Alenka Milk Chocolate Bar, Russian Classic 75g (2.6oz)

Alenka Milk Chocolate Bar is the iconic Russian milk chocolate bar with the baby-face wrapper — a bar produced by Krasny Oktyabr (Red October), the Moscow confectionery factory founded in 1851, and the product whose distinctive wrapper image of a baby girl in a headscarf became one of the most widely recognised confectionery packages in the Soviet and post-Soviet world. Krasny Oktyabr is one of Russia's oldest and most prestigious confectionery manufacturers, and Alenka was introduced in 1966 as a Soviet state enterprise bar — the milk chocolate calibrated for mass production with domestic ingredients, the bar that represented the Soviet standard for milk chocolate and that Soviet citizens associated with the taste of affordable, everyday chocolate for decades. The Alenka bar occupies a position in Russian and former-Soviet confectionery culture similar to what Milka holds in Central Europe: the recognisable, trusted milk chocolate of childhood that the diaspora household buys specifically because it carries the taste memory of a specific time and place rather than because it is the most complex chocolate available. Break off squares for an afternoon treat with tea, give as the small nostalgic gift for any Russian or former-Soviet diaspora recipient, or share as the Russian milk chocolate bar that needs no explanation to anyone who grew up eating it.