Soviet Union’s Economic and Political Woes

As an insider--a person who has seen the sordid reality of Soviet life in the raw--I chuckle at the recent outpouring of articles in the American press, elaborating on nepotism, shortages, cronyism and other gloomy isms of Soviet reality.

For years these vices--an outgrowth of the regime--have been there. Simply, Moscow--the country’s window for visiting foreigners--had been better stocked with goods and foods, compared to the rest of the Soviet Union, until the sweeping wave of chronic shortages struck recently the capital.

When Carol J. Williams (“Moscow Shoppers Vent Ire Over Food Shortages, Costs,” Part A, July 7) airs Natasha Ternetseva’s grievances, it’s because Muscovites were ignorant of or deaf to the wrath all other non-Muscovite citizens have been fuming with for seven decades over the “deficits.”

The Baltic states, where the tables used to groan with seafood in good old days, have been eating “junk stinky fish,” a chambermaid of Hotel Riga told me some 20 years ago during my business trip to Latvia’s capital. Bare shelves have been staring at frustrated customers in Alma Ata and Dushanbe, in Yerevan and Kishinev, in Kazan and Sukhumi--all of them capital cities--for many, many years. Since Nikita Khrushchev’s days, political anecdotes, under the general caption “Questions and Answers of the Armenian Radio” have been mushrooming in all major cities of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet athlete Sergey Bubka hit the world record in pole vaulting, the next day the story got afloat: “Does Bubka have anything in common with prices?” to which the Armenian radio’s answer was: “Yes, they both hit world records.”

In the U.S.S.R. prices have been skyrocketing 100%-400% overnight. So you wake up to see all citrus prices up 100%, coffee 420%, salami, hams, etc., 250%, hardware 200% and so on, each high-priced item moving further up on the list of dearth.

It is the never-ending string of sordid surprises that account for Soviet citizens’ sour pessimism regarding promises of improved living standards.

There is no change in substance. The only difference is that some eight or 10 years ago Ternetseva would think twice before venting her ire in public; now she holds the passport of glasnost .

BERGE MESROPYAN

Van Nuys