Memories of a socialist supermarket

My grim tour of East Berlin’s gray streets and empty stores in 1988 taught me all I needed to know about everyday life under Soviet-style socialism. Zohran Mamdani needs 20th century history lessons.

The socialist rich kid running for Mayor of New York City says he wants to open government-run grocery stores if he wins.

Obviously, ‘progressive’ Democrat Zohran Mamdani never visited a Communist supermarket and has no idea how empty, terrible and embarrassing they were.

Clue: They made post offices and Pennsylvania’s government liquor store monopolies — i.e., ‘state stores’ — look like Apple stores.

In 1988, before Mamdani was born, I spent six hours or so being oppressed — and depressed — under the heavy hand of soviet-style socialism in East Berlin.

Here’s part of what I wrote about my grim grocery ‘shopping’ experience. And here’s a link to the rest of my adventure on the sad and gray side of the Berlin Wall.

Going to the government grocery store….

East Berlin

April, 1988

I had imagined East Berlin to be like a huge, well-guarded, open-air post office. It was. All of East Berlin needed a paint job.

With no advertising anywhere, it was colorless and gray. Even Alexanderplatz, the city's expansive main square, was shabby and architecturally bureaucratic.

I went into a flower shop, a toy store and a dairy store. Each was pitifully understocked. A book store was overflowing with the works of anonymous but presumably state-pleasing authors.

Traffic was light on broad Karl Marx Allee. All the cars were the cheap East German genericmobiles — Trabants — that make Yugos look luxurious.

East Germany’s Trabants added to the acrid polluted air of East Berlin with diesel-like fumes from two-stroke engines that mixed gasoline and oil.

Dozens of government-issue high-rise apartments, hideously similar, flanked the avenue's wide and deserted sidewalks. I peered into the trash baskets as I came to them. Empty. Empty. Empty. Empty, except for two cigarette butts.

I suddenly realized why there was no litter problem in East Berlin. There's nothing to throw away.

Before I reached my ultimate destination, the main East Berlin post office, I discovered a neighborhood supermarket into which a steady stream of serious shoppers was pouring.

I entered, looking and feeling extra-conspicuous with my 35-mm camera and new $65 Reeboks. The busy market was a Kroger or Ralph’s in size and configuration, but it was a cruel parody.

Bread and cheese sausages were in relative abundance, but the produce department was a pathetic bunch of bins full of potatoes, lumpy beet-like things and mutant lemons, the only citrus product.

The single frozen-food case contained about 20 packs of unidentifiable chicken parts. The aisle shelves were loosely stocked with generically packaged goods. The whole scene was slightly surreal. Up close and personal, socialism no longer seemed funny.

Capitalism and the West have their faults, but this was depressing.

These grim-faced shoppers — no different at all from their fat and happy and free brothers and sisters in West Berlin — were perfectly aware of how out of it they are, politically and economically.

But they were stuck on the wrong side of the Wall and I felt sorry for them. It was hard to believe the standard of living is higher in East Berlin than it is in Moscow.

Note: I didn't take photos of that pathetic grocery store, for some dumb reason.

But East Berlin had a higher standard of living in 1988 than Moscow, the 'most-livable' city in the USSR, which helps you understand why when Boris Yeltsin visited a typical American supermarket in Texas he was so shocked by the variety and quality of its contents he realized the USSR had to dismantle itself.

Here are some photos of what passed for everyday life in East Germany by a man who had to live in constant fear of the Stasi.

Here is a very good 2009 documentary film titled ‘The Secret Life of the Berlin Wall.’

If you watch “The Lives of Others” and read the great book ‘Stasiland’ by Anna Funder, you will get a pretty good picture of how oppressive life was in East Germany, the creepy kind of people who kept it that way for 45 years and the heroic people who peacefully toppled their socialist dictatorship.