The song is written from the perspective of a young, starving girl standing on a freezing street corner on a stormy night, desperately begging passersby to buy her hot bublichki (“Buy my hot bagels, have pity on a poor girl…”).
She describes her miserable life: her father is a raging alcoholic who beats her, her mother is old and helpless, and she is freezing to death with tattered shoes. If she doesn’t sell her bread rings, she won’t survive the night.
In the mid-1920s. Vladimir Lenin had introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), which temporarily allowed a limited form of capitalism.
This created a class of wealthy new rich people (known as “Nepmen”) who spent money on luxury, jazz clubs, and expensive restaurants. At the exact time, cities were flooded with extreme poverty, unemployment, and millions of homeless orphans left behind by the Russian Civil War.
The song captured this massive social gap. It belonged to a genre called Blatnaya Pesnya (criminal or underworld songs) because it represented the gritty, real life of the streets, far removed from official Soviet propaganda.