Just to clarify, are you asking about the Soviet market economy or the day-to-day basics? The former is a really fascinating subject, but I'm definitely not the best person to provide a detailed explanation! However, if you're more interested in the latter, I can help a little bit with that.
We'll start out large and try to explain the why of it, and then shrink to the actual day-to-day stuff at a market, and then we will inevitably get dumped at The Pudding Pop Incident of 1989.
The most important thing to remember while looking at the Soviet Union magazine you've linked is that it was intended as propaganda for the U.S.S.R. and its satellite states, and doesn't reflect the reality of most Soviet citizens' lives. For anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Soviet Union during this period, this is a pretty obvious publicity shot. The floor is spotless. The people are all well-dressed. The market is obviously busy but not overcrowded, and there are no massive lines. The produce is attractively arranged and stacked such that it will catch the eye and give the impression of endless bounty. There are decorative signs (most, interestingly enough, facing the camera) to attract the shoppers' interest and help them make selections.
The effect is meant to convey a more utilitarian and practical version of a Western supermarket; less stylish, perhaps, but the essentials and even luxuries are there in abundance for the average person. Suck on that, amerikanskiy.
But again -- it's a picture from a propaganda magazine.
Reality? There were definitely markets in the U.S.S.R. that were better-designed and provisioned than others (the flagship GUM in Moscow comes to mind -- it's still around and is a seriously beautiful building -- and later, the hard-currency stores that were restricted to the elite), but the average Soviet market did not provide anywhere near the breadth or depth of consumer goods typically available to Western shoppers. For the average Soviet citizen out doing the marketing, it was more common to find a restricted number of items available at a given time, after which they'd disappear and a new set would appear. Again, someone with more familiarity with the Soviet economy as a whole can give you more background on how and why this happened, but the very short version is that Soviet manufacturers were accountable to the central economic planning agency (GOSPLAN) and not consumer demand or market forces as such. The end result was that you often saw what we'd think of as a weird array of things available in the shops, and there wasn't necessarily any rhyme or reason to when or why it was on offer.
Here's an example: Even a freshly-minted Western MBA who's spent more time huffing glue in the classroom than paying attention would be able to tell you that a single chain of stores with franchises in different communities will have different needs. Say you're managing a Target in a town where the average income is $100K/household, and you've got a sister store a few towns over where the average income is $40K/household. If you're looking for something like, say, hair dye, then you're better off going to the Target in the less-wealthy town. Why? Because Target's found that shoppers in wealthier communities are more likely to get their hair dyed in a salon than do it at home, so the shipping and opportunity cost of stocking hair dye in that particular store isn't worth it. While Target mostly wants an inventory that's predictable so shoppers can rely on them for that, it will also tailor inventory to the needs of surrounding communities. Any product it puts on the shelves that doesn't sell took space from something that might have made money, and is thus a bad investment from its perspective.
The same is true of the shopping "cycle." Western retailers know what shoppers are looking for and when, and both the manufacturing cycle and inventory reflect this. Bathing suits appear on the racks in April/May. Prom dresses show up early spring. Candy manufacturers ramp up production of candy in specialized packaging 2-4 months before major holidays. Backpacks and notebooks are falling off the shelves during the summer, and so on and so forth.
The thing is there was no communism in the Soviet Union. USSR was a socialist country that wanted to become communist country in the future (like 20 years from now — so, it was promised to soviet people in the 1960s that their generation will see communism in 1980s or slightly later).
So, there were money, and there were markets. Someone could buy some vegetables there or meat (beef, pork, chicken and so on) or honey.The quality of these products was much higher than quality of the products from the regular shops but prices were also much higher, and markets were not everyday destination for the majority of the soviet citizens.
It was mostly about food; it was forbidden/illegal to sell clothes or electronics there (especially imported ones), and someone could easily go to jail just for one pair of Levi's jeans.
I could be mistaken here but I think that most sellers were not individual farmers but people from kolkhoz or sovkhoz (state-owned farm communities). Kolkhozes had to sell or even give their production to the state, according to 'plan' (KPIs), but if they had more production on their hands — they could sell part of it via food markets. But these markets always were gray area of the soviet economic system, so it'd quite hard to find a real source of these foods in some cases.
If you wanted to buy imported clothes or electronics you had to go to the so-called 'black markets' or tolkuchka/tolchok (tight crowded place). They were very small and extremely unofficial, and there was a huge risk for the sellers (jail), and also a huge risk for the buyers (because there was a lot of criminals and con artists).
I've always wondered this too. In particular, how did they justify money (which is needed for a market) under communism?
