In what follows I want to explore how this ‘single-minded desire’ of the Soviet consumer rooted in the economy of shortages continues to shape and influence the post-Soviet understanding of consumption. To do so, I will analyse a set of 178 essays written by young Russian people that I collected, mostly in April 1997 in Barnaul, a remote industrial Siberian city with a 
population about 800,000 people. Being a part of a bigger project, this article deals with only few themes articulated by the respondents: with the phenomenon of post-Soviet imaginary consumption, with the gender characteristics of the subject of post-Soviet consumption, and, finally, with the patterns of this consumption.