As is known, a planned economy does not particularly stimulate the development of competition, therefore, unlike Western products, the packaging of which has long attracted consumers with bright colors, original fonts and pictures with cartoon characters, Soviet goods for decades were produced in the same packaging, which often had a boring and nondescript appearance. At the same time, it cannot be said that the concept of design was completely absent in the USSR! Today we remember the 10 most conceptual Soviet packaging that generations and generations of Soviet citizens grew up with!
In the Soviet years, match labels were quite diverse; there were even fans of collecting them along with postage stamps and postcards.
The “AVION” label (translated from French as “airplane”) had a completely imported look, and yet its design belongs to the Balabanov match factory, located in the Kaluga region.
The factory was founded in 1947, first as a mechanical plant, and in 1952 as a full-fledged match factory. Due to their low cost, Balaban matches have been successfully exported for a long time, which is why the product required special, “pseudo-foreign” packaging that would look decent in both Eastern and Western Europe!
In the center of the stylized retro label is a biplane from the 1920s. The inscription “safety matches” refers to the same era when it was necessary to clarify whether matches were dangerous or not, because sulfur matches ignited from simple friction (remember cartoons where characters light a match on the sole of a shoe?).
Schoolchildren made a lot of all kinds of crafts from matches - houses, little men, fairy-tale birds and fish. A box of matches was perhaps the cheapest Soviet product, it cost only 1 kopeck! However, even if they managed to find a penny on the ground, they still did not sell matches to children, because “matches are not a toy for children, buy lighters!”
Soda
Another “long-liver” that successfully survived all the crises was the packaging of soda from the Sterlitamak soda-cement plant.
In 1936, a group of Soviet geologists discovered huge reserves of limestone in the Sterlitamak Shikhany mountains, and during exploration of oil fields in the area of the city of Ishimbaya, deposits of rock salt were found - the second most important component of soda. Construction of the plant began before the war and did not stop throughout the war years. Already in March 1945, the first batch of caustic soda was received!
In April 1975, the Sterlitamak Soda-Cement Plant was renamed the Soda Production Association, which was registered as an OJSC in December 1994. In the spring of 2013, Caustic and Soda merged into the Bashkir Soda Company.
The selling design turned out to be of no use to soda - this is an essential product, and it will be bought in any packaging. That is why Russian soda is still produced in primitive red and yellow cardboard packaging in the style of the 70s. Apparently our children will see her like this too!
The production of processed cheese was mastered in the USSR in 1934 at the Moscow Processed Cheese Factory No. 1 (later Karat). At first, the product was simply called “Cheese No. 1.”
In the 60s, in the Karata laboratory under the leadership of M. F. Kulesheva, recipes for the still popular Druzhba, Volna and Yantar cheese curds were created.
Its low cost contributed to its wide spread, which is why the cheese was popular among eternally hungry students who came up with the meme: “Friendship cheese - chew it, tell a friend” and drunkards who took it as a cheap snack with vodka. The answer was to increase production - by 1972 it exceeded 155 thousand tons, which was equal to about a third of the total cheese production in the country!
In 1993, Karat became an open joint stock company. In September 2005, during the Second Moscow Cheese Festival, a monument to the Druzhba cheese cheese was erected near the factory building, which reconciled the characters of Krylov’s famous fable - the crow and the fox! As of 2014, the monthly production volume of the plant exceeds 100 tons of finished products.
Cigarettes "Belomor"
It can be said without exaggeration that in the USSR Belomorkanal cigarettes were the most popular! They were very cheap (22 kopecks for 25 pieces) and therefore were accessible even to the lowest strata of the population, who cared little about the high resin content and low class V quality.
The Belomor brand was created in 1932 at the Leningrad factory named after Uritsky. The author of the tobacco mixture is technologist Vasily Ioanidi. The author of the drawing is the artist A. Tarakanov. The image of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, built in 1931-1933, was a kind of information propaganda.
Due to their wide distribution, cigarettes quickly became a part of Soviet culture, included in many jokes, films and even cartoons (just look at the wolf from “Well, wait a minute!”). Belomor cigarette butts (colloquially BK) introduced the neologism “bull” into the Soviet lexicon. There were a lot of jokes about the diameter of the cigarettes, 7.62, which fully corresponded to the caliber of the machine gun cartridge!
Currently, the production of cigarettes in nostalgic packs has been resumed - with tobacco of appalling quality and a huge inscription “Smoking kills,” which completely destroys the conceptual concept of the packaging.
In the early 60s, the USSR government adopted a new food program, which noted the need to create high-quality, but affordable milk chocolate. In 1964, confectioners from the Moscow Red October factory developed a new recipe, which was later introduced at the Rot Front factories, named after. Babaev and many others.
The new product needed a beautiful wrapper. But the proposed classic, Vasnetsov’s painting “Alyonushka,” did not receive management approval. Then, through the newspaper “Evening Moscow”, a competition was announced for a photograph of a girl as an “advertising face” of a new product.
Thousands of citizens responded to the call, sending photographs of their children of different genders and ages. The winner was the work of Honored Cultural Worker of the RSFSR Alexander Gerinas - in a photograph he took 4 years ago, he captured his eight-month-old daughter Lena wearing a silk scarf.
The photo was redrawn by artist Nikolai Maslov, giving the girl bright blue eyes. The chocolate bar has been produced in this form since 1965 to this day. In 2000, Elena “Alyonka” Gerinas, who had grown up, filed a lawsuit - for 35 years of successful sales of chocolate with her image, she did not receive a penny. But the court sided with the capitalist producers, recognizing the image of “Alyonka” as an “independent work of art” that owes nothing to the original.
Tea with an elephant
“The same taste, the same tea was in a packet of tea with an elephant that fell behind the sideboard 30 years ago.”
(an anecdote from the early 2000s)
A notable symbol of the Soviet era were packs of black long tea, which everyone simply called “tea with an elephant.” The packaging design was developed in 1967 by order of the Moscow Tea Factory.
Despite the low demand for professional design in the USSR, apparently, manufacturers were still familiar with its technologies. The elephant on the packaging invariably referred to India, creating for the consumer the complete illusion that this was 100% Indian tea! In fact, it was a “blend” - mixed varieties of tea in the ratio: 55% Georgian (it was noticeably inferior in quality), 25% Madagascar, 15% Indian and 5% Ceylon.
“Elephant tea” went on general sale in 1972. The color of the packs and the number of elephants varied depending on the composition.
At the beginning of the 2000s, the “That Same Tea” brand was actively promoted, exploiting the positive association that had developed over decades, when people were accustomed to seeing only a high-quality product in packs with an elephant.
The primacy of the invention of vodka is still disputed by Poland and Russia. The attitude of the leadership of the Soviet Union towards vodka was ambivalent - on the one hand, drunkenness was sharply condemned by Soviet propaganda, on the other - the monopoly sale of vodka brought huge income to the state.
There were many types of vodka. Old-timers will undoubtedly remember “Russkaya”, “Moskovskaya”, “Stolichnaya” (“anise, unfortunately there is no…”), “Sibirskaya”, “Okhotnichya”, “Extra” and, of course, just “Vodka” for 4-70, which received the affectionate nickname “Andropovka” among the people.
- “Newly Blessed”?
- God be with you, my dear! Daria Petrovna makes excellent vodka herself.
- Don’t tell me, Filip Filipich. Everyone claims that the new one is very decent. Thirty degrees.
- And vodka should be FORTY degrees - this is the first thing. And secondly, God knows what they threw in there. Can you tell what comes to their mind?
- Anything.
(From the film “Heart of a Dog”)
But of all the varieties, we will probably choose “Wheat”, since it was its packaging with a yellow field, sheaves, houses and forest that the authors remembered most! It was produced from 1976 and before the price increase in 1981 it cost 4 rubles. 42 kopecks, after – 6 rubles. 20 kopecks (excluding the cost of dishes 5 rubles 13 kopecks).
It was believed that it was based on wheat raw materials and therefore had a special “wheat” softness, in contrast to the cheaper “Russian”. Most likely, this was once the case, but in 1980 a new GOST was developed, and the quality dropped noticeably, the “bread aroma” disappeared, but the cost increased to 10 rubles. In the late 80s and early 90s, vodka was sold only with coupons. It was not only drinkers who took it, because in conditions when money was worth nothing, vodka was the hardest and most reliable currency!
“Pshenichnaya” is still produced, although in a different container and with a slightly modified label, on which it is written that this vodka is made “according to old Russian recipes” (!?).
Milk in triangular bags
Although today such packages seem very Soviet, their authorship belongs to the Swede Eric Wallenberg. The idea was simple but effective: to use the material in an optimal way. In 1951, Ruben Rausing founded the Tetra Pak company in Lund, which was named after the same tetrahedral packaging (this pyramid can still be seen on the company logo).
In the late 50s, the USSR government signed the first contract with Tetra Pak for the supply of equipment for the dairy industry, and soon several Soviet enterprises were equipped with Tetra Classic lines for packaging liquid products.
Unfortunately, the image of the pyramids is negative. The fact is that only the first cars were Swedish, the rest were simply copied by our craftsmen. I wanted the best, but it turned out as always - the pyramids, made on Soviet clones, were constantly leaking. The bottoms of the pallets on which they were transported were always filled with milk. But it was very convenient to drink from the pyramids after cutting off one corner! The cost of one pyramid was 16 kopecks.
In the late 80s, Tetra Pak was one of the first foreign companies to open a joint venture in the USSR. Triangular containers were replaced by liter rectangles (remember those blue packs with ears of corn?).
Now the company's interests in Russia are represented by its subsidiary Tetra Pak CJSC. Tetra Pak in Russia operates a packaging material production plant in Lobnya (Moscow region), the largest in Eastern Europe. In total, Russian food enterprises have installed 520 Tetra Pak lines for bottling liquid food products.
Pepsi in glass bottles
The world famous drink Pepsi-Cola was invented in 1898 by American pharmacist Caleb Bradham from New Bern, North Carolina. The soda, which he first modestly called “Brad’s Drink,” contained pepsin and kola nut extract. The drink received its current name only in 1903...
In 1971, during another detente in relations with “Western partners,” an agreement was concluded on the supply of Pepsi to the USSR. In return, PepsiCo became the official distributor of Stolichnaya vodka in America, which, despite all the sanctions, our country exported quite successfully.
On the eve of the Moscow Olympics, mass sales of the drink began in Moscow at branded kiosks. Pepsi outlets were distinguished from typical Soviet stalls - gray aluminum boxes - by bright colors, streamlined shapes and a large logo on the roof. The retail price of the drink was 31 kopecks per 0.33 liter bottle, which was twice the cost of any Soviet lemonade (even though it was bottled in 0.5 liter bottles).
In 1986, Pepsi became a sponsor of the Goodwill Games, and two years later the company released the first commercial commercial in the history of Soviet television.
Although the author of the rounded red and blue logo was not a Soviet artist (the drink with a similar design was sold all over the world from 1973 to 1991), glass bottles with a white label forever remained one of the symbols of the perestroika era! Unlike today's products, the inscription "Pepsi Cola" was made in Russian.
In the early 90s, fragile and heavy bottles gave way to the familiar plastic containers and aluminum cans. Nowadays, especially for those suffering from nostalgia, the production of Pepsi-Cola in glass bottles has been resumed by the production company Aqualife (the same “drinks from Chernogolovka”), although this pleasure is surprisingly expensive - about 65 rubles for 0.33 liters. And, which is typical, they buy it!
Condensed milk
The technology for producing condensed milk was discovered in 1856 by American inventor Gale Borden, who was looking for ways to store products for a long time. The first plant for the production of condensed milk in Russia was opened in Orenburg in 1881.
The famous blue-white-blue design was developed in 1939 by Iraida Fomina, the daughter of a famous architect. In terms of their contribution to popular culture, cans of Soviet condensed milk are often compared to the legendary cans of Campbell’s tomato soup, designed by Andy Warhol!
Boiled condensed milk was considered a special delicacy in the USSR! True, the industry did not produce it, and Soviet housewives cooked it themselves, boiling jars for a long time in pots of water. This method was very dangerous - you just had to hold the can a little, and it would explode, dousing the walls and ceiling with thick brown smudges!
During the shortages of the 80s, condensed milk and stewed meat were among the most popular goods. Gomel condensed milk, which was considered “radioactive” after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, became the talk of the town.
However, it is Belarusian condensed milk (already from the Rogachev milk canning plant) that today is the main continuer of Soviet traditions. And, just like the Druzhba cheesecake in Moscow, there is a monument to Soviet condensed milk in Rogachev!
But in Russia, experiments to reduce the cost of the product led to the appearance of goods such as “Condensed milk”, “Varyonka”, “USSR” and other dairy “products”, which, due to the high content of palm oil, do not have the right to be called “condensed milk”. Be vigilant and read the label carefully!
Let's remember what alcoholic drinks we have
always stood on holiday tables during the Soviet years.
Many of them have not been
are produced, but their taste is still preserved in memory.
At first I wanted to call this part in the spirit of the previous ones - “What we drank.”
But I thought about it and decided that this is a little incorrect :)
I tried alcoholic drinks for the first time when I was 15 years old.
I got seriously drunk for the first time when I was 16, on New Year’s Eve. "Port wine 777".
Fortunately, I did not become addicted to the “green serpent” and to this day I consider it evil.
If in excess. But high-quality vintage wines,
I occasionally respect cognacs and whiskeys.
I had one hobby in my childhood and adolescence. Collected wine (vodka, cognac) labels.
Agree, it’s a completely innocent hobby for a child. And I was just a fan.
Sometimes you find a bottle on the street, bring it home, put it in a bowl of hot water,
15 minutes - bang! and a new label in the collection. Friends (mother’s) helped
- they looked for treasured bottles from the deep Soviet period in cellars/attics and gave them to me.
Over the course of several years, an impressive stack has accumulated
. Then the hobby suddenly disappeared, as did the collection itself. But, fortunately, she was later found.
I carefully scanned it and now I want to show you :) Labels for me -
one of the doors to childhood memories.
Soviet drawings, fonts, prices, "I belt, II belt", "Price with the cost of dishes", packaging,
kilometer-long queues for wine and vodka, coupons...
Crimea, sea and grapevine, after all.
Don’t be lazy, take your time, look at each label -
she is able to tell and remind a lot of things.
So what was on our tables and refrigerators 20-30 years ago?
I'll start with aperitifs.
The lion's share of wine production in the USSR came from the Moldavian SSR. The inscription "MOLDVINPROM"
will appear on almost every third label.
Sherries and vermouths:
And “GOSAGROPROM” is on every second one :)
One of the pearls of my small collection is Hungarian vermouth.
Very popular in the 90s, live bottled beer from our native Ulyanovsk plant (R.I.P):
And this is the same Ulyanovsk plant, but still in the 80s:
The pride of our brewery!
Our plant soldered not only Ulyanovsk, but also its neighbors :)
Classics of the genre!
This also happens now. But it's not like that anymore...
Greetings from China. Their beer. These are the wild 90s.
We're done with aperitifs, let's move on to table wines, of which there were a great variety in the USSR.
Table (dry, semi-dry and semi-sweet) wines:
Guys, this is Checheningushvino! Quite a rare label.
Rkatsiteli is a popular light wine made from a highly valuable grape variety.
Greetings from Volgograd!
Azerbaijan:
Black Sea pink, with the inscription on the boat "Abrau-Durso". Apparently, it was produced at the same plant.
We brought this small bottle from my first trip to Crimea, in 1991:
Such a small bottle of wine stood in our sideboard for a long time.
Until the wine turned to vinegar.
I have many childhood memories associated with her:
In particular, the dream of the sea began with her.
Abkhazia. By the way, the label has been revived these days and can be seen on the shelves.
This one is from those Soviet times.
Here is the modern label of Abkhazian wine:
Bulgaria has always been famous for its expensive label printing.
Bulgaria 90s:
Algerian wine. I think ordinary people didn’t have this on their tables:
Fortified wines:
The boys and I found a pack of the next two “zero” labels in some basement.
Apparently, someone hid it there for an underground workshop.
This one has a very uneven print. Apparently - self-propelled. I will not believe,
that Abrau-Durso could afford such hackwork.
Did I mention that I first tried alcohol at 15? I lied.
In church, they poured a whole spoonful of diluted Cahors into us children:)
Well, who doesn’t remember the popular liqueur Amaretto in the 90s? :)) Sold in every "lump".
Like this fortified Moldovan wine:
Remember those troubled times when you could buy alcohol anywhere,
just not in the store... In the "lumps", "at grandma's"... Creepy.
Here's something else sweet and foreign from those times. More like a chocolate bar.
Odessa Mama!
I like these monsters: "GLAVUPRPISCHEPROM GOSAGROPROM RSFSR ROSSPIRTPROM"
Probably those who worked there always took a long time to answer the question about their place of work.
Cossack wine:
Flavored wines:
And here there is even a back label with a cocktail recipe:
Port wines
I have always associated ort wine with something cheap and unworthy
self-respecting person. Like a triple cologne.
"Mom is anarchy, dad is a glass of port." Unfortunately,
the opinion was confirmed with the first experience of severe intoxication,
happened to me after the chiming clock in 1996. Bottle "777"
was destroyed practically in one gulp, between two and a friend
- hurried to see friends (Vitek, if you’re reading me, then hello). Hmm...
"Agdam" is still Soviet:
"Agdam" is no longer Soviet. And it went up in price. Price release....
3
And another variation:
Moldovenian :)
Georgian portveshok "Three bananas":
Sparkling wines (Champagne - New Year is coming!):
Champagne in the late 80s and early 90s, like everything else, was not easy to buy.
Some tricks were used to get a box or two for the wedding.
And you even had to show a certificate from the registry office that it was really for the wedding.
Because there’s no point in celebrating for no reason when there are “dashing” people in the yard
- drink water according to coupons...
I didn't like champagne. No, not because it is somehow different.
It’s just that bottles from it were very rarely accepted.
We can say that they did not accept it at all. From vodka and beer - easily.
And champagne bottles stood like dead weight in barns and on balconies.
The only use they have is for shooting with slingshots. Glass is strong -
did not scatter the first time, prolonging the pleasure for the second and third hit.
They also mixed carbide with water, plugged them with the original cork, and ran into the “bunker.”
Yes, car enthusiasts stored all sorts of liquids in them, such as diesel fuel, oil and electrolyte. Reliable capacity.
Here they are, dear to every Soviet citizen, labels.
They made it and bottled it everywhere.
Azerbaijan SSR:
Tolyatti:
What did not have the right to be called “champagne” was called “sparkling”.
Abrau-Durso, king of Soviet sparkling wines:
And note, one price - 6 rubles 50 kopecks with the cost of the dishes. How simple and clear everything was...
Cheap Moscow "fizzy" for two-piss:
Imported, from Bulgaria:
From Hungary:
Friends, sorry, I couldn’t resist :)
This is modern, “new world”. I haven't tried anything better...
Strong tinctures:
End of 10th grade. We are all very adults now, we can decide for ourselves what to drink and how much :) The choice always fell on this:
0.5 per 10 people - cool, let's go for a walk! :) Why lemon?
Apparently, on a subconscious level, they chose a compromise between childhood (lemonade) and supposedly already adult life (vodka).
It was still rubbish, but it was impossible to show it. And don't forget that this is 1996...
For some reason, tinctures were then made to look like lemonades. Did you involve children? :)
The only inscription “bitter” indicated that it was not tasty.
Strong tincture “Zubrovka”: Prepared on the basis of bison grass, it has a soft, slightly pungent taste and aroma of bison grass.
And the price is already a whole red chervonets.
Cognacs:
Our parents were lucky - they could still drink normal, “not scorched”
cognacs from Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Moldova.
How many types there were! But not everyone can afford it. More expensive than vodka by 5 rubles.
Moldavian SSR:
I found this bottle in some old basement, half full. Naturally, the liquid was immediately poured onto the ground :)
But it was someone’s stash.
Something that doesn't exist now. Georgian cognacs:
Azerbaijani:
Cognac of the Dagestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Produced at the Moscow Interrepublican Winery.
Disgusting cognac drink "Strugurash": But for lack of a better one, he too went:
Vodka was as it is now - cheap and expensive.
The cheap ones were almost always sold in “Cheburashka” lemonade bottles, with a thick foil cap and a “tail”:
Dear - in long bottles, with a screw cap:
And this is how they bought vodka in the USSR:
First they handed over the old containers, then they used the money to buy new ones. If it was enough :)
"Gorbachev's Loop":
If there was not enough vodka, then they took port wine. When it ran out, they went to a nearby store for this:
Interestingly, the same type of vodka could be cheap and expensive at the same time.
I'll start with the cheap ones. This is how they usually paid the tractor driver in the spring for plowing work on their summer cottage:
This was usually placed on the table on ordinary holidays:
It was impossible to get the capital one (at least here).
Prepared with the highest purity alcohol with the addition of sugar in the amount of 0.2 g per 100 ml.
And finally, Tsar Vodka! Siberian:
Strength - 45%, price almost like cognac - almost 12 rubles!
This was what they ordered for weddings.
Kuban tincture, with the sacramental inscription RUSSIAN VODKA.
Gin, whiskey, brandy, rum:
The fact that in the USSR they usually didn’t drink, because... were not produced. But no one canceled business trips to fraternal countries,
so you could find the following drinks:
It is likely that you could buy it at Beryozka.
But this, apparently, was brought in barrels from friendly Cuba and bottled here.
Bulgarian brandy "Sunny Beach":
By the way, it is still produced with the same label today. A friend brought it to me recently and we used it :)
Scotch whiskey!
So what do you think? :) What did you drink from this?
The construction of wineries was immediately launched, of which there were 193 in 1940, and they produced almost 13.5 million deciliters of table and dessert wines. By the way, an interesting fact - until 1936 in the USSR there was no such thing as “vodka” - the 40% drink was called “bread wine”. In 1937, the production of Soviet champagne was launched and standard standards for vintage wines were developed. Only the Massandra wine factory in Crimea could produce them. At the same time, mass production of cognac wine material began.
During the Patriotic War, vineyards on many occupied lands were burned out. But the great attention paid by the government to their restoration made it possible to return to pre-war wine production volumes within 5 years. A big blow to the industry came during the years of perestroika, when almost a third of the vineyards in all the republics were cut down at the roots as part of the anti-alcohol campaign. Many wineries never recovered after the collapse of the USSR.
USSR wine labels - features
In the early years of Soviet power, wine labels were produced without any standard procedure. They were most often oval in shape, with the inscription wine and an indication of the manufacturer. Since the wine was bottled in containers that could be obtained, the volume of the drink was not indicated. Such original USSR labels from the first years have not survived. But their appearance can be judged from photographs of those years.
Dedicated to those who drank it and lived to this day... 
Golden autumn, 1 rub. 15 kopecks. - “Zosya”
Vasisubani, 2 rub. 00 kopecks. - “To the bathhouse with Vasya”
Port wine 777, 3 rubles 40 kopecks. - “Three Axes”, “Logging”
Bile mitzne, 1 rub. 70 kopecks. - "Biomitsin" 
Import substitution, it turns out, was also relevant during the Soviet Union. 
Vermouth, 1 rub. 50 kopecks - “Vera Mikhailovna”, “Vermouth”
Aroma of gardens, 1 rub. 80 kop. -“The aroma of butts”
Autumn garden, 1 rub. 70 kopecks - “Fruit-profitable”
Port wine 33.2 rub. 15 kopecks - “33 misfortunes” 
Rkatsiteli, 2 rubles. 50 kopecks - “Cancer to the goal”
Caucasus, 2 rubles 50 kopecks. - "Beggar in the Mountains"
Anapa, 2 rub. 30 kopecks. - "Sunstroke"
Fruit wine, 1 rub. 30 kopecks - “Tears of Michurin”
The most legendary "babble" of the USSR 
Port wine “AGDAM”, alcohol 19 vol.%, price 2 rubles. 60 kopecks, - as soon as they were called - “As I will give”, “Agdam Bukharyan”, “Agdam Zaduryan”, etc., etc.
This hellish mixture of fermented grape juice, sugar and potato alcohol was drunk by everyone in the country of victorious socialism - homeless people, students, academics.
Agdamych completed his victorious march across the expanses of the country only in the 90s after the destruction of the cognac factory in the town of Agdam, the most famous city of Azerbaijan, which is now completely wiped off the face of the earth... 
At the request of workers in the alcohol field:
Dessert drink “Volga Dawns”, strength 12% vol., sugar - 24%, price - 1 rub. 15 kopecks - a glorious representative of the Soviet “shmurdyaks”.
As a rule, this “dessert” was tried only once, because... the second time, the urge to vomit began just from the mere mention. 
“A tincture of natural herbs with tonic properties” is the long name on the label of another legendary drink of the 70s - Abu Simbel Balsam.
Capacity 0.83 l., strength 30 degrees, price - 5 rubles. 80 kop.
As experienced senior students in the Tallinn dorm enlightened us, elementary students: “Abu” is the best “babolayer.”
The cork, they taught, must be opened very carefully so as not to damage it, and the bottle must not be thrown away under any circumstances: after emptying, you must pour regular port wine into it, carefully cork it, and everything is ready for the next romantic date! 
Well, and finally, one of the main “gifts” from N.S. Khrushchev to the Soviet people - the wine of Algeria, which, with the light hand of domestic “winemakers”, turned into “Solntsedar”, “Algerian” and “Rose Vermouth”.
The people who survived, having tasted this muck, dubbed it “ink”, “fence paint”, “bug pest”, etc., etc., but nevertheless, almost 5 million decalitres of this swill came to the Union by tankers, which with difficulty steamed after draining in the village of Solntsedar near Gelendzhik. It was all about the price: “Algerian” - 14% and 65 kopecks!!!, “Solntsedar” - 20% and 1 rub. 25 kopecks!
A 3-liter can of Solntsedar for 8 rubles. 80 kopecks is my first alcoholic experience with my 8th grade classmates in Moscow, it’s simply impossible to find decent words to describe the state the next day.
“Solntsedar”, which became a symbol of the era of stagnation, collected its deadly harvest in the vastness of the USSR until 1985, when Gorbachev, who went down in the history of the country’s wine consumption as the Mineral Secretary, began the fight against drunkenness and alcoholism. 
"Moscow special vodka"
0.5 l, 40%, price 60 rub. 10 kopecks,
Dishes 50 kopecks, cork 5 kopecks. 1944 - “Bitch”
“Vodka” 0.5 l, 40%, price 3 rubles. 62 kopecks
1970 - “Crankshaft”
“Vodka” 0.5 l, 40%, price 4 rubles 70 kopecks.
1982 - “Andropovka”,
aka, “First-Grader” (released in early September),
aka - “Yurka’s Dawns” (based on the film)
“Vodka “Russian” 0.33l, 40%,
I don’t remember the price, in a Pepsi bottle - “Raiska”
(in honor of the wife of the “Mineral Secretary of the CPSU” Gorbachev)
“Vodka “Russian” 0.1 l, 40% - “Bum Yogurt”
-I don’t remember the price. 
Vodka “Krepkaya-Strong”, 0.5 l, strength 56%.
This very rare vodka from the USSR period, 56% alcohol, is deprived of popular attention, because... sold mainly to foreigners. The legend about its appearance is connected with the name of Stalin: they say, the leader, who had a weakness for polar explorers, asked them at one of the receptions what they drink during the winter, to which they answered: alcohol diluted to the strength of the parallel at which they at the moment of consumption, they are at the Pole - 90%, Salekhard - 72%, etc., and already at the next Kremlin reception on the occasion of the award, Stalin treated the conquerors of the North with specially prepared vodka with a strength of 56%, which corresponded to the geographical latitude of Moscow. 
Pepper is not only for colds!
“And we walked together, like on a cloud,
And we came to Beijing hand in hand,
She drank Durso, and I drank Pepper.
For the Soviet family, exemplary!”
After these lines from Alexander Galich, I simply don’t want to comment tritely on this one of the most popular tinctures of the USSR, therefore, just facts from the labels:
Bitters tincture “Pepper”, 0.5 l, 1991,
35%, price with the cost of dishes 8 rubles. 00 kopecks.
“Ukrainian gorilka with pepper”, 0.7 l, 1961,
40%, price with the cost of dishes 4 rubles. 40 kopecks
There was also a tincture of “Pepper” in the USSR, 30%, produced already since 1932, but for more than 30 years of collecting, I never came across a single bottle of it, because it was not just an infusion of different varieties of allspice and the first a remedy for colds, but also a real holiday for all drinking citizens of the country of the Soviets. 
And Tariban port. This is death. It was impossible to break the bottle with anything, 0.8 liters were brought in, non-standard bottles were not accepted. 
Classic 90s)
