TLDR:

Food was scarce only during the first decades of Soviet rule.

The problems we had in my time were (1) irregularity of supplies and (2) too narrow a choice of food items. Both came from imperfections in information feedback that persist when individuals don’t have economic agency.

LONGER ANSWER

After three major famines in the 1920s and 40s, food wasn’t scarce in the USSR.

Social contract

The Communist rulers that came after Stalin were different from him in at least one thing. They considered preventing hunger an essential part of their contract with the populace.

From the 1950s onward, the choice of food items was narrow, and the restocking routines were very patchy, especially outside Moscow and other major centers. But no one needed to starve anymore. Already in the 1960s, we surpassed the Americans in calorie consumption per head.

Especially bread was viewed as a sacred necessity. Failure to provide bread to the populace was enough reason to sack a local party boss in charge of a particular territory.

Four categories

The entire USSR was divided into different areas of food security.

I was born and raised in Moscow. The city belonged to the top group. It used to get the first picks of everything. Some major industrial and military objects, like the centers of nuclear research and production or the naval city of Sevastopol, got priority at par with Moscow.

On the bottom, there was “Category 4.” These were the provinces that could not expect any provisioning from the Kremlin. They had to procure all the food needed from inside their own territory. The forested provinces of Russia’s heartland and the food-producing areas in Russia’s southern prairies belonged here.

Scarcity

Massive migration to cities bled the countryside of a workforce. Even massive mechanization and the introduction of fertilizers could not compensate for that. Khrushchev started buying food in the West, for which he’s been much reviled by Soviet patriots.

But even this was often not enough.

Another problem came with the petroleum bonanza in the 1970s. Brezhnev and his successors went about pumping excess money into the economy. It was a vain attempt to motivate people to work more productively. Despite all the improvements in food production, inflation emptied the market of food and consumables beyond the narrow list of basic things like bread, sugar, potatoes, felt boots, padded jackets (vatnik), etc.

Waste

I remember how things kept disappearing from the shelves in Moscow throughout the 1970s and 1980s. People who had time to stand in lines or had svyázi (“connections”) managed it relatively okay. They used to say, “The shelves were empty, yet the fridges were full”.

However, the situation was worse in the provinces, and frustration was palpable.

Also, when you read the Soviet food stats, remember that they show items produced, not consumed. There was a waste of epic proportions along the whole chain from the farm to the grocery shop. Especially fruits and vegetables were known to rot in huge quantities in the stores and in transit. Grain reported as “delivered” was often rotting under open skies. “Meat” stats showed carcass weight for everything leaving slaughterhouses.

Crisis

As a part of the Perestroika reforms, Gorbachev allowed state-owned enterprises greater leeway in deciding over their personnel’s pay grades and bonuses. However, local bosses largely sabotaged the reforms. Gorbachev just flooded the market with more money.

When problems started to snowball in the late 1980s, local bosses just held back food and consumables they came across from being sent to other parts of the country. Stalin would have started shooting the saboteurs. Gorbachev didn’t.

The disruptions metastasized. The shelves in the stores went forever empty. In many places, food rationing was re-introduced. Even though no one went hungry, the damage was profound. It didn’t take too many months until Communist rule was over.

Below, three shop assistants in a Soviet food store, ready for service in the late 1970s.

The contraption on the counter is non-digital scales. Behind the ladies, you see blocks of wheat bread. To the left are the packages with sugar cubes. The lady in the center is holding a scoop with something that looks like candy.

These calorie-rich items were considered sheer life necessities. In my time, they were in stock everywhere. When I traveled to Central Asia for my job in propaganda, I visited villages where some peasant women literally lived on bread, cheap candy, and tea. There was nothing else to buy in the local shops. Meat and other things that their family could afford at commercial prices at the market went to their men and children.

Do you like my stories? Feel free to dоnаtе. For a retired time traveler, every penny counts!