Rising Costs Spark Soviet Buying Spree

Waves of frightened shoppers swept through Soviet stores Friday, buying almost everything in sight following the government’s announcement that it intends to raise consumer prices sharply as part of its economic reform.

Bakeries, dairies and groceries in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and other major cities were quickly emptied, according to Soviet news reports, and supplies of flour, sugar, rice, macaroni and other staples were exhausted in some cities.

Women emerged from bread stores with sacks full of loaves that they hoped they could refrigerate or freeze to assure themselves a small supply after prices are raised to three times their present levels July 1. Many large offices, including central ministries, virtually closed so their employees could shop.

Stores on Gorky Street in downtown Moscow were so jammed with shoppers that those inside often found it impossible to leave as crowds of several hundreds formed outside. Trucks bringing supplies of more goods, of almost any kind, were mobbed by customers before they could be unloaded.

Even unpopular, slow-selling products of poor quality were being bought for fear that they would not be available again, according to clerks at Moscow’s giant GUM department store on Red Square.

“Sales of grain, flour, butter and a series of other goods rose by factors of six to eight,” Radio Moscow’s news service Interfax reported. “There are already shortages of vital goods.”

In Leningrad, all the city’s stores had sold out of flour, macaroni and cereals. In Kiev, sales of flour went from an average of 80 tons a day to 500 tons, of macaroni and spaghetti from 40 to 320 tons and of cooking oil from 60 to 140 tons.

In Moscow, the city council ordered the capital’s food stores to sell only to residents for the next two weeks in order to conserve supplies. Deputies to the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, called for introduction of nationwide food rationing.

As the panic buying spread, Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov appealed for calm--and warned that he would resign if the reform program he presented to the legislature earlier this week is not approved.

“This wave of demand for bread and bread products has already rolled through half of the country,” Ryzhkov told a press conference in the Kremlin. “Someone gets worried here, someone begins to understand (that prices will be increased) and now the wave has reached Moscow. I am appealing for restraint and calm in this matter.”

Ryzhkov, haggard and emotional, complained that his government is being assailed by strikes and protests throughout the country and by mounting opposition from “a fixed group” of parliamentary deputies.

“I do not work solely to hang on to my position,” Ryzhkov said. “If there is no confidence in the government, then a new government will have to begin work. If I see there is no trust from the people, well, then I will not leave (office) unvoluntarily.”

But opposition to the reform program, which entails extensive price increases as a key element in a transition to a market economy, continued to grow Friday. Radicals and conservatives alike pursued their attack on the program in the Supreme Soviet, criticizing its many compromises and its stage-by-stage approach as prolonging the agony and likely to fail for lack of overall momentum.

Deputy Mikhail L. Bronshtein, an economist from Estonia, warned that the entire country would now need a ration-card system to make it through the transition to a market economy.

Pavel Bunich, another radical economist in the Supreme Soviet, said that the government had rejected more severe “shock therapy” reforms only to offer “shock therapy without the therapy,” and argued that the reforms will hurt without leading to a real market system. Bunich proposed sending the whole plan back to the government drawing board.

In Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, the republic’s government said it would oppose the program.

Miners in the Donetsk region, the country’s largest coal field, said they would stage a protest over the program before a national miners’ meeting June 11. “If these proposals come true, we will all starve,” a representative of the miners said.

The June meeting is already scheduled to consider a countrywide coal strike on other grievances, the miners said, and would now consider the reform program.

Half a million miners throughout the Soviet Union went on strike for three weeks last year to demand better supplies of consumer goods and more local control of their industry. The country is still recovering from the effects of that strike.

Ryzhkov acknowledged that the country will “have to live through a pretty hard period,” as the price increases go into effect, workers are laid off and unprofitable enterprises shut down. But he pledged government support for low-income families and other measures to cushion the transition, and he challenged the deputies to respond with constructive proposals to improve the program.

“Tension is growing,” he told the deputies during the second day of debate on the program. “We are getting a lot of telegrams expressing worry, ‘How are we going to live?’ ”

Ryzhkov said the criticism pointed up “the weak sides” of the program, but he urged a quick decision, particularly on whether bread prices should be raised as planned.

The Moscow city government’s decision to restrict food sales to residents could inflict serious hardships on the hundreds of thousands of people, many of them construction workers and unskilled laborers, who live in Moscow without official permission and will be unable to buy food under this ruling.

“You can already feel the anger among the shoppers as they scramble for what little we have,” the manager of a grocery in southern Moscow said. “When we tell them that the food is only for Muscovites, that as far as we are concerned they can starve, we could well have riots bread riots.”

As opposition to the program mounted, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev backed away from a pledge by two senior government officials that a referendum would be held before the harshest measures are implemented.

“Well, I have a lot of collaborators,” Gorbachev said, implying that in the current political environment, even first deputy prime ministers are free to speak their minds--but that he would still make the decisions.

But he did express his support for the Ryzhkov program, outlined by the prime minister Thursday to the Supreme Soviet, and the goal of transforming Soviet socialism to a mixed economy based more on market forces than central planning.

As outlined by Ryzhkov, the program envisions a three-stage transition over five years to a “regulated market economy” in which the state would gradually sell its enterprises and move from detailed planning at the center to such economic levers as investment, credit, tax rates and state purchases to guide development.

Prices would be freed from state control gradually.