"LoveIs" gum insert

The influx of capitalist goods into the post-Soviet market produced peculiar trends that might seem difficult to imagine today. One such trend was the omnipresence of gum sold with a picture or sticker included with the wrapper. These were popularized due to a joint effort by the international confectioner Chupa Chups, and the Turkish confectioner Kent, and were beloved by both children and adults during the early 1990s. Gum was typically sold in individual pieces, wrapped in two wrappers, the outer wrapper was disposable, but the one underneath was meant to be saved, either as a collectible insert or a decorative sticker. Major brands like Turbo and LoveIs, featuring glamorous vehicles and cheesy love quotes on their inserts, respectively, were the most popular, but a vast variety appeared alongside them, with all sorts of media included.

As an easily and readily available Western luxury good with no Soviet equivalents, gum and the colorful inserts that came with it became an important staple of post-Soviet children’s collecting, displacing stamps and other Soviet collection games. However, the imagery included in these inserts was startlingly disparate: one kind of gum might include glossy stickers of cars and motorcycles, another stills from a popular Western film such as Jurassic Park or The Godfather, while others yet were pornographic or erotic photographs or stickers. Whereas a Soviet stamp collection might consist of stamps featuring famous writers, space travel imagery, socialist realist paintings, birds, and dinosaurs, a gum-insert collection might include motorcycles, cheesy love quotes, porn, disembodied scenes from The Godfather, and still dinosaurs. This image diversity exhibits a notable quality of 1990s: the influx of Western media was hardly managed, and there was no sense of impropriety in, for example, selling candy with pornographic imagery alongside candy with cartoon characters, or traumatically violent scenes from films with no context or framing.