The most famous "Alyonka", or the story of a girl with a chocolate wrapper

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Alyonka chocolate was one of the most famous Soviet brands. The name of the chocolate was given by the name of the daughter of the first Soviet woman-cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, but another Soviet girl became the face of this chocolate.

The history of the famous and beloved by all chocolate "Alenka" began in the 60s, when the government of the USSR adopted a food program, one of the points of which was the creation of a new delicious milk chocolate. A competition was announced for the fulfillment of the state order, and the confectionery factory "Red October" won it.

Along with the recipe, there was the question of creating a bright and recognizable wrapper. The artists tried many images - Alyonka with carnations, and with pigtails, and in the role of the Snow Maiden …

There was even a proposal to put the famous painting "Alyonushka" by Vasnetsov on a chocolate wrapper. But from above, this idea was criticized, - they say, childhood in the country is happy, and the girl has bare feet. As a result, we stopped at the photo of the daughter of the artist Alexander Gerinas.

Gerinas's wife photographed the girl in 1960 when she was 8 months old. In 1962, this portrait was published in the magazine "Health". And when in 1965 Vechernyaya Moskva announced a competition for packaging for chocolate, they again remembered this photo.

True, for the chocolate wrapper, the photo was a little “painted on”: the girl's eyes were changed from brown to blue, her face was slightly lengthened, her cheeks were browned, and her lips were made more swollen. So, in 1966, packaging for chocolate appeared, which became recognizable not only in the USSR, but also abroad. By the way, these simple transformations saved the Krasny Oktyabr factory in 2000 from paying Elena Gerinas an amount of 5 million rubles. She filed a lawsuit in court demanding to pay her the specified amount for the fact that her photo has been used on the wrapper for so many years. The judges ruled that the image on the label is collective. Today Elena Gerinas lives in Khimki near Moscow. She is married and has two children. Elena is a pharmacist by profession.

For a long time in the Soviet Union, different factories produced about 50 types of Alenka chocolate, until the Red October factory filed a patent for this product. For some time, a poem was printed on the wrapper, which was written by a Soviet schoolgirl, Alexandra Egorova:

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