Avos. “Perhaps.” “God willing.” “Hope against hope.” Pushkin baptized his fellow Slavs with this very phrase in Eugene Onegin: “Perhaps, o people's Shibboleth…” In Goncharov’s Oblomov, the spineless protagonist can barely splutter a sentence without its invocation: “And perhaps Zahar will contrive something…let's hope they'll manage without turning me out…well, things will be arranged somehow!" It is said that few words characterize the Russian outlook as succinctly as avos—a compact expression of the belief that, against all reason, something good might still turn up. So it should come as no surprise that the word eventually morphed into the avoska—the USSR’s portable, fishnet shopping sack.

Nowadays, you’ll see environmentally conscious Western shoppers with avoska-like bags slung over their shoulders, sauntering out of Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. It is an undeniably brilliant little piece of design: collapses to fit inside your fist, expands to hold 12 grapefruits and an organic candy bar to boot. Best of all, it prevents those pesky plastic bags from gathering in your kitchen corner or the world’s landfills. But while the mesh shopping bag might strike Westerners as a handy convenience, the avoska was as natural to Soviet consumers as cheeks are to a chipmunk. The avoska was born of necessity in a world of Soviet food shopping that wavered between blood sport and bad dream.

In 1971, the average Soviet consumer spent 400 hours a year waiting in line. In the 1980s, a million out-of-town visitors descended upon Moscow every day for the sole purpose of shopping. In addition to the country’s endemic famines and food shortages, a typically byzantine organization governed the shop itself: the hateful three-line system. That's one line to be briefed on what goods were available and at what price, a second to pay and get a receipt, and a third to receive the actual product. If you saw an inordinately long line somewhere, it was customary to jump in and only then ask what was being sold, under the assumption that something rare probably lay at the end of it. The devil’s arithmetic of what goods were available when lent most shoppers the stockpiling instincts of people anticipating the apocalypse—and this is where the avoska enters the picture. When something like, say, imported toothpaste suddenly appeared on the market, the expanding mesh bag allowed everyone to morph from a passerby into a bulk shopper with one flick of the wrist.

When the avoska’s recent resurgence began, it seemed a quaint development in the craze for green living. But since the global economy jackknifed, we may be reminded of the bag’s original purpose: not shopping but something closer to foraging.