Why do sneakers exist only in Russia?

Do you often use the word “sneakers” in your speech? Probably not too much, but still you know this word very well. How do you define it? “Flat-soled sneakers”? “Like sneakers, but more suited for lifestyle”? That’s a tough question. It’s much easier to conjure up the word “sneakers.” For some people it will be the brand Converse, whose sneakers were worn by the main characters of the movies: “Stay with Me”, “On the Needle”, “Diary of a Basketball Player” and others. Some will remember Vans and the famous skateboarder Tony Hawk, the brand’s ambassador. However, both for Hawk and for the style lovers of the above movies, sneakers are “sneakers”, that is also sneakers.

You can’t literally translate the word “sneakers” into English.

Sneaker sneakers and what is an “eponym”

Of course, you can remember the English names of sneakers, which are difficult to call frequent: plimsoll shoe or sand shoe. Both of these names have a reference to late 19th century beach shoes. Plimsoll line or waterline – in other words waterline – was the line on the vulcanized sole of future sneakers. If the water level crossed this line, the ship could go down and the shoes could get wet.

Since sneakers are no longer thought of as shoes for the beach, of course, no one has long been calling them “sandwalkers” or “shoes with a waterline” in Russian or English. But if in English the all-encompassing concept of “sneakers” has absorbed them, then in Russian sneakers are still sneakers. Quite interesting – why?

First it should be said that sneakers is an eponym. A word that was originally the designation of a specific brand, but then scaled up to a whole concept. You’ve probably heard “photocopiers” referred to as all printers (even though Xerox is a specific brand) and bigmacs as all burgers (even though a Big Mac is a specific burger at McDonald’s). Sneakers are from the same series. The company that invented them is called Keds and introduced the prototype of the shoes we know today to the world in 1916.

All the hallmarks are there: canvas upper, ankle height, rubber flat sole. The only “but” is the heel, but in general stereotypical sneakers. This very name was fixed in the USSR, albeit not immediately, and acquired different meanings.

Sneakers in the USSR were both mainstream and a protest

It is widely known that in the Soviet Union, textile shoes with rubber soles were standardized by GOST. It was mass-produced at various “rubber” factories, without thinking that this shoe could be useful for athletes. In the USSR, it was probably even harmful, because convenience was not the main priority in a state with a planned economy.

Making sneakers without any technology was easy and cheap – they required, you could say, two materials: fabric and rubber, which only needed to “slap” on each other. Thus, in the 1950s, the famous GOST 9155-88 “Rubber and rubber-textile sports shoes” appeared.

In the 1960s, sneakers became mainstream, they were worn by schoolchildren, students, and workers. And thanks to the American reporter Bill Eppridge, who came to the USSR in 1967 and filmed the famous Soviet Youth report, we know that the sneakers’ dominance is not just a private memory, but a very concrete past.

In 1965, “own” named Soviet sneakers even hit the shelves, not just faceless dungarees from a “rubber factory.” They were called “Two Balls” and were “imports” from China – in the 1960s this was a major breakthrough for the consumer and even something of an exotic. The sole of these sneakers left a trace on the ground in the form of two balls, their coloring was bright blue, and so they quickly became scarce in the USSR. However, they took root in popular culture immediately. The Soviet Union’s chief gudboy, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, wore Two Balls, which again won over his Soviet fans.

Since the 1970s, however, sneakers in the mass culture of the USSR have returned to their folk character, including the scarce “Two Balls”. Sneakers are worn by the bully Wolf from “Well, wait!” and the slacker Syroezhkin from “The Adventures of Electronik”, and Sharik from “Prostokvashino”, who asked for a photo gun and put on sneakers instead of doing useful things in the village.

Hysteroid and egocentric Parrot Kesha, by the way, also appears in the cartoon in sneakers, although he borrowed the shoes from his master Vovka. In short, during the 1970s and early 1980s, sneakers became the sign not of those who wanted to be like Gagarin and become a great cosmonaut, but of various hooligans, loafers, and flighty youth.

By the perestroika years, it was evident that sneakers had moved from being a simple mainstream shoe to a class of protesting young people. This is mainly due to the fact that Viktor Tsoi, the icon of the perestroika era and leader of the band Kino, often appeared in sneakers, and the song “We Are Waiting for Change”, first performed in a Leningrad rock club in 1986, is still a symbol of civil resistance.

It is noteworthy that at the height of perestroika (and thus in the era of glasnost), sneakers could also be seen on Leningrad television, where almost all the major programs of the time, like “600 Seconds” or “Telecourier”, were centered.

It was a children’s program called “Big Festival”, something like today’s “Good Night, Kids”, hosted by two anthropomorphic dolls and a certain creature with a “sneaker” instead of a head. “Big Festival” ran from 1989 to 2001.

“Jeans cut, summer, three stripes on sneakers” – what are “sneakers” in the second millennium?

The phrase in the subtitle is probably familiar to anyone who was of any conscious age and turned on alternative music radio stations or channels in the mid-noughties. It’s a quote from the song “Three Stripes” by Animal Jazz, which sang with its lyrics and music video about the emo subculture and the phenomenon of subcultures in general. Of course, by the three stripes you can guess adidas, not Converse or Vans, but it’s quite normal, considering that there was not a huge choice of brands in Russia 12-15 years ago. Sneakers were one of the most important components of various subcultures: from emo to various kinds of punks. By the way, the girl from Three Stripes wore not some adidas, but the iconic Superstar model.

Sneakers in Russia are really a phenomenon. So impressive that in 2014 they even wanted to ban them at the legislative level. And indeed – you can’t go against history and memory, you can’t just get rid of the memories of the sixties about “Two Balls”, the eighties about Parrot Kesha and your own – about “Three Stripes”. So maybe it makes sense to stop calling sneakers “sneakers” and combine everything into “sneakers” or sneakers, as in the West. But is it worth it?