Read Part II here.

As the so-called millenials are coming of age around the world, there are always posts popping up about what it was like growing up in the 90s. I like to compare what things I recognize from my childhood in Russia and what things must be specific to the country the post describes and do not apply to Russia. I would like to go over a few things that many Russian nineties kids will remember.

1. Tamagotchi

Tamagotchi (тамагочи) was a portable electronic console that let you raise and care for a pet. Around the mid-nineties a tamagotchi craze took over Russia with children nagging their parents to buy one for them.

2. Chocolate eggs

Kinder Surprise (Киндер сюрприз) eggs were hollow chocolate eggs with a plastic container inside. You ate the egg and opened the container to find a small toy inside. They had “surprise” in their names because you didn’t know what was inside the container until you opened the egg. Kids collected and traded the toys from inside the eggs.

3. Seed Bead Bracelets

Seed bead bracelets (called фенечки) were very popular. They were made with very small beads (бисер) of different colors and fishing line (леска). There were many patterns achieve by altering the width, color, and angles of the beads. This was mostly a girls’ pastime.

4. Sticker Books

Another thing we, nineties kids, collected is sticker books (альбомы с наклейками). These were books about popular action figures or cartoon characters that had blanks for stickers (наклейки) with these characters. You had to buy the stickers in packs of six or so and then, if you got a duplicate, you would need to trade it with someone who had an extra sticker you didn’t have.

5. Gaming Consoles

Video games were starting to come to Russia in the eighties and nineties. They were not normally referred to as video games (видеоигры) but as a console (приставка). These were freestanding gaming consoles, like Dendy or Sega, that would need to be hooked up to your TV.

I feel like there are many more things to be said about growing up in the nineties, so let’s continue this discussion next time. In the meantime, can you think of something young people did in the 90s in Russia — or elsewhere?