Angry Russians Get Some Prices Rolled Back

Furious shoppers are forcing stores across Russia to scale back price increases ordered this month in the federation’s move to a market economy, Russian media said Saturday.

Officials in the Russian city of Ulyanovsk, southeast of Moscow, said Saturday that they would reduce the regulated prices on bread, some dairy products and other necessities in the next three days, the Tass news agency reported.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, who toured Ulyanovsk and other cities last week to check on his Jan. 2 price reform decree, was enraged when he found unaffordable prices on many goods.

He fired officials in Ulyanovsk and Nizhni Novgorod and demanded the goods be made affordable. Price controls on most goods were lifted by the decree, but the cost of many staple foods and necessities is still being regulated.

The conservative newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya said Saturday that food prices in the city of Belgorod, 350 miles south of Moscow, were slashed almost in half because shoppers refused to pay them.

Prices in stores in Petrozavodsk, 170 miles northeast of St. Petersburg, were cut by a third after food spoiled because nobody could afford it, according to the farm daily Selskaya Zhizn.

The usual long lines were gone even at the McDonald’s restaurant in Moscow after it raised the price of most items with the Jan. 2 reform, the daily Moskovskaya Pravda reported Friday.

In an extreme example of desperation over prices, the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets reported Saturday that an abandoned infant, apparently in good health, was found near a railway station in Moscow last week.

A note pinned to its blanket said, “I cannot feed this child because of the prices,” the newspaper reported.