We've all seen the pictures of food queues, empty shelves, etc - but these are invariably from the Perestroika years. The same thing goes for every anecdote and account of shortages that I have encountered. Sometimes I see vague references to "chronic shortages", etc, but it's hard to get a grip on the frequency of them. I'm reasonably well-read on pre-war Stalinism, but my knowledge of the Cold War era is really quite limited.
So were food queues, empty shelves, turning to the black market for basic staples, etc, a near-constant feature of Soviet life? Were the consumer goods consistently as poor as is often said?
Finally, when shortages ocurred, especially of staple food items, what were the immediate causes?
Thanks!
You would be interested in this declassified 1966 report by a CIA agent who'd been assigned to the embassy in Moscow. While there she took the opportunity to evaluate the Soviet economy through incognito shopping. She says that
One of the worst aspects is the uncertainty about almost everything. Take the matter of getting your groceries bought. In the first place, you nearly always have to stand in a queue. I stood in scores of them just to find out why the queue was there and what it was like to stand in one. ... One could never be sure of finding even the most staple of foods [at the gastronom]. Frequently there was no fresh meat, and if there was it was pretty poor quality by American standards. Rarely were there any vegetables except tomatoes (in season) and cabbage, and sometimes there were none at all. There was usually a sign "No potatoes." On street cars and trolleys women carrying loaded string bags would greet each other, "Ah, potatoes! Where did you get them? How much did you have to pay?" or "Where did you find that melon?"
So far as consumer goods, she recounts that outside the capital, in Novosibirsk
I myself saw no women's shoes in the stores I visited, and the bareness of the shelves was indeed startling. Of the two so-called department stores in the downtown section of this city of over a million, one was closed for repair, and the one that was open resembled a small store that had just had a close-out sale.
Her conclusion was that the difference between Soviet and US goods was being underestimated in US calculations both because of a gulf in quality and selection/availability.