Outrage Over Bread Shortages Undermining Support for Soviet Reforms : Moscow: For Russians, a meal without the traditional symbol of well-being is no meal at all. Scarce supplies have created a public panic.

Into the tiny guardhouse of the Zotov Bread Factory rushed a worker in shirt-sleeves despite the cold rain.

“Open the gate,” he commanded, gesturing toward the truck waiting outside to carry freshly baked loaves to the capital’s stores. “People are left without bread!”

People are left without bread. It is a terrifying sentence for a nation that lives on bread, that has come to consider it the one dependable product in the midst of an economy gone haywire, that sees it, as it has throughout history, as the symbol of well-being, even of life itself.

For a Russian, a meal without bread is considered no meal at all, and that quick stop in the neighborhood bread store for a couple of loaves to put on the family table has been a central ritual of Soviet daily life for decades.

The steady supply of bread, in fact, was an unwritten but inviolable Communist covenant with the people after decades of deprivation: No matter what happens, the party told them, you will always have bread; you will never go hungry again.

But for a week now, the lines at Moscow bread stores--those that still have anything to sell--have snaked longer and longer, and the indignant panic has grown.

“How can this be?” an outraged pensioner standing in line the other day at the capital’s premier bread store on Kalinin Prospekt demanded. “They bring in a great harvest, and there’s no bread in the stores.

“Soon the windows in all the bread stores will be shattered,” he predicted. “The people will rise up.”

As President Mikhail S. Gorbachev prepares to launch a radical new economic program and Moscow readies equally daring plans to turn the city into an island of virtual capitalism, the bread shortage is costing the reformers in power desperately needed public confidence.

“We curse Gorbachev and the Moscow Council,” an old man in a cap said as he packed away the two loaves of bread he had bought after a half-hour wait. “We should have thought before electing them.”

For Gorbachev’s new reform program to succeed, he must have active support from a populace that believes in the future enough to invest energy in it and to tolerate the new hardships that it will bring at first.

Expected to be presented this week, the reform program moves the country away from a state-owned, centrally planned economy by instituting a mass selloff of government property to private citizens and a gradual shift to higher, free-market prices.

The timing of the bread shortage is unfortunate, and “the psychological damage is enormous,” Yuri M. Luzhkov, chairman of the Moscow City Council’s executive committee and the head of the capital’s new Anti-Crisis Committee, said. “We should have avoided it.”

City officials reported midweek that there had--so far--been no violent incidents connected with the bread shortage, none of the street protests dubbed “tobacco rebellions” that broke out nationwide over cigarette shortfalls this summer.

The Soviet populace is famed for its stoic patience, but politicians learned the lesson earlier this year that they must not tamper with bread.

When Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov proposed tripling the price of a loaf--now cheap at about 30 cents for a loaf that weighs more than two pounds--he triggered such an outcry and rush of panic buying that the government had to back off.

“Bread is the foundation of a person,” said a man in a slow-moving line of shoppers waiting to buy the hard bread rings that Russians dunk in their tea. “We can be without anything--without sugar--but not without bread. A person without bread is like cattle without hay.”

Luzhkov said that 25% of the city’s bread stores were empty or under-stocked; other estimates put the shortfall at approximately the amount of bread consumed daily by 300,000 Muscovites. Outside Moscow, shortages have been reported in a number of provincial towns, but none appear to be as severe as that in the capital.

Luzhkov pledged last week that the bread crisis would pass within the next few days as all the baking industry’s idle ovens are fired up. Those responsible for the shortage will be punished, he added.

“This is our problem, and it’s our fault,” Luzhkov told reporters.

Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov has proposed that hundreds of soldiers be brought in to help bake and transport bread.

Gorbachev, acting to ensure that the government’s low grain supply does not cause bread shortages in the future, ordered regional leaders to guarantee that farmers deliver the grain they have promised to the state.

Moscow officials predicted that the head of the city’s bread industry would be fired, but otherwise, this shortage--like so many others--appeared to be the fault of everybody and nobody, a natural phenomenon for an economy in the process of falling apart.

The trouble began when hundreds of thousands of Muscovites swarmed back into the city from their countryside vacations. The baking industry was prepared for a jump in demand, but it exceeded expectations.

So many other foodstuffs are now in short supply, including vegetables and meat, that people are eating more bread to compensate, Luzhkov said, explaining the unanticipated demand.

As word of the new shortage spread, Muscovites began buying twice or three times more bread than they normally do: storing it, drying it into toast so that it has a long shelf life or freezing it.

All that has driven up demand, and the cycle of shortage, stockpiling and even greater shortages was again under way.

Shoppers tend to have their own theories about the shortage’s origins.

“It’s the Mafia,” said Yelena Yelkina, one of scores of people waiting in the Kalinin Prospekt store for the next batch of loaves. Many of those waiting nearby agreed, supporting the popular belief that shady figures purposely create shortages, either to profit from the resulting black market or to bring on the downfall of those in power and put in their own people.

Engineer Askold Tarusin blamed the Communist Party.

“With the principles it ruled by, it brought us here, and this is the result,” he said.

Years of neglect that came with a system in which no one felt personally responsible--the Russians call it “lacking a master”--have clearly taken their toll on the bread-baking industry, as on other segments of the Soviet economy.

When the shortage arose and officials asked why production could not be increased immediately, it turned out that 21 bread production lines were standing idle for want of modernization and repair, and that much of the city’s baking equipment was more than 50 years old.

The Zotov Bread Factory in central Moscow is one of the more sorry examples.

The giant “1931” drawn on its brick walls may have connoted progress 60 years ago, but these days it means machinery so hopelessly antiquated that, according to director Vasily Molodykh, the factory’s biggest production line has been out of order for four years.

As part of its emergency measures, the Moscow City Council has ordered the idle line restarted within three days. “We have to do it,” Molodykh said.

The city, which operates Moscow’s bakeries, is also trying to attract more and better workers to the manpower-starved industry by doubling their salaries from about $320 a month to about $700.

The worsening shortage has also prompted proposals to ration bread or raise prices, Moscow City Council member Yuri Khramov said, but he warned that price increases “would bring exactly the blood on the streets that we don’t want.”

For all their grumbling and the dire predictions, Soviet consumers for the most part still seem far from violence.

In the Kalinin Prospekt store, Tarusin said that if the bread shortage gets worse, “We’ll learn to suck our paws like a bear.

“We also have substitutes, like potatoes,” Tarusin added.

Maybe.

Luzhkov announced earlier that the city was running about 120,000 tons short of the stores of potatoes it needs for the winter.