Second time as farce IN THE giddy capitalist dawn of the 1990s, many of the tawdry products that stocked Soviet-bloc stores (when you could find them) were driven out by better-made, better-packaged foreign ones. Milk in plastic bags, canned “luncheon meat” and Pitralon aftershave (which, as readers of old samizdat know, doubled as an aperitif among vodka-deprived prisoners) disappeared from the shelves.
Lately, these old products have been making a comeback. Polish hipsters are buying retro furniture in the pupil-dilating browns and oranges of the Jaruzelski era. Proletarian beer brands have been resurrected from Belgrade to Bratislava. In Germany the popular television series “Deutschland ‘83”, which follows an East German spy in the West, has been given the go-ahead for a second season.
Communist nostalgia is not new, but it does seem to be having a moment. This makes some sense in Russia, which ruled the empire. It is harder to understand among the central and eastern Europeans whom the Soviets ground under their boots. And in a twist that should set apparatchiks rolling in…
