Russian Commercials

A few weeks/months/at some point in time I mentioned this commercial in class. Since it's from the 80's and none of us are old enough to really remember the 80's, if we were even alive at the time, (except for Dr. Denner because he's old), I found it on YouTube. I think it's a pretty funny commericial.





And while we're doing commercials, here' s an actual Russian commercial fro Skittles.



And interesting look at a Russian pop culture depiction of their country-folk. We also get to learn the word for bear!



All this capitlist advertisement got me wondering... did they have commercials in Soviet Russia? I mean, what did they have to advertise? There wasn't like you had 4 different options for delivery pizza. What would the commercial say? "Choose us because it's better than starving!"

So I did a bit of googling, and didn't find much aside from the following uncited statement on the ever reliable Wikipedia

"Until the late 1980s, Soviet TV programming did not include commercials of any kind.[citation needed] The first Western commercial was aired for the first time in May 1988; it was a Pepsi commercial featuring Michael Jackson.[citation needed]"

I can't find anything anywhere to corroborate this, but it's a cute commercial and it was when he still had a nose, so I'll put it up anyway.