Famine Never Came, but Russians Curb Appetites : Economy: Patience of the people was underestimated. Still, the Ryabukhins buy apples only for daughter.

Last fall, amid dire predictions of a hungry, heatless, anarchic winter, the Ryabukhin family dried two big sacks of sukhari. The little, dry pieces of toast would carry them through, they thought, if worse came to worst and bread supplies in the stores ran out.

These days, as the apricot trees blossom across this southern Russian city and its women show off their spring miniskirts, the sacks of sukhari are still full and still hanging in the Ryabukhin kitchen.

The crunch never came.

“In November and December, there was just nothing in the food stores but bread and milk,” recalled Natasha Ryabukhin, 37, a music teacher. “The stores were absolutely empty, and it got really frightening.”

But then came the Russian government’s long-awaited moves to lift state-set limits on most prices and to allow retail trade on virtually every street corner. Suddenly, everything was back in Rostov’s stores--at brutal prices, but available.

“Now, we’re wearing our clothes until they wear out, we don’t even buy new socks, but we’re eating fine,” Natasha said.

Instead of the predicted catastrophe, Sergei and Natasha Ryabukhin began a new grind. They eat less and buy apples only for their daughter, Alisa, 12. Natasha has reknitted her wool sweater five times into different designs rather than buy a new one, and she worries about every potential dropout among her music students.

Although many economists warn that the Russian economy will get still worse before it starts getting better, predictions of famine bring comic grimaces now.

“Look at our dog,” Sergei said of Gerda, the plump pooch at his feet. “We joke that she’s just swollen from hunger.”

The warnings of unrest and general collapse in the former Soviet Union--so common last autumn--appear inflated now. “I, myself, am surprised at what people put up with,” Pavel Bunich, a leading liberal economist, said. “I didn’t expect it.”

Bunich estimates that over this past winter, the living standard for most Russians dropped by two-thirds. Salaries quadrupled, but prices shot up by an average factor of 12. And still, the streets stayed quiet, and the strikers kept their picket signs at home.

“Everyone underestimated the reserves of patience of the Russian people,” said Nikolai Shmelev, another prominent economist.

He added that experts also underestimated the amount of food hoarded in most Russians’ cupboards; the stocks were squirreled away for the tougher days everyone knew were coming.

Estimates had generally assumed that Soviet consumers keep a minimum stock of 20 or so days’ worth of food at home--possibly as much as two months’ worth. But, in fact, most people had managed to sock away up to a six-month supply of flour and dry noodles, Shmelev said.

Many of the autumn predictions, Bunich added, “were just our usual panic. It’s just that negative predictions are in style these days. Being a Cassandra is extremely popular. But those who made these predictions were not acting in good faith. The numbers never bore them out.”

Some of the most frightening predictions came from St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, who repeatedly warned that the city had only a few days’ worth of food left and rioting could come next. The International League of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies had dire words of its own, estimating in October that 1.5 million people across the former Soviet Union might not survive the winter. Even President Boris N. Yeltsin warned at one point that “there will be a mutiny” if Russians run out of food.

For the second year, millions of dollars’ worth of humanitarian aid flowed into the country both out of kindness and out of widespread concern for regional stability. Loudly trumpeted as it arrived, much of it went to the neediest--pensioners, invalids and children.

But ultimately, Russians fell back on their own resources to get through both the shortages and the price increases that followed.

Vladimir Zhiltsov, a 47-year-old Moscow engineer at a technical design firm, took on two part-time jobs as the pinch grew tighter. “This year really has made me work harder,” he said. “And in my vacation time, I’ll have to work as a carpenter building private vacation houses. But I don’t mind it. I like to work, especially when you’re paid what you deserve.”

Alexander, 36, an army captain who declined to give his family name, comes home every day from the barracks, gets into his car and turns into a Gypsy cabby, grumbling about the government’s reforms but unwilling to force his family to live on his meager army salary. Even with Alexander’s moonlighting, his family meals have had to drop most vegetables and fruit. But “I don’t think we’ll come to hunger,” he said.

Natasha Ryabukhin said many of her friends have “psychologically matured” to the point that they would take any work, their old snobbery about manual labor gone. “I’ve been saying that when it gets really hard, that’s it, I’ll go be a janitor,” she said.

Natasha Ryabukhin’s grandmother Helena, 88, can remember the famines of the 1930s; Natasha’s mother, Olga, recalls with a shiver the hunger and poverty of Russia during World War II.

Natasha and a visiting friend, Alla Bespalova, could recall more recent times of general privation. In 1962, Alla stood in line with the rest of her neighbors for bread, and Natasha still fumes at how, in 1979, right after her daughter was born, there was no butter on sale anywhere.

Now, Alla said, she has few worries about food, but “my worst nightmare is that the fridge will break.” There is no money to buy another.

Olga worries most about next winter. She has seen the drop in agricultural production worsen this year and fears that the real food shortage is yet to come. Economists, although careful not to begin a new round of crying wolf about impending disaster, tend to agree with her.

Bunich pointed out that Russian peasants, unable to get feed grain, have begun widespread slaughter of their cattle and that the private farmers just getting off the ground will not begin producing immediately. Meat production has dropped 24% in the last two months, he said.

If the government does not take urgent measures to increase production, lower taxes and subsidize failing factories, this year could be much more of a crunch year than last, he said.

Meanwhile, the Ryabukhins have decided to hold on to their sacks of sukhari until next spring.

“We don’t know what will be,” Olga said. “It could be that the real trouble hasn’t even begun.”

Sergei Loiko, a researcher in The Times’ Moscow bureau, contributed to this report.