Clumsy Bears: The Soviet Era Kit-Kat

I just finished one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time – The Lost Year by Katherine Marsh, an adaptation of her own family’s  Ukranian immigration story.  It’s actually classified as a young adult book, but what attracted me was the topic, which is more than adult.   I would describe it as a modern Covid-era Diary of Anne Frank, and despite being classified as a young adult story, it did not skimp on the adult themes, nor did it feel like it was written down to a younger audience.    And with themes of living in the pandemic and Russian invasion of Ukraine, it felt very current.

It’s a dual storytelling that takes place almost 100 years apart.   A young teenage boy gamer, Matthew, is in the midst of dealing with living during the Covid pandemic, his father being stuck in Europe, and his great grandmother, GG,  moving into the house.   He gets his video game system taken away and is forced to go through his great grandmother’s personal boxes with her.   As he does, he learns the story of her immigration from Ukraine in 1933 during Stalin’s forced famine on the peasant class, now called the Holomodor.   

It’s an engaging and interesting story about survival and family secrets.   I related on a lot of levels to GG’s story about her family and their tragedy as it was similar to my maternal grandmother’s Eastern European family’s story.   It educates us Americans on the little known Stalin era Soviet Union in which the Holomodor famine took place.   At the time, the New York Times leading journalist Walter Duranty prevented American from knowing about the Holomodor, as he just reproduced Soviet propaganda and didn’t go out to the rural areas to see for himself the tragedy happening.   The book does an amazing job of explaining why first hand accounts are important in reporting  and  how important it is to dig around the fascade and away from political propaganda.   The theme echoes today’s battlefield about fake news, and of course the most recent Big Lie about the election, propagated by the last president, which incited one of the worst and most violent attacks against American Democracy.

The Holodomor was a tragic period of time in the 1930s in Russia’s past where Stalin forced the landowning farmers to give their land to the state and become collective farmers.   Many of course resisted and Stalin sent resistors to work to death in Siberian work camps.   He also made all Russians and Soviet Republics have ration cards, and took their grain, selling it overseas and bringing it to the wealthy Comrades in the city.   Millions of rural Russions and especially Ukranians died of hunger on their farms as their sources of foods were taken away.       The Stalinist government propaganda denied that this was happening to the rest of the world, and only a few journalists actually went to the countryside and reported what was truly happening.

There are two great newish movies about the Holomodor, Bitter Harvest (2017) and Mr Jones (2020), both of which can be found on streaming services.

There’s a chocolate candy that plays almost a character role in the telling of the story in the Ukraine.  They are called Bumble Bears.   And all three of the girl cousins who are from Ukraine are familiar with them and they are part of their lives as young children.

So, of course as the foodie, I researched, and this chocolate actually was quite a popular but short-in-supply candy during the Soviet Era.   They’re actually called Clumsy Bears, or Mishka Kosolapy in Russian and they’ve  been around since tsarist times, when they were handmade.

It’s a small sized dark chocolate bar filled with two wafers filled with almond praline (a favorite of Russians) and what I would imagine are similar to our kit kat.    However, in the book, the Grandmother quickly replaces them with 3 Musketeer Bars, which is the first candy her Ukranian-American cousin Helen gives her, and they become her new favorite chocolate the rest of her life.    The manufactured nougat of the Milky Way, celebrating its 100^th birthday this year, like GG in the story, is the most similar to the almond praline filling of the Bumble Bears.

Even though it was a tzarist era candy, it somehow became a symbol of the Soviet Era and the USSR.   It was wrapped in a wonderful blue wrapper showing a fragment from the painting Morning in a Pine Forest, depicting four bears by Ivan Shishkin and Konstantin Savitsky.   The candy was expensive, costing almost four rubles, about $7 in todays economy.    Because of its expense and spotty availability, they were really only available to wealthy Soviet families in the cities, not the starving peasants in the rural areas.   These Ukranians and Russians would buy them and stockpile them for special occasions.    So, in a society that outwardly shunned Western greed and capitalism and luxury goods, the Clumsy Bear was just that – an expensive confection that the Russians craved and desired.

The candy’s first industrial production was in 1925 at the Krasny Oklyabr (Red October) factory.   And while there are many copycat producers today, the Red October factory version still remains Russians favorite.   Red October is the term for the Revolution in 1917 in Russia of the Bolsheviks against the Tsarist regime, that resulted in the execution of the entire Romanov family.

People would use them for New Year to decorate their New Year’s trees, called the yolka.    Communist USSR banned religion so what was once the Christmas tree moved to New Year’s the secular celebration of the Winter Season, with their Santa – Ded Moroz (Father Frost) and his cheerful helper, the young Snow Maiden called Sngegoricha     Children would get a bag of goodies at school on New Years which would always include Clumsy bears, as well as a similar candy called Little Squirrel, Golden Hen and lollipops.   But the top of this sugary ecosystem was the and still is the Clumsy Bear.

So I went to my source for all things Russian and Eastern European – Marinia’s Market (formerly Marina’s Russian market pre-Russian invasion of Ukraine). They dont have the Red October factory made Russian Clumsy Bears, but they do have a Ukranian version. Marina has tried to distance herself from Russian since the invasion last year, rebranding their name, changing their sign, and carrying less Russian products. The Ukranian Clumsy Bears are really good – they’re lighter and crispier than a Kit-Kat with more layers of crispy cookie and thinner chocolate layers – and you get that flavor of almond marzipan which is really nice.

Above Image – the Ukranian Versions of Clumsy Bear