It’s summer 2017, and I’m standing with my mom in a supermarket in Yerevan, Armenia. She is an immigrant who left the former Soviet Socialist Republics when she was 10 years old; I’m a first-generation Armenian-American, born in Los Angeles. We’re fixed in place, staring at a tall wall stocked with a rainbow-colored assortment of beauty and grooming products. There’s Garnier, Malibu C, L’Oréal Paris and Dove. Micellar water, hair dye, suntan lotion, and hundreds of types of moisturizer. The packaging is mostly familiar, except the branding is in Russian, not English. My mom is borderline emotional over this very ordinary display. “When I was here,” she says, “we had none of this.”

In the Soviet Union, we didn’t have... is a familiar narrative, one I’ve grown up hearing. For some, like my late grandfather, it was a lamentation of good days gone by. It was also a refutation of American excess, and a general guilt-trip where possible, even though five-year-old me had nothing to do with which days I had off from school, for example, or why trash was picked up on Fridays in one part of the neighborhood and not until Monday in others. (“In the Soviet Union, everyone had the same days off.”) For others, including my mom, it’s a good riddance to a failed utopia, an unbelievable time in history that featured one of humanity’s most ambitious social experiments to date, one that resulted in the sacrifice of the individual for the benefit of the collective whole.

“In the Soviet Union,” my present-day mom says, about the relatively recent abundance of choice in the drugstore aisles, “you went to the store and, if the shelves were even stocked, you only had one choice — one kind of toothpaste, one moisturizer, maybe three soaps.”

"There weren't any brands. The government was the brand."

If you're unfamiliar with the structure of the U.S.S.R., think of it like the fictional country of Panem in The Hunger Games. The capital was in Russia, and its "districts" were the Soviet Socialist Republics of Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, Estonia, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, and most of the countries whose names ended in -stan. By government-set tenets, all worked together to supply goods and products that would be distributed across the Union. This is what’s known as a planned economy, a closed system that rejects foreign imports or private enterprises that pose as competition. This applied to everything from bread and meat to perfumes and powders.