Gradations of my Poorness as Demonstrated by Cigarettes

Dear friends,

just in case it hasn't become super obvious from past posts, your humble writer is broke. Oh, she broke like a joke. I live in a very cute apartment, in a phantabulous part of town, and as a result, have become the poorest chel in this city. Ok, I am exaggerating of course, but just the same, I thought that it might be fun to monitor my descent into poverty by seeing which cigarettes I smoked when I first got here and had money, and which smokes I'm down to now. So I went through all of the empty cigarette packs in my apartment and photographed them, to present you with this little smoking plunge into squalor.

Ok, so when I first got here, I was smoking these:
These are imported from New York, and cost 120 Rubles a pack. They're all natural tobacco and they were exactly what I smoked in NYC. And they were yummy.
I also smoked the occasional expensive cigarillos. Or little cigars such as these:

These are 400 Rubles a box.

These are something like 100 Rubles a pack and they are cherry flavored. I just smoked them for the lovely smell. Hey, I could afford it.

When I got a bit poorer, I couldn't afford the 120 Ruble a pack deal anymore, so I switched to these:

Perfectly respectable Dunhills. Not entirely natural or organic, but they seemed to be a good fit. These cost 60 Rubles a pack. I was ok with that for a while. I thought I was all fancy and could afford them.

But then, I got even more poor and started experimenting with slightly cheaper alternatives.
Here they are:
These are actually called Diablo Nero, and they are black, and smell like coffee when you smoke them. They are 48 Rubles a pack. Fun!

I don't remember how much the Gitanes cost, but they were somewhere in the middle range too. I just didn't like them very much taste-wise. But they were somewhere in that 40 to 50 Ruble range that I thought I could afford back then, along with the Lucky Strikes.

Shit was I fucking wrong.

So next, I had to move down to the 20 to 30 Ruble range. Here's what you can get for that:

Chesterfields are about 27 Rubles a pack. They're not that bad, but they made me cough a lot, so no, not my cigarettes of choice.

Ok, I think these are like 19 Rubles a pack, and poor people smoke them in America too, so I think that we all know just how disgusting they are. I also tried these whack-ass Pall Malls. They were in my price range back then:
Ok, someone actually brought these to my house, so I'm not sure how much they are, but I guarantee that they were also cheap because the dude that brought them over is also broke. Again, gross. But, of course, this is all before I realized that I didn't know the meaning of the word "gross" yet.

Oh, but these by the way, are 27 Rubles and not all that bad. I mean, they're more smokable than the fucking Pall Malls:
And at least they're made right here in Russia. And they've got the lovely name of "Russian Style". Yeah, because it's really stylish to smoke cigarettes that cost less than a dollar a pack. Still better than Mores.

Ok, now just watch the following regress of smokes:

"Our Prima"? 9 Rubles
Yeah, these are real. 9 Rubles a pack. The USSR is alive and well, and polluting my lungs.
These, I don't even know what the fuck hole these crawled out from under, or how much they cost, but they were disgusting. Someone brought them to my house. I think they're like 10 Rubles though. Just so everyone understands, 30 Rubles is like a Dollar. So do the math. "Alliance"? What are they the alliance of? Everything that lives in the bog of eternal stench?

And finally, I had to hit rock bottom:
BelamorKanal. 6 Rubles a pack. These are not cigarettes. They're papirosii. I don't know the English word for this, but these bitches have been around forever, I'm pretty sure that the price hasn't changed since 1924, and also that while there may not have been food in Leningrad during the Blockade of '41, they did have these. So I'm basically smoking wartime blockade cigarettes. On the up side, the tobacco is actually pure. On the down side, they're so harsh that it's not unlike smoking exhaust fumes. Here's another picture just so you can see what a papirosa actually looks like:

One third of this thing is tobacco, and the other 2 thirds are not a filter, but rather just some rolled up cardboard to make the ride smoother.

So yesterday, I got fed up with it all and bought these:

That's right. I bought "Rich" cigarettes. Fuck it! They're brown and PINSTRIPED, like a rich man's pants, and taste like apples. They were 39 Rubles, so I can't afford another pack, but after smoking the USSR and Prima and Alliance and some random Canal, I figured I owed it to myself to be rich for a day.
And that ends our tour of just how poor Plusha can get, as can be demonstrated by the cigarettes that she smokes.
Have a good evening folks. Enjoy your fancy expensive dollar-bought cigarettes. Hey, at least I can smoke almost anywhere I want, such as cafes and bars, and my job. So there!