I remember the Soviet Union and the shortage of manufactured goods

Recently in one of the famous Rusdian massmedia read a message that a survey was conducted on the network in which they asked: do people regret the collapse of the Soviet Union?The published results of this survey were such that the overwhelming majority of the respondents regretted that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.I thought: I am over 40 years old and most of my friends like me well remember the Soviet Union Because we lived in times of USSR. Unlike me, not many of my friends of the same age use active social networks and certainly do not participate in any online surveys.If you take people I know, older than 50 years, among them the use of the Internet and social communications is even lower. And even about the participation of people of this age category in any surveys in general, you can not say anything.I generally got the impression that those people who had not seen the Soviet Union with their own eyes answered this question.

Оne of my favorite pictures from the archive is clearly demonstrating the whole of the Soviet Union. How people lived there.Тhe beginning of the 1980s,a store in Khabarovsk called the "House of Clothing"(in the Soviet Union did not bother much with the names of various stores)).
Morning,probably for a few minutes before the opening, I guess that around 9:00 am. A crowd of people at the entrance says only one thing: it was rumored that the store This morning will be sold some extremely scarce goods.

You need to clearly understand that people standing at the entrance are not going to get on sale at discount prices or buy some fashion novelty of the season.No, just ordinary things were brought to the store: maybe some shipment of casual ordinary footwear or outerwear, which you can not buy at all because there are only two universal stores selling these goods in the city. Because what is on the shelves of these stores and is sold daily to very few people need, since these are not attractive ugly, and often uncomfortable things.And people are forced to queue in front of the closed shop in the morning to try, just try-the success of standing in line is not granted, to buy what the Soviet trade enterprise has suddenly brought to the far Far Eastern Soviet city in a very small quantity.

And at the same time in the city there are two stores from the already forgotten network "Beryozka".

source
Machines, clothes, household appliances and furniture were expensive in "Beryozka", and they could be afforded by people who had worked abroad for a long time, received a large legacy from abroad, or those who bought large sums of currency substitutes illegally. In the mass consciousness, the most attractive groups of goods in "Beryozka" were clothes, shoes and various accessories that could not be found in ordinary stores.

source
The clothes that were bought specially for "Beryozka", as well as the equipment, were selected at special exhibitions, where a number of foreign firms, mostly from capitalist countries, were usually represented.

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But I remember very well when I was still a schoolboy. On the way home from school we went to these "Beryozka" stores and looked-really, we managed to do this for a very short time under the strict gaze of the prosecutors- on the incredible foreign goods, which in normal soviet stores, of course, we never saw..