For Soviets, It’s a Question of Cabbage

From one end of the world’s largest country to the other, Soviet citizens are worried about feeding their families.

But in a nation where appearances are often at odds with reality, food is available--at a price.

Retail prices rose astronomically in April as part of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s efforts to switch to a market economy.

Government-decreed price hikes averaged 60% on a broad range of consumer products. Food prices increased by an average of 240%. Workers received salary increases, but they were too small to fully offset the price rises.

In Moscow, the two-hour-long lines at McDonald’s have disappeared. A Big Mac and a double cheeseburger, with two orders of French fries and two milkshakes, costs 32 rubles and 77 kopecks--a big bite out of a worker’s 250-ruble monthly salary.

In the provinces, the reeling Soviet economy still keeps state-run food stores nearly empty. As meat, milk and butter become less and less affordable, anger rises.

“At these prices,” says a saleswoman in the eastern Siberian city of Nizhneangarsk, “we will get a lot of religion--10 days of eating and 20 days of fasting.”

But in Moscow and other cities, state food stores, depleted after an orgy of hoarding on the eve of the price increases, are gradually filling up with once-scarce staples.

“Now we have even foreign-made sausage in the stores,” a Moscow taxi driver said. “But at 48 rubles a kilogram (2.2 pounds), who can afford it?”

Television viewers outside the country see images of bare shelves and long lines. But a few blocks from one store, men are selling pricey beef from the back of a big, unmarked truck.

Shelves in a Moscow liquor store are empty. But if one walks through a certain door in the back, there is an ocean of vodka for sale--at triple the official price.

Between the appearance and the reality of the food crisis lies a vast, uncharted territory where people have learned to survive by playing the system, Soviet style.

“Yes, there are shortages,” says Michael Sigov, a journalist with the Novosti Press Agency. “But nobody is starving. There’s food, believe it. It’s a matter of understanding how to get it. Some food isn’t available in stores, but people can get it at work. The retired people, the people without jobs, they suffer. But there always are ways.”

By far the most effective way is to have money--either American dollars or bundles of Russian rubles.

Hard-currency shops, which accept only dollars or other Western currency, overflow with imported food, liquor and other items. In the past, when Soviet citizens were forbidden to possess dollars, the shops were strictly for foreigners.

But today they represent an often unrecognized source of food and other items for Soviets lucky enough to have Western, or “hard,” currency. A surprising number do.

The Soviet Union’s anemic currency, the ruble, which is not convertible on the world market, also will buy food outside the official government stores. But it takes oodles of rubles, now worth as little as 3 or 4 cents at unofficial exchange rates.

The April price increases marked the beginning of the end of one of the great social benefits of communism. For more than 70 years, the Soviet government had told its people that food is birthright.

Carrying through on the promise, the government heavily subsidized the price of food. State stores sold food for less than it cost to produce. The artificially low prices contributed to shortages of many items in state food stores in recent years.

Some food wound up in the unmarked trucks and makeshift stalls from which meat and other scarce goods are sold on the streets of Moscow. Some went into farmers’ markets, which sell food for several times the government price.

Private farm plots are another deceptive factor in the Soviet food supply. They are small tracts of land, usually an acre or less, on which farmers are allowed to raise food for personal consumption or for sale in private markets.

Although the plots represent only about 3% of all agricultural land in the Soviet Union, they produce about 30% of the country’s vegetables, meat and milk.

Even some residents of big cities become serious farmers in the spring and summer. These are the lucky people who have dachas outside town, with fruit trees, berry patches and vegetable gardens.

As he drives near his summer home outside Minsk, Leonid Ivanenko, an expert on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, boasts: “We feed ourselves all summer and into the autumn.”