N. 2024b. Wie der Krieg gegen die Ukraine die postsozialistische Produktpalette in Deutschland verändert. Published on 25.04.2024.

https://ukraine2022.ios-regensburg.de/konsum01/

 

 

Nino Aivazishvili-Gehne holds a PhD in social anthropology and is a researcher at the Leibnitz Institute for East and Southeast European studies (IOS) in Regensburg. She was a guest researcher with JUSTIMINO and the ZMO Research Unit “Age and Generation” in November 2024.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Nino Aivazishvili-Gehne (January 23, 2025). Seeing through mum’s eyes: The “Russian grocery shop” in Regensburg and memories of the late Soviet era in Georgia. In Pursuit of ‘Legality’ and ‘Justice’. Retrieved January 11, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13ki0


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.